streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 6:38 am on June 23, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING ( 13 )   

  Automatic writing, 

  mind on auto-pilot, contact improvisation; everything is related to the things that came before, and nothing is related to the center, because there is none. Character development is fun if it’s a real character. I hate making shit up. Why expend time creating and developing new characters when so little is done with the characters that already exist? The ‘abstraction’ gene gets its way, I guess. The need to universalize and ultimately, teach, is part of the human makeup. It’s better than mascara. If words could connect to each other above and below as well as before and after, then that would be interesting, certainly better than much of the artsy-fartsy manipulations extant in the current publications, the next best thing to another dimension.

   

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  hardie karges 9:33 am on June 22, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING ( 13 )   

  DANGLING PARTICIPLES 

  I don’t do flower arrangements, a word here and a comma there, a male noun dangling here and a female verb down under just waiting to swoop up to the rescue in an elaborate choreography of stoic feminism and poetic justice. If these are the nuts and the bolts of the trade, the arts and farts of culture, then maybe I’ll just have to content myself with the rhythms of natives, the beats of the past, and the music of the dispossessed, in order to maintain some integrity of purpose. Maybe art is a plaything of the rich and I’ll admit that I never wanted to be a starving artist. But language is at a disadvantage, because people use it for mundane purposes also. The average bloke doesn’t paint landscapes. Everybody writes. To rise above, pretense demands elaborate editorial gymnastics to maintain the inherited class system. Life itself is an art form, of course, and the essence of art is combination, bringing diverse elements into unique juxtaposition. Nothing is truly original. Balance is the hard part, as always, carefully crafting the finished product so that it is ‘just so’. ‘Stuff’ cannot be defined; you’ve either got it or you don’t. In other words, “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”
   
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  hardie karges 7:32 am on June 21, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: POETRY ( 12 )   

  THE MATTER WITH POETRY 

  Poetry is like meditation, going to great lengths to avoid direct thought. They say the secret to good poetry is to not editorialize. I say ‘fuck that’. EDITORIALIZE! Tell me what you think, tell me what you know! I don’t care what color the sky is when the sun rises in the east and I already know what every animal does the first chance they get. I want to know what humans think about every possible condition that arises in the short span of human existence. I want to know what drove you to such an extreme in the first place, that you settled for this medium in the second place. I want to know how old you were when you first contemplated suicide. I want to know how old you were when you first contemplated homicide. I want to know what you see in your mind’s eye in that thin gray area between the waking state and full sleep, that fitful profusion of images looking for dreams to rescue them from their homeless condition, before that long nod of numbness slowly sinks into a body too tired for tears, too wired and weird.

   
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  hardie karges 7:57 am on June 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: POETRY ( 12 ), WRITING ( 13 )   

  WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW 

  Here’s writing fit for public consumption. There’s no politics nor science, no physics nor evolution, no cuss words nor sex, no spicy pickled metaphors, no right nor wrong, no meaning, no nothing, just letters holding hands forming words forming phrases going to market, staying home, having roast beef, having none, and making the funny sounds of verbal contentment all the way home. I’m ready to celebrate the mundane, revel in the morning blush on the evening primrose, and revel in the morning blush on my wife’s face. I’m ready to publicly mourn the birth of my dog and the death of my dad, exult in the toothless smile of a bum and the toothless smile of a lad. Nobody wants cosmic poems pretending to fathom the heights of quantum physics or wallow in the death of suicidal despair. It fails to inspire and it’s just not civilized. Still photography is my role model, cool remote and serene. I want to paint with words, watercolors and oils according to the mood. I wish I could write other people’s poems. I wish I could arrange flowers elaborately, poems in the shape of chalices and goblets, valises and vases, all containing internal logic, hard-wired beauty. I want to get out of my rut and get into a groove. Alas I’m stuck in my own body, trapped in my own mind, doing the best I can one day at the time. I can’t write other people’s shit; I can only write my own.

  leafless is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    leafless 10:18 am on June 20, 2008 Permalink | Reply

    I like your manifesto. Some interesting lines.

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  hardie karges 8:12 am on June 19, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: MUSIC ( 8 ), video ( 2 )   

  EmptyVee 

  MTV is rapidly evolving from illustrated songs to Hollywood shorts, complete or incomplete with ‘pretty girl singers’ wearing little but shorts, crotch meat for the famished affections. Nevertheless, it’s an opportunity for a new art format. If only someone could see the connection between illustrated songs and sonically sweetened pictures, then there might be something there. Of course very few music videos qualify as anything remotely resembling art, while many short films do. Considering how much teen-culture crap serves as filler for music video channels, removing that should leave room for both music and film. The ideal way, certainly, would be to have only the best of both, or maybe the ‘edgiest’, thus bringing the two fields closer together. Considering the dubious trend of using the film industry and music industry to promote each other’s most pathetic commercial instincts, any new creative approach would be welcome. The widespread use of pop songs to decorate movies, regardless of true applicability, is bad enough without the movies now decorating the songs.

   
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  hardie karges 7:14 am on June 18, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: entertainment ( 3 )   

  ENTERTAINMENT 

  Entertainment holds me between acts. Entertainment cures all, the light, color, and sound wrapping me up in its long loving arms. Bathe me in images of other faces and other races, fights to the finish with action heroes and multiple chase scenes. Movies always have happy endings. The good guy gets the girl and the bad guys get bars. The girls drive their fast guys and the guys drive fast cars. The good guys get the high-school sweetheart and the split-level complete with breakfast nook. The bad guys get cheap whores, cheap hotels, and battles with battles. It’s funny how the bad guys’ bullets always miss their targets, while the good guys’ bullets always hit. The good guys can even dodge bullets. Anything can happen in the movies; stories are created with effects and editing. Sometimes life imitates art, and the stories have happy endings. I could do without all the chase scenes, though, and all the guns, too. Sometimes the simple boredom of real life is preferable.

   
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  hardie karges 8:44 am on June 17, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 )   

  ART FOR ARTISTS’ SAKE 

  Art, like language, is a form of communication, but with slightly different goals. The goal of art, like almost anything else beyond mere survival, is to create pleasant sensations and enjoyment, that is, entertainment. The only question is the best way to do that. Meaning is secondary, only one of many sorts of entertainment. Any meaning ascribed to a portrait is usually of the simplest sort, nostalgia and sentiment for an object of affection. Landscapes are no different, really, love of the known sort, simple sensations. With Impressionism and Cubism and Surrealism, we move through increasing levels of abstraction, to the point where familiar objects are non-existent, grossly distorted, or unrecognizable. So what sort of entertainment comes from the pure abstraction of Expressionism? Abstract meaning, one would assume, the pure thrill of colors and textures having their way with canvas. This is probably not true, however, given the implication that anyone, or at least anyone with high intellectual capacity, could and would find enjoyment in it. In actuality enjoyment seems to come from deriving the sort of meaning that comes from having studied art and knowing its trials and travails over the course of history. In other words, the works are derivative, dependent on prior study of other material, high art in the sense of highly schooled art, largely useless for those not in the club.

   
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  hardie karges 9:00 am on June 16, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: POETRY ( 12 ), WRITING ( 13 )   

  THE BIZNIZ OF POETRY 

  Poetry is what happens in the cracks, the empty spaces, the margins along paper’s rim, bar chits, and bills not yet paid, void if detached. The recycled paper bin is the wellhead of new thought. Poetry is what comes out when the brain is unwinding, disengaged, coasting downhill after a long night of tossing and turning. The early morning hours are fertile ground for plowing, fallow fields for planting. Poetry is a job where you gotta’ be on call. If you can’t write in the dark, then you don’t get the job. Poetry is what happens between acts, entertainment that truly holds you between. We’re competing with jugglers and clowns; we’re not competing with scientists and philosophers. A word is worth a thousand pictures. Writing is like gene-splicing, re-shuffling the codons. The most innocent mutations can lead to entirely new species. I mine my memories to see if there’s something I forgot, cross-reference myself to find out where I stand, second-guess myself as to where I’ll likely end up. Writing is like sex; I try different positions to make it come out fast and hard, in light hot licks.

   
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  hardie karges 10:50 am on June 15, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 ), MUSIC ( 8 ), WRITING ( 13 )   

  EDIT THYSELF 

  “Edit thyself” is the first commandment of writing and the hardest thing for anyone to do with his own work. We love our own work as our own children and hate to cut anything out. More than that, it’s just hard to look at one’s own work objectively, even harder to toss things out, knowing you might never get them back. That’s the feeling you get when the computer goes dead and you haven’t saved your work. It’s a question of negative space and positive space. Are you creating something where nothing previously existed or are you chipping away at the whole potato, just to reveal the precious sculpture within? Is the potato half full or half empty? Are you creating something out of nothing or are you merely clearing away the rubbish so that the diamond can shine through? As a child aficionado of popular music, I lamented the fact that most of the appropriate themes of life had already been discovered, and that therefore the future of the industry was grim, a sad thought, considering the amount of enjoyment that it’s capable of giving. Such are the vagaries of youth. There is no limit to creativity. Its potential is exponential. The more we create, the more there is to create, stone shards, wood shavings, clay splatters, paint drips, wasted words, all just like the film snips lying on the edit room floor of a life almost too abundant for living.

   
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  hardie karges 9:15 am on June 14, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 ), destiny   

  I’m not here to pop bubbles; 

  I’m here to blow them. Henry Miller and William Burroughs were products of their times, the best of their batch in my opinion. In 1934 we needed a prolonged insult, a spit in the face of Art, a kick to the ass of God, Man, Destiny, Time, Art, and Beauty, just like we needed Cubism. In 1959 we needed to see ourselves turned inside out, our worst nightmares become reality, just like we needed Abstract Expressionism. We don’t need that right now. My heroes have succeeded in tearing down the old walls that confined us. Now we need to build some new ones on new foundations. We live in a different time and I have a different mission. I want to restore Truth, Beauty, and Goodness to our lives, before it’s too late. Things are too crazy. The planet will survive, but people may not, especially in a civilized form with culture and language. We take it all for granted, the culture that took thousands of years to accumulate, the life that took millions to evolve. It could all disappear in a puff of smoke, with the strike of a match.