"Americacoma" / graffitti decal / 6" X 4"

Graffitti / 12" x 17" / Prophecy Spoken by the Voice that Wasn't Heard

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Poem text:

I’m coming at you, man, with something to tell --
the pigsties are in good health
and the mermaid’s slurping the last drop of oil!
Each one of us is a holy roller
clapping our kids off to foreign lands
while God dances like a wino to the music of a mariachi band!
So much goes on in a time of war --
when the horny brother busts the cherry of his sister
the blood on the bedsheet pales compared
to the magnificent gore of battlefield slaughters!
O methinks Jesus maybe was King Hipster
half philosopher / half court jester
so me want him come down from his paradise of chubby cherubs and angelic elves
and tell his followers go fuck themselves.
What a mess they done made of things --
men in Oklahoma City pilot drones over Afghanistan
while worms grow fat feasting inside
the assholes of corpses washed away by dementia’s riptides.
Oh if only I could get on American Idol
me would sing about how Christian pols
not Muslim kids should get blown to bits in battle.

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Note at bottom:

poem by Papa Rock
image stolen from a painting by Jeramy Taylor

Graffitti triptych decal / retitled "Lucitities Americana" / central panel / 20" x 19"

(revision)

Poem text for decal:

Irina Malinovskaya, Patron Anti-Saint of Immigrants & Those Suffering from Aborted Longings

Riding a horse-drawn wagon from Russia to England wasn’t in the cards, so Irina Malinovskaya’s ancestors didn’t get to ride on the Mayflower. Plus, they weren’t Puritans, which meant they couldn't have gotten on board even if they’d arrived on time. Still
migration was on their minds and so
they bided their time
-- for generations.
Centuries later, Irina was the first of her family to make it here and like most immigrants her bags were stuffed
with contradictions.
Whereas the pilgrims had killed Pequots, she killed sexual competitors, or so her detractors claimed.

No two stories are the same.
Take Mother Mary as an example. She and sugardaddy Joseph migrated to Egypt. They were illegals, not having received permission
to leave their homeland. Malinovskaya, however, wasn’t an illegal, just unstable. Which is why, the cops said, she killed the Zlotnikov woman.

The investigation went on for months.
From the moment of Malinovskaya’s arrival, there were rumors.
Some said she was an Amazon hottie with a dripping vagina made from the colored feathers of rainforest birds.
Others screamed one look from her was like the U.S. accidentally bombing an Afghani wedding
and killing the attendees.
Always one rumor then another.
Mr. Aziz, an Iranian immigrant, informed friends over cards one night
“When she told people how much she loved her new country
every nerve in their bodies danced like a Sufi mystic in a courtyard filled with the scent of nearby lemon trees.”
Meanwhile on Walnut St. in Wilmington, DE Miss Rose chuckled
“On her first July 4th here, the New York Philharmonic played ‘Lover come Back to Me’
while she performed cunnilingus on the Statue of Liberty.”

In the end, only one thing is certain:
Even if Malinovskaya slew the Zlotnikov woman who tried to steal her lover,
Sitting Bull doesn’t give a shit. Instead, he sits
in a sweat lodge on the prairie, pouring water onto hot rocks. As steam rises
like the earth's breath, he remembers earlier deaths, not the last.

Graffitti decal / 5" x 3.5"

(revision)

Can the Visual/Verbal Arts Accomplish Anything These Days in the U.S.?

Blaze / graffitti decal / 10" x 8"

Yesterday (4/2/2009) at Facebook someone sent me a compliment about the graffitti decal above. Although I appreciated the comment, it started me thinking about the obstacles that stand in the way of effectively reaching out to people through the visual and verbal arts. I don't want to exaggerate, reaching a mass audience has always been a difficult goal for an artist to achieve, and the continuing existence of that challenge is no surprise. However, technological differences between the contemporary scene and the past have redefined the nature of the issue.

The issue of reaching people at a mass level is no longer about using "the people's language" in poetry or about employing popular graphics styles in one's paintings or murals. Instead, the issue is now, Can ANY art have a long-term public impact? The reason for this question is simple. Because technology drowns us these days in images and words, images and words in general have been demoted from unique signifiers of certain meanings to fleeting parts of an ongoing deluge. Reality is no longer experienced as a sequence of invididual "this's" or "that's" or individual "rights" or "wrongs," but rather as a river of infinite this's, etc. Although this may help us see objects/events from multiple viewpoints, which can be good, the technology behind this culture river is nonetheless dangerous in that it imposes on society its notion of the real, which is that the electronic/virtual river is what's real, not the specifics it carries. Consequently, the river overwhelms us with things (images, words, etc.) flying by so rapidly that we don't have time to analyze the specifics. This undermines efforts to produce verbal/visual artworks that effectively counter the status quo, since the only reality now is the image/word flood, not any particular image/word in itself. Images that are for war and ones that are against war are equal parts of the flood as are the views of the coservative and liberal commentators on a CNN panel. Visual art, poetry, panel discussions - their importance is no longer what they say, but merely that they are. The social function of their presence is that it proves the real exists - "real" as in "the river which deadens."

Still, people, including myself, try, as we should. Today's unsolvable problem becomes tomorrow's solved one. But the effort requires getting outside of the box and, at some point, defying authority. This is one of the reasons I started experimenting with graffitti years ago. I don't consider this experiment "the answer" o the difficulties mentioned above. Still, like all artistic experiments with public communication at this time,it is part of a necessary process.

_{Graffitti decal/poster . . . Ornette & the Whirlwind: 50th Anniversary of His Album, The Shape of Jazz to Come / 13" x 18"}

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Slanted red text above says:

Ornette memorized the whirlwind's 50-year-long song
& played it in a state of ecstatic indignation & God didn't dare to interfere

revised graffitti ditty

the nicest veggies grow
from the dead foe ’s asshole
we then boil them in water
& eat them from bowls

we are the goodest of the good
we make war on the terror
while evil queen talks to spirits
inside the king’s cracking mirror

we are snow white’s kiddies
we play marching drums
when we kiss your mouth
we suck the teeth from your gums

mommy’s face shines bright
like sun on everest snow
while she feeds soldiers’ livers
to battlefield crows

snow white snow white
white as talcum powder
no pagan lover
ever ever plowed her

Revised decal

Text for poem in yellow font above:

Bite into the papaya, notice
the lost taste, a signal
that we must hold what’s absent
in our hands
like a ripe fruit then eat it before
youth goes & we return
to islands where everything
even the red
throated bullfinch hangs
stiff with rigor mortis
from the razor wire
lining the roads

everywhere