December 30, 2013

bard o



Rehearsal in the Harry Smith Studio
at Naropa - Boulder, CO 

The Outrider rides the edge—parallel to the mainstream, is the shadow to the mainstream, is the consciousness or soul of the mainstream whether it recognizes its existence or not. It cannot be co-opted, it cannot be bought. It rides through the chaos, maintaining a stance of “negative capability”, but also does not give up that projective drive, or its original identity that demands that it intervene on the culture. This is not about being an Outsider. The Outrider might be an outlaw, but not an outsider. The outrider is a kind of shaman. - excerpt from Anne Waldman's Outrider manifesto

December 10, 2013

November 15, 2013



















bottom: Daniel Carter, Anne Waldman, Thurston Moore at St Marks church. 
Nov 6 2013

November 07, 2013

November 02, 2013

poet steve cannon outside tribes gallery -&- jazz great howard johnson in rehearsal with Gravity.
NYC, fall 2013

October 16, 2013

Olomouc









































above- candled ceremony for Jessica. coney island. oct. 2013
below- with a masked bandit

August 23, 2013

duchamp


21st century nyc artists up in bell towers 
shouting down the fire scape is it safe to come out yet


August 20, 2013

The Whistleblower's Mad Moral Courage

"The logic was that the state was so obviously correct in its policies, only a lunatic could think otherwise. By treating its critics as symptomatic, the regime could deny its opponents the dignity of a criminal charge and the opportunity to contend rationally with their accusers. Torture, drugging and incarceration could be carried out under the guise of treatment, and done so indefinitely – in some cases, inducing chronic mental health problems, closing the causative loop. 
In every society, democratic or totalitarian, the sensible, grown-up thing to do is to commit to the long haul of sleazy conformity. The rewards are mostly guaranteed: if not freedom or happiness, then respectability and degree of security. What spoils it is the obstinate few who do otherwise – those, absurdly, who actually believe in the necessary fictions; enough to be moved and angered by the difference between what an organisation does in reality and what it says in public. 
In this respect, the whistleblower is arguably more mindful of an organisation's stated values and standards than the vast majority of its members and affiliates – so much so that keeping quiet or going along with it or walking away is not an option. The final irony lies in the whistleblower's faith in normal people, the assumption that they will welcome being less deceived, and use the revelations to press for reform in their governments and institutions. 
For these delusions, whistleblowers have been punished, again and again, throughout history. But for whatever reasons, still they do it." 
excerpt from: The Whistleblower's Mad Moral Courage by Christopher Yates
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/20/whistleblower-mad-moral-courage

you can sub "whistleblower" here with any good artist, journalist, poet or civilian of similar consciousness. 

July 21, 2013

July 18, 2013

July 4th State of the Nation


Marines in anger to NSA Surveillance Protestor on Wall Street:
"Hey your flag's the wrong way"

New York City, Independence Day 2013

July 17, 2013

July 16, 2013

every artist on earth dreams they could've done on canvas what Manning did in thin air.
(but who seeks glamour?)
every artist now reconsidering cowardice
a measuring stick for days remaining, not for confidence.
cowardice was shots taken for cash, works
 down the line of coal locomotives.
quantitive- moving fast and far
from the source of the ethical desire.
the desire was assumed to be adolescent. it was supposed to fade-
a boulder on the back dissolving with years
the artists line up to stomp their feet- to seethe- to be hungry-
to watch her kick up dirt across the tracks
she unnameable, she unknown, she seeming without compromise
unwilling to breathe common sense or censored decency

June 13, 2013

boxing match tonight


poet vs. secretary face-off.
Match tonight, 8 PM, in Surveillance Arena

Boxer will play referee.
Audience identities encrypted for security.
Stay late for boxer's testimony on how he fought & won the trial with the poem.

June 11, 2013

unedited




Anne Waldman, Ambrose Bye, David Amram, Arthur's Landing @ Housing Works, NYC 2013.

June 09, 2013

in Klee


Man on the Street interviews in Renaldo & Clara

Shooting in Harlem outside the Apollo Theater 
Camera Operator asks a few kids

hey what do ya know about Rubin Carter? 


interviewer: 
Have you benefitted at all from 9 years in prison?
has it done anything positive for you? 
camera cuts away before an answer, music blares. 
no time for a circus. 

camera man films a man eating a hamburger outside the apollo.

Camera man tell hamburger eater:
yeah I think he's innocent too, why is he in there? 
Man between bites: 

"I'm not surprised. I'm not looking for justice in this country"

June 04, 2013

courtroom theater frame up

Bradley Manning Trial day 2 

Kop


June 03, 2013

providing its own Law

music says "Permanent Revolution"
and the bourgeoisie hear "Evolution, Progress."

And even if, among the young intellectuals, a few understand it
won't their present impotence
make them see this Liberation as beautiful myth,
instead of their own reality

May 28, 2013

thief

He dissects & drains until he has each one down.
these women crave organization.
the reward for their therapy is extermination.
He craves flaws, distinction. The challenge of the wrath and whims of a real woman.
i am the target of the investigation.
there i am, the dirty linen, the kink in the machine.
the other girls regard me as a gram of misfortune
unsettling the delicate balance of their destructive order.
order here means death.
all incentives point to order.
order, the cruel drain.
for a while I drew but some found out about it and i feared i'd be classified as an artist.
i was afraid they would find a place for me in their socie*y
and thus perfect declare their state, their reward, the sucking of their blood.
all fluids rotating in harmony within his ancient greedy veins.
i therefore stopped drawing.
sometimes i slip away and take my red portfolio w/ the soft burlap ribbons.
i like to run my hand across the skin of each drawing.
they cannot classify me without evidence.
a flash of sulphur and one by one they are consumed by flame.
they cannot classify me as artist.
art ceases. i've stopped. i dream of escape.
he is in a bad humor. he calls the role for extermination.
i call to protest. i have defied order. there is nothing left of the artist.
no mood of creation. the rules call for a fixed state.
i understand the gift is escape. i guard my sores.
i cannot accept defeat. my desire to escape mounts.
i'm getting overexcited. my blood implodes.
imagination is about to be realized. survival is stronger
and i decide it must be now.
i run and i ride like hell.
i am riding a predestined escape route.
i understand i am the (escape) goat.
i have unleashed two huge black candlesticks
onto the altar of illusion.
- Patti Smith


Sartre on Genet as child thief - pocketing fruit and eating it:

He turns in on himself, he rewards himself.
The pleasure is real. Real, too, the chewing and swallowing.

But the reality is of no interest in itself; it is there only to lend a body to the desperate efforts of appropriation. The important thing is to use these real facts as symbols.

The legitimate owner puts out his hand, picks up a piece of fruit and eats it peacefully. Genet transfers to himself the owner's gesture and sensations so as to identify himself with the latter by an effort of mind. He takes in order to convince himself that he has the right to take; he eats as an actor eats on the stage; he is playing at possession; he embodies the owner as Barrault embodies Hamlet. However, he makes, at the same time, a considerable effort to be his own audience so as to catch himself in the act of possessing. Need I say that he is always about to succeed but never does? It doesn't matter. He already finds within himself what the Marquis de Sade called the "principle of delicacy," which makes him prefer nothingness to being, imagination to reality, tension to enjoyment.

In short, his operation clearly falls into the category of poetic acts:
it is the systematic pursuit of the impossible. No wonder that he wrote later that "the land of the Chimeras is the only one worth inhabiting" and that he quoted the following line from Pope: "Nothing is beautiful, save that which is not."

But what appears with the first thefts is not only that straining of soul toward something beyond the true which will henceforth characterize Genet's inner tempo, but also the particular nature of his poetic procedure. He never dreams. He does not turn away from the world in order to invent better worlds, he does not abandon himself to images, to musings. His imagination is a corrosive operation that is practiced on the real, an operation aimed not at evading but at transcending reality, and, as we have seen, at dematerializing it.

Other children would have played at ownership with imaginary belongings. A pebble would have been a gold piece. They would have made believe they were buying or eating. But our little thief wants to eat "for real," wants to have real pleasure in his mouth. Only, this real pleasure is neither wanted nor felt for its own sake; it is in the service of an impossible attempt to coincide, in the realm of the imaginary, with the essence of an owner of things. As a result, the whole system is derealized, the very enjoyment becomes imaginary. The true pleasure of a thief becomes a fictitious pleasure of a fake owner. Reality is worn so thin that one can see the light through it.


April 12, 2013

saint genet

child in double exile:

Though he does not yet dream clearly of becoming a saint, he feels that a man is not worth much if he does not live on grasshoppers, if he does not die at the stake with a smile on his lips. This exaltation betrays his secret disorder. It is not unusual for young boys to have extreme tastes, for them to want to be perfect, to be everything, to be first in everything, but if they want to become great captains or great doctors, it is in order to be great among men and of a greatness recognized by men. In Genet's mysticism, however, we discern a rejection of the human order. An abandoned child, he takes revenge by admiring the children who abandon father and mother to follow Christ. It pleases him that saints are answerable only to God, that they long to wrest themselves from the species and that they go counter to their most legitimate desires in order to achieve within themselves an anti-nature. His contempt for his body makes asceticism easy for him. For the same reasons we shall later see him make of love a form of torture. But above all he asks God to give him the rightful existence that men deny him. He derives at least one advantage from his orphan's solitude: his inner life is not socialized. No gaze disturbs his original privacy. Alone, without words, without a secret witness, he lives within himself in a state of concubinage. This solitude will be later mated; he will talk to himself, he will worship himself, reinventing for his own use the archaic myths of the double and of the twins.









note: 
"God" 
"Christ" 
"grasshoppers"