Found Cabinet #1

Inside what I guess would have been the reception area of the old crazy house down on Grove below Lombardy. The place is going condo and I think they've going to save it intact.

The Painter Victor

Is probably one of the finest painters in the city.

His numbers: (c) 512-0945 (H) 271-8291
Tell him Clay sent ya

The Nation of Ulysses

Had instructions on how to remove your fingerprints
In their liner notes. Their music unraveled easily,
It frightened me. They were the hardest Dischord
Band to listen to, the most revolutionary.
My friend Sean, who used to hit the all-ages shows at the Black Cat
Told me one night the Nation of Ulysses showed up and set
A dumpster on fire and rolled it, burning, into the middle of the street.

I don't know why, nearing middle age, I remember this
As the first cool wind to end summer rolls over me on my back porch.
Where are the Nation of Ulysses now, with so many gluttonous dumpsters
There in the alley or bristling with the shredded paper of K street?
What would Ulysses think of his wild and ravenous children,
Full grown now, lost in the forest or else mute under the manager's eye?

Smoke or Fire

California's Burning

Ground-Squirrel View with Finger in It

Tony's Ice Box

Here ya go, bud.

Springsteen

Will Percy: Do you think pop culture can still have a positive effect?

Bruce Springsteen: Well, it's a funny thing. When punk rock music hit in the late 1970s, it wasn't played on the radio, and nobody thought, Oh yeah, that'll be popular in 1992 for two generations of kids. But the music dug in, and now it has a tremendous impact on the music and culture of the nineties. It was powerful, profound, music and it was going to find a way to make itself heard eventually. So I think there's a lot of different ways of achieving the kind of impact that most writers and filmmakers, photographers, musicians want their work to have. It's not always something that happens right away-the "Big Bang"!

Fig.11-Achilles and Hector at the Gates of Troy

circa 1997

I Built This Thing

In 2000, about an hour before I went to fetch my wife Mary from her stay at NYU hospital after she had a brain tumor removed. We lived in Jersey City then. I think I made it in about thirty minutes, using a leftover piece of laminate from our counter-top and a couple of scraps of MDF. They told us she would have to be laid up in bed for a couple of weeks, so I thought it could be for meals. It got used maybe twice as she refused to stay in bed. Then we put our little t.v. on it. Years later, in Tennessee, when Henry was two, he pulled the t.v. off the thing and pinned himself under it. He was okay but the screen always had an off-color corner afterwards. Henry learned how to brush his teeth standing on it in our tiny pink and green tile bathroom in Tennessee. We had it hidden again until just recently as May has gotten enough balance to manage climbing on it. I have no idea how it has lasted this long. The legs are still sturdy even though I can't remember using glue. The laminate has yet to peel. This weekend Henry and May used it to do flips onto his futon. Laying on his futon, we have been piling together to watch the Planet Earth series on Mary's laptop. The laptop fits perfectly on top of it.

/

Joe McCarthy's Ghost

The Minutemen @ 9:30 club, 1984

Metamorphosis (pg. 142)

—Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos! Bous Stephaneforous!

Their banter was not new to him and now it flattered his mild proud sovereignty. Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy. So timeless seemed the grey warm air, so fluid and impersonal his own mood, that all ages were as one to him. A moment before the ghost of the ancient kingdom of the Danes had looked forth through the vesture of the hazewrapped city. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit. An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.

—One! Two! ...Look Out!

—O, Cripes, I’m drownded!

—One! Two! Three and away!

—Me Next! Me next!

—One! …Uk!

—Stephaneforos!

His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.

—Stepaneforos!

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death—the fear he walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without—cerements, the linens of the grave?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her graveclothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new arid soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man