Impromptus with Torn Paper Masks//Viva Tantric Modernism

'It is in the actual act of stitching, when you thread your own needle and start stitching, that you have your own space':

Memorial Day, 2084

'Ideas began to love//speaking not of what has been done but what we will do//And provided we hurry a little, it'll just take a century.'

Sweet Rations/What's Really Food p.3

1. 'A politics of exteriority emerges when the question 'what happens next' is posed by the other side.'

2. We sabotage and refashion memorial day in the name of memory of those struggles whose future did not come to pass, or have not yet come to pass.

3. 'And now, has the word 'revolution' recovered is astronomical sense? With the exception of movement and rest, has nothing changed? Memory remains; Athens is destroyed, Lucretius remains.'

Sweet Rations/What's Really Food p.2

...as if we could change our needs, as if to ask if 'the angle between two walls has a happy ending', as if metabolism and fiction were recto and verso of the same image; 'the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel like the written mythologies of memory and desire':

Sweet Rations/What's Really Food

I've been thinking about how paradoxical it is that Memorial Day in the US is treated as yet another excuse to flaunt a teetering opulence, to over-consume (food especially), considering how destructive wartime conditions prove to the availability of food. How much of our fun and recreation in this country is contingent upon demonstrations of surplus? Does this shallow focus on excess deplete our imaginations? Does the tendency to horde replicas of our present in the form of overstocked supermarkets and pantries and viscera, render us too neurotic to invent new options for our futures? All of it. Yes. I want all of it. I want the all of everything. I think some hypocrisy is useful. I don't believe in guilt. Or that innocence has an opposite or an automatic sympathy quotient. Most mischief is a demonstration, a plea for medicine, a reenactment of certain nightmares, or a prayer for the alltime armistice which requires calling some attention to the battle ongoing and dormant beneath our dormant hunger. The inauthentic grace is a fear of guilt, but the rest is the bravery to want the all off everything

Go Out and be Corrupt/Work Songs

And so to be wise yet appear harmless, my ear is a mass of prejudices, decisions, however silly, however sublime, to withhold your instructions until I become indistinguishable from them, but not because you will hear them, because you will not hear them

It Feels Right to Me

1. 'This internal struggle toward excellence must not be confused with demanding the impossible' Just trading what we dislike and get too much for what we like and don't get enough of. Also, anything less is obscene




2. The Mute Soliloquy of a Phantom/Reconnaissance

Inadequate sir, talk me out of your melancholy village
The thresholds clash with the insides. It's odd to see an owl in daylight, trapped in her perimeter. Inadequate sir,
Coax me into your municipal calling. It's rare to split a howl into a sigh. The hour witnesses us too,
being inevitable and smug about each other, whipped in both directions by our duties (ideas), grunting, working for the circle as book-keepers, crook scholars, politicians, window-washers, bright-time owls and their observers whispering about how strange it seems to lessen the threat of difference with difference. Like cures like, I was warned, so I warned. This fire might dismiss this fire. Next, I see him struggling against the curse of having to appear, huge daynight eyes with a hollow drawl in them, averted. As kin. Ask him. My silence won't protect you. We're related. And therefore there is myth in him. Our skin is black, they say, it's a stray fate and take the pageant to the next town. Now Im yellow and high, addicted to the new tone-telling. Now I'm pink toes, rather than succumb to his songs, yielding my initiative to words and skin. I'm moving forward toward my myth. I thought we were dapper there, real meditating gunrunners, real chaperons of the absolute heard faster as mimes, jesters, gesturers, sliding down banisters into one another's truant armies, mister, sir...I'm a lady, these are my all-day-eyes

Such as an astro sonic aria

We Must Get Closer to the Essence of Life,

I suddenly thought of something. The river. What river. The one flowing past us.

Don't respect the circumstances of place. Respect what happens

Narrow road to the interior, yes. Some interruptions on the way. Facts are interruptions. And desires. And advice. Dandies.

'It's natural for a man to know his own mind, and to be sane

But nature loves to hide.'

That Reminds Me, I get along without you very well, except...

Just don't divert the river

I once received this astonishing letter, a truly atrocious one, especially upsetting because, just between us, most of what it said happened to be true. I sent it back. It came back to me. Sparring.The fix-blue mind could operate like a fugitive. Running from what. Running to something. Grace, the front row. And when you reach it. It doesn't exist.

II.

But we all need a rival. Mine is the word cozy. It's an ugly word, it's an award for an irresistible conceptual ugliness we all cherish, our rivals. They turn us into heroes. We all need a hero.They turn into heroes. They turn into us. They are not enemies, they are pushers, selling us the drug of self. The same as a thrill trusts itself as a fear, both rushes of nerve brought on by arousal. What is arousal. When you bring it so close it has no choice but to disappear. I think so. To turn into something else. Do so. True love seed in the autumn ground. Prude soul. But nature hates to hide. It's natural for a man to trade his own mind for love, and be insane, for pay, and to be perfect.

What I am trying to say is I'm too competitive to crave perfection, I want something more limitless, and therefore, steady, ruin something for me, turn it true and gone

'Our task is to transform sorrow into strength'

Halcyon

Seduction/Hospitality

Her kindness becomes cruel and almost unjust because of how persistent, (no matter what)

and a lopsided fire fluttering in the fireplace

mimics their gestures with infuriating accuracy (puppets peeking at the riggings)

He was worth dressing for, understood her ambiance, and this was one of her lesser reasons

for loving him, he was also belligerent with ambition which meant for all the preemptive regret he possessed

a superficial vitality, almost abnormal discretion, but closely observed one sensed a secret fatigue (there would never be enough)

A catalyst of the quiet that simultaneously kept them together and apart

(they understand what it means to be helpless, to have an outlet that never exceeds the mark)

It doesn't matter whose fault it is. We all, sometimes, leave each other out there under skies, and don't know why

He gave a slight pressure to their interwoven fingers

Some slur in her eyelids surfaced as bridges and collapsed where happiness is an accident replenished by accidents, and collapsed

Lieutenant, my corpse would not stop burning
in the hallucination.... these damn amphetamines... I wasn't actually suffering, a piece of his smile flies past me in my sleeplessness it resembles a shield or slow ash we didn't feel falling–

Leaving, she considered kissing him on the cheek but settled for shaking his hand

Excerpts from Unison (Insurgency)

You're not old, but you're dull. Both our duties, both are vaudevilles of the (usual) lament. Tents, for one, psychedelic turn-ons, buy me a cluster of bells, by me, I mean make me a cluster of bells, make me into one I mean, boredom is always mutual, let's tell on each other and then run in opposite directions, on the count of, not yet, on the clown tough enough to not send in (what I typically want to know about other people is more or less represented by what I've shown about myself). Yesterday I ripped the velvet off my heart then taped it back on, with magnetic tape and fat paper money. Not jittery but a little liturgical when in comes to hope and plantation millionaires. Not chattering but fastly saying I needed some laborers to cut the cane, now no one starves (cotton comes to Harlem)

Five bars later we are lamenting our own materialism (I find my match in contradiction, light it)

In a vaudeville of the elements we call a flood, all I want from the water is my image, bells tugging at their own drift, like a ferris wheel, like affairs we'll have when we feel like it

Brightmoments vs. (Brightmoments)

Privacy (Omnidirectional Memory)

It turns out there’s value in telling people things they weren’t aware they didn’t know

I want to know
if you are single or married
Where you live
If you are a slave

Budge stubborn donkeys

unencumbered by the weight of convention

gone are your haunts

Facts of the Interlude

The selective approach/provides the essential conditions/for creative freedom

I'm Sorry I Sound Calm; I Assure You I am Hysterical

A Gentleman's Agreement/Alphaville

He was looking for his valet on a paranoid rooftop when the wind bucked and he fell flat as a muse into the chubby coop of night where he found you for whom he had been looking found but by that time his mouth was a parachute you grabbed and used for your own, just so you could tell yourself, I love you, take me home

We accept these deteriorations as the whim of the Machine (I am so happy, something must be wrong, I am happening so much that I am stalling, breaking my pact with

simulations of the futures where mules keep thirstiest in their lazy lunge of a carriage, and the generous mistakes their bodies make to protect us from depending on them are so perfect you either have to forget or yearn. Forgetting and longing become the same thing like when you listen... Act like you know what's next, act like it's nothing. That's how you learn, by forgetting

Who sold us on the orchard, hold on, who gave us the weightless and imponderable bloom of either/or, who stays in the orchestra to play us silence, with no riddles, with nothing left to get rid of. Only a perfect gentleman, the kind with plenty of mules and one woman somewhere off in the distance criss/crossing her hands to divert his answer into a target which he will charge and miss on purpose and charge again. It's too perfect, you either have to look away or go blind toward it

Forgetting, anyone at all
who doesn’t chose you
is a quitter

Notice the flat affect it takes him to be hip shook me onto this hypocrisy and I almost dropped with it

You are a sensualist and a rebel

Why won't you come inside from their neglect

I Got a New Curve This Year

--

Some Thoughts on Improvisation and Mastery

"The arts are not drugs, they are not guaranteed to act when taken"

The will and need to improvise, strengthened by the will and need to survive in a hostile environment, is perhaps the number one asset to black Americans as we master any craft. In sports, as in dance, as in film, as in music, as even in the most mundane act or gesture, our output is and refuses to be (still), jazz.

--
The earliest known references to jazz are in the sports pages of various West Coast newspapers covering baseball's Negro League. The first is found in the Los Angeles Times on April 2, 1912, referring to Portland Beavers pitcher Ben Henderson:


BEN'S JAZZ CURVE. "I got a new curve this year," softly murmured Henderson yesterday, "and I'm goin' to pitch one or two of them tomorrow. I call it the Jazz ball because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it." As prize fighters who invent new punches are always the first to get their's.

Henderson's jazz ball apparently was not a success, as there are no known further references to it except for a brief mention in the Times the following day...

Everybody has come back to the old town full of the old "jazz" and they promise to knock the fans off their feet with their playing. What is the "jazz"? Why, it's a little of that "old life," the "gin-i-ker," the "pep," otherwise known as the enthusiasm. A grain of "jazz" and you feel like going out and eating your way through Twin Peaks. It's that spirit which makes ordinary ball players step around like Satchel and Robinson.

Freedom becomes a discipline

"JAZZ" ( and WE CHANGE the spelling each time so as not to offend either faction) can be defined, but it cannot be synonymized, not imitated. If there were another word that exactly expressed the meaning of "jaz," "jazz" would never have been born. A new word, like a new muscle, only comes into being when it has long been needed. This remarkable and satisfactory-sounding word, however, means something like life, vigor, energy, effervescence of spirit, joy, pep, magnetism, verve, virility ebullience, courage, happiness--oh, what's the use?--

Don't ask its meaning, ask its use

Honey in the Honeycomb: Remembering Lena Horne

Vaudeville Suite P. V/ Ego on a Half

How to Share a Memory

All the choreographer said was, don't act demure, and, as if your body is shredding, and at the heart of any disassembly, a reunion. Weather this condition is felt to be an affliction to the supreme happiness of love, is left to the subjective verdict of the person concerned, for example, the intermittency of wind seldom creates a problem, depending on what you collect, it's coming, for instance, the one in red is flailing, the in one yellow, standing still, though they are both looking at the same (each other) thing and shouting I cannot hear you for the thunder that you are

What's Really Food

Proxy in Blank/The Acoustics of a Coup P. IX

(Play both at the same time/Play them at once)






Field Notes
-Romance as a revolutionary weapon/people don't know where they heard it, but they heard it
A more simple way to say it is, you're looking from the dream
And those under the taboo of purity keep coming in as words (which ones) (I can't see them)
-There is nothing mystical about this operation, not the event itself, maybe the moment you became aware of it (those are rumors)
(people don't know where they hurt, but they hurt)
A more final way to say it is, shhhh....peaceful, get your silence together, wear it like an isle before a ceremony, after a sermon (cleared, crowded) (which one), the terror and terrible lure...a child must be spun around, by her father, or like her father, like a foil windmill wobbling in the hot excursion of how I got here, quickly, and played back in the streets, subways, parks, delirium, a stroboscope lit up like a harp in the sun-out at the rush hour, stammering as the currency in charge of how of the situation sounds, skeptical, we kept holding hands in the almost dark until the camera broke.
A little longer,
even