LTDM (Letters to Dead Masters): #29

           George,

          Strange dream last night. I was in bed all over again, in my apartment. I awoke, in the dream, to find Jena Strayner crawling across the floor, not far from the bed, as though she were a caterpillar. Only, she was a brunette this time, and didn’t look older than ten years old. Her face remained unchanged. I asked her what she was doing here. She slithered backwards slightly, propped herself up on her elbows, looked me dead in the face, and said, “Because you are my husband, I am eternally damned.” The feeling in the air was charged with menace. I felt something issue from her head, land next to the couch. It was a kind of whirligig— a congeries of raw consciousness data to fall into, veering off into the insanity of perceived damnation. I had an ESP moment, and knew that she was anticipating her death, in her mind’s eye. But because she was ten years old, a brunette, and a caterpillar, all the menace-n-macabre crap in the air was charged also, with a tinge of the absurd. The sting of it was that when I woke, I did feel a strange energy in the apartment, a sense of the whirligig being real. I did live through my share of macabre moments with Ms. Strayner. What could be more macabre than room 510 of the Atherton Hilton? Or up-all-night in a trailer in Liverpool, Harrisburg ‘burbs?

        In waking news: with Dana now flaunting the guy she’s seeing, I’m left to scope out other diversions. One is Kris, who I’ve finally been able to establish contact with. While she was unchaining her bike today, I managed to talk to her about a pertinent issue— the Grind no longer has a permit to allow outside seating. This means that we have to drag chairs from inside outside, on the few warm sparkling autumn days we have left. Today is one. Kris, up close, is vastly more sardonic (and shrewish) than Dana is. With her voluptuous proportions, she actually reminds me a little of Liz Taylor in Taming of the Shrew. The difference is that Shakespeare’s Kate has no real sense of irony; Kris does. Kris has in her eyes that knowingness which says, quite plainly, once I’ve seen you with your pants off, I own you; once I own you, you become so magnificently ridiculous that you’re to be held in my back pocket (nowhere else) interminably. If you want to call Dana and Kris the Doublemint Twins, Kris is certainly the more sinister of the two twins. What redeems her is honesty. Dana’s veneer of niceness is always holding her back, especially considering how transparent it is. Kris just scoffs and rolls her eyes. Salt on the surface.

       One thing that is worth saying about Dana Blasconi: she comes from country stock, but she is by no means a typical country girl. True country girls always err towards the timid, the meek. They lack gumption, nerve in general. For Dana Blasconi to begin in the sticks, and wind up kicking serious ass (hokey contrivances and all), as she does here at the Grind in Center City Philly, bespeaks unusual courage, and an equally unusually robust sense of self. Dana didn’t settle for the country deal at all. I can’t not link her in my mind to Jena Strayner, who superficially partook of country life, all its lack of amenities. Jumping into a shotgun marriage which included all kinds of pornography-worthy sex, with the damned degenerate who happens to be writing this missive, was about raw courage, country values be damned. Jena Strayner belonged in Center City Philly as much as Dana does. Just as Dana belongs…anyway, both of them earn, for whatever it’s worth, kudos from me about what it means to rebel fruitfully in the world, whatever stump-dumb aegis you happen to begin under. By staking a big claim on living a big life, however much I criticize them in my writing (this applies more to Dana), criticism will always be tempered by warmth and admiration.

       By the way, Chip did finally show up today. We got, unfortunately, into a rather nasty argument. Chip is one of those semi-artist meatheads who insist (and it is a very American position) that an artist should be judged by the size of his or her audience. So, Bruce Springsteen becomes better than Beethoven, Allen Ginsberg superior to John Keats, and the Abstract Expressionists ride high over Goya. Chip even goes far enough to say that Bruce rivals Ludwig in musical complexity. I hit him with every imaginable jab — what art is to me (which has, built into, layers of snobbery which I embrace), what constitutes cultural hierarchies that actually work (over centuries), why America has seldom been taken seriously by world artists (and Larsen). I know, of course, what the subtext of Chip’s argument is— I’m every bit the artist you are, and my opinions matter as much as yours. Well, no they don’t. At the crucial, culminating moment, I revealed to Chip that 1) he is not an artist, 2) he’s not even as good as I am at playing rock music, 3) his opinions on the arts, particularly the higher arts, are all hokey contrivances that are by no means commensurate with mine (I did lay it on thick). He got up abruptly (we were sitting outside), told me he’d never talk to me again, and drove off. I saw the man clearly, as I never had before; behind all his thought, the imperative to compete (on all levels and in all ways); the presumption of equality (misapplied to a realm in which there is no equality); and the philistinism that informs both post-modern art and rock music. America, Larsen says: more freedom, but among kiddies.

        There’s an anti-climactic feel to the Grind these days. Little dramas develop, coalesce, sputter into nothing. Tensions play themselves out on subterranean levels. People don’t say too much, and what they say often amounts to a series of non sequiters. Also, the simple (but very painful) truth: I miss being young. My body of work sits on my back like Baudelaire’s chimera. It also takes the form of a long-suffering mistress, requiring sorely needed, seldom received attention. But lovers and friends and contexts also create bodies of work, and at a certain saturation point you find yourself gazing blankly at a pile of bodies. To the extent that I can tolerate the sensation, I take my scalpel to the distempered parts of all these bodies, including my own. I can do dish about all this human stuff, but then art levels squish into it and the whole thing becomes a palpitating mess. I made the choice as a young man to surround myself with artists; this is surely my just dessert. Blue icing? Sometimes. But at least as hearty as Trish’s eight thousand ways to do rice-and-vegetables.       

       Sauteed,
            Adam