Long summer

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Fearless. Feckless. Obdurate. Vegesexual. Weaponized. Cartoon.

Letters from Paris

I have become your national bête noire; your current Onanistic obsession, your contemporary bitch.

Bourgeoise swine....

You pigs couldn't stagger yourselves out of a piss-soaked bag. At least you are trained to obey. Makes my job a lot easier.

I am everything you are.

Love,

Paris

правда

Baghdad dreams

free form, by Plastic Jesus

Bush dreamt that he was reading Cosmo
"Can This Planet Be Saved?" asked the article
The man wanted something, the woman wanted something else.
So Bush asked God.
"Sorry, I don't have a dog in this hunt," said God.
"I gave you this planet 7,000 years ago. Ask Cheney. He runs the place."

So Bush asked Cheney.
"What you need," said Cheney, "is a barbecue
"Outside Baghdad. Franchise it.
"Accept either greenbacks or American Express
"Serve only the best ribs, the best steaks."

And it was so.
Security was minimal
Profits were slim
It was de-listed
Outside the barbecue, died the American empire
In the sands of Al-Hajarah.

I hardly miss my Cosmo girl

,
originally uploaded by an0nym0usmuse.

not seventeen, more like forty
I never believed a word you said
But you always told a good story.

In Heaven (The Lady In The Radiator Song)

In Heaven
Everything is fine

In Heaven
Everything is fine



In Heaven
Everything is fine
You got your good thing
And I've got mine



In Heaven
Everything is fine

In Heaven
Everything is fine



In Heaven
Everything is fine
You got a your good thing
And you've got mine




In Heaven
Everything is fine

In Heaven



In Heaven
Everything is fine
You've got a your good thing
And you've got mine




In Heaven
Every thing is fine

Don't worry about the government.

An alternative to your daily media junkie source

Alice Liddell's Adventures In Dadaland

Baboons at the art gallery she came to see
Entitled, she thought, at age 153
Her old lover, Lewis Carroll, long dead
She tired of carrying her withered spirit under her curls
And gathered skirt and apron
Curiouser and curiouser
Pornmeisters from Russia sought her for a lolita series
She told them to frig off--she was too old
She smoked Camels in the kitchen while the dishwasher ran
So many memories
When she finally saw the baboons, they had shat on the carpet
And were swatting each other with the guard ropes
One yanked down Le Belle Dame Sans Merci
And proceeded to stomp it
She roiled with mirth
Reminiscent of the circus at Albert Hall

The Marquis Arrives

He did not know what escort to expect; but he was bemused to endure a shower of sand that drenched his blond locks as the chopper set down outside the gate, in a blur of cresents and crosses. He immediately recognized that he was overdressed and over-coiffed; the troops on either side of him had several days of stubble and the hard tack look of soldiers whose clean-pressed decorum had been inevitably ground down from years of combat. These were mechanics, office men, bureaucrats who had been plumetted into the abyss, and had survived on the other end by becoming efficient machines. Nothing in his fantasies had prepared him for this.

When the blades stopped whirring, the Marquis crept to the rear of the machine and retched, holding his cape so as to not stain it. It was the stench that did it. He rose, recovered, and apologized to his charges.

"I am quite fine," he said. "Lead me."

After passing the gate, he felt entombed. He noted the barbed wire running the expanse of the concrete walls and thought, "Well, prisons must have walls." But this was merely the first gate. Beyond lay a second, of rusting steel, at the end of a large courtyard crammed with humanity: dark figures in robes, many dazed, sitting on the ground, some wailing, some attempting to snatch the attention of soldiers who could not, or would not, comprehend their language. Some clutched indistinct papers, or waved small books. He recognized that most were apparently female.... all sweltering under the fire and the stench of the courtyard.

"Who are these people?"

"They are the relatives," someone answered.

He likened the courtyard to some outer rim; as Stygian as this predicament seemed on the surface, he rationalized that they were at least free to come and go. But he felt his fantasies vanish; blanched from him by acid. His fantasies had fled, leaving a white skeleton, and a robe.

He wondered what to tell Madame Doucette.

Adventures Of The Marquis--Techniques In Torture

Madame Doucette--Tell me: What are you thoughts at being reborn in this century?

Marquis de Sade--I have primarily desires, and secondarily thoughts, at finding myself plopped on this century. Souls are attracted to those who are kindred spirits, and then to those who desire instruction. Behind many a suit and tie lies a libertine.

Madame Doucette--Where will you travel?

Marquis de Sade--They do not want for instruction in the Capitol. I believe that the depraved are not necessarily hedonists; merely dead souls. A dead soul cannot revel in the delight of sensation, or yield to brimming lust.

I will travel East, to the far-flung gulag of the Americans.

Madame Doucette--I see... you seek those in bondage?

Marquis de Sade--Yes, young men in bondage, and those who hold them. I have heard stories.... many stories. But the Americans are crude, yet, in their craft. What I offer them is refinement, and pleasure that can be found in torture. I have what they lack, and they have what I desire. I will travel this week.

Madame Doucette--And you will write me of your adventures?

Marquis de Sade--You, Madame, shall be the first to know. And when I return, you shall be the beneficiary of my education.

Announcement By The Department Of Homeland Security

On The Beach, Continued

When the first season of The New Bewitched was wrapped, Darrin had a few weeks off to think. In his basement, he had sought to create an object of terrible beauty, an object not seen since the first act of the play, The Demiurge. He created to destroy. He became a slave to the wheel until it ground him under, and in a fit of pique, he obliterated it.

"Why?" asked the Woman of the Photographs, when he called her while she was in Missouri.

"I don't know," he said.

"Can't you get Samantha to twinkle her nose and reconstruct it?"

Darrin thought a moment. "Hmmm... maybe so. But I can't tell her what for."

"Lie, you doofus! Ask her to reconstruct the *area* that it was in."

He thought about asking Tabatha to do it... but he knew that she was just tell Samantha, anyway. So, that night, Darrin slid up behind Samantha as she was washing the dishes.

"Loved the meatloaf," he said.

"Oh, Darrin, you *hate* my meatloaf," Samantha sighed. "Whadda want? You want me to pimp your Toyota?"

Darrin explained that there was, uh, a problem with his workbench, and could she progress it back, say, three months?

"Only if you get me that solitaire that I saw at Viandries this weekend."

What's a few grand? Darrin thought. So, Samantha wiped her hands on her apron, twinkled, and went back to her dishes.

Darrin waited a few discrete minutes, then traipsed downstairs to find the object of terrible beauty, magically reconstructed, still sparkling with fairy dust.

He had a year to finish it. A veteran of the insurance business, he worked best when there was a dealine... except that this deadline was literal. The New Bewitched would run only two seasons, and he would be gone.

"You must have found another floozy," the Woman of the Photographs wailed one night, her voice crackling in and out on the cell phone.

Darrin sensed a trap, and said nothing. Implicit in her wail was the assurance that he would always return to her. And his object of terrible beauty would suck the world into itself.

Let's Ask Joan Crawford! What is art?

Dear Joan Crawford,

According to classic Marxist theory, the Artist cannot be divorced from the social milieu of his class, his function in the means of production as defined by the bourgeois elite, and his utilitarian worth to humanity as a whole. However, the prevailing aesthetic, in these terminal days of capitalism (i.e., the proto-fascist, militarist über-state), the Artist stands aloof from the dreck of values-based production as a beacon of individualism. His very isolation from social affairs is seen as a marker of a higher call, and his eccentricities are excused as virtues. Even Hitler, for example, forgave Speer for occasionally imbibing one too many biers at Brauhaus festivals on account of the magnificence of his architectural sculpting of lights at the Nurnberg rallies. So my question is this: What, indeed, is art?

Sally Mae in White Bluff

Dear Sally Mae,

I see that you are still a baby Marxist, taking your first, stumbling steps through the official catechism of our doctrine. You have not yet begun to live it so that reality appears as it truly is, without question. You need only look at the world that you see, and trust implicitly that this is, indeed, art, because what we remember of the world past is based on--art. When I used to make movies, the producers always said, “Make it imaginative, make it different, but make it sell.” So we could never upset the bourgeois, or the ruling class, and in many cases, our scripts had to be passed by military censors. So my movies became twisted but distilled photomontages of the daily, imaginative and unimaginative lives of everyone who contributed to them.

What is art? Art is: dead bodies littering the streets of liberated nations; newspapers of blank pages; every conceivable word spoken, to an audience of hearing-impaired; and oblivion at the fingertips of a drunk man.

You Can't Afford The Clothes I Wear

You can't afford the clothes I wear
Lampshades of flesh and shirts camelhair
Bulletproof razor blades with armor plating
Teflon velcro straps camouflage grating

Guaranteed to withstand redress
Red and black jackboot against protest
The claw that paints the slogan, grips the throat
What is writ, shall be unwrote

Dead Souls (continued)

A Fly buzzed when she died
Through the obelisk of words I erected
They could not warm nor move her
Unheard, unseen, I clung

Je Suis Hanté

Prenez-moi et secouez-moi
Et mille fantômes tombent au plancher

On The Beach

In 2007, the television show Bewitched was revived; the original actors were dead, or old, so the network located new actors who bore a very close facsimile to the originals. "Darrin" was discovered by talent scouts as he read The Wall Street Journal on a bench outside his insurance office in Manhattan. The scouts placed his photo side-by-side one of Dick Sargent and admitted--he was a virtual reincarnation.

Finding Samantha proved a bit more problematic. Locating witches was much easier than it had been in the 1960s, but most did not want to prostitute their talents for a such a short-lived commercial venture.

The producers chose to film The New Bewitched in black-and-white, to give it a historical patina.

Immediately, unexpected problems arose. Ten years earlier, Darrin had met a young divorcee, down on her luck. He guided her and her children to the nearest battered women's shelter, loaned her money, gave her advice. Soon, she began calling him, daily. They met in Central Park for surreptitious meetings, or took long rides on the subway, to nowhere, discussing life, love, and a make-believe future. He often photographed her posed against the cherry trees, or in her small apartment, or framed against the Flatiron building.

He fancied himself a contemporary Stieglitz. His attention to the insurance business suffered.

"Marry me," she said. He hesitated. Samatha became suspicious, and his secret was exposed. He burned the letters, the photographs. Those he could not part with, he hid in the rafters of the house.

The woman met another, and married. She sent Darrin a wedding invitation in the mail. Samantha found it. "Let's attend," Samantha taunted, her nose twitching. "I want to attend. I will wear my best gown. I can still fit into it. Could she?"

Darrin filed the invitation somewhere... somewhere in the antique accounting ledger his brother-in-law had given him. He thought. He was never sure.

For the next year, he continued to stumble upon relics of the woman, which he hastily burned before Samantha could find them, sometimes without success.

She was forgotten. She was expunged. She did not exist. She had not existed.

He filled the holes in his photo albums with post cards of Italy.

Until last year. Darrin had been walking down Fifth, when a car pulled up beside him. A window rolled down; it was Her. The Her of the photographs. Her hair had been chopped off, and she wore sunglasses, but they recognized each other. "Hello, Darrin," she said. Unbeknownst to him, she had been working in a nearby building for several years.

It took weeks for them to work up the courage to meet for lunch. Over cocktails, she spilled. Her marriage had gone south. Darrin twisted and twisted the straw in his ice water. Samantha, he confessed, had become a stranger. And his company was near bankruptcy. He was not sure of anything, anymore.

They met, surreptitiously. America had changed completely in the space of a year, since the second attack. A curfew was in effect. Concrete and iron barricades and razor wire blocked many entrances now, manned by Homeland Security "personnel" with M-16s. All-seeing cameras peered behind invisible monocles, everywhere.

Darrin, like most, had accommodated himself to the new reality without grumbling, for the sake of national security. He had become the invisible man again, and his instincts dropped into place. He met her, at cafes, or dark booths in public places, their subterfuge aided by the cloak of constant surveillance.

He allowed himself to caress her hand, but in the years that he had known her, he had never kissed her. Now, ten years older and wiser, he could see the wanting in her eyes.

Finally, after a cadence of lunch meetings and innuendos, they agreed to meet for one last time at the only place they knew would be both public and private—on the beach.

Much of the beach had been closed off and barricaded since the attack, but the guard posts were often unmanned. It was all an elaborate Potemkin village. Darrin, with his connections, knew this.

Standing in the sand, the only illumination being from the lights of nearby Manhattan, Darrin clung to her and felt her warmth beneath her summer jacket. Cancer had ravaged her. "I’m fragile," she warned him. He found her lips; cold, at first, as he sought to warm them. Unlike ten years before, he did not care how many men had kissed her before him. In the shadow of the valley, it no longer mattered. She was what he needed at that moment—someone to hold. "We are all dead souls anyway," he rationalized.

When the producers of The New Bewitched discovered this affair, they came close to canceling the project. The first week’s rushes had been filmed and were in the edit room. Their "Samantha" had been discovered tending bar at a truck stop in North Dakota, and she had been lured to New York City with the promise of extra rations. Finally, it was decided to integrate the story as a subplot, in a dream sequence, as a sort of surrealistic cinéma vérité, to be broadcast near the end of the first season.

Visit Cuba!

Dadaist Manifesto Portmanteau (draft)

I am Krishna, destroyer of worlds
I am one hundred thousand and one dead
I am a Shylock lover's kiss
exceptio probat regulam
I am i Am
manifest, unnerving
not Judas
I am
tat tvam asi I am not
A horse head's lament in a bad play
where the heroine stoops to deliver the mortal kiss
I am da
I am I am
da dat
da da am da
Da.