CHRISTO

The 16' high gates were draped with orange nylon. The black feet of the gates were made of stainless steel. 7500 of these throughout the park. It was one of those things that was hard to place -- were they meant to be Roman centurions on the march, or were they Buddhist monks on a peace march? Were they only themselves? It was hard to make the mind just let them be. So big they teetered on the edge of the sublime, the mind trying to make sense of it and reeling.

Central Park was one of the first un-gated parks. Born in the difficult period between 1857 and 1872 Central Park was meant to be a monument to the idea of the Republic. Olmsted was a Republican but he used a lot of Irish labor (Democratic) to build a consensus. The effort was stalled by the Civil War while Olmsted was the Sanitation Commissioner for the northern army (which lost three times as many men to disease as they did to bullets -- Grant was the first Union commander to understand this and to steamroll the south in violent victory after victory rather than just let his men die from typhus).

Grammercy Park in Manhattan is still gated. It's the only gated park that remains in Manhattan (it's open one day a year in May for about seven hours to the public). In 1857 the gated parks were the norm. Throughout Europe parks were for the royalty. Olmsted wanted to build a Democratic park. No one was sure if it would work. Terrified that the rich and poor would clash. That women would be throttled. In fact of the 600 women who were raped last year in New York City only two were raped in Central Park. 852 acres at least a tenth (?) of which resembles wilderness.

There was a brilliant sunlit dimension to the nylon fabric during the day, and toward twilight a more somber mood. I preferred noon. The wife preferred the quieter and more somber mood and said that then the gates reminded her of the windows of the skyscrapers. I loved this idea but preferred the cheerful sunlit fabric against the depressing dead nature of the park.

Horrible crowds had come to see the Gates. Hard to find parking. All the parking garages along the west side were full so we had to go up to 95th Street to find an open garage. Then walked through the slush around the reservoir and into the Met. VERY crowded. Tiny Romare Beardon show with angels over the slums in large collages. One small room with perhaps ten pieces in it. My three-year -old son saw a scary Incan facial carving and ran up to it and turned and looked at us while screwing his face up and pretending it was Halloween.

We then had to head over something called the Pulaski Skyway to find the Marriott near the Newark Airport -- so many curlicues in the scenario finally at a QuikMart a Greek man in a Lexus who was buying a Diet Snapple agreed to guide us to the hotel. The next morning at the breakfast the whole room was agog when the news channel discussed the Gates project. A table of elderly Asian men and women were pointing and saying something I couldn't understand but they looked hopeful and radiant and filled with respect.

We came back in the next day for another look at the Gates project.

Such a huge crowd that traffic simply stopped at the Holland Tunnel. Then, report of a fire in the tunnel. We were trapped in the enormous traffic and couldn't turn around. We could only wait. The cars just emptied and their occupants went for cheeseburgers at a nearby Burger King. Finally the sluggish movement began and the jockeying began again as ten lanes went to two. A giant of a man in a white BMW came squirreling up a non-lane and someone said hey, that's not a lane!

"Fuck you motherfucker! I'm going to fuck your mother! Fuck your mother you motherfucker!"

The elderly but very angry and powerful-looking individual who was nearly seven feet tall but who had an elderly woman in his car -- perhaps sixty years old -- the whole scene was very weird and I wondered if bullets would fly. The bad man who was saying the bad words had three dots tattooed on his left hand. This means he was a Cuban gangster according to a website --
http://www.shutitdown.net/gangtattoos/

It was another kind of New York moment.

Q. How many lightbulbs does it take to screw in a Lutheran surrealist?
A. A tsunami.

America

America is a bus of elderly women
Visiting their relatives in a nursing home

America is a UPS truck delivering free Bibles
To the poor of the world

America is an airplane of martial arts experts
Hoping for a replay of 9/11

America is tightening its belt
Doing Tai Chi
Getting fit to hold off jihad

America is a platoon of preschoolers on trikes
They fan out across the playground in military formation

America is not Amerika it's America
America is America is America
America is hopeful anxious serious
America is a public conveyance driven by Jesus
Armor-plated windows and puncture-proof tires
Secularists try to hijack it
But America is an immense armadillo
Filled with Hispanics, blacks, gringos
Men, and women and children
Some 85% believe in God
Collectively paying the toll to enter heaven
Faith and service

America is a taxi driven by a Pakistani with a cross hanging from his radio dial
America is Charlie Chan for Christ
America is a Greyhound Bus filled with the weeping widows of 9/11
Jesus what's the matter with this bus Jesus
Jesus if you need a rest I'll take the wheel!

PLANS

The feminists locate all evil in straight white men.
The Islamics locate all evil in the Judeo-Christian.
The Christian locates all evil in gay people.
The Marxists locate all evil in rich people.
Every group locates all evil in another group.

Here's a weird bit of Christian cross-over culture -- slightly surreal:

http://www.users.muohio.edu/miyamadm/babygotbook512.mov

At least five years ago Steve Shaviro alerted me to a funny novel called Black No More. The book is by George S. Schuyler, a black conservative who wrote from the 20s until the 70s. This book is his one major hit, and was originally published in 1930. A science fiction novel it concerns a machine that can make black people into white (I wonder if Suess had read it and it had inspired him with his book on the Sneetches). At any rate, I've ordered it and a book of essays by Schuyler. The essays are funny, but I have a feeling this novel is going to be too much. Schuyler has an in-your-face attitude toward everyone.

The book opens with this dedication (I just opened the mailer envelope two minutes ago):

This book is dedicated
to all Caucasians in the great republic
who can trace their ancestry
back ten generations
and confidently assert that there are no
Black leaves, twigs, limbs or branches on
their family trees

The introduction is by Ishmael Reed. I read his amazingly good novel Japanese by Spring a few years ago. It does seem that such weird categories as race can and should be treated more often by humorists. Wodehouse's Thank You, Jeeves comes to mind. The strangeness of it. Geneticists can't find ANY difference at all between races. What is race?

Amelia in St. Louis

She skips
"I want to buy a book too"
About what, Aaron asks
"Trains"
Next time, ok?
"Ok."
She skips
We go back in the house
Amelia can you be sad & happy
at the same time I ask
"No," she says
But what if you're so happy you're sad
Is that possible I ask?
""No," she says
We drive off to a weird arc
Down in downtown St. Louis
And look in the nearby King Louis Catholic Church
Aaron says the columns are Corinthian
Can you say Corinthian Aaron asks
"No," Amelia says
We drive up Route 70 to the airport
I hop out
Two days of discussions & meetings
Readings & bookstore haunts come to an end
Amelia is a two-year old girl (birthday in August)
Sits in the baby seat
Of her father's Camry
He bought it for $3400 last summer
Amelia has been maddened by her shoe while we drive
The shoe has green Play-Doh
In its zipper
She talks to the shoe
And then asks her dad for help
But it's time for me to go
I pick up my luggage out of the back seat -- mostly books
"Can you say 'Goodbye, Kirby'?"
Aaron asks.
She looks at her difficult shoe.
I say, "Nice to meet you, Amelia."
"Goodbye, Kirby."

February 11, 2005

BAY WATCH

If it's true that David Hasselhof remains a Lutheran or at least has this in the back of his thinking then it's possible to see Bay Watch as a Lutheran program. The sea in Christian iconography represents the endlessness of death. And to save souls from death is the Christian game-plan. Therefore, one could see the scantily clad lifeguards of the Bay Watch series as pastors.

In the Lutheran Surrealist universities of the future Bay Watch could well be part of our canon along with Dr. Suess and the complete line of Elke Sommers' oeuvre.

TWO DAYS IN ST. LOUIS WITH AARON BELZ

Arrived at 4 pm and was picked up by Aaron. Aaron is larger than I expected -- he must have a shoe size of at least 11. Mine are only 7 and a half's. He's about 6'3". I'm 5'10". We drove in to St. Louis to his house. This is one of many that were built in 1903 for the St. Louis World's Fair. Hard to characterize it as one of many weaknesses in my vocabulary has to do with building styles of indigenous American architecture. He has a small lawn, and front porch with stone steps. The house is brick and stone on the outside, and inside features a creaky set of steps. Very ornate wooden fixtures. In the top floor of the house is a large library -- all of Ashbery, all of Bly, all of Ginsberg, etc. -- neatly arranged. He had a book On Humor by Ian Critchley in a pile of books devoted to his dissertation topic -- Ashbery as Silent Comedian. That's not the exact title, but I forget what it is. As you look out, a very weird bird sat on his roof. It was perhaps a starling but it was the most overfed starling I've ever seen. A sort of Falstaffian grackle, perhaps.

We then went out with poet Tom Hunley for something to eat. I had a pork chop, but was too nervous because of the first reading in ten years or so coming up so I couldn't really enjoy it. There was a thousand gallon fish tank in the place we ate but no fish in it just a couple of snails.

We then went to the Museum of Contemporary Art to prepare for the reading. It was a huge place with a show of Japanese pop artists up. Very good show I might add. Lots of anime type drawings and even sculptures, with the usual stuff in the margins about the atomic bomb blasts. That seems to have permanently transfigured the Japanese psyche in ways that nobody could have guessed.

We finally read. Hunley read first. Too nervous to really listen as well as I wanted to. His poems slow down as he reads them, he pulls them apart and has them by memory. He remembered to be human in the middle of his reading -- he thanked Aaron for putting it together something I forgot to do. There were Christian high school kids in the audience from Aaron's Christian high school and I wondered how they were dealing with the explicit sexual imagery -- scars coming together with scars as he put it at one point. Brian Jackson introduced Tom's reading saying his work was "about defeat" as I had said in a blurb, "but it wasn't defeatist" which was a very good twist.

Aaron went next. Aaron is becoming an icon of sorts. He has his own sensibility. It's something of Ashbery's elegance but he is not a gnostic who attacks reality as Ashbery does. Belz has a more comfortable relationship to reality. But he is nonsensical sometimes, and very formal. His endings are extremely peculiar often twisting and contorting into new layers of seeming irrelevance that hang together due to the vowel stitching, and tone. He ended his reading with his poem about birds and dolphins -- it is my favorite poem of his, and I think is a classic along the lines of the best poems of the Cavaliers. Our big theme now is animal-human -- where does one begin and the other end? Since Darwin the west has been unable to think about almost anything else even when we aren't aware of it. Especially when we aren't aware of it.

I then read. I explained that I hadn't read for a decade. I tried to give my story -- how I used to be a surrealist but am now a Lutheran and so hence I am a Lutheran surrealist. And I sway between the two unpredictably. There was a light in my eye and I wasn't sure how I was coming across because I couldn't see the audience. My poems moved me in places unexpectedly and I choked up -- reading about family, marriage, tiny events with kids. In the audience was one very stately black guy -- Marcellis Leonard. After the reading I went right up to him as I wanted to get to know him. He is from Springfield -- a creative writing teacher at the University of Illinois. Our discussion went through many things over the course of the evening. He said he was a homebody with 14 grandchildren. He looked about forty but he told me he could be my father.

TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES

The Democrats at bottom are like the Manson Family. United by the need to revel in bloody sex, they dream of attacking the moderately prosperous families of the suburbs and carving Nazi symbols on their bodies & ripping babies out of their wombs.

The Republicans are more like the clown killer of Chicago. They prefer to lure people in through the offer of jobs & then lock them in their basement and slowly bleed them to death.

Yes, many voters prefer to die in one way or another and are even self-righteous about it -- pointing out how bloody horrible it would be to die the other way. I tend not to be overly concerned and find the picky among us somewhat comical.

The Democrats -- even at their best -- produce men like the Kennedys or Bill Clinton who appear among us as lecherous monsters killing the likes of Marilyn Monroe, MJ Kopechne, while bellowing all the while about human rights.

The Republicans slap embargoes on countries and slowly bleed them to death shrieking all the while about human rights.

Between these Cyclopsean brothers must be an exit of some kind & Lutheran Surrealism will find it if it exists.

Our brave little band -- like Jason & the Argonauts -- must find a way through the clashing cliffs to the life beyond. At present we know no other way than to follow the Dove -- twin symbol of Orpheus & our God.

A man mistook an exploding zeppelin for his bicycle.

Every five years or so I give a reading. This Thursday on February 10, 2005 at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis I will read with Tom Hunley and Aaron Belz. The program will begin at 7 pm, and finish some time before 9 pm. 3750 Washington Boulevard is the address. It's free.

Lutheran Surrealist Psychiatry

If we return to the origins of surrealism we will remember that it is based on a misreading of Freud. Freud had said that the id (which comes out of Schopenhauer's notion of an infernal monster that rules all) was the basis for desire. And that in jokes, for instance, this id is freed from the repressive superego. Breton liked this, and thought he saw in it a whole theory of revolution. But Freud had also said that this repression of the id was the price of civilization. Civilization may have its discoteques but they are for Saturday night only.

Breton wanted the discontents to become discotecques 24/7. When he met Freud the Viennese gentleman attempted to disabuse the Parisian of this notion.

Breton persisted. The surrealist psychiatrist Jacques Lacan took up where Breton left off. "Le desir" became his cause celebre. Zizek, who takes up this demented baton, defended Mary Le Tourneau, the Seattle teacher who molested her twelve year old in the name of "love."

Freud would never have approved of this chain of transmission. I don't, either. Nadja, in the novel of that name, is a seriously wounded woman. She leaves her child in the lobby of her hotel while she goes off whoring. The Marquis de Sade -- who represented an unbridled id -- is also seriously disgusting to me. I believe in the superego.

The Father is an image of the superego in psychiatric parlance. The idea that we should turn toward a permissive matriarchal society (an idea that has been shot down repeatedly even within feminist milieux by book after book and yet it continues on) is silly. We need the father. The father represents law and order. Lacan suggests that women can also rule in the name of the father. I agree with this. But somebody has to rule, and they have to do so in the name of truth and justice for all. The flag -- the symbolic pennant of the father's rule -- must not be desecrated without penalty. Teenagers cannot be allowed to get away with this.

Lutheran surrealist psychiatry defends nation, flag, and fatherhood. We do so in the face of a nation that is "becoming teenager" -- in which our 50-year-olds dream of being teenagers, and look as much as they can like them. In which Cher strains after youth, and in which Mick Jagger refuses to see what she is doing, and John Kerry rides snowboards in an attempt to capture the youth vote. The father is a symbol of law and order, and as such is also the stand-in for the deity. Judges should bang their gavels and not be afraid of the phallic symbol whether they are male or female. The law IS, or everything will become convulsively ugly.

Lutheranism believes in the reality principle. There is one chance for freedom, but it is not in favor of licentiousness. We believe in God the Father. We believe that we are in bondage to sin, and that we cannot free ourselves. We do not wish to topple the superego, but only to ask that it accord with that greater reality of justice and truth that first Socrates put forward, and that continues under the name of Christ, and the founding Fathers. Lutheran surrealist psychiatry would cure us of teenager-dom, teach us that the id is something that HAS to be suppressed in the name of parental responsibility, and make us into adults at last.

As soon as one is no longer idiotic one becomes stupid.

FRIENDS

Mark Haskell Smith was my closest friend at Evergreen State College and then after that in Seattle for several years until he took off for Los Angeles to make it as a screenwriter. He is now a member of the screenwriters' guild and has many movies to his credit. Most recently he has been writing novels. The first one, Moist, was published by LA Weekly Books and is about a slacker who joins the Mexican mob in order to get close to a Frieda Kahlo clone. The most recent one is Delicious, published by Atlantic Monthly Press. It's about a Hawaiian gang fighting a Vegas gang over the rights to supply visiting Hollywood entourages with sushi and Hawaiian Punch in Waikiki.

The leader of the Vegas gang is Jack, an elderly man with a permanent boner due to inflatables placed in his penis. He is an irreflective twit for the greater part of the narrative but here he has a moment of sentience:

"Jack scuffled his walker to the edge of the patio; he didn't mind being in the sun if it gave him a better view of the action. He had a couple of hours to kill before his meeting with the line producer -- some fairy that the network hired as a favor to some bigshot. Not that it made any difference to Jack. You want to have sex with another guy, cool; that just leaves more pussy for me. Besides, that was the way things worked in this business -- in any business, really -- friends hired friends and did favors for friends and friends of friends. You wanna make it in Hollywood? Make some fucking friends" (79).