Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Overheard by a fly on the windshield....

Me: I'm thinking about moving to Phoenix.

Her: What?!?..... Phoenix is an armpit!

Me: (fumble).... Well I've always been curious about what it would be like to live in an armpit....

Her: (laughter)....Well I suppose I can't stop you.... but at least stay on the freeway until you get to Tucson....

Me: Why?

Her: Because Tucson sucks, which is better than armpit.... and besides, Tucson has a music scene.

Me: I quibble with that comparison.

Her: As you should....

I went to a surreal film series in Tuscon in the winter of '87-'88
showed at the YWCA eh
drove down from Phoenix every weekend
from urban sprawl lumberyard labor
into Buñuel's loco segways

http://www.luisbunuel.com/books.html
visions of old north Mexico all the way to Hermosillo
andd Sonoraaaahhhh
drove down there on sat morning, jammed all day in Tuscon, they had a food co-op, head shops, cool progressions,
and the films at the Y,
never made it up to the university, no,
old Tuscon in late Saturday afternoon,
watched the lovers sit on a bus bench
quiet clear cool sweater weather
easy soft light, as if eternity were captured for a moment,
slept in my car, parked at the Y, Sundays
sometimes visited my cousin and her Zzen hubbie
meditataions and hiking,
drove back in the afternoon,
watching tle landscape dissappear through the rear view mirror.
the am radio playing, "calling all angels out on patrol" over and over,
til static dissappeared the radio from Tuscon and
Phoenix rose up, oh sometimes I'd hike in their lovely desert parks, yes, but it also signalled my entrapment in
mainstream blues, little motel room, but with a horse in the field out the back window, and the lumberyard
slamming boards with Big Tex, and the regulars,
never made it into Tuscon, I was called into
screaming banshee continuation of my last hiatus
until I swooped down into old St Pete in the spring of '88,
still had local rambles, but it was my last hurrah before
coming home, sleepy backwater bluez port,
anchored.
still I have my travels in memory,
titillated out by swags and lollygags,
and discover new horizons such as this short victory
captured the wind he did.
"An unspeakable Betrayal"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0520208 ... readerpage

....."it was my last hurrah before coming home".....

exactly how I feel about my wander.... my exhausted wander, at this point....

I gotta say that I agree with her.... Phoenix has the soul of a random number generator, except for maybe the "Vinchell Donut House", out in Mesa.... Other than that, hurl a dart at the map, and you'll come up with five-lanes, wilted palm trees, fast food, and low-rise stucco, 99 times out of 100. It's up to Tucson to deliver me from this fatal, heat-stricken re-run.... though these days, the hum of air-conditioned subdivisions of conformity encroaches on the vast expanse of basin and fields like beige bacteria, threatening to fill in the entire span between cities, rendering any comparisons between the two as somewhat arbitrary....

Anyway.... great stuff, Jimbo.... Thanks.....

Well, yes, live in gentle suburbia and when I see snaps from sober Duck, LROD on the path, MNAZ in the desert, I rejoice.

Actually I did a sketch Saturday, skipped my life drawing group and did a sketch of a street from my car. Will post it some time.

In between the rectangular grid is a plethora of counter-culturalists, at least ten thousand here in Tampa Bay, listener-sponsers of WMNF radio http://www.wmnf.org

The ten thousand things
sweeping the back patio
victory garden with tomatos

Yes the scalliwags
always welcome
the road goes on.

Buckeye Road. Before the ten was finished through Phoenix, thirty five red lights and then out into the cactus patch, cut throuh Ghila Bend and back out to ten, change the CB to the LA channel. My favorite AZ truck stops were little america on the old lincoln highway, the macrbe sceene of those taxidermed penquins and Wickenberg, the showers with the warning about the water. I always felt like I glowed in the dark a little when I got out, and Tonapah Joe's and Alice. and the little girl laying there at the one oh four mile marker. The natural stone fortress in Texas canyon. Geronimo's hide away.

I always loved that Arizona state flag, seemed so Zen.

nice road ramble you all thanks

speaking of the bourgeoisie, I always liked Lenin's remark to Red Emma, "free speach is such a bourgeois notion"

Professor Jack, you oughta be in movies.

Still truckin thru old Phoenix,
grinding gears to Mexican musica,
or AM radio maybe not
just the Gila Bend blues
around the bend
psychedelic radioactive showers
and hallucinations of floating cherubs
at the 104 mile marker
informed as it were
by the proletarian puppet show
and the dancing armadilloes.


http://www.autoplates.com/prod047.htm