One of the books that my father checked out from the library using my name was Illusions by Richard Bach. I learned that one pretty fast and it wasn’t as challenging as Ulysses was but I felt like since it was so easy it must not have meant so much. That’s obviously not true.

I breezed through that book not because it was easy but because I was a kid and I didn’t think anything it talked about was impossible. I wasn’t tainted or jaded as we become when we’re older and for me the idea of vaporizing clouds was an easy one to accept. Flying too for that matter.

Decades have passed since then and I’ve read that book plenty and I recently reread it just again. I was struck by how much I took the book to heart and how it absolutely shaped me as a person and defined a great deal about what I think and have thought since I was a small child.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever read anything by Richard Bach and I’m sure his work isn’t monumental literature but I am also sure that his work is important. To me it is, at least, and that’s enough. The opening passage from Illusions is just great and I loved the grease-stained pages reproduced for the thing and it looked like a real journal to me. The story of the little creatures that cling to the rocks is still an important idea that I’ve never not held in very high esteem and I figure it’s nice to post it here for you and for later.

“Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all–young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.

Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, “I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.”

The other creatures laughed and said, “Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks and you will die quicker than boredom!” But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.

Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, “See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!”

And the one carried in the current said, “I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.” But they cried the more, “Savior!” all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior.”

It’s simple, of course, and it’s nice and it’s important and I like it very much.

Originally published at [Posted over at smartwentcrazy.com/journal.]. You can comment here or there.

Some good conversations have come up after the post I made just before this one and I kept thinking of the perfect Bukowski line [and subsequent book title] ‘What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.’ This is as good of a mantra as you could have, I’d imagine, and I think that it’s sort of been ringing louder and louder as I’ve been thinking about the whole art thing. And it’s not just art but it’s literature too and, most importantly, it’s about life in general and as a whole.

Everybody has their own fires to walk through and what’s hard to you might be easy for me. What’s hot to me might be breezy for you. What’s art to you might be crap to me and what’s good solid work to me might be kid scribbles to someone else. I mean, really, I can’t hardly navigate through until the end of some of Allen Ginsburg’s writings. And I know plenty of people that find Salinger more ponderous than poetic. It’s all subjective, of course. And all we can do is just do our very best work and leave it at that.

But, in the interest of being contrary and while we’re on the subject of Bukowski, I cannot understand how anyone could ever just simply dismiss Bukowski as being little more than a misogynistic drunk. Have you ever really read any of his work or is that just some point of view you learned to express is your Womyn’s Writing Workshop?

[Why does all of this stuff always get me so goddam excited anyway? Sorry. Sort of.]

Originally published at [Posted over at smartwentcrazy.com/journal.]. You can comment here or there.

So I’ve been considering the definition of the word Art a lot lately since I’ve been working on this new project. The thing is being called One Thousand Thousand and the idea is to create one million pieces of art. All original, done by hand, and without any mechanical reproduction. It’s the same exercise that we’ve been doing for years now but it’s suddenly become official and proper and it’s coming along nicely so far. [The link goes to a gallery of 35 recent pieces that were all done on the same day. I've probably done as many as 150 or so pieces in one day but I forget for sure. Either way, you have to do that many if you'll ever get close to doing a million.]

At any rate, I’m posting a portion of those finished pieces to Etsy and am having a go at selling them off for a buck or two. I’ve never really spent any time on Etsy and I didn’t know too much about it save for the things I learned from Cybele.

If you don’t know the site then I’ll leave it to you to check it out but Etsy is supposed to be a place to buy and sell only handmade products and items. The other permissible items that you can sell there are either vintage things [at least 20 years old] or supplies that are used to create art or handmade items. But whatever your art is, painting, knitting, using odd materials, collage, sculpture, photography, jewelry making, knitting or candlemaking or whatever your art is. And that’s a really cool concept for sure and there are some very, very cool things there. Very cool.

But I’m realizing pretty quickly that there are some really crummy things there too. And the art section in particular is really overrun by some just awful stuff from people that claim it’s art and call themselves artists and it just drives me crazy. And this isn’t something that is unique to Etsy at all. I’m not saying that. I’ve felt the same way about major gallery showings on down to mail art websites like the old, awesome Nervousness. [Is that thing still going?]

Bottom line is that there is just a lot of bad art out there and there are people that encourage it and even pay for it. Tremendous sums, in fact. But I think it’s just because they don’t know what art really is. It’s just some imaginary and unrealistic concept in their head and they probably never took too much time to really think about it too hard. Or maybe I’m just over thinking it myself. [Probably both, I'm sure.]

Still, all you can do if you feel the way that I feel is to just not let it get to you and remedy the perceived situation by producing what you believe is good solid work and hope that it evens out somewhere down the line. It’s kind of like Karma, I guess. The negativity and hurt and suffering is cyclical and the only way to right those things is to choose compassion and take the higher road and create lovingkindness every chance you get.

And to art again; I have always thought that anti-art is somehow closer to what True Art should be or really is. I appreciate the anti-art, anti-product, Fluxus, Futurism approaches a great deal. Those philosophies have been important to me lately and have inspired a lot of the things I’m working on as well as the outlook I have as of late and I really appreciate the definition that George Maciunas gave for what he thought the differences between art and anti-art really were.

This is basically what he said:

Art existed to “justify the artist’s professional, parasitic and elite status in society, he must demonstrate artist’s indispensability and exclusiveness, he must demonstrate the dependability of audience upon him,
he must demonstrate that no one but the artist can do art. Therefore, art must appear to be complex, pretentious, profound, serious, intellectual, inspired, skillful, significant, theatrical, It must appear to be valuable as commodity so as to provide the artist with an income. To raise its value (artist’s income and patrons profit), art is made to appear rare, limited in quantity and therefore obtainable and accessible only to the social elite and institutions.”

He also said that anti-art and the Fluxus approach was,

“To establish artist’s nonprofessional status in society, he must demonstrate artist’s dispensability and inclusiveness, he must demonstrate the self sufficiency of the audience, he must demonstrate that anything can be art and anyone can do it. Therefore, anti-art must be simple, amusing, unpretentious, concerned with insignificance’s, require no skill or countless rehearsals, have no commodity or institutional value. The value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, massproduced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all. Fluxus art-amusement is the rear-guard without any pretension or urge to participate in the competition of “one-upmanship” with the avant-garde. It strives for the monostructural and nontheatrical qualities of simple natural event, a game or a gag. It is the fusion of Spikes Jones Vaudeville, gag, children’s games and Duchamp.”

Again, I don’t think he covers it completely and I know he contradicts some of what I’ve said. And, most importantly, I know there’s no right answer here. But what I do agree with completely is that I think it’s so lame for people to take themselves so seriously about the things they produce and create. I think that as soon as you start worrying more about copyrights and watermarks than you do the whole process of catharsis and creation then it’s not only pretty sad but it’s also, to me at least, absolutely ridiculous. The entire point of Art and making art in the first place has been missed.

In pretty much every gallery show I’ve ever had or been a part of my work has sold out. Completely. This isn’t me being arrogant or cocky or boastful and I swear on everything that it’s not. I’m not even implying the work was good or even worth it either. But it’s more to say that the work has always been priced to sell. I’ve always been of the mindset that I’d just simply not like to take the pieces back to my place at the end of the day and I’d like to not live with them anymore after a point. For the 52 Weeks project there was a provision in the contract with the gallery that if every single piece didn’t sell then we wouldn’t sell any of them at all. It was an All Or Nothing Clause and the point was that either they would all have to go and the emotions attached would be exorcised along with the work or the whole thing would stay completely intact where you’d have to make room to keep living with it.

I guess what I mean to say is that I have always made, and I continue to make, these things [my art] to either get something out of me or to share something with whomever might come along and listen. One or the other. And by choosing prices that meet the financial abilities of the average human being is just a way to actually accomplish those two things. If I charged three grand for every little piece I made I’d be sitting in a boring museum of my own work and nobody would hear a word I was ever trying to say.

Adding some super-crazed prices to your work is just bullshit, really, and when I see some mediocre piece that has this zany-high price tag I instantly feel like it means the person that made it only equates money with value. Either that or they feel like that’s the way to really prove to everyone else that they are a ‘real artist’ and that their work is important. This is what galleries do for the most part and it’s all hype to create a profit. Or whatever. I don’t know really what I mean to say exactly. But I know what I mean for sure.

So I guess I say go ahead and make contrived pieces of crap using imagery that’s as overused as the goddam Golden Arches. Throw in words like inspire and breathe and hope. Add some fairies or angels or anything with wings and toss in some doll heads and antique typewriter keys just for good measure. Then, for the love of all that is good and true and sacred, be sure to scan it and then run off a few copies on your inkjet printer and sell them as limited prints. Give it a French name so it sounds ‘fancier’ and more high-brow. And you can call it whatever you want. It’s art. You’re an artist. Fine.

But I am too and I have a different opinion about it and I might be wrong or I might be right or I might be neither or even both. I have no idea what I’m talking about even. I guess it is what you say it is and it is what you make it out to be and it is all dependent on how it touches you or speaks to you I suppose. [And that's something different for everyone I guess, right?]

Ugh! [YAWP!]

Emerson said, “Give me health and a day and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.” I guess I’ll leave it at that. If that’s cool with you.

[Pardon me for my rut.]

Originally published at [Posted over at smartwentcrazy.com/journal.]. You can comment here or there.

I had always sort of considered what I’d like to have written on my headstone when I am dead. It’s a big thing to consider and I have always refrained from having any text tattooed on my body after all of these years because I can’t quite come up with something perfect enough. Although I suppose that with a tombstone it might not matter as much since a tattoo is something you have to live with for a while and a tombstone is something that you get to make other people live with.

Charles Bukowski always was one of my favorites as far as epitaphs were concerned. His just says, “Don’t Try.” It beats hell out of Keats’ any day. And another favorite is the one that Bernoulli chose for himself and was a nice play on his Miracle Spirals as well as his belief in reincarnation. It reads, “Eadem mutata resurgo” which is translated from Latin to mean, “Though changed I shall arise the same.”And how can you not love Royal Tennenbaum’s inscription? [Go see it if you haven't.]

What I have so far would be nice to use on opposing sides of the thing and that way, depending on how you felt about me when I was alive, you can choose to be reminded of the good or the bad.

This is all of it so far:

A quiet man, not given to law, quarrel or wrangling, not vitious, but pleasant, neat and spruce, loving mirth in his words and actions, clean in apparel, rather drinking much than gluttonous, prone to venery, often entangled in love-matters, zealous in his affections, musical, delighting in baths and all honest merry meetings, or masks and stage-plays; easy of belief, and not given to labour or taking any pains, a company-keeper, cheerful, nothing mistrustful, a right virtuous man, often had in some jealousy, yet no cause for it.

Or, on the other side of things is this bit:

The man was riotous, expensive, wholly given to looseness and lewd companies of women, not regarding his reputation, coveting unlawful beds, incestuous, an adulterer; fanatical, a mere skip-jack, of no faith, no repute, no credit; a goldbricker, chronic malcontent, spending his means in alehouses, taverns, and amongst scandalous, loose people; a mean lazy companion, careless in the emotions of others and not careful of the things of this life or anything religious; a mere atheist and an unnatural man.

This is adapted from a 17th Century book by William Lilly called Christian Astrology. It’s somehow supposed to be how the planet Venus can change people depending on where it was when a person was born or something. And I have no idea why I was even reading that in the first place.

[I'll keep you posted on the developments and the final edits.]

Originally published at [Posted over at smartwentcrazy.com/journal.]. You can comment here or there.

Addendum to the entry just before this one:

Just shortly after those things happened I get a great, brick-house beautiful email from Brandon [another Hospitality Club guest-turned-friend] who I have not spoken to in over two years easy. And later this evening as I check my mail I get news that Nes has finally been given the Spouse Visa she had been waiting over a year for. She got the news just before leaving Tucson for Diamond Mountain.

I never check my email much lately and I almost never use my Yahoo! account. I just happened to be at home and I had some time to kill so I fooled around online and decided to check my mail. That’s when I got the email from Nes asking if they could stay with me for the night as they were coming down from the mountain to see a show at the Rialto. It’s a freak thing that I ever even checked my mail that day. Seriously, I have over 150 emails in my inbox.

Something else sort of cool is that Nes and Ed stayed with me at Cybele’s because my apartment is more like my own personal fort and it may not be suitable for everyone. And I had a friend staying there already since he was in between apartments. So they stayed with me and Cybele at her place.

Another interesting thing is that there was a point where I had never even met Cybele in person and I invited her to come along with me to one of the teachings that Geshe Michael Roach was having. She was unable to make it and I eventually met her later but out of the blue comes Nes and Ed.  [Maybe it's not that interesting the way I'm explaining it. But in my head it's so interesting it's crazy.]

Yet another small instance of this Connection and Reconnection business; I showed Ed the dollar bill I had ready in an addressed and stamped envelope waiting to be sent back to Gary. Ed added another dollar just because. [Full circle again.]

Later that evening I got another unexpected email from my past. After not being in touch for probably 20 years one of my best friends from high-school sent this:

I was had some Sigue Sigue Sputnik on my iPod the other day and it got me to reminiscing. How many times did we make that walk from your house on Patterson to Village Square? That was like 3 miles each way. I still laugh at the time we mixed bleach and ammonia to clean up the giant Adidas logo on your basement floor. We could have died then. I watched some dumbass janitor make that mixture when I was working for Sam’s Club and he was taken away by ambulance shortly after.

Other good/interesting memories:
Book Brokers (I still have the Kraven’s Last Hunt SpiderMan series, one of the only comics I still have)
Magnum 44 markers and the wrath that follows their trail
Listening to New Order’s Substance over and over and over again
Prank calling the Dierbergs pay phone
RPG marathons at James’s house (Do you still hear from him? I often wonder what he ended up doing.)
[Censored just to save a certain party any hurt feelings or embarrassment.]
Getting high more than is reasonable or necessary.
Taking an excessive amount of NoDoze and then going to see Mannequinn 2 which we walked out of.
The Central West End. I need to give my wife a tour of that place soon. I miss it.

Lots of good times from age 15 to 17. I have a 16 year old step son who loves to sit in front of the xbox 360 a little too much and wish he would go out and experience life. The TV and video games are sucking the life and real experiences out of the future generations. I wonder what souless bastards they will all become. Not saying we are perfect, but we can at least say we lived.

Just for old times sake, yell at the top of your lungs, “I am the prime male specimen!” Especially when the day is very droll. Works wonders.

But, yeah, I knew that there was something going on over these last few days. I’m not sure that any of this stuff means anything really. It’s not much more than a running theme for the day I guess. I just can’t not think, however, that it makes for a pretty beautiful reminder that the past is not always prologue and the past isn’t even the past.

Yup.

Originally published at [Posted over at smartwentcrazy.com/journal.]. You can comment here or there.