Established Marvel : a Monk by Abbreviation
Saturday, January 24, 2009
I'M SO GLAD I'M NOT FREE I COULD PUKE
182. I'M SO GLAD I'M NOT FREE I COULD PUKE (at ave A and 3rd st, 1999):
The old guys are sitting back and enjoying the game : 'I've got all of what I ever wanted and I don't need no more of anything' and before them the young girls the 'amazing' ones the college kids who hang out here on Sunday mornings go by - as the flat-bellied thighed-tight blue-jean swagger-hipped stare right up at the TV screen somewhere to another land and the ice-skaters swirl by them : Olympiad skaters glissending on hyptronic hillbilly pirouettes while every drunk in fourteen counties applauds and that's the world today but the one guy he picks up the Post and reads 'mad bikers revenge - crazy wipeout one dead eleven injured in gun melee' and he looks around smiling to the tall one the nearly naked one and says 'who said bikers weren't violent who said kid?' and she looks down with a smile and says 'Oh my God I heard that on the radio oh my God let me see...'
The old guys are sitting back and enjoying the game : 'I've got all of what I ever wanted and I don't need no more of anything' and before them the young girls the 'amazing' ones the college kids who hang out here on Sunday mornings go by - as the flat-bellied thighed-tight blue-jean swagger-hipped stare right up at the TV screen somewhere to another land and the ice-skaters swirl by them : Olympiad skaters glissending on hyptronic hillbilly pirouettes while every drunk in fourteen counties applauds and that's the world today but the one guy he picks up the Post and reads 'mad bikers revenge - crazy wipeout one dead eleven injured in gun melee' and he looks around smiling to the tall one the nearly naked one and says 'who said bikers weren't violent who said kid?' and she looks down with a smile and says 'Oh my God I heard that on the radio oh my God let me see...'
-
'Man will never be set free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest' - Edward Abbey said that and I've always liked keeping that in mind for it's kind of just as important as that old Whitman adage about 'resist much obey little' and I always find myself enjoying these little tiny maxims that seem to sum it up and get it right in so few words all the while everyone else is writing wordy tomes about condescending alternating currents of serious opinion and all the while too the world around us rots and falls apart and it seems we all singly fling our own spittle and money into the pot without knowing much and saying less and to me it's always a good thing to just throw back a bunch of crap wherever I or you can and these pithy little two-liners really help (OK so why I'll never know) but on the other hand you've got to remember my plight for I was the one guy on hands and knees usually picking up found pennies elated at nickels and divine with dimes the one who slept on the gratings along the street for the warmth they afforded or like any of the two guys today sprawled out in the half-cold on the sidewalk retaining wall at NYU Film where they could bask in the sun and the blown-over heat from the powerplant steamer for the nearby LaGuardia Houses and these guys were quite balmy and not crazy at all - balmy like the meaning of being warm not crazy - comfortable right there and they reclined on their blankets and paper boxes as if the rulers of the world were 'they them very selves' as I bet they'd put it and anyway it's like I always opposed authority in whatever guise or at least questioned it enough in a theatrical way so as to confuse it for authority gets very confused very easily and it's quite simple to just talk back and fast right into its face to win any argument with it unless of course as usually happens authority has the gun and you don't (part of Authority's prerogative right about now - go figure that one) 'we have reached the point that the idea of Liberty an idea relatively recent and new is already in the process of fading from our consciousness and our standards of quality to the extent that neoliberal globalization is in the process of assuming its opposite - that of a global police state of a terror a security a deregulation of means whereby the oppressors have the sole use of the means of oppression and the people have nothing left but resistance - a new maximum with a lever of restriction and constrain equivalent to that found in any fundamentalist society' : now I'm not sure that would exactly mean or if it's even something you would follow but it's considered serious and profound enough around here that people have massed against it - Alice's Polish Restaurant on any Sunday morning at Avenue A and 3rd Street is filled with them - all those new and young scientific and artsy minds trodding through the streets in communication with each other and others in a new and crazily-viral network of hubris pride strength and trouble all together - on hot lines talking back and forth to each other instantly through the air new air modern air young air and free air - as if it mattered but it doesn't (all you've got to do is find yourself like me at the one remove the iconic distance to see any of it for what it is - an iconic posturing really worth nothing at all and a peer-pressure conformity of piss-poor performance all movies and jugs and booze and sex and spiels) - and the only answer is to go back and laugh at it all in some Tristram Shandy Lawrence Sterne kind of way because there is nothing else but raw funny power attached to over-learned fat scholars bamboozling their own spittle as it rolls down cheek and collar into believing it is truly ponderous stuff in a Duns Scotus of the Scrotum kind of way - and then in any other language manage to say (I've heard them) 'excuse me I'm gonn'a be late for my flight if I don't get early to the airport taxi' YEAH IT REALLY MAKES ME LAUGH and the gay diarist sitting at the counter the brown one with the green eyes he's sitting I'm noticing in Alice's Polish Restaurant just like I said and all by himself too he's reading interminable newspapers and Sunday smut and adding to his notebook scribble while he awaits his coffee and food - huge slabs of Challah French Toast as the menu says and I mean huge slabs for $2.99 a slab - a real steal a deal at Alice's Sunday Special proving he's smart as a whiz and sharp as a tack and round as a peg and dumb as a hack - and the guy and girl behind the counter are talking their waiter talk and chummy enough as if they're sleeping together to boot and in a hearty Polish accent I hear them going back and forth and I'm watching and deciding about her story and then they break into pure Polish and back again to English and I'm thinking like what brain could accompany that body and wondering if she'd be possibly interested if I told her I was a descendant of Count Vistula the Warrior Prince from 17th-century Poland's eerie woods or what now had become that anyway and I figured hearing that she'd be sure to want to run away with me and talk that slutty Polish tongue into my ears while we fled through the Dneiper Woods or whatever on my steed and I'd be hanging on to her every word while she hung on to every I mean every inch of me while we raced through the woods fleeing from the intrepid Vlad Pastieckski and all his troops coming to get us and kill me and ravage her for all she was worth but here instead she's her and I'm me and she's tending to huge toast piles and pouring coffee and me I'm sitting here wondering about paying and the guy next to me with the eastern eyes is reading and writing all about the terror state we are in but over there above our heads the TV light is pushing some lame winter sport in this time's grim adventure of living and outside the windows the five guys on motor scooters are starting their little engines and strapping on their silly helmets and I hear them revving the tiny tinny engines to howling high-revs certainly lessening their engines' lives all together - beat that silly powerplant men! - and I wrap my heart again around Little Eva here the Polish powerplant watching over me and bringing me coffee and she's watching me watching her fetching that stupid wall-eyed guy more toast oh boy my God this is for sure what a life and if what he had said before was true I'M SO GLAD I'M NOT FREE I COULD PUKE!!
'Man will never be set free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest' - Edward Abbey said that and I've always liked keeping that in mind for it's kind of just as important as that old Whitman adage about 'resist much obey little' and I always find myself enjoying these little tiny maxims that seem to sum it up and get it right in so few words all the while everyone else is writing wordy tomes about condescending alternating currents of serious opinion and all the while too the world around us rots and falls apart and it seems we all singly fling our own spittle and money into the pot without knowing much and saying less and to me it's always a good thing to just throw back a bunch of crap wherever I or you can and these pithy little two-liners really help (OK so why I'll never know) but on the other hand you've got to remember my plight for I was the one guy on hands and knees usually picking up found pennies elated at nickels and divine with dimes the one who slept on the gratings along the street for the warmth they afforded or like any of the two guys today sprawled out in the half-cold on the sidewalk retaining wall at NYU Film where they could bask in the sun and the blown-over heat from the powerplant steamer for the nearby LaGuardia Houses and these guys were quite balmy and not crazy at all - balmy like the meaning of being warm not crazy - comfortable right there and they reclined on their blankets and paper boxes as if the rulers of the world were 'they them very selves' as I bet they'd put it and anyway it's like I always opposed authority in whatever guise or at least questioned it enough in a theatrical way so as to confuse it for authority gets very confused very easily and it's quite simple to just talk back and fast right into its face to win any argument with it unless of course as usually happens authority has the gun and you don't (part of Authority's prerogative right about now - go figure that one) 'we have reached the point that the idea of Liberty an idea relatively recent and new is already in the process of fading from our consciousness and our standards of quality to the extent that neoliberal globalization is in the process of assuming its opposite - that of a global police state of a terror a security a deregulation of means whereby the oppressors have the sole use of the means of oppression and the people have nothing left but resistance - a new maximum with a lever of restriction and constrain equivalent to that found in any fundamentalist society' : now I'm not sure that would exactly mean or if it's even something you would follow but it's considered serious and profound enough around here that people have massed against it - Alice's Polish Restaurant on any Sunday morning at Avenue A and 3rd Street is filled with them - all those new and young scientific and artsy minds trodding through the streets in communication with each other and others in a new and crazily-viral network of hubris pride strength and trouble all together - on hot lines talking back and forth to each other instantly through the air new air modern air young air and free air - as if it mattered but it doesn't (all you've got to do is find yourself like me at the one remove the iconic distance to see any of it for what it is - an iconic posturing really worth nothing at all and a peer-pressure conformity of piss-poor performance all movies and jugs and booze and sex and spiels) - and the only answer is to go back and laugh at it all in some Tristram Shandy Lawrence Sterne kind of way because there is nothing else but raw funny power attached to over-learned fat scholars bamboozling their own spittle as it rolls down cheek and collar into believing it is truly ponderous stuff in a Duns Scotus of the Scrotum kind of way - and then in any other language manage to say (I've heard them) 'excuse me I'm gonn'a be late for my flight if I don't get early to the airport taxi' YEAH IT REALLY MAKES ME LAUGH and the gay diarist sitting at the counter the brown one with the green eyes he's sitting I'm noticing in Alice's Polish Restaurant just like I said and all by himself too he's reading interminable newspapers and Sunday smut and adding to his notebook scribble while he awaits his coffee and food - huge slabs of Challah French Toast as the menu says and I mean huge slabs for $2.99 a slab - a real steal a deal at Alice's Sunday Special proving he's smart as a whiz and sharp as a tack and round as a peg and dumb as a hack - and the guy and girl behind the counter are talking their waiter talk and chummy enough as if they're sleeping together to boot and in a hearty Polish accent I hear them going back and forth and I'm watching and deciding about her story and then they break into pure Polish and back again to English and I'm thinking like what brain could accompany that body and wondering if she'd be possibly interested if I told her I was a descendant of Count Vistula the Warrior Prince from 17th-century Poland's eerie woods or what now had become that anyway and I figured hearing that she'd be sure to want to run away with me and talk that slutty Polish tongue into my ears while we fled through the Dneiper Woods or whatever on my steed and I'd be hanging on to her every word while she hung on to every I mean every inch of me while we raced through the woods fleeing from the intrepid Vlad Pastieckski and all his troops coming to get us and kill me and ravage her for all she was worth but here instead she's her and I'm me and she's tending to huge toast piles and pouring coffee and me I'm sitting here wondering about paying and the guy next to me with the eastern eyes is reading and writing all about the terror state we are in but over there above our heads the TV light is pushing some lame winter sport in this time's grim adventure of living and outside the windows the five guys on motor scooters are starting their little engines and strapping on their silly helmets and I hear them revving the tiny tinny engines to howling high-revs certainly lessening their engines' lives all together - beat that silly powerplant men! - and I wrap my heart again around Little Eva here the Polish powerplant watching over me and bringing me coffee and she's watching me watching her fetching that stupid wall-eyed guy more toast oh boy my God this is for sure what a life and if what he had said before was true I'M SO GLAD I'M NOT FREE I COULD PUKE!!
Sunday, January 18, 2009
SOLVE FOR X
181. SOLVE FOR X:
Gone delirious and I am sitting around reading the House of Bernarda Alba by Garcia-Lorca but I don't know why yet I read it anyway and wonder instead about the Poet in New York title figuring it might be better but I let it go and I realize I hate reading drama where you have to decide between the lines and distinguish the scene and the placing of it and who says what and the breaks between the phrases with names spoken by different people and the blocking of the scene interspersed with parenthetical intrusions showing instructions and facial expressions and movement and phraseology of characters and such and I realize it's all so outlandish and just plain boring in its predictive pomposity so much so as to be unnatural and even dictatorial in its workings and if it's a play it's meant I'm sure to be staged and acted and not merely read so why read it but it's like the equivalent of riding a bus needing the Daily News on your lap for whatever reason and then the bus careens haphazardly and crashes and the newsmen arrive and you sincerely hide the Daily News for you do not want to be seen with it or at least do not wish to be photographed and covered in the press while holding it for in the back of your mind it's somehow shameful ('Bronx Man Indicted in Wife-Beating! Alligators Again Found in Local Sewers! Mets Battered By Brewers!') and that's the same feeling I get reading Garcia-Lorca's play I should be at the Joyce Theater or somewhere instead maybe watching the performance or at least reading something else instead - like Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle or something - but not doing that I'm in its place throwing dice and casting sticks I'm throwing the I Ching for anything and trying my hand at measuring FATE and the weary luck it all may bring and here again before me are the two lions at the Library staring out looking far across to the East River missing I'm sure the old Tannery Row and leather workshops and slaughter houses and coal heaps all now gone and forgotten POWERPLANTTUDORCITYUNITEDNATIONS too everything all a'jumble just like that and I'm confused too and my head hurts and the cold makes it pound and it's hard to breath in the half-dark menagerie I inhabit walking through a dim city light turned over and about by winds and debris and trash and junk all blowing around topsy-turvy potpourri and everything smashed about as cold can be and the two night-guards by the Siamese Connection I hear them talking : 'but where the hell have I heard that before ? or saw that girl in the white billowy shirt say something like that maybe last Summer I can't remember but I know her face and for sure I'd know that fine ass anywhere too - must be last year and ain't I a fucking Rip VanWinkle myself or not ? hey Joe how's about a cup of coffee no?' : and as I look around me I suddenly realize again that there's not any reason for me to stay here or not one enough anyway and I'm just improvising a poor jazz life here and there's not even anybody around anyway who would know Lorca anyway 'cept maybe one or two I can maybe remember if I try and even if he did write Spanish I'm not about to read it and nobody would recognize the words anyway no matter what tongue they were in ('my good God we've come to this impasse?') and I look over east and the nighttime soldiers are in a line over by some embassy or mission or something - all those weird Slavic types brooding and stiff - and the dark blue car is idling and just waiting for action ('Police Line Do Not Cross') and even I can tell it's a cop car with no markings about as hidden as a monkey in a nursery with the big spotlight on the mirror and the special lights cut into the grill and the really nondescript license plate for sure ('shit if I'd know that was a cop car') but just as time passes so too does traffic and that car's gone as I watch it running down the Grand Central ramp heading south down Park somewhere and leaving me right here solid as ice and ready to melt ('I swear Summer's coming early this year and there won't even be a Spring') so who knows and who cares what the hell the weather will bring.
Gone delirious and I am sitting around reading the House of Bernarda Alba by Garcia-Lorca but I don't know why yet I read it anyway and wonder instead about the Poet in New York title figuring it might be better but I let it go and I realize I hate reading drama where you have to decide between the lines and distinguish the scene and the placing of it and who says what and the breaks between the phrases with names spoken by different people and the blocking of the scene interspersed with parenthetical intrusions showing instructions and facial expressions and movement and phraseology of characters and such and I realize it's all so outlandish and just plain boring in its predictive pomposity so much so as to be unnatural and even dictatorial in its workings and if it's a play it's meant I'm sure to be staged and acted and not merely read so why read it but it's like the equivalent of riding a bus needing the Daily News on your lap for whatever reason and then the bus careens haphazardly and crashes and the newsmen arrive and you sincerely hide the Daily News for you do not want to be seen with it or at least do not wish to be photographed and covered in the press while holding it for in the back of your mind it's somehow shameful ('Bronx Man Indicted in Wife-Beating! Alligators Again Found in Local Sewers! Mets Battered By Brewers!') and that's the same feeling I get reading Garcia-Lorca's play I should be at the Joyce Theater or somewhere instead maybe watching the performance or at least reading something else instead - like Brecht's Caucasian Chalk Circle or something - but not doing that I'm in its place throwing dice and casting sticks I'm throwing the I Ching for anything and trying my hand at measuring FATE and the weary luck it all may bring and here again before me are the two lions at the Library staring out looking far across to the East River missing I'm sure the old Tannery Row and leather workshops and slaughter houses and coal heaps all now gone and forgotten POWERPLANTTUDORCITYUNITEDNATIONS too everything all a'jumble just like that and I'm confused too and my head hurts and the cold makes it pound and it's hard to breath in the half-dark menagerie I inhabit walking through a dim city light turned over and about by winds and debris and trash and junk all blowing around topsy-turvy potpourri and everything smashed about as cold can be and the two night-guards by the Siamese Connection I hear them talking : 'but where the hell have I heard that before ? or saw that girl in the white billowy shirt say something like that maybe last Summer I can't remember but I know her face and for sure I'd know that fine ass anywhere too - must be last year and ain't I a fucking Rip VanWinkle myself or not ? hey Joe how's about a cup of coffee no?' : and as I look around me I suddenly realize again that there's not any reason for me to stay here or not one enough anyway and I'm just improvising a poor jazz life here and there's not even anybody around anyway who would know Lorca anyway 'cept maybe one or two I can maybe remember if I try and even if he did write Spanish I'm not about to read it and nobody would recognize the words anyway no matter what tongue they were in ('my good God we've come to this impasse?') and I look over east and the nighttime soldiers are in a line over by some embassy or mission or something - all those weird Slavic types brooding and stiff - and the dark blue car is idling and just waiting for action ('Police Line Do Not Cross') and even I can tell it's a cop car with no markings about as hidden as a monkey in a nursery with the big spotlight on the mirror and the special lights cut into the grill and the really nondescript license plate for sure ('shit if I'd know that was a cop car') but just as time passes so too does traffic and that car's gone as I watch it running down the Grand Central ramp heading south down Park somewhere and leaving me right here solid as ice and ready to melt ('I swear Summer's coming early this year and there won't even be a Spring') so who knows and who cares what the hell the weather will bring.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
AT LEAST THE MOTTO WAS ORIGINAL
180. AT LEAST THE MOTTO WAS ORIGINAL:
"Goldfish and goldenrod I’d heard it said and both of them seem pretty useless to me and since we’ve tamed the atom we’ve untamed the world but it’s never quaint enough that we don’t think about what once was and the old world is filled with interesting stories but no one today any longer knows them or knows them less or perhaps knows fewer of them – you know I’ve always liked using the word ‘fewer’ in any instance I can in place of the erroneous word ‘less’ which I hear so many people misuse ‘We have less customers today because of…’ but really it should be ‘we have fewer customers…’ the word ‘fewer’ being plural usage while ‘less’ seems to work perfectly well for the singular as in perhaps ‘less use’ where you wouldn’t say ‘fewer use’ but rather ‘fewer uses’ where it is wrongly said ‘less uses’ – anyway I’ll keep on with less diversion and fewer interruptions OK and moving from that to the next I’ll tell you another thing – as a dichotomy – we may want to be thankful for such things too as the battlements we just passed and the old lookout heights at the top end of this park old rock outcroppings and natural features from which the advancing armies could be seen at a distance by the settled-in armies and maybe we should be thankful for them because today’s everyday living and the calm we live amongst could not have been achieved without the sacrifices much earlier of these men who fought and staked out positions in what was basically a wilderness which was being intruded upon by others and all these others of course felt as right about their cause as did the local soldiers trying to hold out as well as the soldiers from another land sent here but for the fight and all the while the beleaguered and decimated native population could merely watch in wonder or look on in sadness and awe as everyone and I mean everyone went about killing each other (I wanted to say ‘killing themselves’ but that doesn’t work) in the pursuit of a fashionably idealized sense of freedom and correct politics but even in that old day when they fought NOTHING it was nothing really made any sense and less it does today and it’s like hearing a kid say ‘my mother is French and she loves me very much’ it’s all meaningless and without any connection to anything else and as much as we destroy the natural world around us that is as much as we must really pay back for what we give out and it’s all a terror at this point I was afraid somehow she was maybe coming unglued but wasn’t sure what to do not having spoken myself for quite some time yet I was totally interested in listening to this woman who just seemed to be rambling on and as we walked downward from her 110th Street lair near to the area where she taught and 116th Street and Morningside and the cathedral and all of that curious landscape up there (we’d just started at ParallaxBooks the interesting bookstore located up by that selfsame street with the most intense view of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as it fronted the west – a sight I’d remembered many a time over the last 30 years but now this same street had completely refined itself and turned around its dreary location into something much finer and yes the Cathedral still proudly glowed – but we’d walked well down from there and her interest really piqued as we’d entered the park environs at The Harlem Meer as it was called) and anyway it was better to listen to her stuff than to have to hear some of the stuttering barbaric banter of those people walking by in either direction – the weird tourists from other lands with their cameras and maps and lunches the skinny local kids walking for mischief or bugging people the little groups of cackling girls on the search for whatever would bring forth their giggles the old people staggering along in silence seemingly intent on whatever the lovers entwined walking dogs or mooning the nature types slowly staring at trees and lingering beneath bridges or along the ramble their quiet and slow patter although soothing to the ears made up of nothing either the stately ones usually men walking by preoccupied with thoughts of money or prosperity or young women for all I know the religious types walking with God the kids learning to ride bicycles with mothers and fathers in tow the Japanese always eager to break out a smile and stare back the tough Germans walking with wood the hungry the fed the single the wed in EVERY aspect the pinnacle of mankind achieved even within its dregs but NOWHERE else was the talk so good not even the time I’d spent with Elizabeth Jenviers Liberte from 25 Fifth Avenue an awkward persona now so long gone BUT I never forget for sincerity breeds familiarity and good dreams do all the rest and with that said I was ready to let her go on and continue which she then did with some pretty amazing new subjects - all things of course I could have myself said too but was IN THIS CASE letting her speak for me "things I hate – you really want to know? – board games card games any kind of pass the time games and by games I mean where two or more people are involved because I really do enjoy crossword puzzles but that’s all not acrostics not jumbles nor any of those other weird word-games without clues or with convoluted methods and shapes and all that RUBBISH I like being alone and I can’t stand people who insist on staying overnight or who insist on having you stay overnight because I really demand aloneness and people bother me."
"Goldfish and goldenrod I’d heard it said and both of them seem pretty useless to me and since we’ve tamed the atom we’ve untamed the world but it’s never quaint enough that we don’t think about what once was and the old world is filled with interesting stories but no one today any longer knows them or knows them less or perhaps knows fewer of them – you know I’ve always liked using the word ‘fewer’ in any instance I can in place of the erroneous word ‘less’ which I hear so many people misuse ‘We have less customers today because of…’ but really it should be ‘we have fewer customers…’ the word ‘fewer’ being plural usage while ‘less’ seems to work perfectly well for the singular as in perhaps ‘less use’ where you wouldn’t say ‘fewer use’ but rather ‘fewer uses’ where it is wrongly said ‘less uses’ – anyway I’ll keep on with less diversion and fewer interruptions OK and moving from that to the next I’ll tell you another thing – as a dichotomy – we may want to be thankful for such things too as the battlements we just passed and the old lookout heights at the top end of this park old rock outcroppings and natural features from which the advancing armies could be seen at a distance by the settled-in armies and maybe we should be thankful for them because today’s everyday living and the calm we live amongst could not have been achieved without the sacrifices much earlier of these men who fought and staked out positions in what was basically a wilderness which was being intruded upon by others and all these others of course felt as right about their cause as did the local soldiers trying to hold out as well as the soldiers from another land sent here but for the fight and all the while the beleaguered and decimated native population could merely watch in wonder or look on in sadness and awe as everyone and I mean everyone went about killing each other (I wanted to say ‘killing themselves’ but that doesn’t work) in the pursuit of a fashionably idealized sense of freedom and correct politics but even in that old day when they fought NOTHING it was nothing really made any sense and less it does today and it’s like hearing a kid say ‘my mother is French and she loves me very much’ it’s all meaningless and without any connection to anything else and as much as we destroy the natural world around us that is as much as we must really pay back for what we give out and it’s all a terror at this point I was afraid somehow she was maybe coming unglued but wasn’t sure what to do not having spoken myself for quite some time yet I was totally interested in listening to this woman who just seemed to be rambling on and as we walked downward from her 110th Street lair near to the area where she taught and 116th Street and Morningside and the cathedral and all of that curious landscape up there (we’d just started at ParallaxBooks the interesting bookstore located up by that selfsame street with the most intense view of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as it fronted the west – a sight I’d remembered many a time over the last 30 years but now this same street had completely refined itself and turned around its dreary location into something much finer and yes the Cathedral still proudly glowed – but we’d walked well down from there and her interest really piqued as we’d entered the park environs at The Harlem Meer as it was called) and anyway it was better to listen to her stuff than to have to hear some of the stuttering barbaric banter of those people walking by in either direction – the weird tourists from other lands with their cameras and maps and lunches the skinny local kids walking for mischief or bugging people the little groups of cackling girls on the search for whatever would bring forth their giggles the old people staggering along in silence seemingly intent on whatever the lovers entwined walking dogs or mooning the nature types slowly staring at trees and lingering beneath bridges or along the ramble their quiet and slow patter although soothing to the ears made up of nothing either the stately ones usually men walking by preoccupied with thoughts of money or prosperity or young women for all I know the religious types walking with God the kids learning to ride bicycles with mothers and fathers in tow the Japanese always eager to break out a smile and stare back the tough Germans walking with wood the hungry the fed the single the wed in EVERY aspect the pinnacle of mankind achieved even within its dregs but NOWHERE else was the talk so good not even the time I’d spent with Elizabeth Jenviers Liberte from 25 Fifth Avenue an awkward persona now so long gone BUT I never forget for sincerity breeds familiarity and good dreams do all the rest and with that said I was ready to let her go on and continue which she then did with some pretty amazing new subjects - all things of course I could have myself said too but was IN THIS CASE letting her speak for me "things I hate – you really want to know? – board games card games any kind of pass the time games and by games I mean where two or more people are involved because I really do enjoy crossword puzzles but that’s all not acrostics not jumbles nor any of those other weird word-games without clues or with convoluted methods and shapes and all that RUBBISH I like being alone and I can’t stand people who insist on staying overnight or who insist on having you stay overnight because I really demand aloneness and people bother me."
Friday, January 02, 2009
A SECOND-LEVEL OF BEHAVIOR (NYC, 1968)
179. A SECOND-LEVEL OF BEHAVIOR (nyc, 1968)
I've already told about the Christmas tree set-ups and the guys who'd come to sell them : little sagging pickup trucks with New England plates or some jiggy dumptruck from Pennsylvania suddenly parked on the curb and set there amidst a huge array of trees and stands and lights and wreaths and the average New Yorker waltzing by all this just took it in - looking at the strings of bare bulbs stretched on electrical cord as if they simply were stretched along some construction site somewhere and had to be both tolerated and walked by and the seasonal attributes of 'joy' and 'peace' and all that crap went unsaid except as it related to making Manhattan's old urban canyons of grit and rubble into sudden mountain-men redoubts of woodland bliss and huts and cabins in the forests (New Yorkers have sometimes great imaginations but you can imagine they had to in order to rationalize or conceptualize all this stuff into some cerebral storyland they could live amidst - otherwise it could all drive one crazy) and for a period of three or so weeks there was - amidst the newsstands and fruit and vegetable stands and second-hand books and record stalls - an entire second-level of behavior combining raw frontiersmen with tree-bargaining and the most crafty inspection of merchandise ever seen and within all this too (I must say) was the enormous and wonderful potential of seeing beautiful girls and women in furs and greatcoats and boots and hats looking trim and perfect and luscious as they sauntered through this faux-snowcastle of wonder and awe - I'd swear the most beautiful females who ever were often were right here - and again there were no rules there were no plans and no means of getting to wherever one was going without the fanatical mischief of whatever detour and sidestep these wondrous Manhattan streets brought your way - I mean every avenue and nearly every street - the broader the better Broadway Lexington Columbus lower Fifth and all the rest one after the other and every one had new secrets to bring out and it seemingly never stopped - the amazing rancor and hum of 14th street the wiry torment of 8th and St. Mark's Place and the hootenanny fragmentation of Waverly and Washington Square and all the rest : seemingly a wonder that went forever - and with it ALL I was in love.
I've already told about the Christmas tree set-ups and the guys who'd come to sell them : little sagging pickup trucks with New England plates or some jiggy dumptruck from Pennsylvania suddenly parked on the curb and set there amidst a huge array of trees and stands and lights and wreaths and the average New Yorker waltzing by all this just took it in - looking at the strings of bare bulbs stretched on electrical cord as if they simply were stretched along some construction site somewhere and had to be both tolerated and walked by and the seasonal attributes of 'joy' and 'peace' and all that crap went unsaid except as it related to making Manhattan's old urban canyons of grit and rubble into sudden mountain-men redoubts of woodland bliss and huts and cabins in the forests (New Yorkers have sometimes great imaginations but you can imagine they had to in order to rationalize or conceptualize all this stuff into some cerebral storyland they could live amidst - otherwise it could all drive one crazy) and for a period of three or so weeks there was - amidst the newsstands and fruit and vegetable stands and second-hand books and record stalls - an entire second-level of behavior combining raw frontiersmen with tree-bargaining and the most crafty inspection of merchandise ever seen and within all this too (I must say) was the enormous and wonderful potential of seeing beautiful girls and women in furs and greatcoats and boots and hats looking trim and perfect and luscious as they sauntered through this faux-snowcastle of wonder and awe - I'd swear the most beautiful females who ever were often were right here - and again there were no rules there were no plans and no means of getting to wherever one was going without the fanatical mischief of whatever detour and sidestep these wondrous Manhattan streets brought your way - I mean every avenue and nearly every street - the broader the better Broadway Lexington Columbus lower Fifth and all the rest one after the other and every one had new secrets to bring out and it seemingly never stopped - the amazing rancor and hum of 14th street the wiry torment of 8th and St. Mark's Place and the hootenanny fragmentation of Waverly and Washington Square and all the rest : seemingly a wonder that went forever - and with it ALL I was in love.
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