It's that I don't feel like a fully formed human being, after the unraveling. And I don't feel like I was even fully present for the unraveling. Why would I expect to be? Well because that was how I managed to endure all the other unravelings - via a system of watching, disembodied, in order to notice the details in order to turn them into something else (a song, a drawing, a poem).
Like how I remember every detail of that October of my homelessness when for a week I was invited to crash with that white-trash (there's no other word for it) family of 8 or 9 kids, all of them dropouts, with the mice running along the baseboards and the ratty poodles shitting everywhere, fried smelt by the bucket, 151 rum set on fire and shot down. How I coached the pre-pube son with rotten acne how to wash his face and not pick at his zits. And all the sisters were wrestlers, literally, and the mom was like Jabba the Hut only not 1/2 as present, back in Madison Heights with the stinky blankets on twin beds, the fall colors, and Homecoming yik yak filling the halls of my school. "The best years of our lives!"
I wandered from handout to sleepover to bus terminal to train station to ghetto motel with my Clash lp & my hardcase of 45's: Stevie Wonder, Tommy James & The Shondells, The Who, Supremes, Grand Funk Railroad, Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels, The Rockets. That I lost somewhere along the way and miss to this day.
"Being present" back then was "being disembodied". Outside my scrawny body, watching noticing writing it all down in my head so I could remember so I could vouch for myself because this was the shit all those Beats wrote about except I was 16 and a chick so it was even that much more important to be up there, on the ceiling, watching like one of those cougars up in Northern Michigan that eat people out on the trails.
But yet I think that this is the viewpoint of the artist. That this is what a writer does. I mean from experience I think the two are intertwined: being disembodied as a result/reaction to trauma and being aware in order to tell the story later.
Maybe this most recent trauma, these past 2 years, what I've been is "fully present" in that I have "embodied" the shock, the loss, the crime, the abuse, the sheer ugliness of it all - and so have felt like I haven't felt a thing. I mean that's only natural right? After what I've been through? Maybe.
Oh god the absolutely primal feral wild rains we've been having have turned the city into a mammoth barral of red wine and neon green lizards. The honeysuckle in Ginger's heavenly yard where I sit at this very moment, the last Tuesday I'll sit here as a trailer-dweller - ah, it is encumbant upon me to sit here and praise it by breathing, leaning back, and getting dumb drunk on it all!
What kind of soul is it that yearns for this density, this utter other-planet feel, this subtropic godless holy river raft? We weren't supposed to be here at all! This land was meant to crumble and sink. It is impractical to live here in every possible way, yet so divine, a dream made of pumps and thread, a non-place place, we are idiot pranksters laying it all on the line for a moment's pure release, all to live in a city that is just going away.
You have to act like you know what you're doing, and though I sincerely know I like to make things and give them away - that I am a Marxist-sortof Socialist primitive shaman something or other - I also know I like to create an ambience at the store that will exploit consumers and make them engage in the capitalistic game. None of it is real or true. Or is it? The texture, look, scent, and sound of the ambience of the store comes from a very real connection to those things. I have a genuine aesthetic affinity for Bryant's store and though the silent role I manifest there is contrived to make people buy our goods I genuinely love not talking to them. And then on the flip side. Art In Action.
The creative class of this city needs to talk about the socio/political elements of "Katrina" that we must not continue! Disdain for the environment, lack of connectivity, capitalistic power structures that breed greedy competitive human beings, systems of isolation that keep the economic classes separate, selling selling selling profit bottom-line, attention attention, fame. If the art is just the same as the art of every other gallery and musem and registry - if the "art industry" only wants to function as just another business ("Now's our chance to compete with the Big Boys!") - then what good will any of that art do to insinuate change?
I am not interested in more of the same. I am not interested in that destructive egocentric game. I am however very interested in making a difference, maybe via resistance, via this particular process-oriented methodology, which does require being noticed to some degree, which requires many of the same components of The Game that disgust and bore me. So I want to use their tactics to exploit their weakness and even their irresponsibility only by showing people that there are "other ways" to succeed as an artist in the world, to live as an artist in the world.
This notion that the artist also has to be a business-woman is fairly new and why, pray tell, is it that important? If you don't care about getting canonized because the canon is run by a bunch of patriarchial assholes then what do you care about getting an agent? Seriously? It's possible to make money doing other things, honorable things, that don't exhaust you or "sell your soul", and keep your work free of the dialogue and system that makes art into nothing more than a commodity, like a thermos. I mean, it takes a great deal of business acumen to be a truly functioning artist who doesn't become an all-out business-woman. It takes savvy, you want to be able to communicate your ideas, you need to be able to get the ideas and the work out where it needs to be. But it's possible to do it outside of "The Game" and it's a landscape ripe with possiblity for actually making work that cultivates connectivity rather than blocking it.
I know this idea, this vision of free art is radical and I am teaching people (and myself) its value and this means this is my job. And this free art, these concepts of art-making, are to me a valid and legit and necessary response to "Katrina". Why build a fortress on land that is disappearing? How does a culture that is fluid withstand the efforts of a culture obsessed with "preserving it"? You cannot preserve it, and that is it.
Buddy Bolden's trumpet floating across the river from Algiers. Mardi Gras Indians warring on a streetcorner in the 7th Ward in elaborate outfits they will wear only once. Second lines coalescing in a random fashion to dance wild down Orleans Avenue for 2 hours, only. Mardi Gras. This is a culture grown out of the cycle of passing. Tibetan monks had to escape their homeland in order to escape slaughter and preserve their religious texts and this is how their spiritual practice spread to the West and continues to live - it moves.
How contrary is it to try to embalm the body when it's going to just float away? How absurd is it to encase in a museum art that working class people won't go see because they don't feel welcome but it's supposed to change their lives or tell their stories? Is this to all-of-a-sudden, because the country was so horrified to watch so much death and change that was injust from "Katrina", become a city where things lasts forever? How nuts is that?
Feeding people, clothing, housing, clean air and water, opportunity, medicine - this is what people need. Art that is deified, that is alienating, that costs money that you don't have, that does nothing but perpetuate the same cycle of consumption/destruction - people don't need that. They need to learn, see, work their own creativity, to feel the power of the creative process, which is at base nothing more or less than the passion to survive. A Biennal? It only matters if serious effort is to include the work of the marginalized, is made to bring the working class in, to teach them their own empowering potential, to give them the forum to give voice to their own voices. This an artist and only an artist can teach, by example. A bueracrat cannot. An arts magazine cannot. A web registry cannot. Only the artist, who does not need the machine or the money or the fame or the power.
Because we are blessed to posses this ultimate gift - the skill and ability to envision more, and to make that vision a reality. The "art industry"? How is it different from Wal-Mart? It's just another store, just another system for helping people pretend that if they buy something or sell something they'll live forever. What I can achieve in one afternoon walking around Lakeview making sculpture with plastic bottles, talking to people, listening, does more than any Wal-Mart can.
And I write in the dark, the dark of green, mosquitos, and one lone star that's Venus, a planet. I am always only walking into the dark. It's all any of us do, all, and everything, the lot.
