‘you can’t get there from here’ (pen and ink, paper) a. blake schwarzenbach

(Inspired by a reading at Strand bookstore by Jenny Boylan and Tim Kreider: which you will have to look up because I don’t care about, nor can I correctly insert, links, hashtags, friends, and any other carbon-based content.  But here’s what you can do to help the Catastrophe continue to bring you the finest, freshest art and news in the whole world wide web.  Type these words into your browser/surfer: “Tim Kreider; Jenny Boylan; Strand bookstore.”)

action.  action is the job of the playwright.  it drives the plot.

sometimes a still-life painting can provoke you to live.  to act.  by its very stillness….

out of the ashes of the dead fruit — the dead and perfect still life — comes a hero.

We could be heroes.

We could be kings.

We can beat them.  Forever and ever.

Then we can be heroes.  Just for one day.

out of the ashes of the still and perfect night.  rose the phoenix.

GUITAR DRACULA.

Why should I read this?  Why write about a bunch of stuff that never happened?  And worse still, why would I want to read it!

I work.  I work and I work and I work.  With the idea of room and board in mind.  I work for four or five people.  Just in my house.  Wife.  Mother.  Kids.  Sister.

Then I work for my employers.  I am afraid of falling through the cracks.  Off the wire.  Into an unnamed place.

Saving Private Manning.

I would like to walk you through my version of why we make art.  I believe it is what distinguishes us from the fascists.

Some people think it’s fluff.  Yuppie fluff around a dying world.  I am not a yuppie, but I welcome even the idea of fluff around anything.  I’m thinking purple swirling candy floss and my little girl is happy.  My little boy.  Me.

Take your heroes seriously while you can.  Or they will disappoint you forever.

Forever is a long time to try to imagine.  When someone says, “Never Forget” I immediately think: “Forever.”

A long time to live in a static realm.  Why do we want to learn stuff?  Useless stuff that never even happened?  That, my boy, is History.

Walk with me now.  Through 49 frames of the artist’s mind.  Colorful permutations of the apocalypse.  The way Isaac Hayes had it.  The way Annemarie Schwarzenbach had it.  The way Morrissey had it.

My point: They have it.  They never had it.  They has it.

Take your heroes seriously before they disappoint you eternally.

My shrine….

Look at this last picture again.  You’ve seen it before.  But now it has all this accident and vulnerable anger.  That is History.

Q: Why should I read or watch anything when I gotta work?

A: You don’t have to.  It’s entirely voluntary and seldom encouraged.

This is my favorite store in Kensington, Brooklyn.  I’ve never actually been in, but I seem to keep stopping in front of their store and photographing their front windows.  Last week it was a baby, which I used to describe how I felt when I was on Facebook.  This week it’s

“WHY MAKE ART?”

Why make art when it is just more work?  I work all day.  Why would I come home and work even more on…art.  Deflection.  Artifice.  Acting like some droopy kid who can’t put his arms in his sleeves?

BRAD. IT’S SNOWING. AND I MISS YOU.

(Clearly, I attenuated a few frames.  There were actually 50, but I wrote 49.  And then the technology got in the way, so I made a few quick decisions.  There’s probably 29 frames in this post. But it was only in my haste to get this out to you.

))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))My only sin is worrying.))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

I work and I work and I work.  Like a Prince.  Like a cockroach.  Like Hamlet.  Like Gregor Samsa.  Like Bartelby.  Like Bradley Worrying Manning.

A tragedy in 52-acts

Part III of the Al-Faiz saga, which began with “State Secrets: A Theory of the Unconscious.”  (If you’re unfamiliar with the Catastrophe, stories are posted with the most recently created appearing first.  Thus, Chapter Three will appear above Chapter Two.  This makes narrative and chronological order somewhat of a blender, which was already a point of contention within the texts themselves.  It is my lack of technological savvy, and not some high-concept peccadillo, that makes this so.  I would recommend reading “State Secrets” first, until I can resolve the problem. You can do this by clicking on the blue ‘Previous’ arrow on the upper right of the post.)

While waiting, having been told to wait indefinitely, I grew restless and artistic.  I also saw the film “Flashdance.”  As if for the first time.

The cinema of the 80s is one of my favorite old Wadis.  I often roam her old valleys and riverbeds, marveling at the raw and un-coached honesty of that time.  At the movies we are subject to ‘enormously powerful’ powers.

American Balls Again.  The 80s were a time of enormous American balls.  Most of the popular films were about freedom and independence (“Flashdance,” “Top Gun,” “Star Wars”).

Next Issue: Al Faiz IV: Deep Integration (Ibn al Gtr Draq and the War on Horror)

A thumbnail preview…

There were always guitar draculas.  Wherever there was a mountain or a plain or any kind of uneven surface, a guitar dracula could be heard, wailing at the consternation of landscape — it’s vexing, foolishly limited horizons.

A graphic novel of shuffled (tandem) notebooks.  Al-Faiz: A Theory of the Unconscious.  One page paints while the other dries.

This is how the state secrets were unwittingly, hopelessly shuffled.  It’s in all of us.  A tsunami of the unconscious. The bottom, after all, was the brightest point.

–From Al-Faiz, the Tandem Journals

It is a journal of salvation; a journey of deep and dangerous ravines.  The thru-line a porcine corkscrew.  (comet strikes Russia, pope retires. in what order exactly?)  Shelley’s ghost.  The ghost of the USS Cole.  The myriad abysses of our childhood memories.  Dead leaves blowing around in our wet heads, spontaneously combusting and seeding the next landscape with black bits of memory.

The trek to and from Al-Faiz is a matter of mortal consequence.  We blunder along, nomadic, homeless, Bedouin all, until we are at last at home on the road.  The road of and to our stories.  Texts blend, sentences are cobbled, which we cling to with full animal intensity.  Stories are life.  Stories are lives. Our lives.   A multitude of applications all drawing power from one central nervous system: the soaring abyss of the unconscious.  The images below are presented in the order that they were conceived – clearly, the unconscious was the divine engine pulling the story forwards — I merely serve at the pleasure of the President.  And wonder at the maestro’s Hammerklavier!

Al-Faiz: A Theory of the Unconscious.  Episode II.

Al-Faiz: Trudging West to Die. Episode III.

For Immediate Release: WOOZY WISDOM AND THE DRAGON OF 2012 (Al-Faiz, Ep. III)