Monday, March 26, 2007

the office

We called it the 'office'. It was a corner of three story brick school building outside a door at Garfield that is enclosed and shaded by a large pine tree. We smoked and talked there every morning. The three of us George, Matthew and I. All someone need say is meet me in the office and we knew that meant it was time to smoke. Even in the rain and wind the office was dry and secluded. George always had cigarettes. There's something about smoking, with the mouth, sucking in smoke that's killing you, Talking, eating, having sex... with the mouth. And we called it male bonding. Smoking in the office and talking every morning of every school day for four years. We called ourselves friends and after graduation we each went our separate ways and never returned to the office.

George had always liked guns. He was a student of history, a student of philosophy, a student of war. A pondering, gregarious, talkative friendly man. A beautiful man with curly brown hair and olive skin who looked just like his mother, his fathers first wife, a Jew, whose picture was in an oval frame in George's bedroom and her eyes starred serenely at you every time you went into his room. She had died long ago when George was a very young child. And she was only a memory. Only a beautiful face, in black and white, in an oval frame. And just like her he was a beautiful Man. That is until he had too much to drink. Like the night on Madrona when the 3 black wannabe gangbanger negroes were harassing him and he reached into his volkswagen van pulled out his 45 automatic and fired up into the midnight air three times, bam, bam, bam and the negroes scattered. Or like the time we drove to Everett to pick up a friends car and he and I got into an argument and he grabbed my car keys and tried to throw them onto the freeway and we got into a wrestling match and I drove away and he walked 35 miles home. Without a drink George was a pacifist. Series high shooter of his Marine Corp graduating class. This told him he could blow a mans head off from a football field away. After the Marines he purchased his first gun. He kept it loaded in his van. This calm, peaceable, loving father of two, married a petit Japanese woman and bought a house in Factoria to live happily ever after.

Until the ghost in the bottle came back to haunt him every time he took a drink. George couldn't take a drink and relax. He drank like a Pioneer Square wino Indian. He would drink one after the other after the other. Until it took over. And he became aggressive, and petty and wanted to fight everyone. He would even drink and go back to a place in his child hood where the priest at St. Marks would molest him playing let's take turns with the penis in our mouth and he found that he liked it but he couldn't explain why so he would drink and run in out of bars on Broadway and find homosexual liaisons and late at night return home smelling of shitty ass and scotch; he would crawl into bed with his wife and her honor was lost. She asked for a divorce.

And that afternoon in St. Marks Cathedral we all watched together as the casket rolled down the center aisle on processional towards the holy altar and his wife, wearing a black ankle length skirt and a black veil, flanked by their two boys in their Sunday school suits walked slowly behind. And all of our friends from Garfield where there seated on either side of the aisle like a high school reunion. And George was there, closed casket, because I don't imagine there was too much left of his head after the bullet had ripped through the roof of his mouth and shattered his skull into so many pieces. He had returned to St. Marks and the priests that tormented him.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

hope








hope


rp: instrumental programming







Monday, March 12, 2007

groove 3






groove 3


rp: instrumental programming









famous quotes:

"I can't wait to get Reason so I can show you how it's done" ~Brian Hartman


until then
peace & reason

r

Friday, March 09, 2007

art is...


groove 2


rp: instrumental programming









"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature." (Marcel Proust)

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up. ... The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. ... The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. ... We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. ... From the moment that art ceases to be food that feeds the best minds, the artist can use his talents to perform all the tricks of the intellectual charlatan. Most people can today no longer expect to receive consolation and exaltation from art. The 'refined,' the rich, the professional 'do-nothings', the distillers of quintessence desire only the peculiar, the sensational, the eccentric, the scandalous in today's art. I myself, since the advent of Cubism, have fed these fellows what they wanted and satisfied these critics with all the ridiculous ideas that have passed through my mind. The less they understood them, the more they admired me. Through amusing myself with all these absurd farces, I became celebrated, and very rapidly. For a painter, celebrity means sales and consequent affluence. Today, as you know, I am celebrated, I am rich. But when I am alone, I do not have the effrontery to consider myself an artist at all, not in the grand old meaning of the word: Giotto, Titian, Rembrandt, Goya were great painters. I am only a public clown - a mountebank. I have understood my time and have exploited the imbecility, the vanity, the greed of my contemporaries. It is a bitter confession, this confession of mine, more painful than it may seem. But at least and at last it does have the merit of being honest." (Pablo Picasso)

"every media of human expression that conveys spiritual truth" (Rodger Pegues)

Saturday, March 03, 2007

moonlight sonata



Moonlight Sonata


rp: instrumental programming