Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

--- revised:

Character simmers in the grit and grunge of urban deserts, where sleek condos rise from cracked streets, bright, slippery serpents above ancient rivets and stains, next to the clubs. Insomniac hipster alleys. Smog flows out from hipster grunge into the foothills, and flung-burbs materialize in its path, safe colors and double garages to no end. They used to build with style—Victorian spires and lace, a craftsman’s elaborate attention to trim, even stout brick and solid oak floors of mid-century pads with aircraft carrier rooms and huge plate glass. You could fill those places with art. Fill off-white subdivisions with laundry.

Flung-burbs are filled with poets however. Cyber-poetry floods the net, and you may click on countless gushings of young flung-burb angst. The beige hole. Get it out! He never had such an outlet back then. Poets were beat, or dead. Welcome to insipid lips, where quatrains fail and image pales, sextets are sterile and metaphor, puerile. Welcome to a drip tank, where wallboard warps and women are flat, where the floor is cold and beer is warm, paint is fresh and chips are stale. Let us write poems of sprawl, and broken shards of my soul.

Flung-burbs are not all budding cliché and basketball hoops however; they are brilliance and purity and spray paint disease, the gamut. Build a million garages in the sticks if you want. Your kids will tag you. Pray for them as they go to war again, ten blocks or ten thousand miles. You hardly know those people. Get it out! He carps about endless crap wars, each one inevitable. Yeah? Human violence never drops out entirely, but war? It’s random, a matter of duty. We try not to think about it. Try our damndest. He writes crap protests and gushes of lost love in a desert of mind, fails to get the big picture. He is at peace with his stink on the subject, in the now. You do what you must.

It’s all random funk, elongated, truncated, venerated, confiscated, genius of innocence and baldheaded tattoos in the breeding grounds of country and Exxon. In a cluttered rambler out by telephone pole no. 14002 a dandelion pushed through pavement, celebrated youth under a soft kiss chemical sun. Every day fine art is conceived, childhood seen. Every day our weapons trade for profit, madness and blood honor. Pray to their honor. Learn to shoot a little straighter than the neighborhood.

Let 'er RIP, nazzerino.... let 'er RIP.

Nice rant, as usual... well spoken and realized, as usual... only the nouns have been changed to defend the assumptions.

Keep the pen loaded, amigo... never can tell when the muse needs to cavort...

Mnaz, puerility exposed for all the world to jest. You write like a bionic Babe Ruth. Homer over the fence every time. I love your take on the dying suburban dream. We internet subversives need to stick together. hehe

John

Thanks Cec, John. I sense my recent writing surge easing a bit. (Get it out!) Had to tweak the ending. More succinct. More wordplay and/or rhythm (even some rhyme) in my writing from the last two months. "Carps" and "crap." Ha.

more thoughts on it . .


Character simmers in grime and grunge of urban deserts. Sleek condos rise from cracked streets, bright financial slippery serpents above ancient rivets and stains next to the clubs, and hipster grunge haze flows out to the foothills where flung-burbs materialize in its path. The beige hole. Safe colors and double garages to no end. They used to build with style, splash with paint, Victorian spires, a craftsman’s elaborate attention to trim, even stout brick and solid oak of mid-century pads with aircraft carrier rooms and huge plate glass. You could fill those places with art. Fill off-white subdivisions with laundry.

Flung-burbs are filled with poets however. Cyber-poetry floods the net, and you may click on countless gushings of angst. Get it out! You never had such a thing back in the day. Poets were either beat, or dead. Welcome to insipid lips, where quatrains fail and image pales, sextets are sterile and metaphor, puerile. Welcome to a drip tank, where wallboard warps and women are flat, where the floor is cold and beer is warm, paint is fresh and chips are stale. Let us write poems of sprawl, and broken shards of my soul.

They are not all budding cliché and basketball hoops however; they are brilliance, purity and spray paint disease all in one, the gamut, the cross-section. Build a million double garages, your kids will tag you. Pray for them as they go to war, ten blocks or ten thousand miles. You hardly know those people. It’s a little rough in the safe colors. Get it out! The endless crap wars, each one inevitable. You do what you must. Don’t miss the big picture, some crap protest. It’s all random funk anyway, elongated, truncated, venerated, confiscated, a genius of innocence on baldheaded tattoos in the breeding grounds, a dandelion pushed through pavement at telephone pole no. 14002 under a soft kiss spray paint chemical sun. Come learn to shoot a little straighter than the neighborhood. Seems a little gone.

But fine art is born everyday, childhood lived, a mother’s love hungrily received. You can’t dwell on the negative. Every day our weapons trade for profit, madness and blood honor, so pray to it, but don’t dwell on the negative; you seem stuck on it. Read the poems; they will tell you what it’s like, youthful battles that make no sense in a sea of safe colors, but keep reading and you find yourself in the mix. You’re not immune to the scene.

see all this prose writing, if you see it in some context like actual scenes from your life, and then weave it into a kind of non plot that has different scenes with some dialogue tossed in, think 'Naked Lunch' and put it on the road, or think 'On The Road' and eat your naked lunch, heck think 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but more in your own experience.See, I went back to the beginning, but the idea was it is a novel about a poet's life, the second part when poet actually came is the hardest part.So it is kinda like a novel within a novel, a flashback like a desert flash flood.And then you flash forward, and take all that stuff and sort of hammer it into a sculpture of sentences.I know it sounds insane, and believe me, it will make you feel like screamin at it, but that prose is screamin poetry, screaming novel, novel, novel.And you gotta listen to the music, even if it is just a version of Honky Tonk by Bill Doggett in some low joint on the edge of nowhere and gone tomorrow.You know shift it into golden gears.....hi lo....hi fi....lo fi.....grind the grime, and rhyme the nob with the blob and blast off in a trail of nuts and bolts from the wild blue yonder and make for outta sight outta mind.Next stop, area 51 to a few snap shots, and then all the way through to Truckee.

Yes, listen to the music, even if it infuriates you and you're barely held back. "Who the hell played this song?" And why now? And you got a convertible full of felonies outside the door, gonna make a run for L.A. No, that was HST. I gotta truck fulla debris, gonna make a run to god knows where.

people like margaret mead and howard zinn committed themselves to the notion that we shouldn't underestimate the actions of a single individual that sets their mind on standing up to the forces that make the masses miserable, to the change that is possible through determination.....and lately it does seem, I'd feel better demonstrating than just watching tv.....it takes a lot of effort and courage to get outside your relative comfort...maybe our writing is important, I don't know.....maybe our action is important, I don't know,
it all seems so daunting some days, like Sisyphus and his big rock...but
my feeling is lately
we better clog the streets before it's too late......peace !

Keep on keepin' on, no doubt.

I guess I haven't done much actual picketing or volunteer work. At the federal level, in terms of our crap-ass foreign policy, I'm not seeing much difference between dems and repubs of late. I mean, re: Bu$hko, "the people" finally woke up a little some time in 2006. Too late! But they basically tried to reject neo-CON aggression as ongoing policy to some extent, with a lot of voters crossing party lines and such. And what good did it do? Sorry folks, the CONS got their foot in the door, and that's that. Hard not to feel that protest against Big "Defense" is basically futile. Maybe protest on a level of Vietnam might make a difference, but I don't think we'll ever see that unless the draft comes back.

I've debated US warmongering on various discussion boards, so at least that's something, but . . . And I'm only now getting caught up on lesser-known destructive policies, such as the Iraq sanctions. So many folks think of the '91 Gulf War as some sort of "great triumph of justice." It had a more genuine "Coalition" (sort of); I'll give it that, I suppose. But the bombing was very destructive, and it appears the country's water supply system was intentionally damaged pretty badly, and this, combined with sanctions, insured that Iraqis would not have an adequate water supply for years. I don't think people realize how destructive US policy has been over the years in these sorts of things. And this is the overt stuff. The covert stuff has added a lot more to the toll.

Anyway . . . Funny how a lot of segments I've written have crystalized around some poems of mine from the last couple years. It's a real challenge to mix it all into a road trip/motelin'/desert rattin' sort of backdrop, and slip in some philosophizin' and pontificatin' and what have ya. Not sure I'll pull it off. Thanks revolution, Steve.

yea the parties are only mildly different, they all took money from BP,
including Obama......I think the best thing to do is focus on your community.....give some time and energy to make things better, in my area the results have been rather amazing......more trees, new small businesses, a farmer's market, more live music...less traffic, etc.

and who knows, maybe one day the communities join each other,
march on city hall...it just feels better to be doing something.....we've cleaned up the stream, got rid of invasive species in the park, and there are heron down there and fox, raccoons, crayfish have come back,...small scale stuff, but maybe as I said, it leads to bigger things

keep them wheels turnin'.....roll on brother mnaz.......

Did you know the universe is beige when you came up with that title?

Everybody took money from BP, including environmentalists like the Nature Conservancy, Environmental Defense Fund and others.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2010/05/23-3

On he upside BP did paint their gas stations green.
Ah yes the greenwash.

Sorry about the ramble mnaz. Pete Seeger was singing about Ticky Tacky houses and Levittown in 1951 and Riesman was writing about The Lonely Crowd.

A society dominated by other-directed individuals lacks credible leadership, is not concerned with self-knowledge, and arguably trivialises human potential. Today, the triumph of the other-directed is almost complete. Companies are full of emotionally well-adjusted incompetents. They control virtually all aspects of society. However, as Riesman points out, the costs of this dominance may be high. When conformity has been placed above individuality, society loses its ability to think clearly.

http://www.meritocracy.org.uk/page20.htm

I think you are doing what you can when you pick up your pen. I don't know what else we can do. Listen to the music and teach the children and hope they forgive us when this generation of vipers dies off.

I think about this bit from The Lonely Crowd

The final of Riesman's categories, and by far the rarest, is that of the 'inner-directed'. These are individuals who evolve their own values, based on their personal experiences and understanding. Often, their parents are freethinkers who have created the environment that allows them to develop in this way.

Sorry mnaz it was just piece of creative writing and I make too much of it. Sorry i rambled all over it,
I keep thinking about how happy I am to be alive as bad as it seems. The worse thing for me about this suburban sprawl is not being able to see the stars.

thanks for writing
you say it all so much better than I can

Steve, you're right. Maybe it has to somehow "start with the communities," and I shouldn't dwell as much as I do on the nefarious feds.

Jack, thank you for your comments. I'll have to carefully think over what form and extent of "commentary" I want in the prose, especially in a chapter like this. I want to write a "literary journey," so you can only take your commentary so far. Even old HST got his shots in at the War Machine in "Fear and Loathing," and I thought they were pretty effective. So I can't just totally back away, but it's a tricky balance. Regardless of what I do, I'm sure some will read parts of this as "preaching," or cynical . . . Oh well. Thanks for the links. I'll try to get to them later. Have to go right now.

Sorry about the links I only put them in as footnotes.

great links, mr. truck...you are the man with all the connections, ha
yes and BP does have that colorful flower-like logo that reminds me of nuclear death for some reason.....too bad so many of the brilliant minds were seduced into advertising.....even the army uses them to suck in teenagers ( they even use psychologist ) that seems dirty to me...recruiters that know the techniques of manipulation that descend upon a poor rural community.....we must say no to this...
everything is not ok ! ...the end DOES NOT justify the means !
sorry for the rant !...you know how it is...sometimes it just spews out.