Tag Archives: risk

A Mark on the Cave Wall

Middle-Paleolithic cave drawing: about 12,000 years ago...

Middle-Paleolithic cave drawing: about 12,000 years ago…

If a junkie can find a way to get high, so can the artist
Do what you must to support the habit
Some transgressions are worth committing if they bring just a fragment of truth
Sometimes the work we create is worth all the pain and disaster,
Worth the humiliation and mockery,
And once in a blue moon it’s even worth the loneliness
So think globally, act locally,
And, if you can,
Create art whose beauty will last
At least as long as man’s ugliness.

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Sarah & Cecil Stole Romeo & Juliet’s Getaway Car

“Tramps For Life, episode 3”
(Or: Even Rebels Get Sad When They Have to Be Bad but all in all there’s nothing worse than having Jungle Fever on the road, broke and homeless, and trying to up the ante)

N.Fleck/D.Kangalee, 2006

N.Fleck/D.Kangalee, 2006

— heard.
Outside,
the cold rain
pours down
and beats
relentlessly
upon the roof of the car.
The car that is not yours.
And your homeless heart flinches in that way only a newly-dispossessed person’s heart flutters and aches and cold-lip-dry-mouth-cracked-chapped hands open the passenger door, but you notice – on the floor, under those worn out boots barely covering your feet which you are nervous has caught an infection – a text, a crumpled magazine…and the printed word on that filth, the alignment and the rhythms, calm you…Because they were written by someone even more destitute than you and you no longer have to dread and shudder your way three stops on the N train amidst Hipsters who come from some place no real New Yorker has ever heard of, and yet your ignorance bounds you…But you read the text and you realize it is just the thing to read when you are in someone else’s bathroom and the floor is cold and you cannot complain because it is not your home, and you wonder where your home went and how it came to…
*
You tried.
You did everything possible without breaking any laws, yet every moral code that you ever tried to live by has been left shattered and torn.
Your reputation – skids marks under Cassio’s heel; your name has been warped and twisted like the heart of a Judge who refuses to resign.
You ask yourself why? And you see fleeting images of who you could have been and phantasmagoric duplicates of you and your lady and yet you wonder…what was the sin?
Like the disabled and the forsaken, you, too, cast an eye up to the sky in hopes of an answer…There is no answer. The answer was known, was given – long ago.
And it is not his or her or their fault.
It is some
perverted
joke.

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Truth

Some see truth in a painting, others in a jar of cookies.
If it’s a biblical passage that sets you straight or a steady job — who cares?
People only care — or the system will only care — when you’ve violated its laws
or created
your own.

Book Of Urizen, W.Blake, 1794

Book Of Urizen, W.Blake, 1794

“I must create a system or be enslaved by another mans; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
— William Blake

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Subway Vein:The New Process, the Final Form (Or: On How to Stay Creative in the Hell of Not Being Able to Connect)

Write text, edit by copy and paste and whatever and however the text is either repositioned or pasted, I leave it alone – altered format and all.

I am only concerned with the text itself, with the flow of words and their implied meaning.
The nuance, the presentation, the visual style happens randomly, sometime dictated by the order of karma or energy or some other mysterious force, sometimes by sheer beautiful accident.

The mission for me is to get these words up on the mountain –not fixed but moving upward somehow into someone’s eye or mind; penetrating another part of the brain where there might be a little less resistance.

The trick is how to create and destroy at the same time.
In redefining myself, in trying to consciously make an identity and present one to you – I not only transcend lies or fantasy, but I imbue the imagination with dignity and courage again.

The harshness of words, the resilience of the human spirit, the trauma of life, the beauty of a form gives way to many things, sometimes art or expressions of love or the impulse to rebel and reach for freedom is one of them.

There is nothing wrong with taking one’s self serious as long as one understands it will only matter to them; the groups, the masses, the mobs do not sanction goodness, they do not write operas or make paintings.

At best they applaud, at worst they hang you. Somewhere in between is a vote.

In directness, there is a responsibility.
Unafraid, one can champion the urges one feels inside, the sentiments one can’t let go of.  This may be the only truth you can rely on out there in that Tubes–filled-space-age spreadsheet of the Internet and your sowl.

Sold.
Stole.

Doesn’t matter: we’re all hocked.

But you can still choose the length
of your mercenaries’ fingers.

DLK May 13, 2012-05-13

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