Rock N' Roll

Wird dieser Winter jemals aufhören - Will this winter ever stop 28,5 x 49,5 cm Acryl on wooden board

ROCK N‘ ROLL

They say that a woman can be “won” 

through displays of expertise and passion.

Don’t try to market yourself, they say;

sell a life-style or an art form instead.

Better, try to sell both as one, and one as you.

My choice would be Rock n’ Roll. Only you 

can’t explain R&R. What kind of dialectic—

the kind that sounds like Pete Townshend

smashing his guitar against

Keith Moon’s drum-kit—

what kind of dialectic is that?

Badly slurred speech wrapped in a 

hangover; little ash piles of brain cells left behind

the trashed hotel rooms of a continent.

Confused, wracked with passion, red-eyed,

unzipped, crawling across a fire-proof carpet

in some nameless motel on the edge of Omaha

trying to make it to the rumor of

a chlorinated water-hole somewhere between

these plaster walls and the parking lot. And yet

to this day the Fair Grounds of Iowa beckon to us. The glory

of back-to-back dates in Peoria, in Duluth, the “Riot House” in full orgy.

What can you say about concerts at which some fans wear ear plugs?

Led Zeppelin - Immigrant Song (February 27, 1972) Sydney Showground

Color

Rot Gelb Grün - Red Yellow Green 28,5 x 43,5 cm

THE SPANISH PEACOCK’S LAMENT

The absurdity of his beauty,

nature’s most flamboyant transvestite.

Probably an earlier version of himself

was a terrible dresser, a manic number-crunching    

nerd now paying with interest for the bad karma of  

bad taste, pointlessly gorgeous

like one of those would-be movie stars who

end up doing commercials, underwear or lingerie ads,

or low level sit-com work as the neighborhood knock-out,

brainless but nice, a running joke that chews gum. These days

the Spanish peacock has plenty of competition:

beneath its folkloric needlework every peasant blouse

is set to burst into a duet of chocolate colored nipples.

Unfortunately a bunch of chunky, sheepish Midwesterners

are insulting a silence of heat haze and wheat chaff, their

air-cooled bus—about the shape and color of Moby Dick,

                                                                     the whale, of course, not the book—

blocking a view of field workers making hay

while the Spanish Peacock lifts his skirts and lets loose  

with as haunting a cry of despair as ever heard in these parts. 

 Rodrigo - Concierto de Aranjuez

Guitar: John Williams

BBC Proms 2005

Summer

Chamisso-Platz 39 x 29 cm

FINALE LIGURE*

Guess what comes from this place? Here follows the Birth of Pesto:

fresh basil and olive oil plus garlic crushed with a pestle

in a deep narrow bowl and

mixed with pasta then sprinkled with old parmesan,

on the table a fiasco of Vino Rosso di Toscana,

not a fine wine but a very robust one, yes, a muscular robust

wine of the earth rather than of the air—which is

doggerel a semi-poetic wine dealer might recite—

the stucco façade of the ancient farm house 

peeled back in places

to reveal

its original brick sub-structure,

decay does wonders for some buildings,

fireflies bobbing and weaving above the lawn

on hot summer evenings, sun-drunk boxers, the thickness of trees

and ivy hanging

heavily as if held there  

by the dark yellow and purpling light. Sometimes 

it’s hard to believe that we are a part of all this gorgeous stuff,

we sit back and try to be satisfied

with our good fortune but it feels like

television somehow, a story

belonging to someone else,

though in a way similar to us,

an actor mired in middle-age, say, walking 

through a cool, high ceilinged room

forgetting his lines, tripped up by a carpet,

knocking over an expensive vase, spooking the cat, and thinking perhaps

that decay doesn’t do wonders for most people, not in this life.

*Finale Ligure is a small town on the Italian Riviera.

 

 Vivaldi's Concerto No.2 in G minor "Summer" 3rd Movement
 Nigel Kennedy performs "a la Citadelle", 2005, France
with the Polish Chamber Orchestra

Fusion

Marrakech 40 x 30 cm

LA PLACE (MARRAKECH) *

Through the gate comes a donkey pulling a cart of

   God Knows What

a man with two green monkeys, a trio of petit

   bourgeois French women, temporary henna

doodles on their forearms and wrists and here comes William Burroughs

   riding in on the breath of his latest fix mere seconds

before noticing he’s, like, in the wrong medina, man

   smell of cumin, smell of chili powder, of sweat and horse dung

smell of dried mud and rotting fruit, musky incense drifting

   into a sweetish subterranean odor of human excrement

Paul Bowles on the roof top of the Hotel de Paris

   firing up his trusty hash pipe

several decapitated heads rolling across La Place like bowling balls

   in a shopping mall suburb of Ft. Worth, of Atlanta

   sound of bare hands on the skins of Saharan drums

oui, madame, what I have here in my hand—a fat writhing lizard— 

   is that rarest of aphrodisiacs—it works!

   a smell of hash, of wood smoke, of roasting meat     pink walls

everywhere, rose, ochre with reddish tints and pale orange, layers of peeling adobe

carpets pungent soaps shiny baubles snake skins the residue of a thousand espressos

   yes please guten tag come in bon jour bitte have some tea you

insult me with that price, hah hah, but still we are friends, non? oui? I have five children

a glee club from North Dakota moves cautiously through the portals of Club Med

   little boys calling out after them     

where you from? where you go? what you want?

* Djemaa el Fna, known as "La Place", is a large square at the edge of the medina of Marrakech.

Jimmy Page/Robert Plant - The truth explodes

Performing in Marrakech's Djemaa el Fna