Cold today we passed someone curled up against the side of
the QFC on Mercer under two black umbrellas I’m still not used to seeing people
in tents around the city it still shocks four years ago a young woman froze in
a tent in February in a small park a few feet away from homes worth millions
9:21 p.m. the bathroom light goes on I’m on the bed in the
bedroom with a laptop on my lap tonight’s trending searches on Google zombie
deer disease rogue wave norwegian cruise ship gs pay scales covid 18
coronavirus houthi rebels red sea alex batty missing
59 years later Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone still excites
it’s weird the song has such a triumphant sound but it’s referring to tragic
circumstances back then homelessness had a very odd chic attached to it young
people from good homes joyfully throwing themselves into vagabondage it was a
little insane but everyone also knew deep down they had places to go if the
road got too tedious or frightening or weird Like A Rolling Stone served as a
very robust and peculiar anthem for that level of heedlessness but if you get
past the music and listen closely to the words something very different is
occurring to the protagonist of the song nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street and now you're
gonna have to get used to it that’s fucking scary because everyone gets a close
look at it now on their way to work or the grocery store and it’s not pretty and
it’s certainly not chic
Susan Sontag on Antonin Artaud whenever behavior becomes
sufficiently individual it will become objectively anti-social and will seem to
other people mad all human societies agree on this point they differ only on
how the standard of madness is applied and on who are protected or partly
exempted for reasons of economic social sexual or cultural privilege from the
penalty of imprisonment meted out to those whose basic anti-social act consists
in not making sense
We live in two parallel worlds now the luxurious privileges
of the elites and the dog-eat-dog brutalities of the working class or what’s
left of it
Poetry has returned to the universities the only place where
it continues to receive high status and serious attention but the bebop spontaneities
of the jackhammer streets have been elided by the elliptical refinements of a
language groomed with symposiums and discourse
The aristocrats of academia ain’t got nothin’ on me I live in
a conch shell at the bottom of the sea smoking opium on a red velvet couch and
watching reruns of Taxi one day I hope to shake off all ambition all pretense
and pomp and rise to the surface long enough to take a course in Taylor Swift
at Harvard
7:27 p.m. Christmas Eve I drift off asleep in my chair reading Proust with my new suspenders we had roast beef cooked in a slow-cooker all day mashed potatoes and gravy and watched the final episode of Tulsa King starring a 76 year old Sylvester Stallone a show in which reality is stretched so thin that whatever occasional bits of concreteness behind the silliness and outrageous contradictions of the plot appear seem almost borrowed from an actual Tulsa the city Ron Padgett Joe Brainard and Ted Berrigan once called home a hand on a steering wheel entanglements of fear and loyalty now and then some really good dialogue pissing contests among Mafia capos cowboy ex-cons motorcycle gang led by a crazy Irish psychopath bullets breaking bottles in a bar not your average Christmas movie but it filled the eyes and ears with moving images while we filled our mouths with luscious morsels of beef marinated in time and balsamic vinegar
No comments:
Post a Comment