Back in the Saddle
December 6, 2011
The question is, why bother? Isn’t that the first question of your day? What is your answer? If you aren’t prone to fantasy tales or dopamine receptors, you’ll be stumped. The energy it takes to come up with a good reason to give a shit, if you are also trying to stay true to reality, is daunting. Last night’s Indian restaurant drink with a curator friend who actually read me the cover letter she’d concocted for a museum position was so hungry and verbose that I retreated, again, to my garret to ponder the mystery of meglomania– and in doing so, became re-determined to stop promoting. Granted, there are numerous rewards in grasping. If you aren’t grasping, what are you doing-? What else is there? I am determined to find out. — That letter she’d submitted. The position she’d applied for. The art at stake. A bottom feeder. A synthesizer. The middle man. The cusp of reality and commerce. The gal that wears the leather and beret- and gets a percentage. No talent, no ability per-se- just an societally accepted appendage- a slog in the capitalist machine, taking the pure and packaging it for a shipment to mediocrity. Why have the intellectuals started to eat themselves? Oh yes, they are paid by the Universe-ities. If you follow the money, as the radicals suggest, you will simple stop going to Indian restaurants with artistic friends who profess liberalism. Choking with the bullshit I found myself at a mental health facility questioning my sanity. They wanted to offer me pills that would protect my psyche from the people who were my only known friends. Friends who had succumbed to the bullshit. Friends who meant well and were concerned about my visit to the mental health facility. Friends who picked up the tab at the indian restaurant. All I have to do is keep my mouth shut.
The New Bohemia
September 27, 2011
I was living in a dump in 1992 which seemed romantic because it was a short subway ride from Manhattan- the idea of a dumpy area being withinn 100 miles of Manhattan is beyond comprehension to us now, just as outrageous as thinking that living anywhere in Rhode Island, dumpy or worse yet not dumpy, could lead one close to a Promised Land. Well, the wheel keeps on turning. It is 2011 and my previously dumpy home base is now a Disney Land Soho – a Bohemians-R-US theme park of grooviness, not a crack whore or curbside sofa in sight. Where are the crack whores and the sofas? The Elmwood section of Providence, what I have now labeled The New Bohemia, just as they did with my dumpy neighborhood in Brooklyn- 1993- when New York Magazine labeled it, The New Bohemia. Well, there went the neighborhood. They took the train over from the Lower East Side and we all had to relocate as the rents skyrocketed. Old familiar story. Gentrification. I had to move on, move out, but forgot to move up and so have ended up in what is considered the worst section of Providence, RI- Elmwood, or Slumwood, as I call it, a real trash-strewn downer with an exceptional ethnicity. If only somebody, anybody within a mile had more than 5 dollars, whatever our race, creed or color. No luck. Thanks Wall Street. Unlike 1992- the crack whores and aging whitey artists and latino drug dealers and asian noodle pushers all understand that it is not our fault after all that we’re broke, and we are all in this together, hence, there are less break-ins, less crime, than twenty years ago. Sure, we’re all still suspicious of each other, but the new divide is rich and poor not brown black white yellow. Plus, we all know that none of us have anything to steal. I am feeling Deja-Vu, living in Elmwood, — the trash, the potholes, the broken windows, the ramshackle historically signifigant houses, the chain link fences, the blight…the ugliness….where have I seen this before? Brooklyn. Williamsburg. 1993 – just before the TIpping Point- the New Bohemian label- the dumb-dumbs moved in, thirsting for hip-dumb, the scene, – the turning point- the scene starts before the rents rise- then boom it’s over and on to some other boom. Rhode Island, the last place and yet first place for a renaissance. They call Providence the Creative Capital, and I must say we are saturated with artists- with the thugs in control but being herded up by the FEDS. It’s a city larger and yet smaller than its parts. An enigma. I keep coming back to it. Confused. Now wait a minute. It’s ocean close, near New york and Boston, what is the PROBLEM? I won’t get into that now. Gentrification is germinating, but ever so slowly in Elmwood. Despite the bygone gorgeousness of the oversized Victorian houses, many of which have been invaded by lawyers and real estate agents and yuppies looking to double their money- block to block, it’s still a shit-hole. No matter how many lovely homes you have, with crack houses and no place to walk to except an overgrown cemetary, it’s pure dump. So, what’s next. Certainly, artists move into dumps. Here they come. But slowly. with hesitation. They need coaxing, the monied artists. The ones who can Tip that Point. And that is what a New Bohemia is all about. The CUSP before the fall into a pool of potential for payback. It’s sickening, I know, dealing with the vapid cheerleader consciousness of the pioneers, scared shitless, but buying in anyway- hoping for the miracle. And the miracle, I now predict, is coming and would it be anything less, RHODE ISLAND??– Providence? The worst SIDE of Providence. We proceed on tip-toe. We step over the garbage. We smile at the muggers,…Have a Nice Day. – and the soirees are about to begin, sabotaged by anxiety. We would have had much more fun in Williamsburg had we known it was going to turn out swell. I predict a swell outcome here in Elmwood. I am going to try my darn-dest to enjoy it this time around.
How to get somebody to do something for you without paying them or sleeping with them.
July 23, 2011
Good question.
Wasting Time on Facebook
June 17, 2011
Be Back to the Site soon. Got way-layed.
Moment of Reckoning
May 20, 2010
Woman in an Adirondack Chair:
The perfect day is agony. Not a ripple on the lake, although a soothing breeze moves trees, wind chimes, the abundant petunias. It’s a dry air today with plenty of sunshine, late afternoon in late summer, chores completed. No impending bills, social engagements, deadlines. The muffler on the old car has started to rattle but it isn’t a bother today, just a reminder of the wisdom in nursing an old car instead of being pressed with a car payment each month. Read more
What would I do if…?
May 19, 2010
Let’s say somebody had a gun pressed against your temple and they were going to pull the trigger unless you, for example, prayed, or wrote a story, or stood on your head. Let’s assume that you didn’t want to die, weren’t anywhere near ready, had important things left undone. Read more
Pulling a Runner
May 18, 2010
In spite of self-help advice to the contrary, if you feel like running away from a problem, challenge, crisis, person or place, get going. You may have responsibilities, contracts, moral imperatives, and a car that needs a tune-up. Get in the car anyway and just go. Move. You’ll end up, at least temporarily, in a situation that is worse than the one you ran away from, but you will at least be away from something or someone that enticed you out of your complacency and into the realm of the sublime, i.e. A Comfort Inn in the retirement metro area known as Sun City, Florida. A place so far from where you want to be that you like it because it deduces each moment of your life into a fragment of pure disgust at American Culture. Yes, I ran away from something unpleasant in Savannah and then Sarasota, clocking 1,672 miles on my old Volvo, only to find myself writhing out of a bi-polar agony into a rapturous hysteria at the fact that I was comfortably comfortable at a Comfort Inn watching dead bodies being bulldozed past their relatives in Haiti. A big, beautiful TV Screen pummeled me with spitballs of media packaged terror, interrupted by advertisements for Thermacare pain reliever patches.
Twister
April 23, 2010
tornado
Featured Article:
Dumb- Ster
The cop looked in the dumpster and noticed a picture of his wife. He had just received a complaint from the Olympic Sports store that someone had dumped bags of garbage in their dumpster. That someone was me. I’d cleaned out a few drawers of hometown memories that morning, – high school notebooks, graduation pictures, diplomas, clippings and headed into what I thought was a free-for-all dumpster tucked behind a strip mall. After I threw the bags into the dumpster I took a walk with the dog and when I returned to my car I was met by the policeman and the assistant manager of the Olympic Sports store. Read more »