(non-space): THE PLASTIC ARTS DO NOT LAMENT

Home now. Slept in a car/motels/deserts/on a Brooklyn roof, and bathed in lakes and gas stations and sometimes not at all.14 states in about six days total, before bumming around New York for another three.

YYYEAH.

["Read More" link=words and pictures.]

no photography was allowed here,

and my camera died here.

didn't have my analog backup,

because I am an idiot.

Somewhere on Amtrak's route between the Central Coast and Los Angeles. Wheels slap endlessly against the tracks, like an addict’s fingers rhythmically prepare flesh. I’ve been on trains for hours, and, through blurred and slatted vision, the dunes appear italic.

I amble through Union Station’s art deco ducts, ugly and sick with exhaustion, and get asked for change three times in five minutes.

...The recessed ceiling of the station’s fantastic semi-rotunda—its blue coffers arranged in a brutal pattern of emptiness, like a thousand sunken, Aryan eyes—serves as backdrop to a woman who simulates tears by wetting her face with water from the restroom sink next to mine and chokes out a request for a dollar.

As all poetry is a lie, I found it oddly poetic (causing guilt to encroach upon my sympathies)—but, as also is the case with most poetry, I denied her.

----

Ran into G. as he was walking along the sidewalk outside the station; I was chewing on a cigarette/feeling bad/sublimating it all by way of Olvera Street's subterranean bass blasts.
"HEY!"
“Cruse! What the fuck? What are you doing here?”
“Just…y’know, ‘raging against the cataract of time.’ Picking up a car in San Diego, driving it to New York starting tomorrow.”
“Whoa. By yourself?”
“Yeah…”
Grin. “You don’t change.”*
“Unfortunately.”

*…and we don’t change; none of us; not really. Psyches are static: circumstance, dynamic. Yet as we age, occasions for adventure and variability are denied us—which is, I guess, why I’m here now, stupidly spontaneous.

Biplane engines shudder through the public’s collective associations with aerial warfare, and drag apocryphal messages across the sky…formerly a haven thought impervious to capitalist modes of aggression, now advertising is transposed onto that last pure domain.

This scene: the implied recrudescence of consumption, after the pockets have grown cold from prolonged inactivity; after so many hues of Neutral have stitched into one another, into the even, planar Zen of the road…

The landscape is a filmstrip of the unreal—and, as it is unbuilt, it could never house or sustain you; it can only hold your dumb, inert gaze for a transitory moment, before it ejects you back into an existence both paper-thin and performative.
The desert’s only kin in ambivalence is the manufactured metal box that you now inhabit—which has always separated you, from everything (can’t we say that the mass production of automobiles was entirely historically contingent upon American isolationism…?)
--and through its glass, heat lacquers your face to the sheen of a pewter St. Christopher medallion and it glows, all neon and heresy: blood is merely acting out its script…in such barren realms, ideas of god or fate are cremated under an atheist sun.
All this weather and machine legacy, foreign and domestic, is legible punctuation on your genetic paragraph.

Driving, somewhere outside De Smet, under naked trees of lightning that snake out from violent clouds, their mass a tessellation of anger and electricity…can’t quite believe I’m not dead.

Sought refuge in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s former home…yeah.

Currently in a wood-paneled diner, surrounded by hateful stares and collapsed mouths, swilling coffee that tastes like a nursing home. (Well…at this point my capacity for sensory-recall is dubious...today’s surrealism does not beg for metaphoric accuracy.)

Haven’t slept for about 36 hours. The road invites hallucinations and the earth delivers: jagged, pale Mesozoic colossi for miles, enrobed in bands of rouge sediment…and yet, like an old IBM punch card, their code’s randomness is illusory—an encrypted, sempiternal intelligence breathes inside.
Their arbitrary appearance confronts the park’s urban precision, making the Badlands seem even more bizarre.

Across state and county lines, air pulses isotropic with the radio’s energy.
Infinite planes of asymmetry produce a weird plaid of theologian frequencies…male and female voices alternating in a miasma of psalms, before they lose traction in the air and slip away…comically replaced by a Black Sabbath song, or with a detached, British description of Syrian deaths.

. . . . .

The military cemetery at the base of the Black Hills forms an acrostic of Name and Rank, all meaningless now; spells out Death’s matrix, its cause and effect…one small family of graves, its significance obscure, contains gaps: broken axes await more soldiers’ obedient skin to be subsumed into—and edify—their logic of destruction…“What is it they know that the powerless do not? What terrible structure behind the appearances of diversity and enterprise?”

It was sometime between seeing Western European tourists—encased in cheap imitations and huddled around the United States’ most glorified hole in the ground, eyes fixed on their cameras’ pixelated stares—and walking down the Coney Island pier, hearing a faraway woman’s rendition of the National Anthem (voice scraping earnestly at an octave too high, like a besotted dog against a wooden door…) that a dislocated form of nostalgia began to creep in. Huizinga’s “THE PLASTIC ARTS DO NOT LAMENT” ebbed around the outer membrane of my…whatever (consciousness?), nagging imperceptibly as paranoia or a half-remembered nightmare. I stamped each syllable onto the shit-shellacked wooden planks.

You can grow so silent and interior that you hear all your body’s minute processes before they occur…a prickling schizophrenia, like Fourier’s undiscovered fifth wave, undetectable by even the most sophisticated instrument.

Sole human interaction occurred today in Brooklyn, when a man slowed in the street, leaned out of his vehicle, and wordlessly flashed a grip of 20-dollar bills at me. He was driving a van emblazoned with LAB CORP. DNA TESTING SOLUTIONS.

“YOU WANT MY PLASMA, BRO??” I screamed.

---------------------------------------------------------

and so....

abandoned-ish house in Calico ghost town

Virgin Gorge, AZ

i found an ostrich farm.

Zion/Virgin, Utah.

i found a rock farm.

Zion

directly before getting accosted by Mormons. southern Nevada.

one of the more scenic areas of Provo.

These dudes practice modern day mummification. "Sealed except to the open mind"

These dudes will also give you shit if you heckle their birds.

OKAY.

Idaho

M0rm0n temple/Idaho Falls.

ghost town on the Montana/Idaho state line

...also a fucked up transportation graveyard

When I asked him how he had lost the fingers on his left hand, Mr. Hall told me his story about a steam roller accident where he worked, at a salt mine in Nevada (before he moved to Idaho, where he now lives.) It had been his dominant hand, so I went on to say how our brains were "so elastic and adaptable; we can train it to do virtually anything." He said that his brain was still in its shrink-wrap, and had never been used.

the Torii of the west.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Pit

uptown Butte

the most insane hybrid architecture i've ever seen.

american computer museum in Bozeman, Montana.

MAXWELL

BABBAGE.

yellowstone

hike to the Calcite Springs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beartooth_Highway

montana and/or wyoming

Red Lodge

moon/long exposure

AGAIN: TAKING PICTURES OF THE MOON.

I CHASED THIS FUCKER DOWN

...BOOM

Badlands

Chicago

Ba'hai Temple, Wilmette IL

Philadelphia

UHHH ,WHAT

Rafael de Cardenas

Benjamin Noriega Ortiz

Brooklyn Botanic Gardens

(ART STUFF)

...wait, just kidding: "images from the maximum-security prison in Corcoran, California. A surveillance camera shows a pie-shaped segment of the concrete yard where the prisoners, dressed in shorts and mostly shirtless, are allowed to spend half an hour a day. When one convict attacks another, those not involved lay flat on the ground, arms over their heads.They know that when a fight breaks out, the guard calls out a warning and then fires rubber bullets. If the fight continues, the guard shoots real bullets. The pictures are silent, the trail of gun smoke drifts across the picture. The camera and the gun are right next to each other. This video also emphasizes the social relationship between the one who fires and the one who films, between the one with force and the one who takes shots."

Farocki's work made everything else in the moma seem really trite and stupid and i left immediately afterward.

...however, beforehand: