A few years back I began writing an autobiographical poem (here is a sample http://jpgmag.com/stories/8099 ). It felt like it took a lifetime to complete, but it was really only seven long, amphetamine-laced tumultuous years. The central plot was how Adagio and Libra, the poem's two primary characters, used magick to cast spells and mix genders to change back and forth from male to female bodies, traveling backwards and forwards in time, often coming and going in mid sentence. They, along with The Others, were forced to evacuate (as in bowel movement) and vacate (as in foreclosure and eviction) a mythical paradise on earth. The circumstances were similar to a disillusioned superpower retreating from an emboldened enemy, wagging its cruise missiles between its legs at the end of a long, protracted and unpopular, costly, unwinnable war.
Angry God Almighty, a notoriously cruel political leader of a paramilitary faith-based fascist political movement known as the White Republikan Godheads exiled or enslaved everybody from the Garden of Weeds. In the process, he slaughtered anyone and everyone stupid enough, or moral enough, to resist the Permanent Republikan Majority. Ironically, acts of public resistance from secret pockets of socialist redistributors and democratic activist resistors from the zennunderground were mostly students and minorities, an irresistible force for change and transformation enabling civilization to sustain itself and persist indefinitely. The irony is that, had there been no resistance to death in the first place, there would've been no persistence of life and we wouldn't be here to tell the story and we'd probably be better off; more about that later.
In preparation for a last-ditch, last-minute Alcatraz-type escape from prisoner-of-war-torn Paradise locked on a chain gang with whole earth tree huggers, Adagio built an arch called the Arch of Ideas. He gathered together two of every thought and idea that did or ever would exist, and he stored them in the arch along with artists, poets, painters, writers, photographers, jazz musicians, dancers, comedians and anybody else trying to escape final devastation on a collision course with apocalyptic-nightmarish, Book-of-Revelation-driven, reality-distorting, truth-denying war-mongering on one hand, and a homophobic, disinforming, voter-suppressing, race-baiting, bigotry-dominating power grab of fear, divisiveness and unprecedented gloom and destruction on the other!
Besides offering the only hope for Paradise to be born again outside the gates of Exxon, The Arch of Ideas was important in other ways too, albeit unbeknownst at the time. Although at first, the arch embraced an origin of unity between opposite values and contradictions through acknowledgement and analysis of economics and class struggle, paving the way for a world that worked for everyone with no one left out. Nevertheless, habitual reliance on the failed politics of neo-conservative imperialistic/nationalistic policies of the past, coupled with obfuscating so-called "transparency", which made "up" to mean "down", and "front" to mean "back", and with only old, tired, worn-out ideas to guide them in the dark, the arch sailed into the Port of Pathology, a breeding ground of infection for myth, illusion, superstition and other forms of discredited belief systems. As a time of peace and prosperity crawled slowly to an end, suppressive religious fantasies, like diseases once thought to have been eliminated from human memory, reared their ugly head again as infestations of unregulated ideologues. Eventually, religious zealotry, religious fanaticism and religious theocratic bullies forced history to repeat itself with an exhaustive, mind-numbing predictability culminating in a religiously-motivated, civilization-destroying world war. But I'm jumping too far ahead again. I want to get to the part about photography.
Angry God Almighty, a notoriously cruel political leader of a paramilitary faith-based fascist political movement known as the White Republikan Godheads exiled or enslaved everybody from the Garden of Weeds. In the process, he slaughtered anyone and everyone stupid enough, or moral enough, to resist the Permanent Republikan Majority. Ironically, acts of public resistance from secret pockets of socialist redistributors and democratic activist resistors from the zennunderground were mostly students and minorities, an irresistible force for change and transformation enabling civilization to sustain itself and persist indefinitely. The irony is that, had there been no resistance to death in the first place, there would've been no persistence of life and we wouldn't be here to tell the story and we'd probably be better off; more about that later.
In preparation for a last-ditch, last-minute Alcatraz-type escape from prisoner-of-war-torn Paradise locked on a chain gang with whole earth tree huggers, Adagio built an arch called the Arch of Ideas. He gathered together two of every thought and idea that did or ever would exist, and he stored them in the arch along with artists, poets, painters, writers, photographers, jazz musicians, dancers, comedians and anybody else trying to escape final devastation on a collision course with apocalyptic-nightmarish, Book-of-Revelation-driven, reality-distorting, truth-denying war-mongering on one hand, and a homophobic, disinforming, voter-suppressing, race-baiting, bigotry-dominating power grab of fear, divisiveness and unprecedented gloom and destruction on the other!
Besides offering the only hope for Paradise to be born again outside the gates of Exxon, The Arch of Ideas was important in other ways too, albeit unbeknownst at the time. Although at first, the arch embraced an origin of unity between opposite values and contradictions through acknowledgement and analysis of economics and class struggle, paving the way for a world that worked for everyone with no one left out. Nevertheless, habitual reliance on the failed politics of neo-conservative imperialistic/nationalistic policies of the past, coupled with obfuscating so-called "transparency", which made "up" to mean "down", and "front" to mean "back", and with only old, tired, worn-out ideas to guide them in the dark, the arch sailed into the Port of Pathology, a breeding ground of infection for myth, illusion, superstition and other forms of discredited belief systems. As a time of peace and prosperity crawled slowly to an end, suppressive religious fantasies, like diseases once thought to have been eliminated from human memory, reared their ugly head again as infestations of unregulated ideologues. Eventually, religious zealotry, religious fanaticism and religious theocratic bullies forced history to repeat itself with an exhaustive, mind-numbing predictability culminating in a religiously-motivated, civilization-destroying world war. But I'm jumping too far ahead again. I want to get to the part about photography.
