Monthly Archives: May 2008
From a Whimper to a Scream
The killer is beneath me – maybe coming through the floor, maybe the mattress. I am being tossed around like a coin and the killer’s hands keep coming at me and I fend them off until I scream at the top of my lungs and awake. She says, “What was that strange noise you made?” and she imitates it and it sounds like a little blurp… a whimper… a small animal in distress, or as she puts it: “a little girl.”
“A Monster,” I say, still too asleep to explain that it’s a serial killer with a whole back story that is already fading in my consciousness. She starts to laugh at me and mock my mouse like sound that made it all the way from the terror of my unconscious to the comfort my waking bed… albeit without the volume. Hidden in that little whimper somewhere is the all the horror of life and death… or someone else’s idea of a joke.
Keep Your Head Down
Istanbullshit
Somewhere in Istanbul there is a wall around the ancient part of the city. The houses in the city were made of wood and have all rotted away. I suppose it was dry rot as Istanbul looks like the desert and the thing of it is that with out all the little wood houses against the ancient stone walls, the walls have started to lean perilously inward. We are part of a group that go to see the walls before they fall. I think how funny it is to care about the walls, when the city they once protected has already turned to dry rot. I invent a cocktail with milk and some strange exotic yellow liquor. You pour the liquor into the milk and it just gathers in the center of the milk like the yolk of an egg. I call the drink a Humpty Dumpty in honor of the walls of Istanbul.
Silent Movie
Naked Influence
Naked
Go Down Moses
After the traditional birthday lunch with my mom and her husband, I decided to walk back to Brooklyn. I’m always after a novel route, so I decided to walk east to where Moses parted the tenements (Robert, that is) and turned them into a maze of grid bricks like suprematists and abstract painting and Russia and Stalin. I’ve been in Stuytown and some of the other developments over the years, but I’ve never taken in this huge stretch of brick housing in one good walk before. My meanderings ran from Kips Bay all the way down to Chinatown. It was like visiting a whole “other” Manhattan. I was thinking to myself how I’ve never really seen it used effectively in mass culture. For a city that’s been so thoroughly pictured in t.v. and movies, it’s amazing to me that no on has seen fit to find what a great character this architecture might play in a story. It got me thinking… 
Campus Taurus
I am visiting the campus of some university and I go to the art department, which is in a large modern building. The ground floor is a well lighted, airy, white wall gallery. It is full of people coming and going to classes and studios upstairs. As an art show, someone has put an enormous real live black bull in the lobby. I know its art because it’s dressed in a well tailored orange suit. Someone asks me if I’d like to ride the bull. It’s very tame I’m told, but when I get on it of course starts bucking all around the lobby. Everyone scatters and I dismount. They apologize and ask me if I’d like to join a tour of the campus. I say, “I’ve already joined a taurus of the kick ass” No one thinks it’s that funny, but I’m self amused and I go walk my dog around the park-like university. I turn my head for a minute and she gets off leash and I run around for hours looking for the old dog. Seems there is a lake in the center of things and she’s gone swimming.
Delusions of Brooklyn
I was running around brooklyn to see a friends show and decided to bring my still camera and note pad and experiment with jamming together whatever I came upon. Someone was extoling the vitues of a buddhist teacher’s MP3s so I threw that in along with colin stetson and me muttering to myself.