First Payntn' - September, 2003
Collection of Hurricane J.B.

...we now return you to your regular programming.

Lovers At The Window

Call of The Wild

"The mysterious voice of blood, which is silent for generations, or only utters a confused murmur, speaks, at rare intervals, a more intelligible language. In the general confusion race claims its own, and some forgotten ancestor asserts his rights...The great migrations from the tablelands of India, the descents of the Northern races, the Roman and Arab invasions have all left their marks. Instincts which appear bizarre have sprang forth from these confused memories, these echoes of distant countries and peoples...Hence, the impulses that causes a man to leave his luxurious life to bury himself in the steppes, the desert, the Pampas, the Sahara. A man goes to seek his brothers, even if the search brings him closer to only death."

~Theophile Gautier

Samantha's Ocean Text

That feeling,
that knowing,
that tingling,
almost a thought;

once or twice, maybe, yeah,
you get it once or twice -

you know the one:

I've just met you,
but
I've known you
my entire life...

From the second I first opened my eyes,
to wandering aimlessly across my allotted time,
through names and school hallways,
through motivations, ambitions and angles
that could never be mine,
through the elephant grass of my ancestors' land,
through the fallen trees eaten by the red mites of my memories of summer,
through asphalt oceans I wanted in all seasons only for myself,
through trying to tell the stories, all different stories, my stories that are not mine but I stole from open and sewn mouths, dead and alive eyes, and me to dumb to be anything but fearless as I attempted languages made of those tongues;

and all these endlessly unquiet nights of history that never once bowed
to your loneliness or mine.

This feeling,
this knowing,
this sensation
almost a clear thought:

I've just met you,
yet I've somehow
known you
my entire life.

And to think we were simply tired from the week all day?

No one explain this moment that is writing this ever,
please, for I have my own answers, and you yours,
so let them be that way,
beautifully unexplainable
up here
on this forgotten rooftop
staring out over the world.

6/15/08

The Nature Of The Beast

It's well known that when people venture into the far reaches of consciousness, they do so at the peril of their sanity, that is, of their humanity. But the "human scale" or humanistic standard proper to ordinary life and conduct seems misplaced when applied to "art". If within the last century art concieved as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature - the nearest thing to sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society - it is because one of the tasks of art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what's there...The exemplary "modern" artist is a broker in madness.

~Susan Sontag "The Pornographic Imagination"