Title page for this work-in-progress + what lies herein.

i thought Chloe was trying her hand at Beat poetry...
until she told me this was her spelling list.

Same concept, different scene.

By all accounts i have spent most of my life in a  reverie, of sorts.  Somewhere between vague wake and sleep. i catch myself checking if i’m on the right side of the yellow line or glancing at the clock just in time to do something i’ve promised.

i reckon it is just my disposition. The slipstream is not a bad place to be, better than some. i'm not spacey as i have a trail of work to prove manifestation + a career to track. None the less, it would be nice to have the chance to choose.

If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.  -Marcel Proust

Just got off deadline with the Magic Flute, the only opera you’ll not find me crying-over in the wings. Near the pit door was a free zone of sorts. i recognize it, having first met a free zone while living in the Vulcan Foundry in Oakland. People placed gently or dumped things they no longer wanted. Of course it was all art + production genre goods: stretchers, sample clothing, used canvas … This pile by the back stage door was of a different nature + mostly unidentifiable, accepting, an empty pizza box, Bose speakers w/ a nest of wire, a half full Listerine bottle. Nothing i would pick up + carry home. Just saying.

i know all of you know this, but that operatic scatting has a formal name. Mellisma. Said w/ an Italian accent. It’s what the Queen of the Night does in Act II. i always thought that was a happy little song, but what she is doing is arguing her daughter into murder.

Have i mentioned the use of panic to calm hysteria?

This is theater no one sees. I perform my task, coloring walls with a stream of sweat and consciousness. Or, a river of consciousness. Some days are green. All green. Monochromatic within the subtleness of every corner of that hue. The edges try to creep into blue or spread into  an olivey yellow smear. But I wrangle it, keeping it within the circle of my minds eye. It is a game I play with the chalk color. They have inherent needs to become something that I may not want, and I reserve the choice to let them rule my thumb or keep them under it.

-jahh / Minotaur - there is a shadow of a monster on the front porch  -pg 15

You have to learn the rules of the game.

And then you have to play better than anyone else.

-Albert Einstein

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward;

they may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Three made the mod squad.

When i’m on deadline, different thoughts surface, some adjusting into clear memories, others sift away + only an anxious feeling remains. Just shots of memories. Standing at a stoplight on a certain corner as a car speeds by + a passenger yells wtf out the window to you. i’m thinking everyone has this experience of ‘hits’ when the mind is occupied in one area or another. Isn't it Joan Baez that sings about memories tumbling like sweets from a jar?

i had thought to put in different names, but this was so very long ago, kind of. + although this may not make since to you, it’s just how the mind works, yes?

When looking  back on being w/ Kyle the vague feeling of eminent trouble surfaces. Our compatriot Dana joined in our artistic carousing. He wanted to be a writer so i reckon he felt no competition from us. We loved him because he was quirky (who were we to say), he wore gardening gloves in the winter, brought strange + stranger women home to stay over night + lived to be a character from the film Chariots of Fire.

Dana fired off odd one liners, “Jayne, of all your faults, malicey is not one of them.”

We'd rehearsed non-existing screen plays in the subway at rush hour.

Once, we scaled a fifteen foot cyclone fence at dusk to walk across a barricaded rickety scaffold high above careening traffic. Actually, once was enough.

We had spontaneous photo shoots on the roof top. On one occasion Kyle + i dressed Dana as a messiah in a lamé diaper. It was cold. Dana was really cold. i wanted  him to wear double stick tape on his tattered sandals so that he’d pick up and drag leaves, dirt + small sticks. i thought for some reason it would make the image authentic, as though that was important.

jahh / Script for a practicing artist + an unfinished life. Posted just because.

  

The dogs are throwing themselves down on the bare floor, rolling their eyes + groaning Lurch-like. Yes, it’s moving time again.

  

Excuse me.

i just popped over from Theme Thursday. And it seems i’ve set a theme and not responded to it. 

Hoping this will suffice. 

Minotaur / plate #20
Seeing clouds as a fingery low moving mask of smoke racing through the deluge of watercourse is where images become the skeleton of a nightmare.

Yes, the water came down during the dark time. I hurried out at first light to check damage or if all had been spared. The lilt of the rain forgave some of the walls leaving them dry, soaking the facing walls and smearing chalk beyond recognition - yet, still interesting. Looking deliberate, softening the drawing into morphic shapes with more possibilities than the original  state. Is  this formed by another? A message shaping up from another pedigree force? Perhaps next rain will work through this smudge to expose an image sharp as arrows. 

Let  smudge be smudge -  just so, I’ll be satisfied with this question, waiting for the chance of an answer.

Drawing leaves behind evidence. 

Some times people like you more.

Some times people like you less.

i’ve lost week to deadline. That's just how it goes.

i dreamed of an old friend last night + got on to memories i have not thunk possibly ever.
Rely.
Relay in writing, i like that.

In high school art class there was a small yellow + gray streaked glasshouse off to one side that sat out into a small light shaft between buildings. It was off-sight of the art teachers so they had no clue to what was happening inside. You had the teachers buffaloed.

But now thinking about it, that green house was a fishbowl to the cafeteria across the way.

A potters wheel was wedged between short bleachers of plants + supplies. i preferring hand building — since they said i was no good at throwing pots, the product being too chunky + far from elegant. But that didn’t keep me from trying. i was in the process of making, as a neighbor friend was enhancing. This friend was obviously in need of a something to focus on. He chose one of the still wet deep walled mugs + slowly, oh so carefully carved out a niche on the front side + added chips of tiny mud, choosing any array of micro triangular, tubular + spherical pieces all into an area one inch in diameter. He worked so carefully it was scary, + so close his nose scraped the clay. When he was satisfied, he straighten up, + a with dawning on his face that happened way too in-often, looked at me wide red eyed + awestruck.

It’s the universe Imploding!
Whoa. 

It has been a wicked deja vu week.

Real life rang false.
He carried a doll wrapped in scrap paper in his pocket. 

His mother sent a note along with him, 

only just this morning, 39 years ago,
Excuse him from whatever
he wants to be excused from.

i have been thinking about Escape Speed lately.
What it takes, to make us get up, out the door, over the comfort threshold + onto our next adventure. Perhaps just out of the way — so the door may close.

Sometimes dramatic. Expelling oneself + not looking back until everything is so very tiny that when you turn for a look-see all has transformed. But of course, it was you doing the transformation.

Drugs can do this. (i didn't say that.)
But i will say this about Escape Velocity;
i’m guilty of using it’s potency in the past. Moving to the coast, to coast, to coast, + then eventually back to the other coast. Sort of pinging in space, never landing for long. Sure. it took up a bunch of time + energy, but when i look back on it - a flash. A lot can happen in a jiffy.

Sophomoric, i know.
But there you have it. Once, + again, the human condition.

i practice active fleeing in my mind, i said.
He leaned into me + whispered, “I know.”
He wasn’t kidding, he had known.

DYNAMIC CHANGE;
Change that happens positively,
immediately,
+,
is not irreversible.

Hibernating with a Deer Spirit

Walking back from the bus stop this morning i could feel a shift in the air.
Winter's Work is coming on.

Action and reaction are equal and opposite. -Gertrude Stein

Choose a subject equal to your abilities; think carefully what your shoulders may refuse, and what they are capable of bearing. -Horace

All men are equal before fish. -Herbert Hoover

William of Occam's Razor
The principle states that one should not make more assumptions than the minimum needed.
=
One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything.
=
All things being equal the simplest solution if often right.

...I would have to add that all of the religions today seem archaic and dangerous. -Joey

Drew would have to also add,
I don't think god is in heaven anymore, that was a long time ago.
=
A quandary.

Just dusting off the unfinished manuscript from the collaborative piece, w/ Hanzon, on the cross-training dictionary. 
i’ve not posted any in a long while + thought i would break this silence w/ a few more of our simple revelations: or not.

1. Materials-alter / Method-alchemy / Inspiration-spirit.

2. There exists in everything the potential of transformation.

The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has. -Michelangelo

3. Try to know if that was the easy part or the hard part.

4. If something is not changing you are not looking close enough.

5. Muse: Learn to work this. Most successful freelancers can't afford to wait for inspiration. People in other professions work everyday whether they feel like it or not.

6. Keep the iron moving.

7. Use gravity to you own advantage.

8. In a proposal I like to always throw in something terribly wrong ... just to see if they are watching.

9. Inner-directed / Outer-directed.

10. Edentulous; Without teeth. I just really like this word.

11. Dynamic Change; Change that happens positively, immediately and, is not irreversible.

12. Great creative works are hard work and not simple. Move towards a true quiet profound excitement, and, being in this slipstream of the creative flux is indeed our element of trusting the outcome.

A semiretired backdrop tool, that has been to the paintbrush hospital way too many times.


76 

In Hong Kong workers mopped up behind us w/ the reek of benzene as though we were stinky americans. There was an amazing lack of unemployed citizens + dirty smells. Early morning in front of the five star hotel we were forced to stay in, we could wouldn't help notice men on their knees scrubbing the white lines on the street using acetone + a toothbrush.

Describing the aroma inside the elevator left us competing for superlatives. This bouquet of sweaty chrome landed somewhere between spicy incense + unpopular feral swine. 

jahh / Script for a practicing artist + an unfinished life.