March 31st, 2009 by Hoopleton

Some art for now, some writing later…

"Face" KP Dawes, 2009

"Horizon" KP Dawes, 2009

March 31st, 2009 by Hoopleton

I’m beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gestures is the imagination… Each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a diminishing tool against the illusion of ONE-TRIBE NATION; it lifts the curtains for a brief peek and reveals the possible existence of literaly millions of tribes.

– David Wosnarowicz, artist

March 30th, 2009 by Hoopleton

I want to ride the surf into a golden beach.
I want to see every continent.
I want to hear every language.
I want to soar in the sky.
I want to sleep in a hammock.
I want to drive a racecar.
I want to climb mountains.
I want to have adventure.
I want to sit in a Parisian café surrounded by artists and writers.
I want to live in Manhattan.
I want to have a loft in Barcelona.
I want to sip espressos in the Forum Romanum.
I want to stand on the peak of Gibraltar.
I want to ride a motorcycle through South America.
I want to be paid obscene amounts of money for my work.
I want to wear expensive clothes.
I want to eat good food.
I want to drink great wine.
I want to go out on the town every night.
I want to have lavish parties in luxury suites.
I want to have sultry sex with young girls that don’t know any better.
I want to discuss good books.
I want to discuss my books.
I want to be praised.
I want to be adored.
I want to be important.
I want to turn down interviews.
I want to taste your lips.
I want to strip your clothes off.
I want to feel your body.
I want to sleep in your bed.
I want to know what’s on your mind.
I want to hear your voice.
I want to keep you from leaving.
I want to play naked in the rain.
I want to skip the light fantastic.
I want to carry moonbeams home in a jar.
I want to break every record in the book.
I want to jump every star.
I want to dive into the ocean with all my clothes on.
I want to live in a world without sin.
I want to see the revolution.
I want to charge the police lines.
I want to set the world on fire.
I want to scream at the top of my lungs.
I want to finish this novel.
I want to create great art.
I want to be great art.
I want to live forever.

March 30th, 2009 by Hoopleton

“As Naked as We Came,” by Iron & Wine.

March 29th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Perfection rides high in the maelstrom. Those old regrets sink to the ocean floor. I wonder what she sees when she looks at me that way? You know the sex was great before she left me. The sex is always great before they leave me. They do always leave me. All I can hope to do is beat them to the punch. It’s perfectly healthy to have something to brood over, the old doctor used to say. But I’d ask him if it’s them or if it’s me. There has to be a reason. The whirlpool seems to go faster. My vision skips. I start seeing things that aren’t there. A face. A silhouette. I just don’t understand what love is. I’m at three decades and I still can’t figure out if I want children or a wife. I can’t decide what kind of relationships I like. The old doctor used to say that some of the most interesting people he ever met hadn’t a clue at six decades what to do with their lives. That makes me sad to think about. I’d like to think I’m close to figuring it all out. It’s spring and there’s snow outside. Soon it’ll be too hot and in a blink of an eye there’ll be snow again. I’ll be standing on a train platform trying to will time to go faster, shivering from head to foot. A few beats more and I’ll start wondering when it was that I got old. Why is she looking at me like that? When was it that I started going through the motions? Was it before or after she lost interest? Funny thing is, she told me till the very last day how unique I was. How great I was. She said she loved me and she meant it, at least at the time. The old doctor’s divorced. He still dates, has a couple of kids he sees on the weekends. Mainly he works. Do as I say, not as I do. Tides swarm the boat. Perfection is still out of reach and the sailors are afraid we might capsize. I have to say that I didn’t feel anything when I was told about her marriage. I was happy for her. I was relieved. Why am I always relieved? I’m living the life of every artists I’ve ever dreamt to be. I’m an addict. I’m occasionally unethical. I’m a hedonist. A misanthrope. I get obsessive about my work. I never reveal everything about myself, but I let all my feelings out. Is it that I’m too closed off or far too open? Is that why you’re looking at me like that? I’m looking for the woman who wants to rush off to Vegas five minutes after meeting me. I want someone who likes the idea of crawling into my skin. The old doctor laughs and tells me that I’m deluding myself. He knows me well enough. Truth is I don’t know what I want. And that, he says, is acceptance. Perfection slips away along the foam. It’ll probably wash up on some sandy shore. Maybe I’ll find it when I’m sixty. I finally know why she’s giving me that look. She never knew me. She never tried. That makes me sad to think about.

March 29th, 2009 by Hoopleton

The song “Gold in the Air of Summer,” by Kings of Convenience

March 28th, 2009 by Hoopleton

Photo for LIFE magazine, by Eric Schaal.

Woody Guthrie used to write the words “this machine kills fascists” on the side of his guitar. I like that. There’s poetry of purpose in that act.

Did you know that the Nazi Party of Mongolia is seeing a major rise in popularity? Mongolia. As though a central Asian people would have ever fit into National Socialism’s perverted ideologies of racial purity. Then again fascists were never blessed with an over abundance of brains. If they had they probably wouldn’t have been fascists to begin with.

At this moment there’s a bullet shortage in Texas. Hate rock, music by skinheads for skinheads is selling out over the web. The most popular books in the world are those prophesizing apocalyptic revelation. The pope, a one time Hitler Youth, has reintroduced the practice of selling indulgences, is preaching against condom use in AIDS-ravaged Africa, and many fear is on track to reverse Nostra Aetate, the Vatican II declaration that ended the centuries old charge that the Jews murdered Jesus.

Where’s Woody Guthrie’s guitar when we need it?

The US government says we are fighting a war against terrorism, but what we’re really fighting is a war against extremism, against the dictates of fundamentalism. We are fighting fascism. The rational world, unfortunately ignorant of its own predicament, is under siege both from abroad and at home. Radical Muslim terrorists are just one spoke in the wheel. Right wing Evangelicals, Traditionalist Catholics, Militant Orthodox Jews, Nazis, Stalinists, Supremacists, militia anarchists, Chicago school capitalists, and countless other groups align themselves against us. Split a million ways ideologically they are united in their absolutism. Committed to dictating their various brands of law and morality on the free peoples of the world, or at least those not exterminated if they ever got the chance.

Pirates off the Somali coast. Indulgences. Mercenary armies guarding the gates of Rome. Has time splintered? Are we sliding backward or has the ceiling just caved in?

My fear is that this time we live in has been an aberration. That it’s not a backlash we are witnessing, but a reassertion of age-old historical forces. For most of recorded human history there has existed some form of ideological fascism. Whether imposed by tyrants, emperors, kings, imams or popes, hate, slavery and genocide have been its by-product if not its chief export. Democracy as we have it today, imperfect as it is, a freedom of reason and expression that we enjoy, is very new and very fragile. What if it’s just a skip in the record? What if it doesn’t last? Looking back the chances aren’t good.

We’ve gotten too soft. Too complacent. We’ve accepted this exception as natural law. We have falsely come to believe that all people will choose freedom, when historically what people crave most is order. We have failed to be vigilant and now as the fascists amass at the city walls we have yet to fully comprehend what this war is that we’re fighting.

Ani DiFranco said that every tool can be used as a weapon. Our weapons must be our words. Our tools must be our voices. We must sing, and write and educate. We must carpet bomb the world with our ideologies and our spirits, without ever resorting to dropping real bombs. But more than anything else we must jealously guard our virtues, not only from the fascists, but also from ourselves, lest we become what we abhor in our fury against it.

March 28th, 2009 by Hoopleton

“President,” by Dan Bern. Enjoy!

March 27th, 2009 by Hoopleton

We fly like comets toward the starry dynamo. The heavens seize. The rays convulse. The coming darkness is no match. We’ve brought torches and enough dynamite to shake the planet a dozen times.

I take a step through the crowded sidewalk. The herds part enough to let me pass. They have no eyes. No lips. They go by scent and scent alone. I am alive in this moment. This moment that will last forever. I take a breath. My lungs fill. I take a second step. And on I go.

Writing is a curse. It’s lonely and miserable work. Write. Rewrite. Edit. Reedit. Dink till you can’t stomach alcohol another second longer. I wish I could stop. I wish that I didn’t feel manic without it. I need to write just to get through the day and most of the time I hate every single thing that drips onto the page. Writing is my agony.

The sky opens up and blood flows down from the stratosphere. Electrical discharge. Plasma dancing and connecting like the neurons of some dying brain. The fragments of the moon go into eclipse. Fire reigns between the stars and silence fills the gaps between.

None of them can see it. They rush to work and play and home. They practically run, slaves of time. Each second bringing them closer to death. Mortality slipping. I walk among them step by deliberate step. Breath by deliberate breath. In each second that weighs on them so heavily I find a thousand lifetimes. A million new experiences. A billion ways to glimpse the fabric of existence. I will never die, it is the world that will end.

I’m propped up against my keyboard. I stare at a blank screen. I haven’t written in days and everytime it gets harder. The characters in my mind are all screaming for attention. The various threads of my stories are coming undone. I want to be anything but a writer. I want to break free of this curse.

In the distance I can hear the sound of emptiness echoing against the tail of a passing comet. I can see the sun cannibalizing itself. Firelight and cosmic rays move in waves against the wall of darkness. The echoes ripple into infinity. And we dance among the strings till nothing has meaning.

I finally stop and the fury of the traffic leaves me. The rush of car horns and traffic lights dims from view. The passing heat of bodies melts into the framework of brick buildings which too melt from my periphery. I am alone. Empty of the living world but filled with life. I take another breath. I let it out slowly until even this body is no longer here.

Words on a page without meaning. Without substance. Words that don’t easily make sense in the context of a brain so stressed by the sublimation of itself. I’m alone in my apartment now. Alone with myself.

March 27th, 2009 by Hoopleton

A simple but strangely mesmerising video featuring the classic song “A Final Hit,” by Leftfield.