the "art industrialist's concept of elan" - Hollywood, CA; 2012 ·
“Tabula Rasa” - i remember the first time i’d ever heard the expression; i was passionately in love with a 2nd cousin twice-removed who lived a mere 853 miles from where i lived at the time. Our correspondence was old school, there were no cell phones, no internet - and each exchange was a relief from the vacuum of waiting · ah, romance, ya’ can’t beat it with a stick, nor can you convert into bytes, or emoticons. For all my garrulous ways, i am remarkably reserved - thank god for education. One of my formative high school experiences was to enact scenes from “Inherit the Wind” with an elder classmate - he as Clarence Darrow, i as William Jennings Bryant. I’d have liked to remain closer to my counterpart in this vignette, but like my 2nd cousin twice removed - some things are just not fated to be. It is the story and the points made by the authors of “Inherit the Wind” which was about the Scope’s Monkey Trials in Tennessee. He, Scopes was a high school teacher who was charged with and prosecuted for teaching “evolution” in the schools. The authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert “E”dwin Lee used keen metaphors to dismantle the stigma of change.
“When we invented the telephone, we lost the charm of distance” bellowed the character of Clarence Darrow at the aged, overmatched, proselytizing William Jennings Bryant - an ironically populist character advocating many progressive values, but locked into a “vision” passing out of favor. Oh that we could call on the spirit of Master Mark Twain to guide us through eddies and sand-bars we face in our shorter and shorter trek on this river of life to the ocean of eternity - that some time back could have been a simple transition from living to dead; but because of the egregious greed of a handful of gluttons modeling eat all you can before anyone else can take a bite, or as the Sioux Nation has so accurately described the “white man” - Wasichu · he who takes all the fat from the bone. I understand this moniker, ironically, emotionally and culturally: my family is pretty in a “privileged kind of way,” & as it would happen, the two eldest are the prettiest - almost like the story of Cinderella · except my oldest brother is not evil and my older sister is as i experience her, simply existentially forlorn.
I, however am nothing but thrifty clean and reverent - noble honest and true · lacking fault or fiction except that which all can see . pretty much, everything. What the fuck do i have to hide¿ i’m gonna die just like you - only i got a little further along and my cover only depends on enough protein to keep me alive and rest enough for me to not go “crazy.” Just now as part of my cover, i was trimming the green plants that are only in the houses of the foreigners for effect, i think likely because the locals believe the expats too stupid to grow food for purpose, but no one will say this to my face. There is simply an unrelenting air of contempt and hostility toward anyone not homegrown or vetted to the nines as _____fill in the blank. I’ve never been good at fitting a mold to someone els’s specifications, as ma - she tried for many a long year for me to fit her version of “okay.” In the end, she simply forbade entree and commanded those in control that i was persona non-grata.
That is a harsh thing to conceive about one’s parent, but a harsher thing to ignore and not embrace as a condition of loving the world around you: women, children, brothers, fathers and wanna be friends. I have just now staunched the flow of blood from a finger i cut in my yard - a yard as near as i can tell, i am no longer welcomed to - how would that be for me as a soul with a family i do not have, or more accurately, a family who will not own me as a member? I don’t know, but there is no other outcome but to discover that truth - how sad · how joyous. They are flip sides of the same coin. The hamlet i live in is counting on an influx of renters they hate on sight - not because the influx is evil or wrong, but because the premise is unnatural and ill-conceived. The movie “Field of Dreams” is a link in the chain of fantasy about the “infinite growth paradigm”.
We live on a finite ecosphere, governed by lunatics claiming license over water, air, food, time and resources - with nary a whimper of organized objection. The media moguls who manage appearance and attractiveness have determined what is fuckable, what is disgusting, what is jailable and what is worthy of extraction, while the “intellectually acute,” assume pretty postures of preening for the camera that counts only for the seconds it transmits; what horse shit is that? There are a handful of punk-ass pretty boys and girlfriends galore that are punking an entire planet for a few weeks of celebrity focus - and i’m very sorry to tell you all · go fuck yourselves. If in your daily effort you are not searching for ways to relieve the burden of hypocrisy, stupidity and fakeness from every corner of your world - you are my enemy and will remain so to my dying breath. Having said that, if any of you bodacious spirits would like to engage or have cojones enough to quarrel my position - step right up you pinche putas and tell me to my face your objections to my arguments, rather than the pissant backstabbing posturing of an arrogant occupying force, lacking the courage to fly a flag that is the modus-operandi of the current security apparatus.
jts 19/06/2020
http://stoanartst.blogspot.com
reprinted with permission - all rights reserved
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