EXTENDED MANUFACTURER’S REALITY

I try out an “extended stay rate” hotel. Too run down to charge regular rates. After the Indians can no longer make any money out of ‘em they cater to people without credit. I am curious. It was a long way to another campground and it was getting dark and I was tired. And I as I said I was curious. So I pulled in. It’s a fleabag. The door to the room shows evidence of having been previously busted in – perhaps the result of a “no knock” policy. It must be a headache for these places to have to constantly repair their doors. I can imagine myself flat on my stomach on the floor, spread-eagled. Rifle barrel up my butt and guys in body armor and helmets rushing about shooting and vicious dogs barking. A lot of clunkers in font of open doors. Beer and bar-b-q on the walk. Noise and arguing late into the night. I’m not curious anymore.  I slept on top of the bed in my sleeping bag. I am shedding my bourgeoisie phobia  one by one – identify and eradicate. I once checked out a place in Bleaker St in the Village. I was young and it was cheap. But it turned out to be a bigger adventure that I cared to have. Instead I stayed in a cinema on 42th street until it closed around 2AM and then rode the Staten Island ferry back and forth until the sun came up. Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot, I cry out. To tell the truth, I’m more afraid of the legals than the illegals. When you’re down, your out for the count whether in Paris or London or here in El Dorado. It’s back to the woods tomorrow night. It’s not the marginalized that one should worry about but them that’s marginalized ‘em.

As a word carp is so crap – Martin Amis

And Ballard’s particular perversion

Needs all the actualizing it can get;

Beside it Joyce’s pendent for excrement

And Burroughs’s interest for scaffolds

Seem sadly quaint

All we know

For certain is

That what they wrote,

Would not have been composed,

Could not even

Be guessed at,

By anyone else

If your heart

Rejects it, retreats from it,

That’s age, that’s time

Fucking with you

Sucking the life from you

Remember that a persuasion

Is not the same as a conviction

A man fights....

With his asshole

Power comes...

In the form of anger,

Up through the asshole

Contrails of distant airplanes

Formed incandescent spermatozoa,

Sent out to fertilize the universe

To inhabit the streets as one’s living room is quiet a different thing from needing them as a bedroom, bathroom or kitchen – Susan Buck-Morss – The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore

Hash browns or grits – boy you’re in the South now. This is a workingman’s town.  The rich own the rundown building but it’s the workingmen who pay the rent. And now the immigrants are moving in. The good old boys are moving into the woods to cook meth. Everyone is dreaming of making money. I visited America’s only diamond mine yesterday. I didn’t find anything. Its like the lottery, it gives the fore-lone some hope. One in a million is enough. Find a diamond, cash in a wining ticket. It could happen. The ones that have a real chance got a head start and live on the other side of town. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. I go to a Mexican restaurant. The waiter sits down with me and starts talking. He wants to know about my Spanish. I understand it better than I speak it, I tell him, in English . “Are you Mexican,” he wants to know? “Indian,” I reply, “but then aren’t Mexicans mostly Indian anyway.”  He is from Michowacan, he says. Says he is married an Indian, Cherokee, he thinks.  I turn on the radio as I leave town. Dolly Pardon. It’s 7:21 in the morning.

The suspect, as such, always deserved a certain punishment; one could not be the object of suspicion and be completely innocent – Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish, 1979 p42

Some of what is called ‘forgetfulness’ that supposedly comes with age is really a lack of direct feedback. Having done the same thing over and over for years and years one goes into automatic pilot and carries out tasks without thinking about the individual steps. Take driving a vehicle. One needs a checklist when learning – adjust the seat, check the mirrors, fasten the seat belt, insert the key… But after a while it becomes automatic. Its only when something unusual happens that we think about what we are doing; say we step on the gas pedal instead of the brake. We know immediacy something is wrong – that is called negative feedback. We take corrective action. But say there is no immediate consequence. Say we’re going to the store. We’ve got the baby strapped in his baby carrier. We put him down beside the car to unlock the door. Now we’re at the store parking lot. We get out and go to get the baby. He’s not there. We’ve left him beside the driveway. That’s not forgetfulness it’s a failure of the feedback loop. As we get older the more or our activities are done in auto-pilot mode and unless there is some negative feedback when we skip a step we are likely to have a “forgetful” moment once we realize (or someone tells us) that we skipped a step. And then there is also just plain old senility also. Did I forget to turn off the gas?

I remember that I wanted to inhale myself – A Artaud

Moreover I have 

Definitively broken with

Art, style and talent

I MEAN THAT

I curse anyone

Who is going to consider these

 As

Works of art,

Works that

Aesthetically

Simulate

Reality...

None of them,

To speak exactly,

Is an art work.

They are all attempts,

That is to say blows – probings or thrustings

In all the directions of hazard,

Of possibility,

Of chance

 Or

Of destiny

I have never

Never studied anything,

But I have lived everything,

And that has taught

Taught me something

I have thrown

The communion,

The Eucharist,

God and his Christ

Out the window

And I have decided...

I remember that

Ever since I was eight years old,

And even before that,

I always wondered who I was,

What I was,

And why I was alive?

I remember at the age of six

In a house, a number 29, to be precise,

Just as I was eating my afternoon snack

I asked myself what it meant

 to exist,

 to be alive,

What it meant

 to be conscious

of oneself breathing,

And I remember that

I wanted

to inhale myself

In order to prove

 that I was alive

And to see if

 I liked being alive,

And if so,

 why

In a perfectly organized world, foot fetishists would no doubt become chiropodists – P D James – Shroud of a Nightingale, 1971 p65

Ginny is telling me she will not listen to me any more. She doesn’t have time. “Well,” I said, “I wasn’t demanding much time.” “I can’t give you any time at all, I’ve got my stuff to do,” she says. Two years ago she had a booth at the street fair and had only three piece of jewelry to show. She tried to take orders. That’s not the way street fairs work, we had tried to explain to her. “Oh, I’m getting so inspired.” She intends to have a booth again this year. “There is so much I want to do. They will be so beautiful.” She’s thumbing through a jewelry catalog getting ideas. She says she’s inspired. Now she needs to go home and get busy. I had this weird dream last night and I had wanted to share. “This isn’t kindergarten,” she said. Well anyway there were this company that was run by computer but the computers could not deal with anything unanticipated. The company’s office is old building with inoperative elevators. The executives drive their cars up a ramp to the sixth floor. Snowplows have to constantly keep the ramps clear and are a hazard to the executives. The snowplow drivers like to intimidate the executives on the ramps. There is a directive from the CEO (the computer) “Reality is no longer fixed either spatially or temporally.” Another directive states that performance ratings (and thus bonuses) will henceforth be based on how much data the computer contains on each individual. No one is actually doing anything but manipulating data – adding to their own files and deleting data relevant to others. In conformance with the new “reality” memo they can zip about in time and space so long as they have computer access. There are a few fundamentals about how this works, for example, nothing an happen twice at both the same time and in the same place. Rules are changing by the nanosecond. Another fundamental rule of neurology is that noting changes the computer’s instructions and  the computer can countermand any executive action. The objective is to freeze everyone else out. “Is this music form Bladerunner,” I ask? “What?” “You know the film Bladerunner.” Osama shrugs his shoulders. A man dressed in black with gold chains around his neck says, “Ridley Scott” as he paces back and forth. “Great movie by the way,” he says and dashes for the door and heads down the ramp. He is squished flat by a snowplow. The driver just laughed. Ginny has her hands over her ears, “I’m not listening,” she says. But neither has she going home and getting to work on her merchandise. My guess it that she’ll be lucky to have three pieces this year. She’s still flipping through her catalog. “I’am getting s many great ideas.”