Posts

Letter to Belmin

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  Hi B Interesting … you ask who was I most starstruck by/impressed by during my work life … well starstruck … I guess James Taylor, maybe Patti Smith … James because his musics was with me on a weekly basis since I was in college and as I told him when we worked together … after we finished … I don’t make any comment about being a fan or anything close to that until we finish … you want to be on his or anyones level, professionally speaking … until the work is in the can … but afterwards I told him “I mark my time by your music a lot” and he was charming enough to say, “I do the same thing." And Patti Smith … who you should wiki … poet, fab fab writer, punk music ma … I told her my writing changed after I saw her at a club … sing and read and perform … “my writing and my friends writing changed after we went to your show.” She said “we all find our people.” So sharp and generous …  So many people ... because my work life at the station covered so many decades … the person ...

It's ...

  ...  my belief that the raw material of good art is human sorrow, and when that sorrow is another’s, one has the obligation to treat it with great care and dignity. But I also believe the one who is loved is placed under an obligation. To survive and bear these trials with grace and dignity. Otherwise all our enterprise is a creature of the fates and all our imagination and invention and care will not be enough to save us.                                                                             - James Baldwin
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Me no want you

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I wonder if my father - who was married with two children - was scared when he was drafted. In my dream I choose to enlist and then panic and wonder if after you sign up and change your mind you go to prison. the first thing they did to me was blow clear tiny bubble like granules up my nose. it burned. and then I walked down an empty city street at night carrying a sealed brown burlap sack that sounded like it had grain or wooden beads in it. then I went into a tattoo place and had to choose one that was gonna take seventeen hours to do. by then, I knew I had made a big mistake and didn't know where I was gonna go or what I was gonna do. the thought of being in the army has always terrified me. when my number was called up ... I had to be at least 118 pounds to pass the physical. I weighed 108, thanks to a season of  Black Beauties and a fab overnight giant diuretic.  I felt like I could fly.

Autumn in my eye

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  Am in the fancy Starbucks place. In a fancy leather chair by the plate glass window, overhearing a womans phone conversation … you don’t have to see eye to eye about everything.  Everyone walking by outside looks as brisk as the day, kinetic as the changing leaves … all different kinds of walks and paces … swerving bike riders … a five way intersection … motion at its most that fits with the music playing … piano and organ and some thumpy thump thing we didn’t have a century ago … a painter painting on an easel across the street … crowds on corners … long haired girls in sweatshirts that fit The Rock … tall young dads … sips of energy … amazing that everyone I see is going somewhere … the gym, to buy food or cloth, a book, a mop, doctors, sofas, so many choices, possibilities … color … funny, how some days are just …

FASHION AIN'T EASY

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MEH MORE REE

  All human consciousness is narrative. One cannot remember a memory as it is; one tells a story when one tells a memory of the past, because every narration is already an interpretation. Each act of remembering tries to establish an order among heterogenous, chaotic data and does so through imagination. We describe an event of the past by arranging it in a series, by passing it through a plot, and by recounting it selectively. Each time we tell the same event we produce a different story. What is remembered is therefore always a story, never the past ‘itself’.                                                                                                           ...