Writings of the Nomad Junkie

New York is not meant for the thinking man, it is meant for the button-pusher, the card swiper, the Ipod-wearer, the subway hoarder.
Spiders and construction.
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Wouldn't you agree that a "successful" work of art is a work that seems to accurately depict the personality of the creator?
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I abhor Mass Media & Popular culture. The same way I detest the "internet age" and most contemporary movies (why do we love trash so much?) Man's celebrity-worship is embarrassing as it is frightening. I was like that, once. When I was ten. It was painful for me to abandon my delusions, my ignorance. I woke up one day and decided to just respond to how I really felt deep down inside. And I realized everything around me...was stupid. Fake. Thin. Fraudulent.  (Even those actual words scare me) And it was painful because these affectations of pop culture were things I once held onto so strongly. But I grew up. There's no proselytizer like a convert.
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In art, ugliness attracts - the truth, which is often painful (ugly) heals. How can a society so obsessed with "health" and gyms foster movies and images and "literature" and "muzack" that is base, hollow, fascistic, and contemptuous of anything radical, engaging, challenging, or truly hopeful? 
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Ibsen said the masses are always wrong. He could have been referring to the movie industry.   If artists and social explorers of the past did not "go their own way" we would be even more spiritually destitute than we are now. We would not know Charlie Parker or Vincent Van Gogh or Chester Himes or John Cassavetes or Jimi Hendrix or Bill Hicks or Octavia Butler. We'd never have known the music of Prince or the cinema of Dreyer.
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Everything comes from something, but it is the job of the artist to say "Yes" when everyone else says "No." 
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What is our generation’s obsession with statistics and surveys and "voting" (i.e. American idol, etc.,) and sameness and our insane proclivity to destroy anything now that seems...real?
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We seek comfort and take refuge in the internet because we feel it allows us to be who we are. But if we are not who we are in real life, what is the point in communicating in a virtual village? What is the point of giving an opinion if it is stuck, adrift in cyber-space?
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The truths we feel and read and receive online should be digested and then vomited up in real life.   In Actual time-body-mind-space.   The only hope I have for "art" is that it will still awaken my mind and incite my senses.
Keep in-tact my "spirit-connection."
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And so my hat is off to you, that late night garage band jamming away at one a.m. even though you've got to get up the next morning, ignore that neighbor stomping their feet or pounding on the wall.  Keep singing, keep rhyming, keep spinning out of control...and if you are lucky, you just may see a drop of blood fall from one of those nylon strings. And you will know it was all worth it, and your suspicion will be confirmed: "Yes, I'm alive."

Blood is real.  It doesn't lie.   And too much "real-ness" and potential is being spilled in the streets, among Black men, among young boys (yes, boys) in Iraq and in the Sudan and anywhere else truth and rebellion and love are being castrated.   We live in a world that will pay you for becoming a killer or at least pretending to be one.  I am not sure which is worse.  And I don't mean to exaggerate.  I mean, literally, that you can say at seven-years-old: I want to grow up and be a killer.

And Little Billy can decide: Either the Army or the Entertainment industry. 

I can go to Iraq or "some far-off place where the people are brown-and maybe look kind of like me-but not really", and I can shoot them or I can just roll out of bed and follow in the more comfortable and lucrative footsteps of American Greats such as 50 Cent or Jay-Z or whomever they tell me knows about my struggle because he killed someone or sold someone death in a little white bag and drove at night making deliveries from Brooklyn to some back-water village down South...Yes, I can kill. And even, maybe, be killed in the process -- but no, they will make sure I am not really killed -- especially if I can sell enough lies and venom. Because lies and venom win awards and make money and make the rich people comfortable and the poor people "proud-to-be-in-the-gutter." And oh, the money...could that be real? And maybe my mama will get on TV, too...Doesn't she just love her boy?

Don't believe the hype.

Blood is not thicker than water; the treachery starts in the "family" and ends up in some poor woman's kitchen.  A flower struggling to be free above her stove...

She keeps it - because she knows: that, too, is real.