Extinction Chronicles - 070620 ·

“Gonna forget about myself for a while, gonna go out and see what others need.” - Bob Dylan

Ole’ mama paradox got me by the short hairs with that one - papa Lao Tzu, says knowing oneself is true wisdom and Ms. Roosevelt says, “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events and small minds discuss people.” We are not lacking in instruction, just common sense. Do we want our species to survive¿ if the answer is “yes,” then what steps do we take to help make that happen? When stated like that, things don’t seem quite so complicated. To be fair, when i say survive, i mean, minus the regimentation the fascists are advocating - one cluster here doing this, another cluster there doing that - neither communicating with the other, and both wholly subservient to the task master. That just don’t float with my radical existentialist indoctrination. I am so much a “free thinker” my family has created language lists for each of their households and security clearances for access to the secrets deemed necessary for the latest “intellectually vetted concepts”. No, i’m not terribly popular in the family reunions i crash; and both nephews had me banned at their weddings due to my heretical influence - right thinking, after all requires the “right” conditions for fruition · just ask hillary, barack and joe.

This from an individual who wholly embraces the concept that one creates one’s own misery; conversely i truly believe the demarcation is not so great - the larger irony is our collective future more resembles the human anatomy than the bankers balance sheet; let me explain - it is a fact that for a human to smile, it requires fewer muscles in the face: ergo the most efficient distribution of wealth is not from greed, whereupon each is unhappy at the conclusion of a transaction, but from generosity that creates smiles for all involved. We’ve been lied to, but sadly it seems the most vulnerable amongst us have been the targets of this lie - deceive the stupid first. Each of, i’m sure has had a big dumb friend that managed her way through the world by bullying others. Mine was a broad who walked down the steps of the Art Student’s League and patted my head like i was a dog - my response to her condescension, which apparently no one previously had dared, was to slap her lesbian patronizing gesture back into her lap. These days i speak of were just past the 60’s and “politically correct” was practiced, but not articulated; i defied then and defy now any accepted practice that does not include my own agency; she and i made peace within minutes based on no more than direct communication.

Our world is starving for communication and all there is are “code words” and cliques one petitions one’s way into whether it is Ithica, NY - or Pico Aliso, CA. I cannot abide a catechism which absolves me from personal responsibility for each choice i make. I do not want strength that is gained from absolving myself of my liberty, anymore than i welcome conjoining with a group that would want me to exclude another such as myself, or as Groucho Marx described so well - “I wouldn’t want to be a member of any club that would have have me.” Independence seems to have become a lost art in these days of fear - all would want to belong, just as i would fervently beg admission to a family which, try as they might cannot exclude me - so i am stuck with the residue of “what did i do wrong; how have i transgressed; what must i do to belong once again to my birthright - breathing, and no more. There are many masters that explain the way · nurture the small child in your midst, befriend yourself to befriend others - find peace in your heart to share peace with others. We are not lacking in knowledge - just lacking in will.

I’d like to say i am inured by my learning from the pain i host in my body - i´d be lying through my teeth, but it would seem the only friendliness i can find is that which i show to myself - and that by happenstance from the voice of Dame Pema, who channels Master Thay - obeying the Dalai Lama, each of which is most certainly only reflecting the love they find in each of your hearts. It is our lot to die, and our chance to die as close to our origin of love where upon one vesicle entered the egg of another to create being. How it ever became ejaculation for money is anybody’s guess, but until we sit fore-square in front of the equation and ask ourselves how we could have allowed such vital event to be hijacked for the salacious curiosity of a disturbed segment of our DNA strand, we’ll never surmount the cul-de-sac we have backed into. I refuse to shame myself for your dubious interest and remain naked to your touch because without it it, i am dying on the vine.

Old or no has no valence in the issue - it is whether you can retain enough agency over your own corpuscles to propagate a free species, or whether you allow your keystrokes to establish a fictional exchange that subjugates your DNA strands to devious, and dishonest future for the exclusive benefit of cowards unwilling to stand up on their hind legs and say “by hook or crook, you and yours are mine and there is fuck all you can do about it,” which is the state our species is in. You are reading these words at the express permission of a pissant billionaire lacking the courage to reveal his face or purpose to you, rather s/he entices you with clickbait and convenience you assume has any relationship to your wants or desires without ever having had an opportunity or moment to stop and ask yourself “what do i want and what is my agency in the decisions i am making?” - good luck to you and us all.

jts 07/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 060620 ·

What a blessing to be able to go one more round with the only asshole i could never better - myself · As an ugly child in a family of pretty people; one learns the “terms of endearment” quickly or gets quashed quickly - my heart goes out to the youngest who had not only me to contend with, but also the Machiavellian machinations of my elder siblings, the two prettiest people to predominate the popularity politics of late 1960 Orange County, CA. Yeah, i know - over-the-top snarky, but you go with your strengths. Little wonder the two glommed onto each other when faced with the other-worldly weirdness of the lower middle child - older middler sister’s affectionate nickname for me · odd Todd. Of the few times i can remember my poet papa becoming violent with me was when i called her a “bitch” and when i declared my intention to grow my hair long: for the first infraction Pop got me in the older brothers room and “bitch slapped” my head from side to side - the 2nd infraction my have been closed fist · what i remember was leaving the house for not the first time, with his sacred vow in my ears “no son of mine is going to have hair growing below his collar.” 50 years later bald and all, she’s still a bitch, and my hair is down to the middle of my back, though there is no longer enough on top to braid.

And i love my sister - it is just that she is inordinately vain · quantifiably stupid, and instinctually cruel. We all work with what we got; she got ma - i got Pop · Oscar Wilde - ‘all daughters become like their mothers; that is their tragedy, no man does - that is his.’ This is the family i have to work with, and work i do as best as i am able. Little brother was finally shamed to respond to 2 weeks of email inquiries; mostly wanting to know if he was alive, or dead in the midst of the plague we all find ourselves. His wan reply advising me that i could find a cheap solution to my “health issues” through the “expat” network that must be around me was more condescending than angry. This reply is very helpful only to know that what my little brother suffers is great, and that he fears i might prosecute a malpractice suit against him and his Nurse Practitioner wife were they to recommend from afar an antibiotic drop for a middle ear complication i have lived with for 50 years.

I do not hate my people - i am angry with each of my siblings for different reasons which i make every effort to keep contemporary based on behavior. I don’t find them quite so fastidious nor honest in their behavior as they presume to be, rather i find them at the end of a DNA strand we share, clinging to objects and ego that they would deny me. The ego aspect of our family rupture is no great loss, for it was mostly “smoke and mirrors” as near as i can gather from 65 years of interactions, but the substance is simple “theft.” (hidden behind proletariate proclamations, and progressive assertions buried under - gimme, gimme, gimme.) At least the looters who are waging war for the crumbs of the capitalist capitulation have the courage to be up front about their desires. My family, as i experience them are attempting to legitimize their theft of a family heritage on no more than a fiction of moral worth, which i again spit on for anyone not wanting to share all the booty with all the people.

Now i feel obligated to finish my dance of 5 paragraphs for an audience that hasn’t the courtesy to acknowledge the same disrespect i would pay them face to face for their conceits. I drink, i smoke, i masturbate, because i am alone and i am as ugly as any version of Quasi Modo - but if you think Charles Laughton was menacing, come and be by my side while i expire after the live i have lived, trying to help the people i have tried to help survive. And in front of me is a refrigerator with a spot of singed vegetables, the mewling of a neighbor child waiting for kewl air - the curiosity of a landed gentry without land · and a planet laying into its own surrender to a greed manufactured at the core of its own troubled heart.

I could die right this moment in peace, without a woman in my arms or a child at my tangle - happily. I have done my best, which was not always good, and tried to help others more powerful than me to achieve more than i could · not always successfully - but sometimes so. I welcome the the end of the strife i have made and look forward to the kindness i will never see from minds i never knew. Just now, before i eat and finish my last smoke and drink, i hear the mewling of a child barely an infant being humored and jollied just like myself when young. I am relieved to know the best amongst us is stronger than the least amongst us no matter what pain i may feel in its absence.

addendum: today is D-Day + 76 years; this is worthy of mention as a significant date in the defeat of the Fascist Axis during WWII, and there was not a peep on my newsfeed - save the accusations of the current Attorney General claiming U.S. unrest is due to Antifa (Anti Fascist) provocations. 

jts 06/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 050620 ·

It is overcast and dark at 3:30 pm, but that does not necessarily mean rain - the thunder suggests otherwise, but again that is no guarantee - sort of like saying d_rump ain’t gonna make a touchdown just ‘cause he’s Nazi president in an allied country instrumental in defeating the last Nazi president on the planet · there are no locks. You’d think they’d pay attention to that logic when they use a handful of corporate traitors in an effort to lock up 330 million wildcard patriots; it just rained. I have felt great pain for the better part of today from a younger brother who just like the oldest brother and older sister seem to feel comfortable shunning me, yet object violently for finding the same in return. You see, i am also guilty of the crime of turning my back on family, and feeling perfectly justified in doing so. I could plead my case here in the court of “public opinion” which i guess is exactly what i am doing by disclosing dirty laundry, but in as high a tradition of “a novel of manners” as i can manage in a 5 paragraph essay - you know not who i refer to or much else but what their relation to me might be. I am hardly casting aspersions when you know them not nor they you. We live in the days of anonymity and i may as well make bank on the opportunity to purge my bile as they say.

The youngest brother in question who long ago had to make peace with his loyalties, which just so happened to not include me. An ex-wife (the crazy Cherokee-propellor blade) shared a sexual fiction with my younger that was nobody’s business but ours, (i can really pick ‘em); it was beyond wild monkey sex, and encouraged a smug superiority for my little brother who aped that demeanor from myself certainly, but more likely the conceit of our older siblings who were really pretty before they got greedy and important. which has flowed manifest associations, founded and unfounded. It is true that i have stated repeatedly, in private and in public - “i would fuck a snake, if i could find someone to hold it,” and this libidinous inclination remains an aspect of my being and my character i do not apologize for, but have corralled as well and better than most of our world leaders. I like to fuck - i relish the feel of flesh in ways only an artist who has spent decades of his life trying to fathom can appreciate. At the same time, my heart is tame and wishes no violence on any life form, including unwilling snakes. I make no apologies for my appetite, and do not ask your permission to feel what i feel - it is this disobedience that rankles my family the most · i would imagine, imagine only because they are constrained by an emotional dishonesty that legitimizes the inherent violence of shunning - a behavior we all share, but for which it seems, i alone must acknowledge.

“Fuck you - and the horse your rode in on” · was an expression i learned from my mother’s 2nd husband. I found it useful after finding myself introduced to my 3rd wife at a “Thanksgiving Dinner” where, she and i were ‘thrown together’ and not. I had asked my stepfather about this attractive guest who was making nice with her eyes; his reply - “fuck you, she’s too old for you,” to which i responded, in our first dislocation from the “mutual admiration society” we had enjoyed since we met-; i could see that he had an honest and genuine love for my mother; but that Thanksgiving, what could i say¿ ‘no L____ fuck you’. M_____ and i were cohabitating within the week; 7 years later, we were married, the same year i was to learn she and L____ had some side game that did not include ma. I am not “washing dirty laundry in public,” rather i am peering as deeply as i am able into the circumstances of my pain and owning what is mine, while disavowing that which is not. Own your pain, each of you - and please dear g_d in whatever form or sex you reveal yourself in · show me the error in my ways. i want to learn, and i want my species of thrive; not as the pale echo that is illumined on each of our screens, but by the very impulse we each possess, each time we encounter another that catches our fancy and inspires our fantasies.

Forgive me not if you are offended by what you read here, for i would spit in your face had you the courage to say what you feel to me. I pray for your future generations that they are not infected by the cowardice of my own DNA strand that causes me great pain regardless of my existential efforts to own what is mine and to dismiss what t’is da’other’s. I am not good at that discernment, but my incompetence no more absolves me from my responsibilities for radical accountability, than d_rump’s diminished soul absolves him from his fate, or my family from theirs. My obligation to my time in this wondrous sphere of blue H2o is to amplify and facilitate as much love as my imagination can manage. My particular challenge at this turn, is to maximize what i don’t understand without as the “Dalai Lama” said so well ‘if you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do no harm’ - fucking Madam Paradox, if she wasn’t my mother, she should have been. 

My pain endures, even after an afternoon of writing, pleading and resolving - i remain unconvinced that those i value most, value what i proffer. My relationship to my family is my problem alone, yet it seems to affect so many i have come into contact with prior to and during my travels that it makes me wonder. I can protest, ‘i wish you no harm, and hold solidarity with you against those who do’, yet in my own heart i feel the aggression of siblings who behave toward me like, as Lyle Sears and i had commiserated about our common affliction, like i am “a piece of shit.” From where i sit now, it is not possible that so many who have been treated so badly, or treat others so badly - have not experienced this aggressive thinking at some level in their own experience. It is at this point the whole equation of how to change the world gets “dicey.” To act like you do not understand while protesting ‘white on black; man on woman; majority on minority; immigrant on local; old on young, or young on old, or g_d on human violence’ - you are bullshitting you and me, and i got no time for horse shit ‘cause we all about to perish. BTW, where did #GretaThundberg ¿ get to on your newsfeed - just askin’? ·

jts 05/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 040620 ·

Bad mouthing people is chickenshit; ennobling people is a gas (especially if you can do it without leaving tracks). Pain can be very educational, i’m not a very good student; there was one vacation i remember particularly, wherein my siblings thought it great sport to offer me money if i could last the 2 week journey without crying - i’m really glad i lost that money, but wish i was still that honest about what i feel. These essays are, in part, an effort to preserve that sensibility. Today i look around me at efforts by the social engineering “shot-callers” pulling the levers and cranks on this vast Rube-Goldberg digital contraption we are all so enamored of, and feel much like i did crawling into the bed of a prostitute, maybe my first, in Santa Ana, CA and wondering how there could be such a difference between my first loves and how we touched each other just a few short years earlier? As an art student in NYC i had the privilege of studying anatomy with a remarkable professor from an August family of Doctors who managed to make his general patrician contempt for all, seem specific to me, (a gift of the emotionally retarded) or so i imagined with my own outsized ego starved for love and attention. He posed a question to the students in my class which i doubt anyone but myself ever solved - more outsized ego, bullshit ·

“Why” he asked, “does a child, just learning to draw invariably show the eyes near the top of the head in its drawing?” - the answer came to me 4o years or so later; it is because of foreshortening - one of the thorniest issues for sincere artists to grasp, an intersection of what one has been trained to know and what one can see. Much like we puny humans loved in our parents arms, only to be introduced into a world of strife and cruelty - talk about your cognitive dissonance. The difficulty for me with my family is how people i was raised to share with; to love - to admire and defer to could be the same people who would betray my kindness, my confidence and my love for a meager advantage? It confused me as a child and it confuses me as an adult, an aged adult. My parents were intellectuals parroting all the popular progressive mantras of the time - outrage at the assassination of a sitting president by a cabal so entrenched that the lords of justice cowered before the truth. 

Who’s kidding who - the digital overlords filtering the speech you pour into your feeble skullcaps to suit their nefarious whims, or the outraged hoards pounding at the gates of heaven - “give me liberty, or give me death”¿?  What is reality; how is it parsed by what we have determined is “civilization”? Not very well as near as i can tell. In the year 2020 we are paying thugs to thug us, with the same lame guarantee, “the last Gr8 war” as soon as these mongrels _______ fill in the blank, are eliminated from the landscape - you will be safe once again. I struggle now with the accomplishment of my task - 5 paragraphs each day · But in the back of my mind i know, it is as dishonest as my siblings bribing me not to cry and so disturb their tranquil story of a family and its Arcadian journey toward stories that can be recounted and shared demonstrating some mythological solidarity with a happiness borne from compliance. I spit on your approbation and welcome my death as a relief from this festering lie that shackles the weakest i see each day and lauds the arrogant and most selfish i find, regardless of where i find myself on the planet.

We have available to us every instrument to feed, clothe and educate every man woman and child on the planet, but allow ourselves to be divided by fears that are solely resident within our own experience. I veer from you, not because i know anything about you or your struggles, but because it was what i have been taught by people looking to exploit my need for belonging. Ironically, the same affect you find most offensive about me - my reluctance to join in your frolic is the same affect that demonstrates as best i can my love and affection for you as a member of my same species. I do not cluster for fear, but from respect for your capacity to make your own judgements - conversely, my contempt and disregard for your opinion is based on your demonstrated need for support about what you think. I love to know others - i relish each opportunity to learn about the struggles of everyone i encounter and am as equally prepared to sever any union that yokes me to your agenda without your having asked - how do you feel about ____ fill in the blank.

I do not trust easily, and yet i do nothing but trust in every action of every person i encounter - except myself · that truth, however is changing the closer i move toward the death i will share with no one. Not because i am selfish or unwilling to share with those interested to learn what i have discovered, but because every discussion i have read about the experience, which in reality is, that that and birth, are the only things any of us do share. As much as i would want to discover language that might encourage you to fun, or love, or solidarity - you are alone as much as i am: no matter how popular you become, or beautiful you are acknowledged to be, there is no more knowledge you can learn or possess than what you can know about your own self and your ability to orient in a cosmology we presume to be reality, but in fact we can barely discern within the fabric of space and time we occupy. I can tell you this with candor and love; i wish you pleasure; i wish you comfort and i wish you deep experience in a place that seemingly presumes to know better than you what it is you find in front, around or on top of you - be well, be happy; comfort all you find · for it and they are you.

jts 04/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 030620 ·

Am back at Dingo Deli - the weather is hot and humid · my heart is calm and i have a salami sandwich for nourishment. Exercise is very important during the worldwide upheaval we now experience. The city of Hoi An, Vietnam is in pain from the absence of tourists which renders its bucolic terrain remarkably peaceful. My neighbors are grandparents of a small girl child whose squeals of growth can be heard, prior to breakfast, during breakfast - in time for naps and with all the surprises found in the course of a day by an 18, or so - month old human. I try to keep the walls damp so the air blowing into their yard is cool because it gives me a great feeling of accomplishment. I left the Kern River Valley for Europe in April of 2014 - i was on a mission to draw the finest drawings i could manage, and to seek the hand of a French Cameroonean woman i had met leaving Bali 6 years earlier - in the intervening time while renovating a beat-to-shit lakeside home in KKKlan valley, i may have drawn her some dozen times and sent letters to her of my experiences, letters that were primarily addressed to my estranged mother, but in an anthropological/conceptual art piece, i thought - what the fuck and shared these highly personal examinations of a problematic relationship with a (maybe) muse who had consented, only by not declining. Yeah, i know, weird - but it’s weirder for me, than it is for you. 

I arrived in Paris and felt that it was important that i be welcomed by her after all this time pitching woo into the aether - when she declined to step out from behind her Sphinx avatar · i moved on; i’d sold a home, left a country, and crossed an ocean: one cannot be more clear than that. That was 2014, it is now 2020 - my sight is failing, and my spirit is flagging · sort of. I understand that life is not over for me, but it has certainly changed. Love is no less important, if only - more so. But not the superheated romance of youth, love has taken on the dimension of compassion for those i do not know, like the necessary awareness of discomfort for the child across the wall enduring a heat her forebears acclimated to, but has become lethal due to no fault of her or her family - almost entirely manufactured by the superheated greed of the culture in which i was raised and to too large an extent i have participated in while a planetary environmental catastrophe through ignorance and arrogance unfolds all around me.

Where and how does one alter patterns, environmental, emotional, and existential? I am now on my 4th beer and am reaching the saturation point where cogency becomes gibberish; yet the shackles of convention are simultaneously relieved - some call it threading the needle, others describe it as walking the tightrope, for me it’s just figuring out which eye and which hemisphere i am viewing the world with at the time. My family spent a lot of time in front of the mirror; it has never been a pleasant experience for me. Even without the mirror, i was never sure which side was my left or right. I do remember one period of my life wearing contacts; it was the first time i could remember seeing my face without glasses - that was strange. The mechanics of understanding the human head became a study as early as 13 when i tried to sculpt the head of George Washington in paper mache based on the “Athenaeum Portrait” by Gilbert Stuart, but it wasn’t until my 60s that i came to realize i have utterly no capacity to see 3-dimensionally - this is only worthy of mention because i had spent almost 45 years of my life attempting to create 3 dimensional objects that demonstrated my understanding of 3 dimensions.

My younger brother who represents my domestic address in the United States has fallen off the grid - this while the country of my birth is in the midst of a possible coup d’etat by a fascist corporate cabal that has for too long manipulated the channels of communication: interpersonal, national and digitally. It is no longer possible to discern who sits where much like it is for me trying to visualize a 3 dimensional object using my rapidly decaying visual acuity. Writing now represents a workaround - workarounds that i ought to be accustomed to by this point in my life, but which are always disconcerting - like walking in a darkened room that one knows by daylight but must parse by memory at night. To have my last link to the land i grew up in grow dark has the same effect; it is destabilizing. Days ago, i thought a walking stick which i know i will need shortly just to motivate upright caused me such distress, i fictionalized culprits and reported them to my neighbors, rendering myself a crazy person in the process; what i experience losing communication with my brother is no different, if only worse.

All i know to do now, is stay the course and be kind to myself, for it seems every time i point a finger of accusation at another, i only find my own self and my personal involvement with that accusation at its origin. It is more than perfectly confusing - it is a downright conundrum. I have not surrendered, for that begins with my last breath, a breath i have taxed to the max with my fixation on tobacco, or as Bob said better, “I left all my hopes and dreams buried under tobacco leaves.” How can i possibly condemn a world so full of insights that i have chosen to ignore through hubris or inattention. We are capable and able to vanquish all we face - me my loneliness, you your ______ fill in the blank. But we choose to blunder forward rather than stopping, even for a moment to relish the splendor just beyond our wrist or out of earshot. The paradox of course, being that all we need to understand about the universe is found mostly between our two ears - understanding ourselves and why we do what we do can be challenging, but will ultimately inform each of us about where we fit and why - good luck · one and all.  

jts 03/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 020620 ·

Hopes are high for a peaceful transition - not much different than the feeling i got immediately after the destruction of the “Twin Trade Towers” in 2001 · it is not going to happen .  .. ··· not because i am a negative person or cannot imagine how to transition, that as Buckminster Fuller has pointed out is relatively simple. It is the hearts and souls of humanity that must change before it can effectively enforce the leadership it deserves. We have allowed ourselves to be divided by greed and ego, and until we resolve that defect of character - we will continue to cluster in convenient cliques that reflect the level of our commitment to the planet and the survival of our species; it don’t look good for the “home team - ” and for those just tuning in, “home team” doesn’t mean those the look like you, act like you agree with you · could, but not necessarily, home time will be those homo sapiens left to the planet to clean up “our mess.” There is no way that our species will exterminate itself. We have proven too adaptable - too adaptable our own good. But before this is over our ranks will have been so greatly diminished as to prove insignificant within the life force that rises to the occasion for the next epoch. The chief scientist for googol - is banking on the “singularity” that will render our consciousness up-loadable, also extraordinarily manipulatable.

The same haters who have purchased the prime real estate whereupon they savor their ill-gotten gains to witness the ensuing apocalypse are envisioning an “idyll” where the life to which they have become accustomed, will be easily managed by a greatly reduced number of human attendants. Sadly, many who read this would do exactly the same thing given the opportunity and means - i’d like to say - not me, but human history and Dr. Faustus have established facts to the contrary. My oldest brother fancies himself as proletariat of the 1st order - black panther tattoo, shop steward in the boatyards of San Pedro and everything · i’ve lost all respect for him, based only on his behavior toward me; believing me to be deranged, but never actually stating his position because of the entitlements he feels due him based on antiquated primogeniture mythologies - i guess, but i’m only guessing. Shunning is a blood sport in my family, and his wife has his gumption in a jar by the door; like most men in ‘merica, including r. reagan when alive, m mcconnel, d_rump and mssrs pelosi, biden, clinton and obama. It is my greatest objection to the fakeness we wallow in, that one half of the species, pleads oppression from the almighty dick - yet the fact is they largely determine the character of the sel-same scoundrels from age 0 to 3 the most formative years are almost always a feminine environment: Bob Dylan - ‘I think women rule the world and that no man has ever done anything that a woman either hasn’t allowed him to do, or encouraged him to do.’

My problem it would seem is i have yet to find a woman who wants me to do what i want; ma was a sticky wicket out of the gate - my birth was a Franks Breech, which from what i gather by the imprecations ma had made during her problematic divorce from my unworthy sire · is very painful to the bearer; as to the bearee, i can only surmise by barely sentient data about my arrival, it was more intrusion than celebratory. Having lived with ma through some of her more depressive episodes, and her concomitant convictions about my intrinsic nature, it has been a challenge to keep faith with the balance of an emotionally somnolent humanity - i never had the leisure provided my pretty siblings to coast on my good looks, and as bitter as that may sound, from where i sit - the universe has been uncommonly kind to me; i can feel pain in a world hell-bent on denying its presence, not just denying as in biting off the expression “fuck you, you ignorant slut” when it is most warranted, but refraining from a mortar assault when it is operationally “tidy.” There have been occasions in my life that i have contemplated murder, and from the good fortune of a philosophically enlightened parent balanced by a compassion born of an unawakened, but otherwise earnest other parent - violence has never been an option for me.

I am doomed to play - put that in your pipe and smoke it · all you salacious editors from empire, perusing without purpose; attempting to fit words into your etymology of dishonor, afraid to peer into your own hearts about your betrayal to the commonweal. I do not covet recognition, or success - unless that success can be defined by the the well-being of every baby birthed to planet earth for the next 10,000 years. There is a cohort of cocky wonks peering into my screen and determining, either by algorithm or conceit who sees that i write - i spit on your paucity of purpose and delicacy of your ambition. You who determine for others what is and what isn’t of value lack courage about your own place in the world - so much so that you cannot or will not presume the next person you meet in your journey wants the best for you · and that my conceited digital plumber is pathetic. You’ve been turned to the “darkside” and mostly angle for a seat at the “grownup’s” table because you believe that is from where the bounty flows. I spit on your ambition and your lack of imagination for enslaving your souls to a column of +/- 5v pulses easily tweaked by wraiths too tweaked to care. 

The ruling class will not gracefully dethrone themselves - and any delusion to the contrary is fueled by hopes of a place in the next regime or self-centered compensation based on an astute investment that was not meant to benefit anyone but the investee. We live with this reality and people spend money based on appearance and then establish relations intended solely to further that agenda - to you i say, good luck, let me know how that works out for you and your successive generations .  .. ··· We can survive, if we learn to see the other’s safety, comfort, and development as a reflection of our ingenuity and resourcefulness rather than our canny awareness of the vulnerability of those we wish to exploit. The drawing shown with this essay is my effort at a complicated time in my history and the hostile folds made by my own artist mother’s unguarded sentiment about my self portrait. I would be lying to the core of my being to say that the violence she wreaked on my self did not wound me deeply, but i would also be lying to the core of my being to say that the information she gave to me by her act of violence did not school me more deeply than any of the dishonest gestures she has struggled with to express to my siblings honoring in kind her best understanding of love with what she had to work with - the same as me · go mama Go, you are the baddest broad on the block . 

jts 02/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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Extinction Chronicles - 010620 ·

Apparently i haven’t exhausted the meat from 1976, for i woke up this morning thinking about what i’d written; the litany i created for that year - just to keep track of the moving parts was: 5 jobs, 5 residences, broke both hands, 60 stitches in one arm, an industrial size vat of simmering spaghetti sauce poured over the other and rear-ended into the middle of 17th St and Broadway by a truckload of drunken Mexicans. I was driving an Ice-Cube Blue Turquoise Toyota Corona that was the only car i’d ever been given. I’d like to say it was only driven by a little old lady from Pasadena, but my step-mother was close enough - we never bonded, though i may have finally forgiven her for taking a powder when Pop wouldn’t join the Mormon Church; her excuse was that she didn’t want to spend eternity alone - my take is she was fake all along, and just took the ride as far as she could get. I know that my lack of generosity toward her is a lesson i am still puzzling. Back to 1976; at this turn after experimenting with having roommates i realized i needed a locked door, or more fluency with what i thought was passable Spanish but in fact was execrable, and remains so to this day even after recently living in Mexico for close to 2 years.

I had found a 2nd floor room in an old school rooming house on East Broadway in Santa Ana; there may have been as many as 14 rooms with a common kitchen. By this time i was working in an industrial soup kitchen in Irvine, CA - “Todd’s Enterprises”, an irony only to myself because my cheques all read “Joseph T. Stevens.” I had narrowly avoided voluntary induction to the U.S. Army, the thinking being how to finance a college education, and 1976 being a lull in the emerging “war for profit” using an all volunteer army; i tested off the charts - i always do, but the Recruiting Sargent kept looking at my eyes · people always do. When he didn’t return to the office from some necessary cosultation, i chose to Carpe Diem and booked it with my complementary P-38 can opener as a souvenir of the occasion. I couldn’t say exactly where in the sequence of events i was pushed into the middle of 17th and Broadway, but i remember that i couldn’t chase the mother fuckers because their truck had left tire tracks on my trunk and crushed the wheel well to the point of shredding valuable tire tread were i to give chase. 

What i remember is staying with boyhood chum down the street from where i had grown up, and sitting in the bathtub trying to figure out how to soap myself with one hand in a cast and the other covered in gauze where the simmering spaghetti had lifted the skin off of my arm like a skin off a boiled potato. Scott was kool, in a wannabe Trump kind of way if there was such a creature in those days. He was a mechanic poet, who had endured a compound fracture of his thigh bone recently enough to have compassion for my predicament, and very handy with industrial tools of all sorts. The Toyota was a unitized frame so the rear right quarter panel could simply be cut out with an oxy acetylene torch, and with view deft swings of a large size ball peen hammer and a 3 inch diameter marine red lamp mounted in the gaping cavity wired just so, i was street legal again, laughable at stop lights, but street legal. 12 months earlier during anytime in 1976 i was in my element - confident and happy, but terribly alone in city whose only real attraction was museums within walking distance of many subways stops and many, many interesting people.

To give you an idea of how arrogant i was, after two years of intensive studio drawing, before i left NYC for the last time, i burned a stack of drawings 3 inches high in the courtyard of where i was staying in the Lower Eastside. They represented 2 years of work with some of the finest instructors i have known, nor was it simple hubris. The elan of artists at that time and the passion for competent and authentic work was fierce and honorable - product was contemptible · but process was lauded; if you were one with your work there was nothing Art could not accomplish. It was in that spirit, that and a loneliness and longing for family and home that i could not reconcile that drove me back to California and my comeuppance for my lordly thinking and reckoning with just how little the world really believed in the power of creative determination, or more accurately how little i understood about the egos of Pop’s two wive’s - both artists - factored into equation of a precocious, however crazy offspring and his own concepts of what art is, could be, or could have been.

I was not welcome, or more accurately, i was welcomed as long as i adhered to the conventions of a family torn asunder by greed, ego and agism. For the longest time i tried to behave with decorum and respect only to find it was not reciprocal as part of what was to become the “fame game” between these to ex’s. Following on the heels of the desultory 70’s was the roaring 80’s and the two maternal dames beat me to the patron trough. I was on my own; nothing was much different, ma had changed the locks in the house i grew up in when i was 15 - justifiably · i was an “unruly child”. But these were different circumstances than simple differences about upbringing, i was fighting for a passion that had effectively rescued me from a dissipated youth. Rather than fame, what has turned out is my faith in my abilities was mostly denial in the process of becoming human. Art had been a crutch which distracted me from dealing with the wounds of growing up in a family that well-reflected the upending of a civilization born of deceit and based on profit. The superheated art markets of the last 100 years has demonstrated; there is no taking reality away from Paul Cezanne: his conviction, discipline and execution of fine art need no interpreters; but to try and equate value for the works of Kinkade, Neiman, Dali, etc as accomplishment, is like discussing the statesmanship of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in the same breath as d_rump; comparing a vision of our future between Arundhati Roy and jeffery bezos; or the importance of candor between Walter Winchell and mark zuckerberg - get up on your hind legs humanity and carry yourselves into the future · ain’t nobody else gonna, and ya’ damn sure can’t buy it, or steal it from Target.

jts 01/06/2020

http://stoanartst.blogspot.com 

reprinted with permission - all rights reserved

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