Leture on text with Haida Hawaiian Stone Fish Dog Shark Bitch, ITIN ’05
After reading, looking, hearing, reading Robert Bringhurst at the Chelsea Museum, I’m not certain if I feel more, or less crazy. I was on some sort of speedball concoction of Tussin and Red Bull (honestly, there ought to be a law) and then they brought out the 18 yr. old Scotch (insert dirty old man joke here). Ever have one those days where you are surrounded by the ineluctable modality and every thing seems to be a cracked mirror in which to read your own dog face the riot act? Last I checked it’s April Fool’s day. Joke’s on me… feels more like June 6th. What an Odd City. Alas Poor New Yorick, I knew him Horatio Alger, A fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy… Where be your jibes now? Your acts of merriment that were want to set the table on a roar?… To see you smile now, makes me want to puke! Go paint your mask, make it up an inch thick…I ask you only this fool: Make me laugh at death!
Well that’s my from memory bead on Hamlet with a skull in his hand like David Bowie doing Cracked Actor. And Bob comes up to me suffering from a similar cold and the Whiskey and says: “I can tell you this because I’m almost drunk: You’ve got to get over your father.”
Which is the funniest thing anyone’s said to me since my mother pointed out that this blog is obsessed with death. I appreciate what he was saying, but one one of my favorite (near inaudible) moments in Orange You Glad is when Senior Stein says of his son: “Oh God, Bob is facinating. We’re pretty boring, but Bob is facinating.”
What tears me a new one is that I’ll never get to hear that (unless you believe in ghosts or audio hallucinations). It’s like Allan Stone was reminding me the other day: my work was one giant Fuck You to my dad’s hard edge, Swiss, Modernism. But we never got past the Rumble in the Jungle to wear Ali and Foreman can smile and slurr over griled hamburger.
So don’t put on any aires when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue…. Plus it’s the only story I have (other than love stories). I had a joke with Philistine Jr. where my father had stories of finding unexploded block busters in the Basel Black Forest, we could tell our kids about how we watchted the BMWs go by and then the Mercedes Benz and then we played tennis (actually in context that’s pretty fucking ironic). Robert started with W.S. Merwin poem that I wrote down:
Mask for Janus: W.S. Merwin
Death is not information
Stone that I am
He came into my quiet
And I will be still for him
Ali Roi, ITIN ’99
So I keep thinking of Kubrick’s blank, black stone, and the Kabbah and Mohammad Ali and Paris and (yes BOB): the old man and the river. The light is going blue outside the window. The king is dead; long live the king.