"How does it feel to be one of the beautiful people?"

Bad Hair Day 23 x 18 cm

WHAT LIFE WOULD BE LIKE IF YOU OR I WERE GOOD LOOKING

Let’s face it—as you look into the mirror at that

mask you’re saddled with—beauty is more compelling

than truth. Nobody will pay you a thousand bucks

an hour to stand on a soap box in the park and recite

all of your great ideas. And who really gives a shit? Not even you at times.                                                                                                

If you were pretty enough, people would stop, at least pretend to listen, goofy

unguarded smiles on their lust encumbered faces. A well-dressed

fastidious little man from a modeling agency just might

slip you his card. You wouldn’t have to be obnoxiously

smart anymore. As if anyone cared who invented stream-of-consciousness.

It exists, we more or less enjoy it, some of us fish deeply in its shallows. Basta.

All I know about Wittgenstein, by the way, is that he had funny hair. It sort of leaned to one side.

At some European film festival, Natalie Portman, obviously

blown away by all the fuss, is demure in the swift explosions of light,

Bardot, Jean Seberg hawking the Herald Tribune, Sissy at the drug store

in Nashville sucking a straw, unaware of her magic, Romy Schneider

looking like a Greek goddess in a black and white publicity photo from the 50s.

Goethe and Schiller side by side, practically hand in hand, always the same age,

and if not beautiful then at least heroic, noble, which is nearly as good, it lasts longer,

and still the classic targets of shit-dropping birds. If Goethe was right, then

“Youth is a disease that time cures.” Substitute beauty for youth, and we can call it a day.

American Gigolo - Call me, by Blondie

Vanity, thy name be ....

Franken - Franconia 48,5 x 38,5 cm

SINECURE

It’s not that I have anything against work, per se,

but what I need is a patron not some Vice-President

   for fuck all 

pulling my chain whenever he feels like it. There’s a character somewhere    

   in Henry James, I think, who claims that he  

does not entertain ideas, ideas entertain him. Now that’s a position I can

still get into. But the issue before us, as the chairman of some

   highly self-important panel might pronounce,

is financial and not ontological or even epistemological

and phenomenology is just a picture in your own mind 

   of what constitutes the “really” real

which apparently is unknowable and I can do better than that:

   what would it take to receive living

expenses plus a simple comfy old house, with a courtyard

and beautiful tiles and Moroccan pillows all over the place

and a flat, spacious roof on which to sleep nights during the hot months

   and this located in a palm

   olive grove within sauntering

distance of the medina or acropolis? I’m not so much

philosophical as complicatedly blown away by the physical

   world and most of its moving parts. Still, I think some foundation

could plausibly make me Dean of Poetry in Absentia

   at the Library of Alexandria, or appoint me

Secretary General of the Union of Disaffected Aesthetes,

College of Arts & Letters,

                                           University of California, Berkeley

whose principle duty would be to write a yearly essay on the state of his Sensibility.

   Let me swim around in a think tank

all barnacled with concepts, clichés, marching orders, systems

   of tightly organized, internally concocted   

delirium. If you required more I could easily offer you

a re-write of the Classical Tradition and even a few of its

more amusing offshoots, my version, for instance, of the long lost

dialogues of Socrates after the orgy, or even confessions  

   of the Buddha before he went straight.

Open your blinds, that’s me in the street,

   waving and waiting for the sun

to warm my blood, inspired as ever,

                                                      as swift as Sugar Ray in his prime.

Carly Simon - You're so vain

Cultures

Mallorca - Majorcan Forest 48 x 34 cm

COMPARISONS

                                                         Berlin, Winter, 2011

A few things I miss about America:

the breadth of its roads. The depth of its oceans. And that

we Americans call aubergines egg plants. Which seems to follow

some surrealist/Da Da dictum on the pairing of technically dissimilar

objects…or something big like that.

Americans today wouldn’t vote for anyone with whom

they couldn’t sit down and drink a beer and share a few

laughs at the expense of, say, whole land masses

and selected cross-sections of society.

                                                     Or a glass of exquisitely rounded

if slightly oak-heavy Napa(68%)-Sonoma(32%)chardonnay

at the Café Mediterenee, Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley, Ca. 94716

A German wouldn’t drink a beer with anyone whom he hadn’t known

   for at least three years.

Nor play tennis with his boss. And would outright reject the proposition

that egg and plant could be equal parts of anything. Even nominally.

Except perhaps as an omelette. With cheese. And a touch of garlic.

Exquisite with a glass of Napa-Sonoma chardonnay, etc.

An American would play tennis with his boss, but probably

not sleep with the man’s wife. Unless she asked him to.

A German or Swiss or Austrian might sleep with his boss’s wife

but would never consider having a beer with him.

Europeans would find it culturally impossible to play a

game of one-on-one basketball with president Obama: protocol, etc.

More than a few Europeans however would love to play one-on-one

B-ball with George Clooney. Then expect to sleep with

him afterwards. Or at least eat an exquisite omelette

on a terrace(with view and ample shade)of his Como palazzo.

I don’t know anyone, European or American, who’d want

to sleep with Sylvio Berlusconi. Except for a few thousand

seventeen-year olds with urgent liquidity issues.

Or drink a beer with him.

Americans find almost nothing culturally impossible.

Which is another thing I almost miss.

 

Philip Glass - Opening Glassworks

When magic was still in the air...

Auferstehung - Resurrection 27,5 x 23 cm

nach/after Piero della Francesco

HISTORY

History isn’t the music coming through our window—

Led Zep working out some Hobbit-derived obsession  

antiquarian in its own quirky way—and history  

isn’t the lilac-hued romance that Karin, warm as a muffin

beneath her feather-stuffed covers, is reading right now,

a story fraught with murder and pestilence and courtly intrigues

and troubadours singing rapturously of love and such matters

(that many of these wandering poets were gay didn’t

stop them from knowing what the girls might want to hear)

and it may not even be those gorgeous frescoes by Ghirlandaio

climbing the interior walls of a white-faced gothic church close to     

the train station in Florence, which are as close as we can ever

get to boarding a time-machine and actually visiting

the Quattrocentro, if minus the putrid odors

and public hangings—it is the art that survives, is all that’s left

of rumors of rumors and various vague confabulations

neatly reduced to the scholarly gossip of specialists

hoisting cocktails at academic festivals—try to

remember that even if you remember not to forget history, you’re doomed

to repeat it in some weird way. And so what if it’s “bunk,”  

as Henry Ford stupidly put it? We seekers of the olden days—another Henry (James)

called us “passionate pilgrims”—seem to need its tattered raiment, its half-forgotten song. 

Ramble on - Led Zeppeling