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 we're breaking out and running to the end of the stars.