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Archive for the ‘Bio’ Category
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
Standing snow – foto Smith
A very brief passage from my memoir soon to be published (probably before summer) by Lady’s City Poetry Press.
I was in a food store in Baltimore in 1974 when a drunk came in and said, “I need a dollar like a dead man needs a coffin.” I gave him the dollar and stole his line. The old women in the store stared at my crotch during this exchange, so that went into the poem too. I was going with Maudlin, and things were touchy because she was in love with the guy who was leaving her so she was using me to buffer her pain and I couldn’t complain because I had to be understanding, so I hid my fears in plain sight in this poem.
Flesh
Like love and money
We weave about the focus
A melody of maybe
In silent forest ritual
Growth duration flesh essence
We stand in the snow
Embrace the cold
And leave no tracks
Though we stumble
Frosted amidst redemption
I need a dollar like a dead man
Needs a coffin
Old women stare at my crotch
Suck sun in summer
Seek sin in fall
— Smith, 1974
from the Nulvoid chapter of
Stations of the Lost
A true tale of
armed robbery, stolen cars, outsider art, mutant poetry,
underground publishing, robbing the cradle, and leaving the country
by Smith & Lady
Two snow standing – foto Smith
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Sunday, November 27th, 2011
Cover foto by Jerry Mann
For a week in March 2000, everywhere I went in Cleveland I saw my face staring back at me from newspaper boxes, coffee house counters, internet cafes, diners, paraphernalia shops. It was the week after I turned 54 and I was the cover story for the Free Times, a weekly newspaper.
SURREAL THING – Collector & artist Steven Smith bares all blared from the cover as I posed in my Amish beard behind a hanging eyeball, maybe 40 pounds heavier than I am now.
I always thought that was about the time I was going to become famous because things were looking good from 1997 when I started being collected and met Meat Beat Manifesto and 2001 when I made the cover; but it’s been downhill pretty much fame-wise since, but a much improved uphill life inner growth wise.
Peter Ball, my musician collaborator, found this copy while cleaning out his attic and gave it to me a couple months ago and I’ve been debating ever since whether to blog it or not because on one hand it’s pretty cool to be a cover story, but on the other it’s a blatant me-ego-me-pat-myself-on-back thing.
Well, ego won. Big surprise.
The first third of the article is interesting; and so I think is the last third. And I love the last line: “My life,” he says, “is more interesting than I am.”
I’ve posted fotos of the paper version because the online story looks totally different.
here’s the article – Surreal Thing.
from the Free Times, March 2000
Posted in Art, ArtCrimes, Bio | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011
1956 me – foto of foto by Smith
Lady’s near the end of our final edit of my memoir (I believe this is our 27th rewrite since she started the book in Croatia in December 2006), and she said “You sure do a lot of bouncing in this book.”
“What do you mean?”
She did a word search and extracted these eleven bounces for me, which span 50 years.
11 BOUNCES
1. In school, I hung upside down from the playground slide ladder trying to impress a girl, lost my toe grip, bounced my face off a metal step and cut the flesh beneath my lower lip all the way through. I could stick the tip of my tongue out without opening my mouth.
2. Bob was having trouble getting the car started, and as I hopped in the back seat, the owner dashed back inside the house and out again with a rifle and started shooting at us, which really livened things up. I bounced up and down in the back seat yelling, “Get going, get going!”
3. The first time I got her stoned a year and a half later, I tried to repay the experience. I gently pushed her back onto our bed and she bounced back up, arced over, and smashed into the floor.
4. She made me whisper in her ear, but then she thought whispering was too loud. The phonograph was on volume two. I calmed her by telling her we’d take a shower to bring her down a little. When we came back, we dove head first into bed. I bounced her up and down on the bed to undress her.
5. Rat really did rat out Ringo, and we all knew it. He had also ratted my out letter. Rat started denying again but Ringo hit him hard in the face, knocked him to the concrete floor, and STOMPED five times onto his head with his hard work boot. With each stomp, Rat’s head banged against the concrete and bounced up to meet the down-coming boot which smacked his head even harder into the concrete as Ringo said one word per stomp: “You. . shouldn’t. . have. . done. . that.”
6. On the way home, I had my motorcycle helmet on and a half gallon of white wine in a green jug clenched between my thighs. I was high, drunk, still tripping, and going way too fast, and I lost control going around a curve and slid sideways across the asphalt into a driveway that had a speed bump. The bike and I flew into the air and came down so hard we both bounced back into the air again.
7. I was totally sober and not high as I shuffled back down the hill into the dark. It was steep, so I kept shuffling faster and faster, keeping my soles flat on the ground because it was too dark to see where I was going and I tripped over an exposed root growing across the path near the bottom of the hill, flew the final fifteen feet head first through the air and bounced hard onto the asphalt.
8. Sound travels in a straight line–it had hit the underside of the table and reflected over to the wall where it bounced off and into my ears. Wherever I was listening to it was above the table top, so I always heard it in the wrong place.
9. Shooting up is a hurtling sensation. You hurtle outward, you expand. It’s just like when they go into hyperspace in Star Trek, you literally hurtle out into the universe, released from your physical boundaries, going beyond skin you hear atoms bounce around your blood and head as you zoom outward, until you’re literally zinging, your system going Twing like you’re a bell rung right, pure, you become time and space.
10. The opening’s a surreal sky high carnival ride. The chute grabs you at 110 mph and jerks you into a long dreamy forever slow motion bounce, like a cosmic bungee cord. All the noise of the air’s rush ceases as you hang in sudden silence a mile above the earth. You’re alone, motionless, the ground below moving, not you (unless you turn the parachute, in which case you’re suddenly lying perpendicular to the ground on your side far above the earth and you wonder why you don’t fall out of the sky).
11. When Mom was dying for the third time, I babysat the neighbor’s two new kittens and fell in love with them. As Mom hovered this way and that, I verbally bribed her and told her when she got home I’d get her a couple of kittens. She bounced back.
Excerpts from
Stations of the Lost
a true tale of
armed robbery, stolen cars, outsider art, mutant poetry,
underground publishing, robbing the cradle, and leaving the country
by Smith & Lady
To be self-published by March 9, 2012 at the latest – possibly before.
2004 me – foto of foto by Smith
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Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
Fool moon green man with red rose – foto by Smith
Junkie Business
I’m losing my last two crutches:
coffee
and marijuana
In the old days
I could have coffee
after dinner.
You know,
this junkie business
is for younger bodies
You keep doing it,
and pretty soon,
you end up like Keith Richards,
falling out of trees
and landing on your head.
— Smith with Lady K, 2006 (in Marrakech, Morocco)
I’m losing my junkie status.
No, that’s not true; I lost my junkie status over a decade ago. It’s just now I’m accepting it.
This year was legal prescription drug heaven. And hell.
During my hip replacement in May, they put me to sleep with Propofol. I said, “Isn’t that the drug they killed Michael Jackson with?” They answered, “Yes, but we’re much better at it.” I waited to judge its effects, but there’s not a single memory between being told what it was and waking afterward.
When they took me to recovery, the nurse injected me with Dilaudid, and as soon as it hit my system I smiled real big at the nurse and went, “Wow, now I know why this was Elvis Presley’s favorite drug.” I know it sold on the street 15 years ago for $50 per pill because I bought one, although it was probably counterfeit because it didn’t work.
They moved me up to rehab and gave me two Percocet pills every four hours, the drug Jerry Lewis became addicted to. I can see why — it do kill pain.
I came home two days later with 90 legal Percocets to control the pain, plus I had another 60 scripted Vicodins left over from pre-operation pain management — and they both very effectively dulled my MAJOR bone-on-bone torn-flesh sawed-bone agony.
And earlier in the year I got a Valium prescription to help me handle me as I was trying to keep calm helping Lady through her reality attack.
But I’m no longer as young and vigorous and healthily stupid as I once was; and while I seriously appreciated the pain relief, I did not like the logy, thick, dull dense body high; in fact the “high” was no longer a high, just something to put up with. And of course serious pain medication creates serious constipation problems, so you gotta choose your misery cuz you can’t have it both ways.
This morning I foolishly drank two cups of super strong Costa Rican pan made cowboy coffee and my body started screaming “why did you swallow so much speed?” So I dug out my prescription Valium, took the last pill, then swallowed the Valium dust in the bottom of the bottle that had accumulated from cutting each pill in half (which probably equaled a whole nuther pill) and I got a body high so high my mind said “No. Enough. I do not like this. THIS IS NOT ANY FUN.”
So I’m finally biting the bullet, giving up coffee, foregoing any pills unless absolutely mandated by the doctor, while still wishing for the one drug I still love – grass . . . which of course I cannot afford here in America. It cost me $30 for a quarter pound of top-shelf Kind/Chronic smoke during my 15 months in Mexico, which I purchased every month, plus a couple grams of hash and opium — all that up here would cost me over a thousand a month . . . probably way over.
I’m also cutting way down on sugar, which is another poison drug; fortunately we’ve already cut out eating meat most days.
So, welcome to reality Mister Smith. Although I’ll be clean and sober, I’ll never be “straight” — I was bent before I ever did drugs and alcohol, and shall remain strange after.
I guess it’s about time — I’ve had a 44 year run on drugs, maybe 20 on alcohol before I drank myself to death in 1991 and woke in intensive care — haven’t had a sip since.
Folks wonder about my art and poetry and drugs. I wrote poetry and made art way before I ever took a drink or did drugs; I wrote poetry and made art all through drinking and drugs; did the same during my mostly drugless 14 months living in Europe; and will easily do so now.
It’s time. I’m tired of being mini-me; time to become maxi-me.
Oh the adventures I’ve had along the way.
Oh the adventures that await.
Life is good. Loving Lady even better. Having my health the icing on the sugarless cake sans coffee. (I’ll still toke ganja at parties though, as long as I’m not buying.)
This all is slightly humorous because I wrote a drug song this morning just as the Valium was nicely kicking in; we’ll record Thursday and if it’s any good, I’ll blog it Friday. It’s titled Prince Valium . . . maybe I’d best re-title it Goodbye Prince Valium.
I’ve known for twenty years this day was coming, and I fought it every day of the way.
“When you’re headin’ for the border lord
You’re bound to cross the line”
(Kris Kristofferson – Border Lord) – fotos by Smith
Posted in Bio, life, Photography, Poetry | 1 Comment »
Friday, September 16th, 2011
Robot Girl, 13″ x 18″, 2011 – assemblage & foto by Smith
Got home from the poetry reading last night, glanced at the two pieces of scrap metal I’d found on the road the day before, decided they went together and 30 minutes later had this piece titled Robot Girl . . . name appropriated from a Was (Not Was) song.
The background will rust a bit more over the next 6 months — that’s one of the reasons I like using rust and copper corrosion because I never know what’s going to happen to the piece thanks to the interaction of iron and copper oxidation . . . these are essentially collaborations with time, chemistry and chance.
We’re both making new pieces because we have a major 2-month art show coming up February/March 2012 where we’re filling both rooms of the Mastroianni Arts Gallery down the road with pieces from my dead mother, dead brother, very live wife, and assumingly live me.
Sacred Pulp
Two Dead Smiths, Two Live Smiths
Featuring
Mother Dwarf Smith, 1926 – 2005
Cat Smith, 1957 – 1987
Lady K. Smith, 1972 – ?
Steven B. Smith, 1946 – ?
February 10 – March 31, 2012
Mastroianni Arts
mastroianniarts.com/
Smith & Lady poetry reading one month
Smith & Lady memoir reading the next month
Memoir will supposedly be available for sale as well.
Stations of the Lost
a true tale of
armed robbery, stolen cars, outsider art, mutant poetry,
underground publishing, robbing the cradle, and leaving the country
by Smith & Lady
PS – I’m the featured reader at The Poet’s Haven booth tomorrow at the Ingenuity Festival on the second level of the Detroit Superior Bridge from 1-2 PM . . . I’ll read 20 minutes or so and then try to sell and sign copies of the just published Crisis Chronicles Press chapbook titled Unruly of 22 of my new poems from 2010-11 plus one each from 2005, 1990 and 1968.
The Poet’s Haven poetshaven.com/
Robot Girl, 13″ x 18″, 2011 – assemblage & foto by Smith
Posted in Art, Bio, Photography | 2 Comments »
Saturday, August 6th, 2011
M.E.S.C. 61692, 1976 – foto by Smith
These are a few of my private journal collaged covers from the 1970s.
The cover above is mentioned in the excerpt below from my soon to be self-published memoir.
(Note – DMT is the weirdest hallucinogen I’ve done . . . it makes “reality” an interactive collaboration.)
I got to be so much in the flow in Brahman, Michigan, one morning I walked half mile up to the highway, stuck out my thumb and a guy picked me up and drove me all the way to Chagrin Falls, Ohio to my friends’ front door.
On the second leg of the journey, I hitched from Chagrin to West Virginia to visit Stone Ranger. It was during that time–DMT time–I had collaged my notebook with word balloons cutout from comic books. Twice on that trip word balloons answered my questions. For example, I asked, “What should I do now?” And a word balloon said, “Well, now we eat.”
It started raining badly, so I sat up under a highway underpass, smoking DMT-soaked parsley and reading one of my religious books, a small, black Brotherhood book that said we could manifest our own reality. I looked up and saw it was still raining. I looked down and saw there were thirty pages left. I said, “Well, I’ll finish the book, and when I’m done, the rain will stop and the sun will come out.”
Whammo, when I finished the book, the rain immediately stopped and the sun came out. I laughed in delight and said some sort of joke to God–to reality–at God’s expense and stood up laughing, lost my balance and landed in a puddle of rainwater. I made joke on God; God made joke on me.
Hitchhiking back, an attractive girl picked me up and said, “Oh shit, if you’re going to kill me, kill me now.” She explained she was on speed and was nervous but had to have somebody to talk to.
“I can help with that,” I said. She flinched as I reached down into my pack to pull out my pipe and some marijuana. I got her stoned. She drove me back to Chagrin and gave me her phone number, but at that point I was being faithful to another man’s wife and never called.
– from chapter 23 of Stations of the Lost – a true tale of armed robbery, stolen cars, outsider art, mutant poetry, underground publishing, robbing the cradle, and leaving the country by Smith & Lady.
Steven Strange, 1977 – foto by Smith
Smithsonian, 1976 – foto by Smith
Moxie, 1975 – foto by Smith
Record USA, 1978 – foto by Smith
U.S. Bares, 1978 – foto by Smith
Inspected, 1972- foto by Smith
Posted in Art, Bio, Photography | 2 Comments »
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
sober Smith June 2011 – foto by Lady K
probably the gentlest foto ever taken of me
Commercial:::::::Lady K, Mark S. Kuhar and I are reading poetry tonight at 7:30 pm in the Serafino Gallery in Little Italy as part of their current Outsider Art, Underground Poetry show in which we also have 36 pieces of art displayed. Serafino Gallery 11917 Mayfield Rd. in Little Italy, Cleveland, OH 44106 · 216.721.1025
Well, I’m done with my final rewrite of Stations of the Lost. Now give it to Lady for her final go-thru and we’ll get it online as a pay-per-print on Amazon within a couple months. After that, I’ll figure out how to turn it into an e-book for cheap download as well.
After rereading the entire thing, I think I can predict what many will feel after reading it — you won’t like me very much but my what an interesting story.
Here’s the first half of the “Serial Suicide” chapter; the second half, which we’ll skip, is even more of a downer.
April 21, 1991 while watching the movie Mortal Thoughts downtown with Mom, I started swallowing small amounts of liquid, which was odd because I wasn’t drinking anything. An alcohol induced ulcer at the base of my esophagus had hemorrhaged and I was swallowing my own blood. I came home scared and didn’t tell Mom.
While Mom was downstairs in her space, I lay in my loft for fourteen hours vomiting blood into a bedside bucket, passing out, coming back, all the time my little computer brain computing, saying, This is serious, you’re going to have to go to the hospital. But hospitals mean money, and I was poor, with no health insurance. I’d vomited blood the previous December for four hours, but managed to stop it through will or luck, so I thought maybe I could stop it this time too.
For the first six hours I thought, Right now I can get up and drive to the hospital.
Couple hours later, more lost blood, more unconsciousness, I’m thinking, Well now I can take a bus to the hospital because I’m too weak to drive anymore.
Later it became, Now I have to call a cab.
Each time I’d start to lose consciousness from blood loss, I’d think, Is this it? But each time I worried about Mom who still needed my help and company, so I came back. All through this, I collected the blood in the bucket and wondered, What art piece can I make with a bucket of my own blood? Buckets of human blood aren’t easy to come by, so this was a seriously unique art supply.
Finally I couldn’t do anything but weakly call over and over until I woke Mom. She called EMS. I was too heavy for them to carry down from the loft because I weighed ninety pounds more then from all the wine and food. I rolled out of my water bed, crawled on my belly across the floor and slid like a seal head first down the loft stairs where they put me on a sling-chair and carried me into the ambulance, where I immediately disappeared into unconsciousness. When I returned to this reality after an indeterminate period of time I looked at the nurse and croaked, “Wow, nice to be back,” and threw up a huge amount of gelatinous blood. It looked like pre-chewed Jell-O as it quivered in her tray.
Oh, I was gone. I mean, I left my body. Before–in the fourteen hours of vomiting blood—I would occasionally lose consciousness and there’d be a nether region where I was aware I might not come back, and then I’d worry about Mom and return. But down in the ambulance I zoomed right past that point. I was gone. When I regained sight, it was literally, Wow, I’m back, and it felt good, I was glad.
I officially quit drinking the next day in intensive care the third time they shoved the tube up my nose and down my throat—the first two times I gagged it back out with my throat muscles. I decided right then if I lived I would never have a tube shoved up my nose again due to alcohol. Haven’t drank since.
The docs dripped six units of blood into me. After five units, one doctor turned and asked, “Where’s it going?” A friend inquired later if I knew what type blood I’d received; said no, but that the next time I’d gone downtown, I’d bought a five hour boxed set of James Brown music.
Back home, Mom had dumped my blood bucket because the rot smelled bad. Everyone’s an art critic.
After I stopped drinking, Mom admitted, “It was so bad living with you drinking I was thinking of moving out.”
“Where would you have gone?”
“I had no place to go, but I couldn’t have stayed with you the way you were.”
I got a call from Dick Head right after I got out of intensive care.
“I can’t drink anymore or I’ll die,” I told him.
“Then why don’t you die!” he screamed. “I’d rather die than not drink.”
** excerpt from chapter 39 of “Stations of the Lost – a true tale of armed robbery, stolen cars, outsider art, mutant poetry, underground publishing, robbing the cradle and leaving the country” by Smith & Lady
drunk Smith 1984 – foto by Smith
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Wednesday, May 25th, 2011
War, 2003, 17″ x 13″ x 4″ – assemblage & foto by Smith
Time to reintroduce myself to new and old with this freshlyly updated cliff notes version of my basic back story, my anti-cv, my real résumé . . . 65 years of the good, the bad and the real ugly.
Smith 2011
1940s
Bitterroot Mountain born
1950s
farm boy cow milker chicken-rabbit-hog waste remover
hod carrier
1960s
paper boy
shoplifter
car thief
house wrecker
sailor
radar electronics technician
poet
USNA Midshipman
artist
hippie
life insurance salesman
husband
1970s
chemist
armed robber
prison cook
bankrupt
graphic arts salesman
Bethlehem Steel extra man
snow cone flavor delivery man
college graduate
newspaper film / music / book / stage critic
milkman
avant garde theater manager
women’s shoe salesman
divorced
computer operator
drug dealer
carnival laborer
adulterer
church janitor
1980s
programmer analyst
drunk
condo owner
publisher/editor
celibate
1990s
near dead
sober
european traveler
2000s
unemployed
cancer
retired
remarried
expat
10 countries 3 continents 31 months
repat
2010s
hip replacementee
— Prologue to soon to be self published memoir titled
Stations of the Lost
a true tale of
armed robbery, stolen cars, outsider art, mutant poetry,
underground publishing, robbing the cradle, and leaving the country
by Smith & Lady
Vampires on the Beach – assemblage & foto by Smith
Posted in Art, Bio, Photography, Poetry | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 17th, 2011
My Back Porch, 1996, 13″ x 13″ – assemblage & foto by Smith
I have the above piece in this Friday’s
PEDALING ART: A Celebration of Bicycle Art and Culture
Wall Eye Gallery
5304 Detroit Ave, Cleveland, Ohio
They asked us to include a paragraph on what bicycles meant to us, so I wrote this.
From 1953 through 60, I lived on a 40-acre alfalfa farm in an area called Paradise Prairie, nine miles southeast of Spokane, WA and eighty-one miles west of the Idaho panhandle Bitterroot range of the Rocky Mountains where I was born.
What greater gift for a future poet and artist than to be born in Bitterroot, raised on Paradise Prairie?
And in the Heart of the Inland Empire in the Great Pacific Northwest back in the Norman Rockwellian innocence of the 1940s as well. Even David Lynch would itch envy.
I was 7-14 years old and my bicycle was my Golden Rocket to the 2-room white wood school house, the 4-H Club, the Grange, the 2-room white wood church — all one to seven miles away. The school had grades one through four in one room, fifth through eighth in the other, 36 kids in all.
My bike was my magic carpet through this Paradise — if I weren’t up a tree or roaming the woods, I was bicycling to school, to friends, to church, to our landlord’s barn to bare the breast of his daughter.
And I still remember standing straight up on the pedals, thighs gripping the seat prong, arms flung straight out, the bike and I flying ever faster down the steep curving rock strewn dirt road hill, riding that pre-edge thrill between heaven and hell.
– Steven B. Smith, 5-17-2011
New Era – foto by Smith
Posted in Art, Bio, Photography | 4 Comments »
Monday, May 16th, 2011
Pain proxy (ceiling of Chiplis’ art studio) – foto by Smith
Chiplis, our found-neon sculpture artist friend, gave a Life Celebration Party yesterday to commemorate his full recovery eleven months after being seriously shot twice in an unsuccessful robbery of his cell fone.
Lady and I figured it’d be great to caboose on his train to celebrate my own new life celebration. Unfortunately we stayed 2 hours instead of planned 20 minutes and today is sore gray cool sleepy and wet . . . a take the day off or else kind of day.
Still it is almost magic that four days after major surgery to chop and channel my chassis, we went out and socialized. Some of today’s surgical procedures approach wizardry.
Chiplis in his Tremont art studio – foto by Smith
And a great shout out to my wife Lady K aka Kathy Ireland Smith for the love and care and tenderness and support she’s surrounded me with this past week. It’s been hard hard weary worry week for her, yet she made it easy on me. She’s my dream meme, my partner dream, my life scheme, companion supreme. May my surgery take some of the worry from her load.
Worn and weary high voltage Lady at Chiplis party – foto by Smith
Peter Ball sent me a gentle funny new cool song yesterday titled Down and Outs Club with delightful vocals by Rick Wagar and Peter — and he did me the honor of including small snippets from my old 2005 gravelly cancer-ridden voice box. My raspy words sneak in and out of odd places at odd times. The tune’s infectious and put a smile on my face and a beat in my bounce.
So I added it to reverbnation.com/mutantsmith even though I’m but a blip in the whole of the flow, but what a delightful flow.
Peter included this news flash when he emailed me the song:
Down and Outs Club News Report:
Cleveland poet Steven B. Smith joins cast of new Apartment One release “Down and Outs Club”.
Asked if he was pleased, Smith responded: “Go away, kid.” Major guffaws from the studio audience followed.
Peter Ball quipped, “Scoring Smith for this song is a major coup. He used to jam with Bill Haley and the Comets.”
Peter’s referring to my attempt to interview Bill Haley for a Baltimore newspaper — here’s a snippet from my memoir:
In the early 70s I went backstage to interview Bill Haley of the Comets. The usher took me back and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Haley, this man’s here to interview you for the paper.” Haley looked me in the eye and said, “Go away, kid. I’m counting my money.” And that was it. The sad part is I could have interviewed Little Richard instead.
VerCity (detail of Chiplis Studio) – foto by Smith
Posted in Bio, health, Lady, Music, Photography | 2 Comments »
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