...and they lived happily ever after. Smith & Lady: poets, artists, photographers & adventurers.
Our relationship was forged to the soundtrack of Yoko Ono's magic,
frenetic, love-laden song, "Walking On Thin Ice." ( play song )
A few shots of Lady’s latest art piece… some in process, some done.
Zazzy Sadie, 2019, Lady, 26″ x 30″ x 6″
Octopus, lips, labia are air-dried clay, blues and greens are copper corrosion. Title chosen by on-line random-number generator.
She did this atop an 1997 failed piece of mine. She’s taken 5 of my long dead pieces, torn stuff off, added a bunch more, going directions and giving dimensions I’d never thought of.
“A big thank-you this morning to Smith from Cleveland (Steven B. Smith) for his musical, mythical land of poetry and his eye-popping visuals. “Cool Cat Copacetic”, for sure!.” – Kathy Kieth, editor/publisher of Medusa’s Kitchen/Rattlesnake Press.
Seven month old fone video of my Art on Madison reading 2.19.2019, with guest appearance by Lady, hosted by John Burroughs.
Video volume is inconsistent due to ceiling heater cutting on and off, plus my soft speaking voice, and lack of a microfone – but it gives you a feel for the rhythm of the words. I had to use headfones to listen.
Friends have mentioned the best parts are Lady reading from the memoir at the end of her set, and me ending with mom’s death around the 40 minute mark.
Introduction by John Burroughs — 0 to 3:12 me reciting — 3:13 to 14:35 Lady reading — 14:36 to 27:13 me reading — 27:14 45:53 Q & A — 46:54 51:56
Watching it, there are moments of magic, but I need to be way less laid-back, and to add volume and texture to my vocal delivery… compensate for having part of my voice box removed in the early oughts.
But the words themselves are right fine. And the audience generous.
Stations of the Lost & Found – a True Tale of Armed Robbery, Stolen Cars, Outsider Art, Mutant Poetry, Underground Publishing, Robbing the Cradle, and Leaving the Country by Smith & Lady, 2012, The City Poetry, 344 pages, $20 https://www.amazon.com/Stations-Lost-Found-Steven-Smith/dp/1477628290
Lost lost sorta-lost lost.
Cards for Medicare, SSN, debit, and credit.
Days pass for some, weeks for others.
Weary worried worn and wan.
And then
found found found found.
Last month hospital asked to see my new Medicare card. Wasn’t in my wallet so they said bring it next time.
Came home, looked everywhere. Nada.
Decided to bicycle to west 79th and get a replacement card, so looked up their hours and find they’re not there any more… have to go downtown, to the BIG Building, where my shoulders, hip, and neck will set off their metal detectors, me hoping they won’t shoot me. Of course I’m old, white, and male, so I’d probably be alright.
Today I get an email reminding me to bring my Medicare card next time.
So I search harder. Take the bin I keep wallet and keys in with years of odds, ends, notes, collage pieces, bills, and look through each piece, getting rid of a lot of trash and finding 9 laundry quarters, but no card.
Then I take everything off the bookshelf by my chair, again to no avail.
Look behind a large broken assemblage leaning against the bin’s bookcase and see a card face down on the floor – think aha, there it is, but it’s my SSN card I didn’t even know I was missing, the very card I’d need if I have to go downtown.
I give up, take a bath, mull… figure card could have fallen with the SSN card and slipped beneath the bookshelf, so I get dressed and take everything off the shelves, the first being a small collage and a book it rests on – I set them on the work table, then take everything out of the bookcase, turn it upside down – no card, and no card on each book I replace. I give up, again.
Wife comes home, tells me her bankcard is lost beneath the car seat for the past week, and she can’t fine her credit card past 4 days.
I get up to go down to the car and notice the collage and book I’d put on the table. I start to put them back, then out of curiosity pick up the collage to see what the name of the book is – and there between the two is my Medicare card.
I retrieve her bank card from beneath the driver’s seat, then clean out the entire car to be sure her muissing credit card isn’t there somewhere. She comes down to help and mentions the last time she used it was 4 days ago at a local restaurant, so she calls them, and viola – they have the card.
Took this foto of a chair not there because Jim Lang frequently quoted “A day without Wittgenstein is a day without a chair” going back maybe 25 years. I never knew he was quoting a Terry Provost poem.
Interestingly, I shot this outside the Negative Space gallery at our monthly reading while Terry was still there – so I took this foto because of him while he was there and me not knowing it was because of him.
Reification
— Terry Provost
A day without Wittgenstein is like a day without
disappearing chairs, without
weaving cloth at an empty loom. Where
the dog fails to talk
to himself.
A day where it neither rains –
nor does-not.
How hot the taxing pursuit
of exactitude. A few millions upon billions of
electron volts exuding the threat
of electrocution, the guillotine-sweat of essence
from some Manhattan Project nuclear pile gone critical
beneath Chicago.
One day a new order of insects shows up
on the front page, as yet
un-named, as yet
un-begging the un-question of its un-filed
family,
genus,
and phylum. As yet both a coelacanth
and not.
Before there were alphabets there were no
spelling errors. Sure,
your pictograph of a wooly mammoth might
have resembled an Erymanthian boar, but the
terrifying, gory, Byzantine abomination of
orthography was as yet a buchstab
in some Phoenician-father’s eye.
Phonetic-Phoenicians everywhere,
and ere the iridescent wing,
a golf course gone to green in Phoenix
has made the snowbird sing.
When plumbing the unknown, the lyric’s a poetic
analgesic for bumps on your noggin.
Contusions acquired where confusing desires ride toboggans
near cobbled-walls where language
ends.
On a day without Wittgenstein
a dangerous virus,
not quite living, seeks
life’s essence,
and not quite understanding, speaks
what it does not quite
know. A petroglyph
a stone’s-throw away from
a glass-shattered house,
putting the sigh in
science, as you cast
bricks from the roof
of your mouth.
Discovered the LIQUIFY option in the FotoShop filter box. Results remind me of the old 1980’s days of manipulating Polaroids as they developed… you could move elements around with your fingers, draw on them, wrinkle them to produce spider webs, toast freeze or microwave them as they developed, though you had to be quick and careful with the microwave because metal element in the foto would start sparking.
Strange – I pick these 2 poems for their moral implications, and find they were written within 5 years of each other, back in the WW I days – the war that ended all wars.
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats, 1919
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
~ ~ ~
Mending Wall by Robert Frost, 1914
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!”
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
“Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.” I could say “Elves” to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbours.”
Been thinking about joining the power structure. I am white. I am male. I am old. Of course I’m poorer than Trump’s chance of telling the truth, and I’m not a lizard-person, so there is that. Can one become a lizard-person? Are there apprenticeship programs? I do lie well, so I have the basic skill set.
~ ~ ~
I wanna be a kleptocrat.
~ ~ ~
Walking from kitchen to living room swinging my arms, my forefinger thumps against something… I look down to see a 3 inch black & pale wasp of 3-segments circle me slowly then move on, and my fingertip tingles with the might-have-been.
~ ~ ~
We’re back home from her eye operation, she’s sleeping… they lasered away 2,500 portions of her eye, reducing the edges of her retina in hopes of increasing blood flow so her retina doesn’t swell.
~ ~ ~
Watching roadkill before it becomes roadkill –
what do you want for Brexit?
~ ~ ~
The better root of the bitter truth
is the bitter route to the better truth
~ ~ ~
They always talk of darma,
but what of darpa… and their darkids?
People say the darmist things.
And when darma goes shopping,
does she drive her karma?
~ ~ ~
“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
– Toni Morrison
~ ~ ~
Folk call me a cradle robber for marrying 27 years younger,
but she chose me, so it’s more like she’s a grave robber.
~ ~ ~
The 1950’s kids TV show was originally to be called The Howdy Dawdler Show, but the puppet star-to-be dawdled so long they found a puppet that would do his duty and changed it to the Howdy Doody Show.
~ ~ ~
We need to change the rules —
you can only shoot someone who has a gun.
~ ~ ~
I live in the addict.
~ ~ ~
Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” – Genesis 3:1, New King James Version
If God made everything, how can the Snake of Eden be craftier than anything God made?
~ ~ ~
Spirit caged by skeleton
bone cased in flesh
free will on the installment plan
