"Down to Earth"

A boy beneath the gulls wears one at his waist, or rather just below. It must be a symbol for something, the bird, it has just got to be.

Six people receive credit for writing this single, a song based on the performing artist's real-life parents' divorce, but Mr. Raymond isn't one of them. Mr. Raymond didn't find for himself, but met, and arranged further meetings with music executives and vouched for, and eventually signed a lucrative contract and collaborated musically on more than one occasion with, the boy, and is often said to have "discovered" him. The artist himself -the boy- popularly Mr. Raymond's discovery and recipient of subsequent fame and adoration, does indeed receive credit for writing this, the single.

An ingenue, an actress, a playwright, and a writer walk into a bar. Slowly, and successively.

Or rather, it's an outline, a silhouette of the thing it represents. Not a seagull per se exactly, but based on the cover of Dick Bach's very short, bestselling, spiritual 1970s' self-help novella, the one in which Jonathan Livingston learns he's not like other birds. In it, Mr. Livingston feels out of place in a world where everyone else (that is, other gulls) find perfect contentment cruising parks for popcorn, dive-bombing live food just below the lake's surface, shitting on sidewalks, etc. Mr. Livingston wants to soar like his proverbial brethren idiomatically known to do so (i.e., eagles). And he does. He meets others more like him, more than the other gulls that is, and transcends space and time, and contacts multidimensional beings, but ultimately ends up back among the first group of unmotivated seagulls, and the whole thing's just really fundamentally about forgiveness. Or something.

And why spend so much time rephrasing a familiar line, which requires some grinding of the cognitive gears, and should lead and build up to an amusing or clever punch, only to reveal the joke parenthetically, and immediately?

The actress's son, that is, plus also her lover. Who is not the same person, the lover, as the son. So the actress's son, and another man, who happens to be the actress's lover -and is also a writer (the actress's son is a writer as well)- join the actress in question, who is a matriarch, and aging, and who will lose her son by the end of Act IV. All of whom walk into a bar with an ingenue, who is also a performing artist of sorts, of course, and female, and complicates the whole lurid ternion.

Perhaps a reference to Seal would have been more appropriate, or to his cover of Steve Miller's '76 single anyway, or to Steve Miller, the band, per se.

Two actresses of vastly different age and experience walk into a bar, together with two full-grown males. One of the men is the older actress's son. He is also a playwright. The other man is a novelist, and the older actress's lover. This gets thorny the way any reference to Queen Gertrude's reclamation from Claudius does. (This is what they call "the intertext," that is, what's "between" or "within" texts.) Plus the less experienced actress is supposed to function as a symbol in the build-up of this increasingly less tangential aside, which, fundamentally, reiterates the first act of a well-known play, the important players anyway, those players whose roles I thought easier to isolate and define, as the first line of what's supposed to be something funny. A joke, that is.

Mr. Raymond "ushered" in the young male performing artist's popularity, some say.

The sudden introduction of multiple persons, the second -or first- for example, often signals a privileging of textual content. Or narrative ineptitude. Or, possibly, the splitting of one into multiple.

The actress is related to the playwright and the writer in ways that are difficult to describe without making explicit the underlying, or "hidden" relations intended on purpose to function beneath or "below" immediate apprehension. This I guess is what they call "subtext," what's beneath the text, or below it; underneath the superficial surfaces [red] (surfaces "above, or added to" "the face" [which, as the storyteller or speaking instrument here, you can by now probably tell I've added at least one or two. Full Disclaimer: I'm using a laptop I bought with my recent winnings to type this -all of which I'd written out longhand- sitting at the Executive Desk I recently had delivered to my newly furnished condo, and realized, sitting here, in the leather Executive Chair I ordered {along with the Desk and Sigmund Divan from an expensive Dutch retailer via international shipping} that most of this piece has just totally failed, for reasons related directly to my real life relations; a lot of this is simply a way for Yours Truly to work through some recently emergent issues regarding this thing they call "love" {I awoke from a dream last night, on the small cot I keep next to the guest bedroom's window here on the 83rd floor of the Trump International Hotel and Tower, a dream in which I'd begun to tell a dream version of my real life partner and lover of almost a year now, that, quote, "I think I love you," you of course here being her (whereby "you" doesn't indicate in a metaficitonal way [or, "in a way that comments on the relationship between reader and writer, and reminds constantly the reader she's reading writing" {but which feminine pronoun gets problematic, depending who's doing the reading}, an unfortunately widespread and erroneous affixation in many disciplines and sciences, esp. in the academic argot of lit crit and performance studies, fields to which she and I, respectively, belong] anyone other than her somnial representation as my unconscious mind imagines her). But before I could finish, she'd cut me off with the nasally, extended "N" sound anyone who doesn't want to hear something makes.}, and that up here, above the city, I can see way out to the edges of LSD, vacant beaches and harbors, the evening traffic as it wanes -and that the drop from 83 floors isn't enough for a body even to begin to approach the terminal velocity of a human being through space, let alone enough to ignore or forestall certain incessant accessories to heterosexual romance] like stage make-up or costume jewelry) there's more text, more to be read, and interpreted, unpacked and performed -enacted- enjoyed, used up, diminished, eventually discarded and, always, brushed aside like so much detritus.

The male and female ingenues received universal acclaim from critics, and lost a child, respectively. (And so at least in that way the roles of the two fictional actresses resonate, in their exemption from maternal concern.) But they were supposed to serve as something central, (And isn't she, too, a fiction?) the pubescent artists' performance, as symbol, something concrete, and tangible, in place of abstract narratology.

Cf. "i.e." supra.

But every universal devolves to family drama.

A boy under the gulls has one just below his hip, the juvenile firmness of it a testament to something, I'm sure.

"For Konstantin has just killed himself."

Photo by Amanda Grupp.  Words by Diego Báez.

How Does It Feel?

One of the funny things you learn over the course of a long-term monotonous, or rather monogamous, romantic relationship is yes the shared splendor of an intimacy between two people, and of course the union and sheer joy of sex -not the way it works out when dating alternatingly, with multiple partners and competing affections and no serious commitment to anyone's long-term well-being- and not only newfound comfort with yourself and your own physical nature, but the level of confidence and how okay you feel discussing said sex life in public.

It's the difference between being able to formulate a coherent and unfettered opinion on a topic as sticky as the polygamous, er that is polyphonous, sound of a symphonic quartet which issues within earshot -probably from the restaurant's in-house speaker system, very likely not actually in-house and present, even less likely still the sound's source approaching the booth you reserved to mark an occasion that turns out to be significantly different from what you had in mind in the first place- and absolutely squandering that last moment of distraction before you pose a question, the response to which you discover, by a sudden awareness of your own body's visibly increased sympathetic output, you are in fact mortified to find out.

Photo by Dustin Whitehead. Words by Diego Báez.

onding on snaw

It's not the kind of thing you can see to explain. The refrigerator was open and snow fell outside. She had them in her hand. She said, These are blueberries. But they were not. She unpackaged them. See? she said. I didn't, and so thought maybe something was the matter. And if something was the matter, I wondered what it was. I made conditional statements. Statements that suppose or imagine. With conjunctions that join. To connect. Like transitions. Phrases like "for example" and "that is." Also images illustrate a point, or represent: The light inside the refrigerator flickered intermittently without seeming to signal. It was cold, not only outside, but also in the kitchen. Only these are words. Oh yes they are, she said. But no, they are only. Words, that is. For example, this is not a blueberry. She made a fist. The berries bled violet and red in veins down her forearms where maybe there were real ones underneath, beneath the skin. Where really there was blood. I saw no seeds. And yet, These are seeded, she said. She said, I know where you get your ideas. That's a technique I've seen: calling someone out for something they've done. She said, These are my conditions, or maybe, This is conditional, indicating "us" with her skin-stained hand. I'm forgetting something. For some reason there was snow in the kitchen, falling on the floor. I wish there was. I wish there were, she said. She said, unless it is the case, it's only hypothetical. In that case I wish there would have been, I said, more of it on the snow, all over, if that's what it would have taken. If these had taken the form of something more than statements, of anything like your seedless spheres there. There's red in it; what looks like red there inside the black then. It's not a metaphor for anything. Something inside the darkness presents itself as red. At least is how I see it. And yes, there is red in it.

Photo by Sadie Myers.  Words by Diego Báez.