Skip to main content

RUDIMENTS 1151.

RUDIMENTS, PT. 1,151
(great matters, born)
Real simple. I was not looking
for anything really; just intent
on making my own way along
the scaffolding I'd been erecting,
upon which to pin the later
structure of my own life. I
didn't really know where any
of it was headed. It was maybe
1966, Winter, maybe December.
I'm not sure. As I said, I didn't
have a sure feed on what was
going on around me. Like it was
said by DeNiro  -  'I hear things.'
There were oddball reports about
society, coming out of strange
places. Dylan was in Australia,
talking about American baseball?
A transit strike in NYC, led by
some bizarre Irish guy, Michael
Quill? It was all brash effrontery.
-
And then, one day, sometime I
think in 1966, the first chink fell
into place. I had never been a
TV guy, hit and miss at most, I
was somewhere, and I saw on a
TV a very striking, white horse
mini-movie or something I didn't
know of. In some way was enough
to knock me out of a stupor I'd
been in. Something I couldn't place.
In those days, if you 'saw' something
broadcast you couldn't just hit a
'repeat' button, or tape or save it
for another look. Everything was
much more ephemeral. I had no
real clue what I'd just seen, and I
felt a little suckered and flabbergasted
too by the dumb simplicity of it all.
But, it was enough to have notched
me over, one section closer to my
newer reality.
-
I hesitate to admit what it was; in reality
 a very pedestrian Beatles early video,
or whatever it was to be called. Some
things about it, right off, that keeled
me : the use of the white horses in
such a setting, the strange 'destructive'
ending scene, out of the blue and, I
thought, rather nihilistic and missing
the point of the entire earlier part of
the clip. Anyone, after all, can destroy.
There was a certain paltry beauty to it
up until that point. In any case, I did
recognize everything, but it sang to
the rest of my mind somehow about
breaking out, seeing past the obvious,
realizing thought, grasping a greater
world  -  history and place. A past
legacy, with the old bricks, the
quizzical Beatle faces (quite the
ordinary turned somehow unordinary),
and the quickly-driven narrative with
strange place-words. A scene conjured
from nowhere. I realized anew that
'something' had me  -  I did not know
what it was, what it would be called,
nor to what it would take me, but I
immediately wanted to answer it.
-
Not to get carried away...it was, after
all, at another level no more than any
other entertainment industry rousting
brought forth to traduce the interested
public and drag them into yet another
buy of 'Product.' The Pop Industry at
work. In any case, there was something
other afoot here  -  multiple layers of
odd meaning that were calling to me,
I don't know where it came from, nor
whether it was of the pleasures and
details of ordinary life, or not; but
these guys had here done something:
like a bank safe, with the large
combination lock very near to clicking
open. Not there yet, but a few short
clicks away, those safe-lock clicks
the old mechanical doors used to
make. Inside? Untold riches about
to be opened?
-
What did any of this teach me? A year
later, a'slumming on the streets of
New York, this stuff was still in my head
and I'd joined the Revolution. I was intent
on the artistic idea that within the most
ordinary of objects and situations there
was great gold to be found. No one need
ever get all righteous or pouty over the
fixation of 'Art.' That 'Art' is nothing
but money-value placed upon it by
the usual tribal merchants and parasitic
traders who only 'call' it such for their
own filthy purposes of prestige and
profit, as if dealing dominoes or slaves.
No one ever addresses this, and the
fools in the street now sing instead about
manufactured media issues of rapacious
and acquisitory 'things.' If there was any
fortitude to this, or a felicity of purpose,
the tribal hens behind all of this would
be taken down first, and shot. But, alas,
street ignorance knows no bounds.
-
The connection then of creative fantasy
to everyday life was immediately
apparent to me in the streets that I
walked and the people I met. Everyone
was claiming, in their soulful and silent
way, to be something other than what 
they were. Had they only kept their own
fingers on their own steady pulses, and
caught the wave of constantly-streaming
importance and material, so much could 
be so different. We would not, I realized,
need to live as a society in the tired,
feebly-managed manner we did. A 
Golden Age loomed anew! Yet that stupid 
little video had touched the nerve, lit 
the wire, infused the corridor of all 
my later imaginings. From such small 
and trivial things are great matters born.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RUDIMENTS 997.

RUDIMENTS, pt. 997 (at the bongo club) I never had much direction, or what direction I had I gave to myself, be it good or bad. On looking back now (seems that's all I do these days) I sense that I was easily swayed and was often quite zig-zag in my ways. (I don't mean zig-zag in the sense of the Zig Zag rolling papers guy, which papers were used for rolling joints, and which name I was often told by a guy I worked for once, that I resembled. Well, the person of that name anyway, shown on the packaging). Fact is, I never smoked much pot. Maybe three or four times. It never interested me, whereas this guy who said it smoked pot like other people ate chocolate. I was around lots of that stuff, and more (pot, not chocolate). First off, pot was for babies. Beginner's stuff. The kind of people I knew then who were potheads were all in a sort of stalled, infantile regression, and their pot-smoking only dragged them deeper into place - they neve...
Post a Comment
Read more

RUDIMENTS 329.

RUDIMENTS, pt. 329 Making Cars When you get out of Nancy Whiskey Pub and roll yourself down to Puffy's, that's a whole other story. Or was then; it's been a while now since I've been there. Puffy's used to have, displayed in its front window, an old photograph, maybe 16x20 inches, framed, and that photo showed old Hudson Street, maybe about 1935, when it was a working-class street, lined with small shops, lofts, and factories. All for the kind of guys who used to work there, and drink at Puffy's. Across the street was the Western Union Building made famous by the writings of Henry Miller, and, nearby, a Bell Tel place and, across from Puffy's at the corner exactly, the grand, old, 1880's building that was once the headquarters of the New York Mercantile Exchange. (In the 1920's and before, someone in my wife's family line was the President of that Exchange, go to find out). That building was ...
Post a Comment
Read more

1130.

RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,030 (otis redding?) I used to sit in John's house and look at things around me  - it was possible there to think of it still being, say, 1924. Mary and he kept a severe and steady, old-format, household. I'd sit there and think to myself that this was 'quality,' the way it maybe used to be. There seemed to be, kept by John and Mary, a transcendance to things, some quality that was above everything and realized the old days  -  before plastics and gilt had a claim to the storyboard of everyone's life. Of course, it wasn't conscious, they didn't have an awareness of it; for that was their characters and it was ingrained. The lens they looked through to see and partake life was of it, and they realized not. It only stood out so grandly to others, like myself, and was remarked upon often; like visiting an old catacomb in an ancient village. Something like that affects everything else aroun...
Post a Comment
Read more