THE REMOTE

I came across a man who could not find his remote.
Nor could he approach his own TV
in vain he looked under sheets, couches, piles of coats,
in vain! in vain looked he.

I don't trust, he said, the laws of science.
There's many things it will not see
and in refusing to acknowledge blind spots,
no vision can be genuine;
it's all either waves or particles, depending on whom you ask,
and things disappear;
commercials are endured;
as the TV has no knobs to turn,
and the remote is lost, all lost, said he.

As he babbled he was lifting cushions all the while,
and I, so wearious of watching
his futile rummaging, did make to leave

and later in my pocket
found it.

Mexican Mud, Syracuse, 1989

Wine, Women & WAR!

This November I celebrate 10 years without a drink. In memoriam, here is a comic I drew in 1999 while interning at the Bellevue alcohol clinic. I'd like to dedicate this to my childhood best buddy, Alan Pyle.

If you don't know war comics, this is patterned after DC's "Weird War Tales." And of course, the classic comics of Alcoholics Anonymous. Just click on each page for a larger version!

I want to write about the illusion of control. That is one of my mind’s focuses. We’re trained by loud voices to respond. I’ve got a loud authoritative voice that gets results.
I can make words seem true the way I say them - they even sound true to me. My deep voice is like a big set of bellows powering an instrument vast and glorious and God- the devil that He is -- hath given me a tone-deaf ear and inclination towards laziness which prevents and prevented and will prevent me from bothering to examine and master the intricacies of this amazing instrument. I use it as infrequently as possible and it closes up on me in irked reprisal. When I, for example, finally speak during a day off from work, to the cashier at the drug store, my voice comes out as a surprise to us both. Where most voices come and go, like little chirps, my deep voice drops onto the floor with a flat slapping sound, staying there. All words tend to lose their meaning when I speak them. My voice is a needle that scratches each record it plays, morphing the singer’s voice into mine, riddling the once-clean margins with my random notations, my boredom, my longing, my sloth. I spit out the crumpled remains of tapes I’ve played, mixes for long drives back and forth to college upstate, blazing too much lazy herb, lots of b’s: burbbly, bubbly babble until I can’t understand my own voice when I hear it on someone else’s answering machine.

The graduating jock poets of 2008, plus me, their devoted and debauched advisor

Where Vertigo comes from (see Kim Novak en utero)

HANDBASKET TO HELL!!!!!

Nightmare Alley

Works from 2003 - the "fertile" period

Acrylic on Canvas from 2007-8

Anna May Wong in transition

2008 - Acrylic on canvas -

Stills from "Hippy in a Handbasket" (in production: 2009)

NOTES AT Sheraton for Xmas 2007

Everytime I leave New York I can't believe how "off" my rhtyhm with the rest of the country is; my image of it now is that you buy a TV and you bring it home and by the time you figure out how to access all the channels, all the channels are telling you need to buy a different TV and new channels.. and when all your money is gone and your room is so full of tenchnology that all is left is the technology and you, then someone comes and removes you, and then all that is left is a device with your eyes and ears and mouth to intake imitation food and imitation sound and imitation image, and soon not even that. The question is where do they take you when you're trash? What's going on at the dump? That's where the action must be.

I'm watching the Wizard of Oz on TNT, and Ray Bolger would brave a whole boxfull of matches to get some brains, and yet in America we're giving them away half price, we're letting the giant alien vacuum suck 'em on up out of us and peddle 'em off to any scarecrow with a wheelbarrow big enough to hold a ton... because that's the lowest amount we want to bother with parcelling out. Now they're already at the tin man, and he wants a heart, and what's a heart to these people? It's the half-baked attempt to cater to pro-lifers that is the "other opinion" on Britney's sister's baby on CNN which I flip to during the commercial. Let's not forget TNT itself which shows this film and has to constantly announce you're watching TNT and that SHREK is up next. SHREK is the most amazing of all these franchises in that it hiply eschews the archetypal subtext of "original" myths like Wizard of Oz. It also reduces any worrisome "human" element.

The voices of course can be drained of human elements via their constant relying on satirical imitations of other voices. Jack Black is the best intimation of this. He moves from one "fake voice" to another and if he does get left without a handy option and is forced to assume his own, all that's left is this high register bitch of a whine.

Rachel Ray is a classic example of someone whose "personality" has caught on with a big enough demographic to warrant having it preserved as it is filtered through the dehumanizing machine - all the actresses who have to audition to get their faces attached to the machine are ordered to strip their individuality away, but Rachel's is hurried through, under a fire blanket and flanked by bodyguards in sunglasses.

Back to the Wizard. I've been down I'll admit, but I perk up when I see Bert Lahr and all is his fey macho swagger as the effete lion. Then the drugs of the poppy fields, and of course the classic multi-exposure revolution of Dorothy's face when she gets knocked out in the tornado.. the alterna-dimensional re-imagining of the basic mythic wandering of the hero in the form of the heroine, this time in Dorothy form, Dorothy which is my 90-something year-old grandmother's name...

the thing is in the modern updating of this coolest of all surviving American myths, what would they be needing? WILD AT HEART tried to reimagine the Wizard scenario as a run for your money road movie with noir and Miami edges... or SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is another one, with Buffalo Bill sure to get a heart (in his fridge); and the scarecrow Lechter, and all that other violence.

This is your last chance, these disney classics are going back into the vault. "Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?"

The fake laughter of how we laugh the day away in the merry old land of oz. Capitalism's evil is apparent in the actions of the wizard - pay no attention to man behind the forrests, powering up his fleet of tractor tin men. The lion's song is all about scoring the bling - he wants satin, not cotton or that bullshit 14th St. chintz. The sign in front of the witch's forrest reads: I'd turn back if I were you. It might read that, but what it says is something different than the surface interpretation. It's designed to enhance your fear and thus give your overcoming it all the more value.

"All in good time, dearie... all in good time." Has anyone ever said that phrase only once? Repitition is also the key to authenticity. We are so saturated with this film that we live it and speak it and breathe it. If we don't incorporate its symbols into our personal dream mythology it is only because we haven't the will to make these things real. We should have an "Initiation of the Dorothy" wherein you pay money for your daughter to get banged on the head and sent to the Oz finishing school of instant-enlightenment. Instead she has to shave her head, join a lesbian youth gang, pop pills and drink vodka, or otherwise seek her own pre-prince's kiss oblivion. (and by prince here I mean, prince of the self, of her own unconscious, you dime-store feminist surface scratcher!)

There's no place like home is Dorothy's mantra. "There's no place like home" "There's no place like Ommmm" - after the search through the capitalist layers of meaning - where bling and long rides with champagne are just ruby slippers and baskets of goodies for gramma what big ass you have... what do we have?

Pig shit and long, long horizons, my dearie.

(Cue Marlon Brando harmonica music)

White-Bred Struggle

Collage Deposit
Fat Cells!

Still from my edit-montage-making in-progress of the Pratt Institutionalized Theater's MORNING MORNING (written and directed by Robert Snyderman).

In the photo: Katie Przybyski

BRIEFING FOR AN ASCENT OUT OF YOUR NAVEL
and into... reality!

What is it and what are those weird noises it's making?
Reality slithers
it's alive, ALIVE!

I call on you reading this now to wake up to reality the way a sleeper awakens from one dream into another.
Come on, Sleeping Beauty, Come on, Rip Van Winkle, Come on, Ashley Saint Ives,
come sleeping sapling coiled in embryonic seed, come yoga mudra and do the dancing downward dog - pass through veils of perception as clean as a hot knife through cobwebs, gliding and gleaming towards steaming breakfast pancakes of the mind.

Genius is but well-tempered insanity, channeled through to pen and ink as the sex drive is channeled into capitalism.
Score one for our team! But you got to learn to not run to mommy with your A plus for the big dopamine payoff - you got to shoot that shit in yourself, pretty boy. Can't you show Patti Smith nothing but Surrender?
The true insanity knows this and entwines its heart with the mysterious, the otherworldly void that is not otherworldly we realize in an uncanny flash but is our home, and Iraq was just you all the time, moustaches and nooses, bags on heads and bombs in nurseries, all this was you all the time,
and Corporate podiums with insignia-bedecked officials reciting what is spoken into their hidden earpiece by off-screen power brokers; you are the podium, you are the mouth that speaks, the eyes that watch from the presumed safety of the dark, you are the hand that bombs and the hand that heals, you are the mouthpiece that speaks to masses and the mouth that speaks to the mouthpiece.

A shabby shaman shamus is no stranger to purification rituals, or poison for that matter; a shamnus learns you got to take the good with the bad, man, Dennish Hopper on Royball, man, but this chick takes it all the time, can you dig that? Okay, I'm losing my train of thought here... put this book down and meditate on the principles of push me and pull you, the llama friends of Dr. Doolittle. Ah HAH! You had forgotten all about them, hadn't you? Hadn't you better? I mean if you haven't already, because they're stupid? Got you again, if you were here I'd slap you right about now. I really mean that, I'd slap the silly out of you, pronto. But you're not here. And now is. Now always is, but you can't slap it. General, you can broil it fry it send it to die in the Frenches, but you just can't slap it.

THE GAP BETWEEN THOSE WHO HAVE
and those who haven't
been in therapy
gets longer every day... longer and longer - and to stay in therapy is to be like the astronaut who is in space, the Bowman, the Kier Dullea ever reaching for that black obelisk rainbow. To not be in therapy is to live always without borders, to deny borders
as firmly as a mom denies her son the one thing he wants, as firmly as rain is fire's double, as firmly as trouble and lack thereof are one, the illusion of death, transcended at last. All eternity is faced either way, but first we build a nice castle, and put on the lotion, and absorb the baking lessons of great god the sun. Omm Omm Ommm,
and try to--when the castle gets washed away by tides to come and you know it will--try to act surprised.

WATER IS IMPORTANT

First thing if you are to come with me on this special journey to the other realm, where the ego has been brainwashed into committing suicide so the soul can live unfettered, you must drink water.

Most trips to the emergency room could have been avoided if the ailing person had been drinking water instead of doing whatever they were doing

Drink it down like a sailor drinks the air at sea.

You were a fish once and if you're lucky you will be again. We hate water, don't we? I mean to drink, as it's so dull and unimaginative; we hate it like we hate our own kin, our own selves in the mirror. Coke is so much better because it's dark and alien, sweet and strange and exciting. But though coke starts out as a ride in a stranger's car it ends in the light of the carnival midway as you exit feeling cheated from the haunted house ride.

But the reason why we block out the memory of death is the same reason we block out the memory of how dumb and so damn short that carnival haunted house ride was; two weeks and we remember that ride as a pretty good time; thirty years and it glows with a patina of nostalgia when you suddenly hear "Rock me like a hurricane" on the radio; what was once a cheap papier mache skull behind chicken wire and surrounded by lights the flicked on and off as you walked past along a moldy plywood tunnel now becomes art distilled. The skull has a symbolic resonance! Ta dum! You see it reflecting in the blackness of your pupils - even when you're not tripping -- you turn suddenly and see it in the form of some dude walking behind you and you wonder if maybe that dude's been behind you your whole life, waiting with the patience of a well-paid chauffer for you to die, to step out of your current obscenely human form so he may escort you onto the next buffet.

The cool part is you're only pretending to be scared, to fool you, to make the movie more exciting.

No it's not a relapse, it's HELLWARD THE HIPPY, the latest adventure of that hippy detective, Dr. Twilite, coming soon to a theater near youtube.

LETTER TO DANIEL PINCHBECK:

Daniel you are right to not stick with any one solution or conception of the problems facing us here on the big Planet E. I disagree with some of the reply posts however whcih long for a way that science can measure psychic phenomena and therefore "legitimize" it and make it useful in a widespread way. I argue this stuff with my pharmacist father who sighs and rolls his eyes when he sees me take herbal supplements, as they "haven't been sufficiently tested" and hence are in his mind, bullshit. That's putting the cart before the horse, like saying "I have never tasted peanut butter, therefore it has no taste" -- we cannot wait for the Big Brother to decide our course of action is legitimate. Such dualities as legit and non-legit are the real enemy here. The psychic power we refer to is immeasurable, as the very concept of measurement bends and melts before it. I would recommend a look back to the good old 1970s where ESP, telekenis and so forth was all the rage... tests in CIA headquarters, heads exploding, Kirk Douglas running around, spoons bending, you get the picture. It was all there, all proven, and then we forgot about it, why? Because there was nowhere to go from there, no way for proven psychic powers to co-exist with our 3-D pop culture world aside from showy gore effects and conspiracy plotting, acid overdoses and nervous breakdowns. As history always repeats itself you may rest assured we are heading into another countercultural revolution ala the Summer of Love in 1967. I imagine it hitting its zenith right around the big 2012 date, and thanks to the internet, burning man connections, etc., we will be much better prepared than last time. There is no way we can envision the sudden, drastic psychic change awaiting us... what we can do in the meantime is to practice unconditional acceptance and suspension of judgment. We must transcend the duality of this being good and that being bad. Our psyches spin on axis similar to that of the earth... every hostile feeling we have towards another reflects back on us with the certainty of night following day (Shakespeare!) If we want to save the world, we must let go of our fear of its total destruction. I dont mean passive acceptance, I mean--as they say in AA--take the next right action, let go of the result. The future is already written, we won. The rest is just drama and mcguffins, enjoy!