Writing languishes behind the other arts,

especially painting, as if a picture were really worth a thousand words. Nevermind, it’s all the same really, the will to express forming scratches on the slate of experience directly or indirectly like drug-induced orgasm or the real thing in all the glorious lugubriousness of its meanderthal mess. You get the point regardless, if you’re lucky, if there really is a point, to all the lines holding hands forming meanings in the minds of men whether the critics approve or not.

Forget plot. Life is the plot.

Everything else is pretentious pretense. One’s obra maestra is one’s life. The only art involved is to express the various elements that comprise one’s self in new and original combinations. Combination is the essence of art. Nothing is truly original. The same ideas occur at similar times in diverse places given similar situations to work within in an ever-contracting world. The challenge is to lose your self in your work, like creating a child from bodies destined to die, the child itself destined to die, immortality only achieved in the long run from past to future viewed by a mind’s eye too myopic to know that the concept itself is its only limitation. Lose yourself and find the path, a path, any path with heart that embraces infinity without embracing its limitations.

ART FOR ARTISTS’ SAKE

Art, like language, is a form of communication, but with slightly different goals. The goal of art, like almost anything else beyond mere survival, is to create pleasant sensations and enjoyment, that is, entertainment. The only question is the best way to do that. Meaning is secondary, only one of many sorts of entertainment. Any meaning ascribed to a portrait is usually of the simplest sort, nostalgia and sentiment for an object of affection. Landscapes are no different, really, love of the known sort, simple sensations. With Impressionism and Cubism and Surrealism, we move through increasing levels of abstraction, to the point where familiar objects are non-existent, grossly distorted, or unrecognizable. So what sort of entertainment comes from the pure abstraction of Expressionism? Abstract meaning, one would assume, the pure thrill of colors and textures having their way with canvas. This is probably not true, however, given the implication that anyone, or at least anyone with high intellectual capacity, could and would find enjoyment in it. In actuality enjoyment seems to come from deriving the sort of meaning that comes from having studied art and knowing its trials and travails over the course of history. In other words, the works are derivative, dependent on prior study of other material, high art in the sense of highly schooled art, largely useless for those not in the club.

EDIT THYSELF

“Edit thyself” is the first commandment of writing and the hardest thing for anyone to do with his own work. We love our own work as our own children and hate to cut anything out. More than that, it’s just hard to look at one’s own work objectively, even harder to toss things out, knowing you might never get them back. That’s the feeling you get when the computer goes dead and you haven’t saved your work. It’s a question of negative space and positive space. Are you creating something where nothing previously existed or are you chipping away at the whole potato, just to reveal the precious sculpture within? Is the potato half full or half empty? Are you creating something out of nothing or are you merely clearing away the rubbish so that the diamond can shine through? As a child aficionado of popular music, I lamented the fact that most of the appropriate themes of life had already been discovered, and that therefore the future of the industry was grim, a sad thought, considering the amount of enjoyment that it’s capable of giving. Such are the vagaries of youth. There is no limit to creativity. Its potential is exponential. The more we create, the more there is to create, stone shards, wood shavings, clay splatters, paint drips, wasted words, all just like the film snips lying on the edit room floor of a life almost too abundant for living.

I’m not here to pop bubbles;

I’m here to blow them. Henry Miller and William Burroughs were products of their times, the best of their batch in my opinion. In 1934 we needed a prolonged insult, a spit in the face of Art, a kick to the ass of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Art, and Beauty, just like we needed Cubism. In 1959 we needed to see ourselves turned inside out, our worst nightmares become reality, just like we needed Abstract Expressionism. We don’t need that right now. My heroes have succeeded in tearing down the old walls that confined us. Now we need to build some new ones on new foundations. We live in a different time and I have a different mission. I want to restore Truth, Beauty, and Goodness to our lives, before it’s too late. Things are too crazy. The planet will survive, but people may not, especially in a civilized form with culture and language. We take it all for granted, the culture that took thousands of years to accumulate, the life that took millions to evolve. It could all disappear in a puff of smoke, with the strike of a match.

POETRY AND ALL THAT RAP

Forget story line; forget characterization. Like his critic told Jackson Pollock in the movie, “there’s only paint and surface”, words and paper, time, a medium for light and sound. A medium it is, certainly nothing rare nor well done. Nobody’s writing the great American novel anymore, just pulp fiction for ultimate adaptation to screenplay. Most poetry sucks, too, reverted to the flower arrangements in fragile crocks that the Beats smashed to bits fifty years ago to no future avail. When the smoke clears, poetry’s firmly back in the control of the academic pencil pushers and their precious little artifices and the delightful breaking of grammatical rules for dramatic effect. Someone who’d never dangle a participle leaves a subject noun suspended in mid-air at the end of a stanza waiting for the verb beginning the next stanza to rescue it and its lack of importance from certain oblivion, the flying trapeze of literature. This proves nothing except that the author went to poetry class and learned the insider’s language. I get all giggly just thinking about it. Of course ‘slam’ poetry tries to undo all that artsy-fartsy crap by the pure will of ego unleashed on a noisy stage, releasing obscenities on a suspecting public in dire need of sensibilities left to offend. Its similarities and simultaneous emergence with rap music is more than coincidental. Henry Miller and William Burroughs were the right men for the jobs of their times, but it remains to be seen who’s right for the new millennium, an age of interdependence possibly beyond the grasp of heroes.