WALKING ON THIN ICE

Woogie Boogie

frags from lodz (pronounced wooge) poland, in no particular odor…

magda – of blue’s lady fame – said our last nite in krakow america should thank us cuz we changed her opinion for the better of americans. before us, all was UGLY amerikans – now she knows some are cool, and will be more open minded in next meeting. kathy and i knew before we left we were ambassadors for good.

magda’s guy – blue seven, leader/lead-guitarist/lead-singer of the urban-jellen test – is the coolest lifeform i’ve met in decades. smart, kind, creative, thoughtful, original, spiritual, gentle. think he’s the reason we came to krakow – kathy said how about krakow, and i replied with my ever present why not. really weird to see the laid back soft spoken guy transform into this high-fire rock n roller up on the stage. thanks blue. we appreciate the creative space chance you provide.

takes 10-20 pounds of plants to make one pound of meat. there is 3 times as much animal waste (shit) produced on land as there are industrial solid wastes. plus cow farts are a serious contributor to greenhouse gasses.

thot of renaming my penis from microsoft to boo-boo, so i could ask flux to kiss my boo-boo.

croatian words have different endings if you’re male or female or speaking to one or the udder… what do you use for transvestites, or sex changers?

lodz seems stuck in 1980s music – that’s all we hear here in the hotel.

haven’t had an edible omelette since we left the states.

everywhere but america they allow you to wear backpacks in all the stores.

i had ostrich steak last nite. delicious. kathy had dead sea things with chicken (chicken tastes just like republicans.) we’ve also been offered bear, deer, eel, octopus, tripe (tho tripe ain’t animal meat so much as animal guts).

kathy used to weigh twice what she does now. i am tremendously impressed how she shed her weight, husband, profession, past prejudices. i asked her where the kathy she lost was, she said that’s the evil kathy – she’s working as a programmer making a million dollars a year… i asked her what’s her fone#… she said she’s a ball of fat, you wouldn’t want her… said oh i don’t know, for a million i can put up with a lot.

up in elevator back from breakfast i said you gotta eat all the food, drink all the coffee, take all the showers, smoke all the grass you can when it’s there cuz you never know when you get to next… she gave me ‘the look.’

krakow yesterday, lodz last night today, england this afternoon. this is truly wearying. i can see why flux take 1-2-3 week vacations and then go back home – this constant unknown and mostly unknowable costs the mind, the soul and the body. but. it also feeds the mind, the spirit, and the soul – and in my case, the body electric as well cuz i can walk for miles now and not tire (too much, that is – i am 60 and have broken bits here n there).

bird in hand

 

the indian water bladder trick works – but kathy works better… she was already awake.

forgot to mention – friday at the urban-jellen test concert, kathy and my fotos and art images were part of the light show.  rather fun to see our images projected on the stage screen.  and it is magic to get up before a concert crowd and recite slowly from memory “in 1968 lying on lsd on my bed downtown baltimore” and watch everyone in the audience perk up… wondering who is this old dude with the young wife and gravelly voice talking about lsd?

urban’s blue seven and magda stopped by last night to say goodbye. hopefully they’ll be stopping by croatia to visit.

now i unplug and disappear until unknown time.  kathy and i will don our packs, walk thru this special city in the dark to the train station, get on and start the next step into our new unknown.

on one level, this constant state of flux and leaving and arriving is hard – but on every other level, it’d be harder not to do.  this is magic.  and magic is never free.  but we are.

the radish report

 

our last nite here. walked thru the rain dark city from seeing scorcese’s the departed. great film. but sad. nobody’s happy. no one has any life outside their lies.

walk thru the morning darkness tomorrow our packs on our backs to the train.

krakow’s been magic.  good folk, good flux, good performances, good concerts, good reading, good smokey grey. krakow’s the first city i feel fondness for. first city outside amsterdam i’d like to revisit.

it’s odd being homeless, with no safe main base. we flow time, eddy in place spaces 1 – 3 – 7 – 12 weeks at a time. now that we’re homeless, we’ve become our own home, each each others home, kathy and i. be nice to see tho what ‘home’ becomes these next 3 months being in 1 place in a small house alone in a small fishing village in croatia. no internet.  no fone.  no known aquaintances. being in one place for 12 weeks. since our place sold june 16, we’ve spent

   6 weeks in chiplis’ fairy trap love shack, cleveland oh usa
   1 nite on the plane from chicago to london england
   1 nite leeds england hotel
   1 nite a sheep field, grassington england
   7 nites bed&breakfast in burley-on-wharfdale, england
   1 nite leeds hotel, england
 24 nites london house, england
   1 nite amsterdam hotel, netherlands
   2 nites another amsterdam hotel in a bad room, netherlands
   4 nites same hotel in a little less bad room, netherlands
   1 nite inn outside lodz poland,
   7 nites flat in krakow, poland
   4 nites 1 small room hostel/pension in krakow, poland
 39 nites old jewish section of krakow, poland
      tomorrow nite in hotel lodz, poland
      then 2 nites england, outside stansted airport
      and nov, dec, jan in small croatian fishing village

interesting framing – we’ve had 3 months of road roaming madness in all those abodes above, and now we’ll have 3 months of quiet to contemplate the said, been and done. 3 on. 3 off. 2 by 2 they went.

have to be up at 4:30 or 5 – and we have no alarm clock. so i’m using an indian trick i read and drinking tons of water before bed. each time my bladder awakes me, i’ll drink more. see if truth works like fiction.

 this is radish reporting from underside the mirror

Saturday Night in America

these are the notes kathy emailed me that she took last night about our various conversations, what we saw…. i blog them as is – no logic, just skip & trace (notes by lady, fotos by lady):

It’s a Saturday night in America. The Krakowians are at the mall. They’re just like Americans ‘cept they’re innocent and beautiful and cultured. No fat folk here. The women are as beautiful as mannequins. ‘Cept maybe not innocent. Maybe we’re the innocents. Like that tile pattern: you view it one way and the tiles project outward, the other way in.

We wish for a system, a homeostasis. We wish for personal exceptionalism. The exception as part of the system. We live as though chemicals and nutrition are estranged artifacts of facts. Will alone to faith.

Eat Republicans. They taste just like chicken. ( We have to get this rumor started. )

Pot goes with computers.

Not many ppl know when stages come up in their existence. But we’ve been manufacturing them. In Croatia, we will kill things in the sea and eat them. We will turn savage. Write our blogs in blood. Contemplate our navels by the fireside by the sea.

We’re going to start a new designer clothes line of “thing stuff.” Make golashes for its testicles. Make l’il rubber suits. Actually we could have some velcro stitched into the penis skin so we could have little costumes we could hang onto the penis. Make little arms and feet legs. Little appendages. We’ll have an annual contest. People would show up and show us their costumed “thingies.” We could have “thingy” plays of Shakespeare.  We will corner the market with this slogan: “the world’s penises come to us.”  A cowboy hat for the first “thing” in the morning. And chaps. Oh, no, only one chap. Yes. We’ll have one chap.

A friend of ours goes to bed at 3 a.m – his wife at 8 p.m.  I wonder what alien terrain: someone else’s life, someone else’s apartment. The furniture of strangers like touching a corpse. Dinner parties are funerals where we’re all supposed to be happy to see each other.

We saw pictures of a shrine in Africa, Libya. Mud buildings the worked womb of the earth. Circular windows, circles of light cast out into the night from mud facade. Oh I wish for a warm culture and music and comfort. Prehistoric.

The loud Americans. Laughter behind hotel doors. The world’s a small place. There’s so much we haven’t experienced. We’re like flies stuck to flypaper. And we help provide the glue, too. A culture that prides itself on being ignorant – brand names on street wear. Pop sensational culture, attitudes broadcast to keep us all down.

Everything an icebreaker in the Arctic. Every fishing pond full. Every flower pot fertile. So smart and young and valueless, so innocent and cynical. Pantomime the parent.

Possibility volume through which I travel. As though the mountains and valleys make way to absorb my essence, as though I could permeate everything I see – that woman in the store – that noun clown over there.

hurtownia

the 3 tenets of
the church of not quite so much pain & suffering:

  go thee, and suffer less
  do as you would be done
  this too will pass

now that pimsler croatian lessons 1-8 have taught us how to pick up the opposite sex, offer them beer and wine (no water), feed them, buy them something, and take them back to the hotel, we’re hoping the last 2 lessons will have advice on buying condoms, or getting a venereal disease check-up

walking thru the krakow nite to a good movie, kathy said “it’s amazing what we can get used to.” i replied “i ain’t used to nothing. – i’m keeping my eyes open, my eye on everything – things might start moving, sneak up on you.. i’m not taking any chances.”

the film was Children of Men – excellent british sci/fi about near future infertility. well written, some shocking quick cuts, realistic plot, solid acting – shows what will happen once the republicans take over.  clive owens is the british actor i respect the most – and julianne moore is always great.

we walked by a sign saying Hurtownia – made me think of america.

they say in any city in the world, you’re never more than 8 feet from a rat – unless you’re in washington dc, and then it depends how close you are to the white house.

speaking of rats, george w. bush now says he never said “stay the course” in iraq (a google search shows 2,990,000 links to him saying it) – look in dictionary under lies, and they have a foto of bad bush george. and dick(less) cheney sez he didn’t endorse water boarding torture on a radio interview few days ago – look in the dictionary under liars, there’s a foto of the vice president for torture cheney. these guys make 1984’s Big Brother look like amateurs. i call cheney dickless because he’s not man enough to own up to what he says – plus he turned coward when called to go fight in viet nam (says he had more important things to do). and the bushleague boy is technically a traitor for going awol from the texas national guard during the vietnamese war.  it’s always the cowards who send others to die in their place.

jokes aside, it broke my heart to stand in the nazi concentration camp of auschwitz and hear the guide recite a list of torture techniques the nazis used on the jews – and realize they were the same list of torture interrogation techniques cheney and bush just got america to legalize.  america has done many shameful things, but she’s never gone this low before. gives new dirt to the word unclean.

welcome to the new boss – even worse than the old boss.

bit o city pretty

internet access is back, so a bit of krakow before it goes again…

bird / dragon sculpture on the Wisla River

stained wall

horrid American style Galeria shopping center

Kazimierz – old Jewish quarter (where we live)

rabbit painting in Tytus i Koka Club (where we read last nite)

Wawel Castle

our street in Kazimierz

see that train amoving down the track

crawling from club to pub looking for mr goodwire wi-fi access.  reality took away our room’s internet access today.  weird – at chiplis’, our internet went down the last couple days, so we went down to lucky’s coffee shop to wire surf – and they went down as well.  the last 12 hours in our 1st krakow place the internet disappeared. our last few days here, it disappears again. reality is trying to move us on.

i’m ready. each city has its own special ugly. each city has its own special beauty.

tonite we recite a couple poems each as part of the dada cabaret opening for the urban-jellen test concert – our third rock concert reading in krakow… our 3rd rock concert reading anywhere actually.  tomorrow we’ll get our train tickets to lodz, do laundry, shoot kathy’s ever shrinking assemblage, see a movie maybe – pack sunday, leave monday. monday nite in lodz poland. fly back to england tuesday cuz it’s cheaper to fly from poland to london to croatia than it is to train from here. thursday in croatia.

i’d best get used to no internet – we’ll have none in the fishing village.  have to go 6-10 miles to the next town, use their library to post. i’ll be going from 2-3 posts per day to 1-2 posts per week… you lucky devils you. of course they’ll each be 100,000 words long.

have loose idea for 3rd smokey grey story – kathy & i appear in it… i’m a judas goat working for pod centrum, going with kathy on their orders – she’s a pod defective. smokey wants to save her from them and me.

next day – no internet in room again, for second day.  i’m devastated. how can i check to see what new lies bush, cheney and rove have spread?  they’re the unholy meeny miny mo trio of untruth. bush makes me wish there were a god who’d throw bad folk into hell – cuz then there’d be a special level way down low for those three, along with rumsfeld, wolfowitz, rice.

quite disappointed in our pimsler language tape – after 8 croation lessons, all they’ve taught us is how to pick up a man or woman, offer them food, beer, wine, and take them back to the hotel.

don’t know when i’ll be blogging – maybe find a cafe, maybe not. life is weird – thank god.

the man in the grey fennel suite

here’s the 2nd smokey grey short short story –
The Man in the Grey Fennel Suite – (10.26.2006)
http://www.agentofchaos.com/poetry29.html#x03

don’t forget Lady K’s 17th issue of The City Poetry zine
http://www.thecitypoetry.com/issue17/index.htm

the 1st smokey grey short short story –
Smokey Grey, Private Lie – (10.20.2006)
http://www.agentofchaos.com/poetry29.html#x01  

1st & only smokey grey poem –
Private Eye Smokey Grey  – (12.11.2005)
http://www.agentofchaos.com/poetry29.html#x02

New issue of the City Zine!

new issue city zine! clarke! mcguane! dumm! budgett! wascovich! joan of art! bree! diamond! weems! shaffers! grgorinic! raden! blue7! gourgiotis! brodsky! stumpf! cunnane! johns! chiplis! worm lady! townsend! chase! goldberg! ke! the smiths! markk! sobieska!
issue 17   the city poetry zine
http://www.thecitypoetry.com/issue17/index.htm

….some juicy snips

.. clarke ..

face of America trying to make sense
of everything that has happened

.. admit2 ..

Good art produces sprouts, which are able to grow their own roots, but most of them wither and die, which is why any art mostly resembles an herbarium.

.. bree ..

shades make a
lacy leaf projector.
means a bright wake
for me, summer times,
when i rises late. to

http://www.thecitypoetry.com/issue17/index.htm

Lady K

dead elvis 2006

here’s the 13 top earning dead folk from the past 12 months. always said death is a great career move. can’t wait to die and start earning the big bucks myself. of course, anything i made dead would be more than i’m making alive. and my expenditures would be lower.

money kings of the dead
[this is 1st yr elvis did not win]
average death age: 57.7. yrs
average dead earnings: $19 million
average years dead: 20.7 yrs

Kurt Cobain – $50 million
  – died 4.5.1994 – 27 yrs – suicide
Elvis Presley – $42 million
  – died 8.16.1977 – 42 yrs – pills
Charles M. Schulz – $35 million.
  – died 2.12.2000 – 77 yrs – cancer
John Lennon – $24 million
  – died 12.8.1980 – 40 yrs – murder
Albert Einstein – $20 million
  – died 4.8.1955 – 66 yrs – natural causes
Andy Warhol – $19 million
  – died 2.22.1987 – 58 yrs – doctors
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) – $10 million
  – died 9.24.1991 – 87 yrs – natural causes
Ray Charles – $10 million
  – died 56.10.2004 – 73 yrs – liver disease
Marilyn Monroe – $8 million
  – died 8.5.1962 – 36 yrs – pills
Johnny Cash – $8 million
  – died 9.12.2003 – 71 yrs – diabetes
J.R.R. Tolkien – $7 million
  – died 9.2.1973 – 81 yrs – ulcer
George Harrison -  $7 million
  – died 11.29.2001 – 58 yrs – cancer
Bob Marley – $7 million
  – died 5.11.1981 – 36 yrs – cancer

this list is from forbes.com – i try not to use forbes.com because they’re greedy bastards (surprise surprise) – their site takes forever to load cuz i suspect they’re loading my computer with their cookies and ads of mammon.

another site i refuse to go to is rollingstone.com – they’re just as greedy as forbes and take even longer to load.  last time i went there, they refused to let me leave… they disabled my back key. i had to end my session to get away from them. went back in several times over several days to make sure that’s what they were doing. what a sickening selfish low-scum scam from what once was a beacon of hope. wrote them a complaint but they deigned not to answer. that was two years ago. refuse to go back and see if they’ve changed their policy. i am a loyal friend. i am a loyal enemy. i don’t take kindly to self important arrogant flux denying me choice. (just went back to check – they let me out, so this is an old gripe).