Portrait of Boebert

Wearing jeggings and heels and telling racist jokes. Blowing shit up in TV commercials. Inventing stories that make her look like a monster: Cruelty signaling. Glasses clink as funds are raised to do more dumb shit. Spectacles of bad comedy fueled by malice. An orange swine in Florida as mentor. Pickup trucks for grocery runs. Guns as wearable fashion. The pursuit of a smaller mind and reduced empathy. Bitterness, heart-freeze. Vocal cords dipped in acid. Tapeworm mind. Frontier viciousness. A permanent state of dyspepsia. Mediocrity turned into terror.

We Are the Ghosts or They Are the Ghosts

We are the ghosts or they are the ghosts. We are or they are. Did we come to haunt them? That I'll not believe. We sold them rifles, gun powder, learned to cure buckskin, built trading posts on the bends of the rivers. We are the ghosts or they are the ghosts. They learned our language and spoke to us beneath the harvest moon, wheat in the barn. We could not appear as apparitions or mist, foul odors that will not relent. "Ink ink a bottle of ink, the cork fell out and you stink." We are the ghosts or they are the ghosts. We did not come bobbing as corks on the eastern horizon one cold Plymouth morning - hazy, shimmering, fading, reappearing. We did not come to haunt them or bring them into our nightmares. "Poor old man, your horse must die, and we say so, and we hope so, Oh poor old man."

Dolphy

optical illusions

on the bass clarinet

sound like sonic confusion

but it's just something

not met before

score exploding

onto new terrain

don't need a weather vane

to hear the song the wind gave

in europe reaching out to souls

with george gervin

finger rolls of light

the vibraphone blinks

blue sights

navigation signals

in the blue night

sending messages from

stratocumulus cool heights

tony williams drums tic-toc

salvador dali trip clocks

melodies mesmerize minds

like a dream fox

dolphy watched ships

on the seine

as they reached docks

sailed rhythms

mingus and coleman

helped unlock

folks flock

stop talk

take stock

as their jaws drop

2 Aphorisms on Artistic Creation

Among the lifelong vocations of the artist is the fight against self-censorship. In a functionally insane society, the colonization of one's consciousness is composed of multiple layers - most of them undetected. To create something worthwhile, these levels of captured consciousness must be bypassed or exposed and dissolved.

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A central role of art in societies that have divorced themselves from ancient, Earth-rooted wisdom traditions is to make visible the crimes, idiocies and daily miseries that have become normalized and therefore invisible to the society's members.

On Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher

"Capitalist realism" (a play on the Soviet-enforced aesthetic of "socialist realism") is the term coined by the late cultural critic Mark Fisher to describe books/movies/TV/podcasts/songs in which no option to the the dreary pursuit of wealth and "success" is presented as something desired by sane people or as something even real. Capitalist realism refers to works of art or entertainment in which nobody dreams of anything other than making money, gaining more social status or getting famous. In capitalist realism, people who want other things do not exist or, when they do exist, they are portrayed as hopeless fools. "Everybody secretly wants to be rich," is a message in capitalist realist works. In works of capitalist realism, everything and everyone is and should be for sale, eventually.

Fortunately, actual humanity does not resemble the humanity depicted in works of capitalist realism. Hundreds of people I know online and hundreds of people I've known in my life have dreams, desires and ambitions that are not those depicted in capitalist realism. My friends dream of greater connection with nature and with other people. They dream of having more time to pursue creative work and work around social and environmental justice. They imagine and pursue lives not defined by a dog-eat-dog hierarchy of exploitation and a state of being cut off from Earth ecology.

The results are in. This thing has run its course. Hyper-individualism, wherein we each live trying f*ck over the other person, has run planetary ecology off of a cliff. All this time, all these years we were dreaming of something different, we were told: "No you're not." We were told that all we needed was a Jeep or a swimming pool. Well, that dog won't hunt. We are remembering ourselves.

People and People Magazine

Celebrities are worshiped as demigods because they appear to have achieved something that was fairly commonplace in many previous iterations of human society: unalienated labor. Work defined by autonomy, mechanisms of communal decision-making, independence, chance, interface with nature, individual creativity, group creativity, sharing, and the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of one's labor were/are hallmarks of many indigenous, non-empire societies on all continents of the world. Looking at celebrities, we imagine them working in contexts in which democracy and autonomy are not checked at the workplace door (or app or Zoom room). We see them as people not reduced to days defined by toil and taking orders, as people engaged in creative expression in their jobs and not living under a Sword of Damocles threatening: medical bankruptcy, eviction, food and housing insecurity. There they are, frolicking on the Mount Olympus of the late night talk show circuit and posting on social media images of their existence favored by destiny, of their days which seem to be based in work-play, adventure, chance and expression of the self. We are in late capitalism. This thing is phasing down. If we survive its demise, perhaps we can form (or remember) a way of living together that offers a life of independence, cooperation and imagination to more than a minuscule few.

Loser

Loser, I'm a loser. Let me lose again. Let me pick the wrong number. Let me choose the wrong card. Fold me into a suitcase like a ventriloquist's dummy and let me become lost luggage. Let me linger in a locker. Jesus Christ was a loser, a tramp and a lunatic. Winners are killing us - disappearing the clownfish, the parrotfish, the hammerhead, the manta ray. We must lose better. Lose more completely. Lose like vaudeville saints and fools. Every winner, a world destroyer. "Mar-a-Lago," sea-to-lake-to-puddle-to-drop. Stores on Mars full of items made by people peeing into bottles, timing their shits, scrawling messages on screens - Help I'm prisoner. If I could, I would fold myself like a ventriloquist's dummy and place myself inside this thing to pop out to tell you to stop. To tell you I'm a loser, to tell you the losers are here, baby, and now it's game over.

Against "Hamilton," Against the American Monomyth

What if the iconic American Horatio Alger bootstrap tale was not actually one defined by grit, tenacity and pluck, but was actually one that depicts a person slowly and steadily acceding to the cultural pressure to worship wealth, social status and power? What if the cherished American story of a poor child or immigrant who rises up from poverty into riches and elite status were not a story of triumph, but one in which the empathetic capacity of the protagonist steadily reduces - as the system within which they are trying to succeed at all costs requires them to become cooler, more insular, less compassionate toward others and further estranged from the nonhuman world - a realm which must be converted from living things into dead matter products, per the rules of the system?

Two Trees

A ghost tree in a field in Mississippi. It was used for the hanging of a man. The tree wailed and raged, but was not heard. It died that night - frozen, insane with its silence in the grim twilight. A different tree, a new tree appears and grows around the ghost tree, but the ghost tree remains inside. It rises up when dusk comes and races around within the second tree - howling, crying, mad. The second tree hears, but can only remain still and await the rain, the sunlight, the wind in its branches.

Reflections on Byong-Chul Han

It may have started with the doctrine of original sin: You are not good enough as you are. You must become something else -- cleansed, purified, self-realized, self-transcended. In 2021, you must be more famous, you must be more famous than you are because the scope of mass society is endless, just at the moment you have stretched yourself to span the width of it, it has grown again, stretching east and west like the wings of a soaring dragon, you must become more well-known, more recognized, more perfect, smoother, more of an object of envy.

The Ghosts to Emerge from this Pandemic Will Be Unforgiving

The ghosts to emerge from this pandemic will be unforgiving. I saw one last night walking back from the Jewel. She was seated on the crown of a garage, lowly singing a song in Spanish. Soñamos con una ciudad. Soñamos con un bosque. Entramos en la ciudad. Entramos en el bosque. (We dream of a city. We dream of a forest. We enter the city. We enter the forest). She was lightly tapping her cane upon the roof tiles. I could see the red leaves of the maple behind her shining through her. She removed something from a bag beside her and hoisted it toward her shoulder. Then she fired some ringing buck shot that barely missed me. I looked and she was gone. I thought I could still hear that song. I heard the hum of an electric motor, maintaining the inflation of a big white illuminated ghost on a neighbor’s lawn. Soñamos con una ciudad. Soñamos con un bosque. Entramos a la ciudad. Entramos al bosque.