Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Drench The Tender Earthlings
This morning I woke up and got some tea and opened my e-mail. Not an unusual occurrence, right? Well I had three interesting e-mails that sort of hit me with their feelings of alignment. I had phoned a buddy of mine in Vancouver a couple weeks ago to let him know a mutual old friend of ours was very ill. My friend in Vancouver wasn't home and I spoke to a housesitter who told me Pete was in Japan! Pete works at the particle accelerator in Vancouver and he occassionally gets sent around the world to work on other particle accelerators and this time he was in japan. So I sent him an e-mail with this sad news. I didn't hear back. Until this morning and Pete is in a hole in Japan. He sounds pretty down because it's such hard work and long hours he hasn't even seen much of Japan! It's also very difficult to hear bad news about an old friend or person in ones life and not feel you can do anything to help or support. I relate, our mutual friend is in rough shape and he had also estranged himself from almost everyone in his life in the last 15 years. He hadn't seen his parents in over ten years or his sister in 20 years. This has been described by one of his friends in this e-mail as "his strange retreat from engagement".
I found these words in an e-mail this morning so haunting and bittersweet. Life can be so very hard and sometimes processing our feelings and relationships can be so difficult. I have been sad about this situation for the past couple weeks because sometimes life just sucks. Sometimes it's just too hard for some people. And sometimes anger and fear are the principles some people choose as their path. And there sometimes ain't nothing we can do about it.
But I was filled with a lot of feelings of love this morning at the three e-mails I received from three hugely apart places in the world. So, for poor Pete who is working away in Japan in a dark hole I thought I'd post a Moe. song. We sent Pete a big cd compilation of Moe. playing at the Aragon a couple years ago. he loved it so much he and his son went to see Moe. when they played Vancouver and said it was the best show he'd seen in years. So Pete...I know you're too busy to see this, but here is a song for you anyhow...
I also got an e-mail this morning from a friend I used to work with in a nightclub in Toronto and he now lives in England...and he is a poet and was letting me know about a spoken word show he was doing...but he had the following words in his e-mail Beauty is the word, and it just tied in which the two other e-mails I got this morning so nicely...I guess Carl Jung would call it syncronicity or something, heh heh!
And then, I got a really wonderful video link. It's a song written by the person in the video making a painting. The song is quite lovely and although I wasn't sure of all the lyrics something stood out to me in the beginning of the song...the following sounding lyrics of "and in the chrystal difference between all the beetles/Beatles backs..."
I don't know if the song is saying the band Beatles or the bug beetles...but I heard the band. And I immediately had this image of the song being begun with Bloom's notion of the anxiety of influence. I don't know what the singer/songwriter intended but...for me, it was like a powerful strike and made the song all that more powerful. As the song moves it has many lyrics that also struck me as referencing the idea of desire to find a primary experience for oneself...despite the history of art or religion or philosophy or any social construct. I found the song to be about the struggle and bliss of feeling for oneself and not second hand poetry or images and experience.
Apologies to the writer if this was not their intent...and I admit that I had the sensation of three e-mails effecting me emotionally and all three feeling connected. The idea of a "strange retreat from engagement" to the idea of "beauty is the word"...combined with a sorrow for a person who was in my life a long time ago...and his loss, helplessness and what sort of influence they had on me when I was younger...to this fabulous video and song. Sometimes the people who we meet and pass though our lives can produce both a beauty and an influence of anxiety. The title of this song "drench the tender earthlings" I love because it suggests that life is abundant. That imagination and the energy for experience is infinite. The word drench is a beautiful contrast to the notion of anxiety of influence. There is such an abundance of imagination that we don't have to be stagnant and trapped by the ideas of history or philosophy or previous poets and artists. There's enough freedom and potential of expression for all of us. We are being drenched with experience and life.
So I tried to play the lyrics again to discern what they meant if it was Beatle or beetle...but no answer...I am only able to hear the word as meaning the band...especially in relation to the song examination of "God" and influence that follows in the song. AND...the examination of a poets existence in comparison to notions of God, what god is or is perceived...and hell...that surely is an anxiety of influence (har!...and ouch!) I have typed out some of the words/cut-ups in the painting here...
deepening meanings
flowers with power and unfolding like a bud...
through the glowing green of a glowing plant
The Devil is a God who would control
Rather than love an ear of earth of definitions...(?)
not of possibilities. But poets
Do not live in that fract-
Ured half of life: they swim like swans
Through this inverted wold
This painting on a pond, and glowingly
They glide with knowing grace across the gloss
of that sobering hallucination pool.
whose brief...
and god is groovy because he can build
The world out of the words in which we live
And weave a living love that never leaves
Drench the tender Earthlings God is Groovy
A vision augers inward in a turn
of revelation wheeling through the wire
whose information revelation rise
Check out this awesome video ! I love how the clouds and the sun are also working on the light of the painting...what a great piece! And what a beautiful way to wake up to three such profound e-mails...I feel so lucky...
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13 comments:
song lyrics for the music, which is titled "crystal difference":
the tiny avalanches on the mountains of your eyelashes are gone
and all the stars are mothers making milk made out of light for all their suns
and in the crystal difference between all the beatles' backs and what we dreamed
the beast pours out of all the children's innocence in bloody rainbow beams
and throbbing veins of lightning remind me of all that's frightning that i felt
and in the cities of your soul i'll wander in the winedark till i melt
so dont forget the time when without tryin we told the truth about our lives
remember there's a point to all the craziness you've ever felt inside
and the poem i cut up for the text, which is called "drench the tender earthlings (god is groovy)"
Drench The Tender Earthlings (God is Groovy)
A vision augurs inward in a turn
Of revelation wheeling through the wire
Whose information revolutions rise
Through our electric networks in a surge
Like fires pouring out of wines within
That drench the tender earthlings as they burn
And you and me lost in a river breeze
Or trapped within a trance on a trapeze
Or in the inhalation of a chant
To be sung out upon the surging seas
Or into the eyes of the cormorant
Of our black-winged and shady memories
Or through the glowing green of growing plants
The Devil is a God who would control
Rather than love an earth of definitions
Not of possibilities. But poets
Do not live in that fract-
Ured half of life: they swim like swans
Through this inverted world
This painting on a pond, and glowingly
They glide with knowing grace across the gloss
Of that sober hallucination pool
Whose brief forever cools their fever dreams
And god is groovy because he can build
The world out of the words in which we live
And weave a living love that never leaves
That gives words like home heart and family
Their deep and ever deepening meanings
Whose rhythms put the pulsebeat in our blood
That flowers with power and unfolds like a bud.
thanks for paying so much attention! and you get the beatles thing that's great.
see of course i have no definite meanings here. nothing too literal. the suggestiveness of the ambiguities generates a nice fatty matrix of many many possible meanings, hopefully. and then on another level it should just feel like a hug. thanks a lot for diggin this candy this was one where i really feel like i stretched myself out.
it's the video of the performance of the painting of the poem set to music. going for a multimedia where the multi is the message.
MB
I liked this very much - it is outside of what I have been taught the term Multimedia means, but to me this is the true, pure multimedia where the movement of the artist, the process of the creation, language, the variety of materials, throw in environment as with the light, add the music and = totality - there we are, a TRUE multimedia masterpiece - I was left feeling a bit dazzled (but then I'm tired too - - can imagine being greeted in the am with this energy!
i'm trying to experiment with this stuff in a way lately that never occurred to me before it's going to be really fun i think. and hopefully, it's only beginning.
i am trying to work on an art where the creative process itself is the chief subject. like mallarme's poetics.
oh, also, thanks a lot for the kind words and participation gardenia i appreciate it
oh good grief charlie brown i left out the last two lines of the song lyrics:
"you get so lonely but you are only
hallucinating that you are fading away"
Hey, Mike, thanks for the lyrics and the poem lines. It was quite a sight yesterday morning as I paused the video trying to transcribe and listen to the lyrics. I felt like I was strangely intimate with your back and butt dimples. Heh heh.
You know I've had a long fascination with seeing actors portray painters in films. Actors playing artists I really like to see..Daryll Hannah in Legal Eagles, Nick Nolte in New York Stories, are playing fictional artists and then there are quite a few about real artists...
Frida, Pollack, Basquat, Modigliani, The Agony and The Ecstacy, Vincent and Theo, Girl With A Pearl Earing, I Shot Andy Warhol, Slaves Of New York, The Draughtman's Contract, Wolf At The Door, Lust For Life, The Pillow Book, Camille Claudel, How To Draw A Bunny, My Left Foot, well there's a lot of them both fictional and bio.
One thing I like about grafitti artists is they have a fair bit of archival footage of them tagging and making art on walls and trains etc.
I wondered about those last lines Mike, I was beginning to think I hallucinated them!
Gardenia, the video wa really fun huh? You know William burroughs made a lot of paintings and he was a delightful painter. A lot of his work, maybe most of it was all about the action. One is made with all the bullet holes and damage ona piece of plywood. He painted with bullets, piss, body fluids, and stenciling objects right onto a canvas or paper, he used leaves, grass all kinds of things. And he was brilliant because it's like he knew as soon as he made it...by the sheer force of his elan vital and name and rep it was "worth" something. It was an immediate, hilarious act. And they are lovely narratives/objects.
candy you are hitting all the beats i'd hoped you would. a lot of people dont get this stuff at all this is great.
the back and buttcrack and stuff were things i wanted to crop out for fear of embarrassment but i decided that it would be better to leave them in to create intimacy. like that was my conscious intent and you totally nailed it. thxmnx!
but even more importantly is that you freezeframed it!!! i told my girlfriend, i dont have to stop on the words for too long because in the medium invvolved the audience can do this for themselves. one of my influences, the writers of the simpsons, have innovated this technique in a way that they will probably never get due credit from. but in the commentary they talk about "freezeframe jokes." it is brilliant comedy writing. i'm trying to do it for a more divine comedy thing tho i guess.
and of course burroughs to me is a role model as an artist. i never really painted before this but i consciously incorporated text cutup into my method. and was thinking of burroughs' shotgun paintings as i did this.
hey i noticed you have the poetics of space by bachelard in your "library thing" thingy. is that any good?
Three Mike Brown, are these your creations?? Wowser, awesome!!! I think I'm in like with you..
Oops! I meant 'Thee.' Sorry..
yeah that's me in the video. check out my vids at www.youtube.com/slippereal all original, all diy. thanks so much for the feedback and affection it makes me happy.
other names i have on the internet are slippereal and mikedelic. persona play is part of my art. candy one day maybe we could do a back and forth blog discussion of anonimity on the internet and what it means. that would be rad.
i will be checking this out as soon as I finish washing the dinner dishes. Thank you! And I'm glad I made you happy.
Hey I love all the comments here and I'm so glad a few folks watched Mike's video. I think it's really special. Mike sure...we should plan some kind of discusision or dialogue about anonymous stuff on the internet. I have a lot to say about that ha ha! But we need todo it a little in the future...I have some major stories I could tell you! If keyboards could talk!
one of these days...
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