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

Guy Who

Guy who's a vegetarian except when he eats the Italian Job from 7-Eleven now and then
Guy who's mastered a variety of non-monetizable skills
Guy who tried and failed to be polyamory
Guy whose main goal in life is to never go to prison
Guy who battles despair in supermarkets
Guy who is too afraid to own an ant farm
Guy who thinks rats are charming creatures
Guy who is well suited to be an adjunct professor except for the
money part
Guy who takes solace in observing peers who are more neurotic than him
Guy can't understand people who are less neurotic than him
Guy who admires people who speak Latin
Guy who tried and failed to be religious
Guy who tried gardening but felt bored and then felt guilty about that
Guy who started getting into fist fights with other men at age 40
Guy who stopped getting into fist fights with other men at age 50
Guy who does his best reading on the bus
Guy who likes the vocalizing of frogs
Guy who feels insane when he thinks of bleached coral reefs
Guy who may be too old to do a podcast
Guy who had multiple experiences akin to Charlie Brown / Lucy / football
Guy who thinks he somehow caused this
Guy whose mind is too fragile to be a short order cook
Guy whose mind is too rambunctious to be a coder
Guy who was once capable of being in love with several people at the same time
Guy who a few times in his life heard voices (not his) chattering in his head
Guy who dreamed of a giant Christ crucified on a hillside which he (the guy) could only descend by stepping on the crucified Christ who winced in pain each time the guy stepped on him
Guy who could only smoke a maximum of six cigarettes a day but was still addicted for years
Guy who can't enjoy Scorsese films in which the protagonists are sociopaths
Guy who still can't figure out the salient differences between Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience
Guy who wishes adults had never taught the kid version of him about hell
Guy who notices that his artist friends who haven't attended therapy are addicted insane or dead
Guy who was a different guy before the seventh grade bullying cataclysm
Guy whose the greatest work of art may have been the Neil Young royal blue and yellow jersey he silk screened in eighth grade
Guy who sang songs about heroin addiction before he knew he was singing about heroin addiction
Guy whose mind is too volatile to live in New York City
Guy who sometimes feels like a different guy and this scares him
Guy who likes the Spanish word "desmadre" for big fucking mess
Guy who remembers drinking green wine in a restaurant on a cliff in Madeira overlooking the vineyard where the grapes were from

Christjob: Like Punching a Timeclock Formed In Jerusalem Stone

christ dies daily on the cross
he gets up shaking in the jerusalem dawn
and prepares for a day of crucifixion

each day he goes about his business
with the eating and the walking
and the preaching

then judas betrays him
roman guards arrest him
and he ends up dying on the cross

it’s a job like any other
like dealing blackjack
or fixing bicycles

he hangs on the cross till he’s limp
gets transported to a cave
sleeps, wakes up and does it all over again

Anthropocene Moments

The door opens onto a stone passage. A white bird flies up from the water pooled on the ground. Distant bells ring old songs. He is tired. He feels the world slow and accelerate at once. A large beast shuffles across the crest of the hill. Could it be a woolly mammoth? He sees only its silhouette. He sits down in the dust. He wishes to speak with the gods. They seem far away.

Pharaoh Sanders