2 Fash Pundits, 1 Fash Pol

Cruel, craven Ann Coulter Haunts the Earth

Like the gaunt, hungry ghost

Of a scavenger bird

***

Mendacious Matt Walsh

Believes in nothing

Tries to remember

When he last felt well

In a dream he draws doors on a wall

With white chalk

He tries to open them

And cannot

He wakes up

Spends another day

Acting, pretending, not remembering

When he last felt well

***

Hapless Josh Hawley speaks

Says little & speaks some more

He sees himself reflected in a shallow pool

And tries to think

But thoughts elude him

He speaks some more

listening to "metamorphosis" by glass

If there have been 10,000 composers since the arrival of Philip Glass to write music for film/TV/media that simultaneously "sounds like Philip Glass" and sounds nothing like Philip Glass, well what is the difference? One answer is: pathos, brokenness. Philip Glass music sounds like it is made by a person who's wounded by the ravages of time and aware of his mortality and the larger life/death cycle of existence and who is seeking transcendence or healing or episodes of release and joy through the composition. The people who mimic Philip Glass sound like they are trying to depict somebody in that state, rather than experiencing that state directly and intensely themselves. Paradoxically, if they were to get in touch with that deeper level of experience, their way of expressing it would not sound like Philip Glass. Philip Glass evolved a language to express his state, his wounds and his longings. Each of us has a slightly different language to express our own experiences of these universal struggles.

Makin' Art: De Chirico, The Wasteland, 10,000 Maniacs

Most artists I know, myself included, have created throughout our lives in a way that echoes what the Fisher King says in Part V of The Wasteland (What the Thunder Said): "These fragments I have shored against my ruins." I first encountered the phrase in the song "Poor De Chirico" by Natalie Merchant & 10,000 Maniacs. In the lyric, it is something that the artist says to describe his paintings. In such a context, the phrase immediately conjures Giorgio's silent, nearly abandoned dreamworlds of sun-parched town plazas and eerie pastel towers casting long shadows. Even as a senior in high school, I thought: those de Chirico landscapes really are what we can salvage from this life - places beautiful, but uncanny and permeated with an inexplicable loss.

***

What I and many of the artists I know have been unable to do beyond creating and shoring fragments against our ruins is also diligently pursue & integrate into the infrastructural support that comes from applying for grants, fellowships, residences and involvement in the edifice of academia, not to mention the corporate publishing and entertainment edifice. In other words, writing/playing/performing/imagining has been part of a prolonged act of survival and I am grateful for art and all the artists preceding and contemporary to me who've made my survival and even internal flourishing possible. But the the parallel bureaucratic navigation that well-known and well supported artists achieve has always felt abstract and distant to me. That's unfortunate. And in my case, it may be due to something as banal as undiagnosed ADD. My mind all but shuts down in the face of things that are not immediately present and tangible to me. Well, the brain is plastic and there may be time for me yet to acclimate my mind to the landscape of forms and institutions that are far less real to me than the landscapes of Giorgio de Chirico...

weed

weed in the 70s smelled like transgression

dark sour funk aroma

the smoke snaked upwards and around

cardboard boxes stacked

in my friend's brother's bedroom

steve miller band

white stratocaster sound

pete stood up

his head above the boxes

like a cream-colored gumball

i was afraid for him

would he ever return

from wherever he was

weed in the 1980s already more furtive

wire fence dead leaves

jesuit high school parking lot

("i don't wanna be an eddie

it's a waste of time")

smelled like aggression

like flight from family madness

in front of the oriental theater

rocky horror picture show

the wind from the lake chased the weed smoke

down the street

like it was a villain

i don't know if people smoked weed in the 1990s

well there was that one time that the tamburitza player

convinced me to try weed and dark beer together

bliss and then panic

the expansive lawns along the great lake

sparse clouds above

like tossed gunpowder crackling

in the 2000s weed smelled like

the final puff at the end of time

like fear and rage

it smelled like life lived

with a hot plate and a water bottle

either that or you join the army

for the meals and the money

and you do things in the east

that no amount of weed will obliterate

from your mind

in the 2010s weed is comestible

gone the fungal dank odor

it's efficient round sweet and spongy

foil pouches plastic wrappers

getting through days chewing weed

watching dogs leap in the park

run around the grove in the sunshine

in the 2020s the weed from the house next door

smells like dread

something brewed

by fierce metallic birds

like a void in the web of the time

the pale smoke

the architecture

of the last prayer spoken by the last person

on a drifting vessel

become now a ghost ship