zoos

no more zoos. just as well really, we've done some seriously sloppy work this last decade. an olimpdick effort. [un]just[ly] sequestered our human further from our animal. earphone cords looping from our ears round to our own asses. ipood: i'm listening to what i consume and it sounds like indigestion. aural coprology.
i'm to blame. you're to blame. for the good as well as the bad. take responsibility for the good! but still left feeling like a soggy shoelace in someone else's boot. slops sploshed from the vat we've used to churn the sun, into gods and saviour-science. i was in a bookstore yesterday and everyone was wearing black and suddenly there was nothing left to read. wanted to grab the nearest and yell 'hey you sepulchral fucker! tell me what you know!' but i suppose the nearest was me, and he's already admitted, under duress, that he's too busy shoveling information into his baby-bird personality to know anything much about the world.
and all this is not true. which is a relief. the kind of relief i bought earphones to hear.... thank you for listening, now go and let the animals out.

"if i would, i could"

there's no truth fairy

perseveres
perverse and sere
see here
you wee knights
of weeknights
all blood, bile and quicksilver
and bellies full of eyes
awful jaw-fulls of ornate lies
sucked on and plucked from
and worried out by your lover's tongue
placed beneath your pillowed font
whence from your pilloried dreams once sprung

always liked the hidden orthography of 'heart' and 'hearth'.. 'th'[e] dental fricative draws it on. the 'h' makes a beggar of the heart, but warms it also. gives it heat.

sub/merge

striking in its grandeur, the West Coast resonates in and around me as holding its mysteries in its heights. the persistent reminders of altitude flattens the mid-lands, portraying promises as being 'over there'. this vertical hazes on nearly every horizon, creating a ciel-ing of great magnitude. the past and the future is up, and i often feel that i live in tomorrow's ruins (upon which i might survive to look down upon, hidden by roiling currents and revisionary stories of a pre-delugional world.)

this is much unlike my memories of the european mystery, which is locked down by water and sediment and buildings. it is hidden, and there is a prominent sense of 'down' - something beneath every surface, as if, like water, history abhors the steeps and instead collects beneath the feet. the stories are below, and in need of excavation. here, above, and in need of expedition.

in this vein, one might be able to extend the analogy to perception of memory. here it feels that memory for me is futural. as if i am nostalgic for something that has not yet happened, it could be the wide sky, the occasional murky weather, the high gusting winds, the mountain-locked microclimates... the history is thrown forward temporally. one just does not cast their mind to what lies beneath the ocean.. not truly, not in the way one would in the Mediterranean or English Channel. not in that inherited identity. identity here is created, not sought.

i now work at a bakery in dockside green. and as the construction guys and gals clamber all over their scaffolding (sometimes with a pilfered pastry in their bellies, the punks), it seems as if they are not so much building a new building, but preparing inevitable rubble. and due to the large amount of marketing and spin put onto this complex (immediated narrative) it is building its story right into it as it goes up. however, 'in these uncertain economic times' several phases of the complex have been stalled to wait for consumer confidence (aka best chances of return). so what this means is that the foundations that had been blasted prior to construction (so that residents would not have to suffer hip-rattling booms once moved in) will now be left fallow until the money returns. so it's now a ruin before even being built. i am very excited for this, as this will reveal this building community's true intentions: how will a self-proclaimed 'environmentally conscientious' for-profit PRESTIGE DEVELOPMENT/VERTICAL GATED-COMMUNITY respond to an unplanned open space on their lot? a market? a venue space? a temporary garden? racket sports? a reservoir? tent space for the city's homeless?

we'll see, we'll see.. either way, i'm going to step up and confront any corruption of ideal within the project (i suspect this corruption will occur, if not had from the original inception)

october

Stopping up short, I sat down on a wicket above the visual traipsery. Stretched below it all its blistering vertigo was the sea and creatures like me picking around its wavering borders. The sun was poised to strike the mountains, and Echospace's 'Empyrean' was thrushing my ears through headphones on-loan. The music pooled itself into milk, and ceased. I took off the phones and sat longer, waiting for the melting hues.
Behind me, a sister and her friend pushed a stroller, from which a wee imp-girl's face jutted with intent concentration. The motion of this trio brought my attention into their breathy conversation.
"...no, I'm serious. So VERY serious," the imp-girl laughed.
"Oh really?" Said the friend, "How serious are you?"
The imp-girl scrunched up her face even more, looked at her hand, then thrusting three fingers forward to her interlocutor enthusiastically stated the degree plainly and with confidence:
"400!"

verticklarity

building big.. i'm not sure it's worth it. proponents claim that densification is the major objective of bigness, but some of the most densely populated areas of the globe barely have one storey, and if it weren't for the dire poverty and health risks of living there, it might be said that their existence and spread is proof enough that they work. no, i'd propose that the purposes of the big build are of very few things, far less noble: investment return, commercial floor space (rent money), prestige and arrogance. who really owns these buildings? silverstein owned the WTC complex to lease, which would've cost some hundreds of millions -if not billions- of dollars to clear of asbestos (recall the post-collapse respiratory problems locals suffered?), instead he received some 4.5 billion in the insurance bid (to which, due to poor phrasing, he was able to negotiate as if there were 2 terrorist attacks.. i forget the name for it, but there's a phrase for where a private institution lumps the health costs on the general populace.. good thing it wasn't intentional, or else it would seem as if the company benefited) that's an unimaginably large payout on what was technically 5 years away from becoming a nightmare of a white-elephant. but, i digress.

who owns the buildings? credit card companies!? yes, they do. they've got/had the best credit rating around for a while (self-regulation has its rewards, eh?). the nature of credit is that it necessarily swallows asset, and the only TRUE form of asset yet quantifiable is land (though potable water will become so in the next decade).. which the individual can't really own, as why then are they compelled to pay yearly land tariffs, especially if the government isn't distributing it as they see fit. no, most people 'own' through credit, so, to be frank, they are serfs working the land. but, i digress.

credit card/investment buildings have styled their buildings as 'sky-scrapers'. and they seem so intent on raising the sky's limits that yesteryear's sky-scraper is now this year's thigh-draper. they're towers of purposeful religious semblance: since their inception, you'll notice that no cathedrals are yet being built (barring gaudi's, but perhaps there are others). and for what the church lent in absolution, the credit companies can now lend in relativity. the spacious resonance of the cathedral dome has been replaced by hard, phallic, inscrutable presence. and further, the reflectivity of their surfaces are not just for the sake of pretty. they are one-way mirrors, and we're the captives. simply stated: you can't watch the watchtower. the panoptic prison has been developed on the metropolitan scale, and our depressions, our minuscule, compounded worries have been greatly amplified by this further estrangement from the hegemony. this effect, i'd readily argue, has been committed with the utmost of calculation. the reflective planes act as both as paring sheaths and urban[e] limit. you can't SEE the opulence anymore, just feel it, yet not know from whence that feeling originates. but, i digress.

i saw a film on manhattan island a few days ago. it said, that until the advent of the elevator, the most exclusive, prestigious commercial spaces were located on the lower floors. quite a concept in this present era. as the street level has degenerated, until now it is scorned and vilified, even by those who claim to act on its behalf. all streets are now alleyways, where the garbage, in various packages, is pushed, conning us into wanting it, needing it, feeling something about it. in the case of dumpsters, the effect is one of revulsion. in the gaud and bric-a-brac we're meant to buy, desire. but all the lightin and flashy signs, all that fantasy does not disguise the fact that the street has lost its political power: it has been relegated back to an alleyway of the body-politic, where people wander quietly in scream, marginalized on the one level at which they are ENTITLED to feel most powerful. but, i digress.

above all this, shining high, as if we all agree, are these looming symbols of power. but in a few quick months, as snickersnack as a vorpal blade, a few of these reflective windows have been broken and an awful stench has wafted out from what lies within: as symbols, they are not now crumbling as consumer/borrowing confidence has waned, but they've perverted, and twisted themselves to their true form: we are being watched, bullied and manipulated. and all it takes is an elevator to keep you away from stopping it.

to dream

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

just twitching and twisting out the glamour vein... a cracked stain, like a tree-window's scattered strain... can one replace pleasure with the sheer absence of polished pain? what remains? depravity? a torn remembrane? light-drunk lives bored sane? what, when equanimity has orange pith neath its nails, and a chin sticky with juice, and has glutted itself equal, what can it protect anymore? what can it censure? who can it blame? it stays the same, until someone calls it so... its self-congratulations would drown its articulated spires of citydreams, dragging over itself a deluge of murky hypocrisy, grit and sand and silt and knick-knacks underneath and through the curlicued currents. you'd be there too, submerged, shapes of the known blurring and obscured by the spuming amorphia of dislocation. when all is stable, all becomes unknown. and our silent motives, the ones taught to us in the sun-drenched mires of childhood. the prejudices we osmotically somaticize, as easily as rising, as deriving, as deriding, as red riding. and so what's to want, knowing we are tethered by discrimination into mists of perpetuity?
we're a broke-down gasp, a crippled pleasure pier, licked by the froth as we cantilever ourselves further over the abysses... one a tall child of god, his cherubic hair tickling her nostrils. envying those myths as one envies the inevitable supplantation of us at the hands of our progeny. so, in the meantime, let our tongues dance, let us not plan, but engender casus bella. it is time for an ethos of beauty, as grounded in ecological reclamation, as grounded in partnership and not mastery, as grounded in you and me. now. embrace the dream immediate.