- menopause on an island
- victory over the Times Sq Bomber
L.I.E – The expressway to doubts, sorrows and longing.
No, I’m not going to destroy your mind with descriptions of the Long Island Expressway or, for that matter the GRAND Central, or even the M4 motorway that leads me here. Lies. That’s what we do best.
Maybe the best description for our period (yes, period!) would be the midtown tunnel or the Holland Tunnel. Yes, tunnels. Darkness. Claustrophobia.
The theater is a dark place. It’s the place where we tell the truth by lying. Yet, the system is passing us by just like speeding cars do on the LIE. Except that cars don’t speed on the LIE. It’s a bumper to bumper deal, if anything, especially when the passengers mouths are wide shut and approaching the tunnel or the toll booths. Imagine Munch’s silent scream inside one of those tunnels. No, don’t imagine that.
I said, in the previous post down below that “we should rethink ART as the GREATEST form Of ART itself. Not as a fearful act of expression, but as an act of eternal transgression.”
But our bumper to bumper period (yes, period!!) isn’t up to much transgressing. Sucking the past dry, I realize … no, leave it alone: let it be. Let it be nothing. Well, sucking the past dry, we are in a recycling period and that makes me cry. I’m alive.
The current vacuum or void seems to me like an empty stomach starving for new ideas.
And that’s a huge question.
I’ll leave it up to Hamlet to solve.
But Hamlet has never solved a thing! Yet he thrives in our imagination dead imagine, buried deep inside our brains as the eternal “what to be and what to do” He is the epitome, the prototype and the encapsulation of insecurity, low self-esteem, narcissism and self destruction. If the Hamlet in us ever does look at his own reflection, it will be in a pool of his/our blood just before death, rather than in a thin pool of water.
I’m in tears while writing this because I’ve just spent hours watching/listening to John Paul Jones (the bass guitarist for Led Zeppelin) and it dawned on me that….No. Leave that alone for the moment.
“Ramble On”
I am simply in a state of wonderment or nostalgia or maybe I’ve come to realize that the Led, as well as Hendrix were products of the Cold War era. I mean, the byproducts of the Beatniks, hippies and all the names that’s fit to print in order to describe the “counter culture days” – or the Anti Vietnam War movement and all the peace and all the love we use to flag around and which has turned into so much hate, hatred, green kale and greed. Let’s say that the real world is more like Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin or Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and the blues. Oh yes, the blues.
We’re in 2010. These guys were making the most amazing things and CHANGING THE WORLD in the late sixties, early seventies. Meaning that 10, 15, 20 years after the Second World War, there really was a REVOLUTION from OLD to NEW.
And now? Nothing. This has all been FORTY years ago. So, what was our crime? What is this fucking punishment?
We are bombarded with LIES and sit still. “or take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them”, oh Shakespeare my love: that was almost 500 years ago. And now? We sit still and type. We type and wonder.
But it’s all blind, it’s all Braille. We type and type in vain. Better to spit into an empty glass of Barolo, I think.
When Page, Plant, Bonham and Jones formed Zeppelin, or when Hendrix, Mitchell and Reading formed the “experience” there was a UNIVERSE hidden in them. And a universe with a beat, a sound, a bass so loud that it resembled your own heart when in love. YOUR HEART WHEN IN LOVE.
Yes, and the lungs could barely take it.
Very little moves and that motto: “we should rethink art as the GREATEST form Of ART itself. Not as a fearful act of expression, but as an act of eternal transgression…has become nothing but a retrospective and introspective sound I hear, something that my soul hears, my subconscious knows but I sit still.
Yes, perhaps I will give Hamlet a call, after all and arrange to meet his father, the ghost. What better place than, say, somewhere along the LIE?
Gerald Thomas
3 May 2010
PS May 5
Faisal Shahzad, 30, a U.S. citizen from Pakistan, faces charges including attempting to use weapons of mass destruction. BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THIS BASTARD. MAKE HIM TALK. (yes, I used to work for Amnesty International as a volunteer). Now I just don’t care: Nail him to a chair, beat the m*f* until he gives us all the info about these FUCKING COWARDS!