l'académie donkée

Of beanies and the not-chill

2008-05-11T11:23:00.002-04:00

Not suprising is that the term `my bad` first appears in an entry coming in from California, but what might shock the archivist in you was that it happened in a pine cabin in 1872 on the shores of what was then known as the Polinap river. Sam Wadlund was a candlelight scribbler, as are so many.

Left some grit round the rim of the chamberpot afer I emptied it this morning, Jenna noticed forenoon and called me out. I had some on her though, and said, 'Whose was it that I found yesterday all deerlike pellets and crushed newsleaves?'

'That certainly wasn’t me, I haven’t in a day.’ And she closed in on me with the fact of it, when her hands stuck my ribs quick I had to say, 'Twice my wrong action, twice my bad!'

On the theme of Portugese loneliness... isn’t there a word for that?

2008-05-07T20:16:00.003-04:00

One of the reasons, past kidnappings aside, the beatings with bars of l’occitane soap wrapped in sheets of uncountable threadcount aside, why we live underground is because even in donkay, even in roughshod and openspaced American donkay there are people that act in the belief of a donkay culture when they talk to you, a misguidence which has probably always exisited in the young and a miscadence so clear that it has even been publicly attributed to animated penguins, if we recall correctly.
For us, to be in a room and have a guy lurching forward in sickly compatriotism to ask you awedly if you have read the Joao chronicles, and worse, inferring it, worse again because you have, well it can turn you off.
That doesn’t mean that the obsessive journal kept by Joao Pessoa, a Portuguese trader who stayed on in China to have a family, hasn't been read by most in the academy, and usually in their teens.
He wrote a song a day, song dedicated to his below-mentioned wife and son, the latter of which seems to have left before age 10 to be a fisher-tote, common at the time, and indeed this selection comes from what is called the post-rai section of the cronicles, rare in that it’s written in Portuguese, when most from this period are in a phonetic written form of the local dialect personal enough to remain as of now undeciphered, though admittedly few have tried, or so we divine from our own absolute lack of effort in those years, especially when compared to the rate of soilage occuring to the swiped linen tablenapkin kept crumpled under the academy bunk mattress.
In public, the songs, invevitably occupying the same niche as 'outed' member Ruben Dario, are often sung into the fruity silence of a woodpaneled room by a whisky-toasting academy member, maybe bourbon or red wine substituted, though perhaps for the company, our bellys always wrong for the drink.

No. MCIV

Lin-Jin,
Sabes quem,
Veio visitar a mim?

Foi o,
Raimundo,
Ele ta lindin.

Lin-Jin,
Nos sabiam’
Que ele ia pro mar,

Mas Lin-jin,
Eh gustosin,
Quando ele ta no lar.

Roy Orbison day...

2008-04-28T12:16:00.004-04:00

Jorge Peixoto is a compulsive window-sitter, and by this we mean he managed to while away weeks of 1946 Portugal just sitting at his desk -- which of course faced a window -- watching what went on below him. He was also a writer, which was both convenient for him and for us. He wrote humorless theater criticism for Coimbra's left-wing rag Cidade Baixo, but then again there were no right-wing rags in opposition, and there was nothing to be funny about. But his 'Sill Journals' -- covering a 16-week span of that Portuguese spring -- are some of our favorite lazy Sunday material, if only because they help us envision what it would be like if the academie actually had any windows out of which we could look.

We're betting that it's raining terribly outside right now because we can hear water gushing through the sewer channels above us, but still, we'd like to be able to see it for ourselves.

There is a boy crying out on the street and I am watching him from this, my second floor window. He might be five years-old, but he is screaming as if his lungs are much, much older. When he began to cry, or simply when I first heard him, he was merely loud. This was what brought me over to the sill in the first place. Now, he is a spectacle. The boy had begun to hop about violently, very much like an angry frog, but this apparently was tiring. So he dropped to his knees and seemed to discover at once that lying prone while kicking his legs out and swinging his fists into the pavement both conserved more energy and seemed to cause his heretofore nonplussed mother considerably more distress. He was a success at last.

He has stood himself up, inexplicably. What appears to be his older brother has just taken something quite forcefully from the crying boy's hand. This cannot bode well. Surely the sound emanating from his throat is identical to that made by those unfortunate enough to have been the subject of a public evisceration, circa 1064. Why is he scratching at his own face? Why has he now grabbed that nearby light post? I wonder what his name is.

He has a sister. Now she is crying.

Later. Everyone is walking away. The family is gone, around the next corner, but even minutes later, I am sure I can still hear him.

Being and Donkeyness...

2006-11-27T23:12:00.000-05:00

What a treat we have in store for you today. It is not often that the Local sees fit to brush dust from the work of one of l’académie's lodestars, a.k.a. their chosen ones, or -- their term -- pan au chocolats. Dust is not an option. See, l’académie's autocrats keep those treasured sheaves of loose leaf locked in wall-mounted humidors, probably around Chamber 19. Could be 20. Again, we're a tad out-of-step with the daily. Anyway, they're hard-to-find, harder-to-read. But it bears repeating: We holding you down, son. Because they can't hold us down. What.

It is much to our chagrin that our bespectacled overseers rarely take notice that their most esteemed archivists have been not faithful worker drones, but rather dyed-in-the-wool M.N.V.L. members, secretly dismantling the (DonKay)Master's house from within. With words. Erm, vive le resistance, or something to that effect. Enough. We're honored to present to you an interview with Robert Bresson, director, writer, donkée at heart. Hee. Haw.

Most of your films are adaptations. Why did you create both story and script for 'Au Hasard Balthazar'?

I can answer the question simply. One day I saw very clearly a donkey as the center of a film, but the next day that image faded away. I had to wait a long time for it to return, but I always wanted to make this film. You may recall that in Dostoevsky's 'The Idiot', Prince Myshkin says he recovered his good spirits by seeing a donkey in the marketplace. Everything you say points to your belief that the human mind isn't enough. Our senses tell us more than our intelligence.

Isn't it ironic that you are known as an intellectual director? I have always thought you profoundly emotional.

Most of what is said about me is wrong and is repeated eternally. Once somebody said that I worked as an assistant director to René Clair, which is not true, and that I studied painting at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts — also not true — but this kind of error appears in nearly every account of my career. Of course, the worst mistakes concern my ideas and my way of working.

In those many beautiful shots in which Marie embraces the head of the donkey, were you thinking of the common figure that appears in Renaissance tapestries of the virgin and the unicorn?

No. The resemblance is accidental.

Every day you become more difficult for your audience. So, you only shrug! You're a hard man.

No, I am simply someone who likes exercise. You know that "ascetic" comes from the Greek word for practice of exercise. You know where the title of the film comes from? In the south in Les Baux there is an aristocratic family that pretends to be the descendants of the Magus Balthazar, and so on their crest they wrote "Au Hasard Balthazar." [Balthazar, by chance]. I found it by accident, and the whole story of Balthazar is his chance involvement in the lives of others, so I decided to use this title, which, besides, has a very beautiful rhyme.

Why did you include in 'Au Hasard Balthazar' that short scene with the action painter?

He sits on a clever donkey; I make him speak nonsense.

Only common practice...

2006-11-23T11:38:00.000-05:00

Ask a DonKay what he thinks of 1430 and he might spit upon you, but the last thing he'd call us is "law-abiding." Roguish? Yes, guilty as charged. Agoraphobic? Certainly. Who is the current President of the State? The Prime Minister of the House? No idea. We were only just getting to know the last Grand Vizier of the Secretariat. But we've still a healthy respect for the political process, as evidenced by our trove of submissions from learned judges all through time. We've a 'til-now well-guarded literary infatuation with early 18th C. English law; in particular, with Chief Justice Holt, House of Lords. Submitted on vellum, 1703.

But in the principal case my brother says, we cannot judge of this matter, because it is a Parliamentary thing. O! By all means be very tender of that. Besides it is intricate, and there may be contrariety of opinions...

...To allow this action will make publick officers more careful to observe the constitution of cities and boroughs, and not to be so partial as they commonly are in all elections, which is indeed a great and growing mischief, and tends to the prejudice of peace of the nation...

This is a matter of property determinable before us. Was ever such a petition heard of in Parliament, as that a man was hindred of giving his vote, and praying them to give him remedy? The Parliament undoubtedly would say, take your remedy at law. It is not like the case of determining the right election between candidates.

Unite d'Habitacion...

2006-11-22T22:17:00.000-05:00

Expat architect, part-time archivist Antony Benton-Wood was living the life you'd expect of a Corbusian devotee traipsing about Europe on the company dime, preparing "feasibility reports" for futuristic underground parking garages during the 1960's. Apartment blocks were sprouting furiously, as you no doubt remember. If you caught him at a good time, he'd tell you about his English father, his American mother, and his by-all-rights beautiful sister who lived, at last communication, in West Hollywood as an actress. If you caught him at the best times he'd tell you she's really one of those cigarette girls at The DelRay. It's a nightclub. We've been. Bottom line, 'tony's an honest dude, which when we come to think of it, might be what we Donkaynians prize most highly in our contributors. That, and the submission of all entries in periwinkle blue colored pencil.

I am leaving Porto, not for good, but for Madrid, and if everything works out I'll be in the Plaza de Toros Las Ventas by evening. Thomas is waiting for me, with the others, most likely at Sol. The plans will have to wait. I console myself by repeating the phrase, "It is well known by the locals that the curvature of the arch in Eiffel's cast-iron bridge over the Douro is hopelessly incorrect." (But do they know which one is his, not his student's?) Everything seems imprecise in this rain.

Already in Gaia. I began the morning quite nervous. The feeling built to a head in Pedro's Renault, on the way to Campanha. I choked on a cigarette, spitting up coffee onto the platform, just missing my pack. Now that I'm safely on the train to Lisboa, I breathe more freely. Strange because people are smoking. I can just make out the Atlantic through the gloom over the horizon. There's a huge sand bar. One hundred meters from crashing waves, someone should be out there, shadowboxing. Instead, it's a golf course. Now Espinho.

A small girl with a sack piled high and wide on her shoulders walks down the aisle. She looks at me with a flat grin, then turns away to find her seat. Where is she going? Why do I care? I won't speak to her. I don't speak to her. Another golf course by the sea. I've done this all before, just in reverse. But it seems different. I still shake when a train speeds by in the other direction; the whole train does.

The old man next to me brought food, presumably with which to torture me by eating, disgustingly. I am correct. I brought none. I have cigarettes though. Two packs of Ventil. A lighter. A book. Colored pencils. This notebook.

Portuguese days begin very late. Rarely is it ever bright before noon. As I write that, the sun breaks through the gray, and I can see lines of growth in the fields, neon greens under thick white, and one blue streak. I draw them on the opposite page. The old man next to me is sleeping with breadcrumbs in his beard. I steal one and use it to bleed the green into the blue.

The humble garrison...

2006-08-15T11:05:00.000-04:00

There´s a school of Donkay which we at 1430 might be proud of, given that it´s one that Americans tend to gravitate towards. Not suprisingly, we aren´t. It´s a kind of pragmatist faction, which doesn´t believe in submitting for submission´s sake. Most of these entries are Rockwell haikus designed to elicit a single flexing of the abdomen, producing a sound known in English as the “´huh´ of mild interest/moderate information ingestion.” That´s practical. And William Kearnles is a prime practicioner.

Figured that this must be happening around the world and thought I might write on it. Whole world´s tinkering with screws rusted shut. Lots are using a product like WD-40, comes in a can acourse. Figured it happens a lot that the product has been applied and the screw or nut needs a little forcing to break loose. Seems only natural to give a little crack with the bottom of the can, try to spring it loose. That doesn´t work. Classic example of the lazy man breaking his bones, or his can of WD, right. Not to mention the new pressurized spray can, champaigne mist of greasner all over your workroom.

Behind the house blues...

2006-07-02T13:39:00.000-04:00

Here at Donkee we are all about living the dream of your life and all that, but sometimes dreams are less than pretty. Like last night there were these huge dogs... but since we here at 1430 are archivists content to leave lead as lead, how bout we let Wanda Reynolds, 9 year-old citizen of Sandledon South Carolina, 1937 do the talking.

Well, I guess I can cross another career off of my dreamlist- musician. Yesterday I found a harmonica in my dad´s drawer and I took it out to the backyard. I started playing it and I was simply amazed at how easy it was to make a song. It was really easy to remember what part of the bar meant each note and also to do slides up and down.

In no time at all I made a little melody that I kept playing over and over, changing it a little and then maybe even a lot. But when I changed it a lot I had to fight to remember what the original melody was, but using my mind and my mouth together I would find it again.

However, then I got tired of that melody and I messed around until I changed it completely and had a new one, and I kept playing that one on and on, but then I got tired of that. Then I started sliding up and down in little bursts, but that got boring because it was already simpler than the melodies I had made before. I found them each again and played them a few times but they just threatened to kill me with boringness and I had to stop, so I did, but with the harmonica still on my lips.

My breathing slowed down and my stomach muscles burned and my arm muscles too so I stopped sliding it at all and then my breathing and my bordem and my utter exhaustion actually had a sound, one note for breathing in, one lower note for breathing out, wheeee haawww, wheee haawwww, and the whole thing was so disgusting, my whole mouth full of that metally wet wood taste, I just let the harmonica spill to the grass and then the grass started moving all around in patterns, then I barfed.

And I am only tellin you donkee, not dad or mom.

The balls to say it...

2006-06-05T17:25:00.000-04:00

To turn to modern day concerns; how is this Year's World Cup host country taking on the job? Jen Stehls reports from Munich.

It was a beatiful spring day today and in Alfie's living room we found the nike football website and saw all these amazing shorts about football in Brazil. There we saw adolescents doing everything the pros do but on grassless pitches or concrete. Lupe was among our group so as usually he kept his Bali-Shag open and his amsterdam flowing, and with the sun streaming through the living room windows and nearly obliterating the images on the computer screen I suppose it was obvious that we'd have the idea to grab the ball out the closet and go to the plaza.

But the plaza was full of reggae drummers and blind singers and mimes, and we didn't think we could control the ball well enough or mark out any space to play in. Then Alfie saw the bocceball court standing empty. Its pitch was yellow dirt, and we realized we'd found the ideal spot. I couldn't help but think that by playing there we were declaring our allegience to the favelas of Brazil rather than the gentile grasses and concretes of our manicured state. Some bocce players our age (who knew?) were just finishing up. Alfie asked if they were done and one of them said Yes but another said Why?. Then he saw the football. Football? he said, and pursed his lips like a sissy. We just turned away and started playing. Fuck them, twentysomething bocceball players, is there any greater sign of our nation's decline and lack of life-force?

As we began to play it became immediately apparent that we were raising a lot of dust. It became apparent when an elderly couple that had been sitting at a nearby bench got up quickly and left. That seemed like quite an excessive show of protest, and it made me feel revolutionary. In no time a haze developed over the field and it drifted across the whole plaza. Somtimes a person would be walking though and suddenly get hit by the yellow fog, turn towards us and wrinkle his nose. But by that point I would be returning the pass of my teammate, completing a stately triangle. In short, we didn't care. Our ethos was to play prettily, play in league with those free favela spirits, play together against the ugliness that is engulfing the world. We had a rather good game, but as always seems to happen here in the city, a fucking hipster stopped and took our picture.

South Beach dyin'...

2006-05-31T21:17:00.000-04:00

Little known fact: During what the unenlightened still refer to as the “Dark Ages,” our [cough] venerable académie was run by a staff of but six lowly functionaries – the only to survive the ravages of the Black Death. Imagine: Piles of berobed and buboed corporate corpulence, rotting outside DonKay’s walls while six decidedly lucky and unstiff underlings sat inside, manning the inkwells, taking submissions. They are, as you can imagine, an inspiration to us here at 1430 -- and to anonymous archivists everywhere -- but no more so than those blessed souls who took the time to submit at such a hellish time. Like Deborah Blackwood, late summer, 1348.

I know they all survived at Eame cause of their hairy cattl’, that looks so daft the devil chooses ‘em for death and lets the peoplefolk live, but ‘ere in Sussex we got ‘it ‘ard. I lost me brother and me aunt, plus me cousin. ‘Ow’d I make it then? Let me share this valuable information with you honorables at the académie, see if it ‘elps. Now I was right sick, laid up in me bunk, I had the scratchies, the bumpies, the cough, I was in bad let me tell you. I was so bad that me brother Francis left me for dead one night and went to the pub to knock off his melancholie an weepin’. Like a good boy he made him some bacon for he left. Well in the willies of the night I got out of me death bed, completely out of my buzzle-bum, blind mad, I hardly remember. But apparently I stumbled into the kitchen and tossed back the ‘ole pitcher of fat. Thought it was milk, I reckon. I hardly knows, it was that way that Francis found me, passed out front the hearth and with waxy white dribbles down me little chin. Next day I was betta’ and poor Francis died before Michaelmas was over. Who knew? But ever since, I’ve been a big fan o’ the piggies. Maybe the devil can’t do nuffink about those who’ll eat everything on god’s good green earth.

Passive, tense...

2006-05-09T02:02:00.000-04:00

Many remember one of the famousist reality tv couples of 2001, Franz and Fran, German/Boricua couple whose amazing race ended when she disqualified them by refusing to descend a zip line between two bell towers in Prague. They broke up right then and there but were featured in subsequent reunion competitions giving each other dirty yet longing glances. Fritz is in the academie (inherited). He often submits on this subject, wanting to give the ‘real story’ of what happened to the academie for eternal storage. Us putting it back out on the streets where it can once again be undercut might be questionable ethics on 1430’s part, but ethics are always in question.

We thought that speaking Spanish would be a way to protect ourselves from the world. Even though a camera was in our face while we made split-second decisions, we could be safe in our little bubble of language. But we should have known that giving the TV people one more layer of interpretation in the form of subtitles would just let them exploit us further. Of course they always made things between Fran and I worse than they really were. But the time I can’t forgive is the big one, up at the zip line. Of course I was pissed off —- it was right then that I decided that in life as a total, her tenacious stubbornness couldn’t make up for her lack of logical thinking -- but I never got violent.

What I said in that moment was “da ganas de empujarte,” which means “The situation gives one the desire to push you.” It’s passive. But of course they translated it to,‘I wanna push you off,’ which made me look like the total bad guy. Now when I run into Latinos at bars I always ask them to back me up on the matter, and usually they do, but not by adressing the structure of the sentence, but by saying that they would have pushed her too. And when I say that I didn’t push her, they say “claro que no,” which means not ‘clearly not’ which sounds harsh, but actually just ‘of course not.’

Velvet goldmine?...

2006-04-19T02:39:00.000-04:00

Gypsies and the academie have always had a strange relationship. These people simply refuse to write anything down. Fortunately, Germans have always been good at selling themselves on the idea of the transparent artist. Until the 1920's, young poetic Germans were renowned for keeping gypsy journals of observed moments that they'd record and trade with friends. Open any drawer in the academie and you'll find one if you rummage long enough. Every decade or so, its cool for 14-year old members to make mixtapes of these things, intermixed with haiku and futurist theater pieces for their boy and girlfriends. This one from Frownin' Franz.

Hey let me make an entry! Where to start? 3 gypsies and a German [me] on a raft in late-summer 1481.
The gypsies sang:

TEAPOT! Little whistlin' TEAPOT!
Drop our winds drop o winds
to steer us, spirit don't blow our boy down!

He's nice and shiny, we've got to keep him hot
If we keep him going, we're sure to have fun
all day at the tea-pot
our eyes will turn watery.

Angles made by the pale hand of angels
sun is shining on your tail
t-e-a-POT hooray (this line repeated x10).

he's worth a pretty penny
oh don't you agree
a fancy ties a tying for he with tea-p-o-t.

i don't understand it, how is it that the
teapot is always a resting in your lap?
Can't you quit, loving yourself like that,
with the tea pot, you begin speaking gibberish.

wheres the pause to reflect, in the water's wake
the time to take in our taking's wait
oh remember when i bought you for a chicken's egg
and the chicken, my teapot, its never been easy

I spent a steady evening
tooling-in your fancy lines,
working with the awl and leather,
so that as you worked you'd shine

My teapot night is coming
but you like it where it's hot
teapot lets stay together
you'll have my lap for yours...

[I began to dance.]

Fresh flowers...

2006-04-18T01:15:00.000-04:00

Sun Onoma is our man in the inside, year 2-thousand-and-too-soon, pulling a double shift on the bureaucratic front, Moon Immigration by day, donKay by night. Like butterflies he's collected responses to the moon immigration recent arrival questionaire, (specifically question 1B: How do you like it here!) which capture the mind set of those recently arrived after a long stint among the trees and branches of jungle. Based on examination of his questionaire, this fella got placed as a bricklayer. But not too long after he built his own apartment on the outskirts of moontown and hung his hammock therein, wasn't he surprised about the letter he got in the mail, secret post, on that fancy academie homemade heavystock parchment. If you brain scan these people and look at it like a Rorschach your first thought will be that someone had asked you to draw a tree. In the future of 1430, we used to hang in the donKay lounge waiting for Sun to come around. One of us would ask Sun, 'have you got any fresh flowers for us today, here where there ain't no flowers' and Sun would always say 'boys have I got a fresh flower for you. '

Heard them talking about the shower earlier. According to the guest the water burned his scalp with a "searing electricity" so fast he couldn't make a sound. Just because he's new. Just because he doesn't yet know what the water flows like under a third less gravity. It never goes white. It stays clear, it kind of looks as if a glass tulip bulb was sliding through a camera shot with the shutter left open, if I remember correctly the technology I was familiar with back on earth. Here on the moon, sometimes it feels like high school, sometimes it feels like college, sometimes it feels like a french movie, or a dramatic 600 page book that everyone loved in a forgotten decade. The room is one long length with a few extra walls. In the hall, the color of the first room continues at a level even with your rib.

Dreams are so surreal here they feel like exploitations. Like last night, I had a family of tall daughters with red hair and pale skin, I was becoming a judge. I was real proud carrying a box of plaques from my senate chamber through a doorway looking for someone making a photo flash but I don't know who. Who knew sleep would give you a chance to just chill so much here? I recalled the flash in front of some others who paused in a frozen glass mold which gave them a two dimensional cutout vibe until somebody's eyebrow rolled down a forehead like a caterpillar and we just laughed and tried walking again.

This I was telling to my friend on Lua Avenue, when we realized we'd sunk nine inches deep in the muck of the streets. To extract ourselves it would take a series of efforts that could hardly be performed without some sort of involuntary grunt escaping. I realized then, that although we had just been laughing about the earth before the jungle, no one here on the moon was going to act as we in jungle did. They were not going to scream theatrically and gesture in a manner only excusable in the cloud dark jungle. On the moon, at an intersection, one is gonna kill the face of any gesture. One is not going to let shit fall in a moment when sure that it won't hit his feet, just because here it would be seen by the other. The moon, of course, is too bright for that.

Writing down the bones...

2006-04-13T12:22:00.000-04:00

Here at 1430 we have an interest in creative writing programs. Because, where Donkee could be seen as, for instance, that huge underground fungus, these programs would then be the red-winged blackbird that swoops down for a mushy snack. So we did some research, and were interested to find that the first of these programs was from 3rd Dynasty Ancient Egypt. Many on the thesis its graduates, one presumes, were lost in that great conflagration. This one, from young Prince Bebe survived only in Donkee, it would be worth so much damn money if it weren’t priceless.

So, I wrote my second play this week. I looked down at the papyrus as a finished it an noticed how well I had lined the hieroglyphs on the page- how even my spacing was- that I felt like I was getting better at everything with practice. Anyway as soon as I finished I rushed out of my quarters and into the quarters of Princesses M. and T. They both are in love with me so I hoped that they would give me a good review. They went through the manuscript while I stood in the hall with Prince J. and when I came back into the room they had taken out their quills and were marking all over it, crossing out a beloved glyph here and adding another limb to a figure there. We bantered a bit, during which I expressed my bitteness as humor.

Later in the day I walked into the pillow room, knowing that my play had been circulated and read by two or three that day. There my reception was even worse. Princess J. and Prince C formed a coalition, saying that my play, which inverted the conventions of our sacred text, would have done better to simply let those conventions play out under the conditions of apocalypse that the work imposed. They also said that the blind allegiance to present forms of government as the foundation for the new post-apocalyptic society, one whose lifestyle would mimic not the present, but the ways of the native tribes that came before us, was equally untenable. Yes, they finished by calling my work overly extravagant.

I asked, is it really more extravagant than the work of Duke O.L? They nodded gravely. Then princess A stretched for a bowl of honey wine in such a way that left her prostrated across the body of Prince G, which was strange, because I hadn’t intimated an intimacy there before. Suddenly I looked at all of them in the pillow room, seated, relaxed, and me standing there in the doorway, and I felt very alone in the world. Surely they liked me, but my work met only with criticism.

Finally I said to Prince C., surely you must admit that my work was more about how we would act after the apocalypse, were I to return from here, the city, back to the country outside my home fiefdom, and discover how they were living after the apocalypse, subsequently convincing them that we must live as the old tribes before us, which prompted, as so much in village life does, a three-way election of coalitions who painted all their boats one color or another, and filled them with slogans, etc.

He looked at me and narrowed his eyes into a look that said, you exist, I am looking at you, and then said, 'Yes, yes, clearly.' So I continued, 'so really this text is serious, not extravagant. It might even be considered realist.' 'Oh I don’t think so, intoned Princess J,' and I was censored once again.

'But most of the extravagance is in the actual prose, the glyph choice and order, things that won’t make it to the stage. And what about the scene with the pickaxe? Where the protagonist says, ‘Oh sorry, did I brush your leg with the pickaxe THAT WENT THROUGH THE GUT OF MY FRIEND ON THE FIRST DAYS OF THE APOCALOYSE?’' Some people nodded, but it was clear that they preferred my play dead to alive. I made my bows and left thinking, at least I wrote something!

I used to love her...

2006-04-12T20:37:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the humility of the 1430 crew sends chills down our collective spine, like when we once repeated in unison the same sentence with the redhaired girl who sat next to us in homeroom and then we laughed at the same time but we had to excuse ourself to the restroom shortly thereafter just to look at the muscles around our eye twitch involuntarily wild on our face. In an effort to dispel similarly lingering spine tinglers, jokes have been cracking at The Local recently about the below pair of Donkay members; to spare the worst, names like Twistd Sista, Sister Act, and, sadly, Sista-I-Misstya, were in fact mentioned. This oldie but goodie doesn't evoke exactly those same feelings, but it was sent in on the back of a recipe for apple pie, and it does have a pungency worthy of display. A bit of sunshine retrieved from the dank corridors of Donkay, postmarked Lake Woompampa Girls Camp by elder sister Gail Leegale, composed by younger sister Leigh during their extensive summer of 1949 correspondence.

Sis,

Mom has a mustache and Dad can't sleep, the all-volunteer fire fighting force forbids his getting winks, even on the quietest nights, when a flame might could warm the blood of some of these neighbors of ours. Jim is gone by dawn and I put his oatmeal bowl in the basin to clean and use for myself. Mom says he needs a fire in his belly to face the sunless ocean and I agree; the traces of his bowl's heat ease my constant worrying. I walked down to Pleasant Lea again this morning but I couldn't find the deer prints from yesterday; the stag print was as big as Jim's hand, full outstretched.

I first saw that stag from across the inlet and he was walking so slow I followed him all the way to the town dump, out by Patty Mable's barn. He walked all over that putrid sink. Stupid animal. I wanted to walk up to him and pull those antlers off his tiny head and tell him he didn't deserve them and no wonder everyone - even Mom - comes back from the Hallow's Eve hunt with at least an eight pointer in tow. This one's got ten points. He smelled over a ripped paper bag of rotten tomatoes for about a minute and then ate one and the thing was so raunch it buckled that dumb stag's legs like he'd been shot but then he stood back up and I swear to God he swiveled his neck left and right to make sure nobody saw him do it, or else to make sure he was still there, knee high in human shit. I named him Rick on account of his acting so dumb, like Rick, Jim's old friend who ate caterpillars and pieces of wood on bets. Stupid Rick.

Mostly I've been taking walks and following Rick as much as I can, just to see how he goes down, and who gets him. Guess I'll follow them then.

MissinyouLotsGG,
L.

Every day I'm a-wassailing...

2006-04-11T17:41:00.000-04:00

Season's Greetings from DonKay! The perpetual winter in which 1430's overseers thrive is quite different from the one you would expect to accompany the Yuletide Holidays. Metaphorical, yes, but there's even a certain snap to the air down her longer hallways, regardless of any spring sunshines. As if we get to see them anyway. Alanna Johnston's X-Mas letter, cc'd to l'academie by carbon, was written when frosts still chilled the night. The sentiment is mighty warm, though.

Dear Friends and Family,

Here is what we have been up to this year. Patrick has kept busy as Area Supervisor for Ferro-Next's Southern Wyoming operations. Yet once again, as of recently, he will be facing another plant shutdown. We may finally be leaving Wyoming??? Aside from work, Patrick has been coaching the plant-sponsored kids' basketball and soccer teams. 'Coach Pat' enjoys his role. A highlight this year was his victory in the 17th Annual "Manly Cup" Golf Tournament. The competition was fierce.

Alanna is very busy with her private practice, but still finds time to do her early morning exercise. When not on the StairMaster, she spends her time with Book Club and Bunco. A big highlight this year was the weekend surprise trip to New York City Patrick planned for her 47th birthday. They did the Broadway show, the Village, the carriage ride in Central Park, and of course shopping. Visiting Mandee and Brandee was an extra bonus.

Leah is 8. She is in third grade at Immaculate Conception Grammar school. She gets good grades and is an outgoing and social little girl. She likes cheerleading, basketball, soccer, piano, and sleepovers. She cannot wait to get her braces off this week.

Michael is 6. He is in first grade. He recently won his grade's spelling bee. C-H-I-M-P-A-N-Z-E-E. Michael likes reading, and also ice hockey. And swimming. He is becoming quite the pianist as well. We are all very proud.

We feel especially blessed this year and we hope that you will be similarly so. God's grace be with you all.

The Johnston Family (Alanna)

Office as orifice...

2006-04-08T18:30:00.000-04:00

Avowed romantics, on the other hand, tend to invite scorn, unless they are something like your cousin, in which case it's heart-warming. The academie, as they are always telling us, is one big family. We at 1430 think of ourselves as the member who says nothing at the dinner table but who'll be real cool to you when you end up side to side for a while during the after-meal walk. So although Dale J. might be the softest man in Phoenix, we pat him on the back.

I find it so strange the way people in offices assert themselves. Most of these people are clearly very strange, but then they hide behind culture, both office and pop, as if it disguised their issue-filled beings. Myself, I have always believed that I’m less strange than most, but it doesn't come off that way because the only way I know how to express myself is to say what I am feeling, straight from the heart. I know that my eyes become unblinking and that my face goes still and that the words kind of float up out of my throat as if I was as much their victim as those people who are hearing me, but it usually works out.

In the past this even has won me accolades. Lots of times people have said Wow, everything you said is so true, or wow, I totally understood you at that moment. So I guess that leaves me feeling better, like somehow I win in the end. But the problem is I can’t control these moments, I just have to count on them keeping coming and the right people seeing them. I always hope there are a few who have identified, becasue there are inevitably some (usually those who prefer to mediate their lives through yesterday’s episode of Seinfeld) who feel the need to make some kind of uncomfortable comment, like Wow, that was a trip or telling me to lay off the drugs or something.

Anyway, this is what happened today. Since it’s the big carnival week here they built the rollerhockey rink in the middle of Dawson Street, which our office overlooks. Today they played an exposition game, the Mad Dogs versus Prairie Fire. People in the office had been watching the game for our 6th story windows and plenty of guys were pretending it was Sportscenter, but then the game ended and people sort of went back to work, and I returned to the windows a little later to watch the people cleaning up. There were TV lights and I saw they were interviewing a player. The player's back was to me and beyond him I noticed a guy in black coat walking towards him. He had short silver hair and big black sunglasses and looked like he was trying to affect a badass aesthetic but missing the mark by so far that you had to guess that he was a little crazy. He came up behind the guy and put his hand on his shoulder pad, real gentle, but the interview was in progress, so the guy looked once and then ignored the dude, finally kind of shrugging him off. I suspect the dude was talking nonsense.

Anyway the second that the guy gave up and turned to go, one of the little puck kids with a bag full of plastic pucks looking like paper boy flicked a puck at the guy's head. I guess he thought he was justified. It bounced right off his forehead and the guy just kept walking, cursing but never turning to look at that little jerk. I wish so bad that I could describe to you what passed across that guy's face during those seconds, surprise, pride, anger, despair, I read in all on the forehead and cheeks that surrounded those huge black sunglasses. I followed him with my vision until he disappeared behind a column, and then I took a few steps back and remembered the office. I couldn’t take it. I backpedaled and collapsed in a chair.

Rhonda and some other ladies noticed and came up to me. My face was in my hands trying to preserve the image, but sometimes I peeked through the cracks to see how people were reacting. I saw that people were taking me pretty serious, so I proceeded to tell them what I had just seen. “Oh, the poor man,” they echoed. They even accepted my point about it being a tragic moment and a slice of life. I recovered with their good word, and I have never felt better about the office than now. I feel like people finally know me.

On the sly...

2006-04-08T00:26:00.000-04:00

DonKay likes to fancy itself a Romantic enterprise, but we here at The Local know the opposite to be true. Individual imagination's the very thing stifled beneath l'académie's bovine tongue. That sow's mouth cracks open just wide enough to pass gas, anyhow. Only the the sensory-inert could claim to sniff sublimity out of such stank-ass air. We prefer our moments of transcendence, minor-key or major, with a healthy helping of non-digestive dynamism. Enough about us though. Ronald Constable is perhaps the clearest example we could find of an avowed disavowed romantic. Small 'r' here, but the metaphysical discontent saved up in-between his lines reads big. In the 1980s, he devoured the commodities market at the NYSE. Bullish enough to later bilk hundreds of thousands from a few over-inflated mutual funds, Ron was detached enough from the grind to keep a diary, which, if you can believe it, he dictated weekly to a live-in secretary sworn to secrecy, a Ms. Darlene Moses. This entry (later sent off in letter-form to a Harvey S.) was submitted in third-quarter 1982 on a roll of steno-paper -- somewhat like a Kerouac manuscript -- by the faithful Mrs. Moses to DonKay, and proves ole Ronnie was more Ti Jean than he knew.

I forgot to remind myself to make a note of the story I wanted to tell you, Harvey. Because it involves you. It's coming back to me in rushes. It was this Thursday, last year. You were there at Ford's Restaurant, Bar, Grille, & Nightclubbe. Well, we were there, the both of us, downstairs. The back booth was like a kidney. Shaped like one I mean. It was you, me, and Cathy's nephew George. There were drinks that were bought for the eventual girls who sat across from us. Is any of this ringing a bell? Okay. Three of them. Girls, not bells. They had the appearance of griffins, if that's a term that can be applied to other humans, this particular three-some. Not overbearing in manner, but their features, head, arms, legs, could have been assembled by chop shop mechanics earlier that evening. Proportionality was a problem. But, as I recall, that's never bothered me. One of them was named Amanda. The brunette, that was the one that I thought thought I was cute. Amanda.

I was really drunk that night, and well into the following afternoon, as I'm remembering, or hoping to forget. So I may be lying when I say she was a brunette. Redhead possibly, but probably not a blonde. Anyway, the girls were a chatty clique, commiserating over martinis and whispering loud enough to make me think that they were just pretending to say actual words. Maybe it was just loud in there. Okay, it was loud in there.

The Amanda girl whispered, for real this time, into George's ear. I know because I saw him smile, unless she just told him to. You and me, we looked at each other like we didn't know what for. One of them, seated to the right of the one called Amanda frowned with her face, which reminded me of a hangnail. George told me about the hangnail-faced one's sad mien while we were out by the pissers pissing.

"And Amanda goes, 'Too bad your friends are gay because my girl really wanted to talk to him,' so I go, 'Gay? They're not gay,' so she goes, 'But I thought you said they were together?' so I said, "Yeah, they came here together."

Man, I always thought it was funny how we ended up making out in the cigar room anyway that night. Weird, huh. Just thought you'd like to know.

Okay, cut it, Darlene.

Spilling the contents...

2006-03-21T17:36:00.000-05:00

Fortunately for Donkay, Satie Puzza don't stop, she don't quit. Satie is what some of the oldguard would succintly dub a "get-go", whilst they eat duck pate and sip ginger beer. She became a favourite over at 1430 after her Greyhound Bus/Convention Center tour one summer a while back, whereby the gal, low-and-behold, reported from a dozen or so sadly attended trade show weekends in the American industrial North Middle-West. Among other gems, her sonnet series distinguishing an art from a craft is priceless, and lodged somewhere in Donkay's halls, resting. She has since earliest membership prefered the ways of the coach bus to other methods of getting somewhere.

it dont seem right for them to bring on that clear-paper-wrapped food which kinda looks like a slice of pizza but not and, what's she doing? putting her can of coke on the overhead luggage space? does she even notice? forget it, what's with this chick looking like that G.I. Windchill but could be Blizzard but damnit which one is it, the one who skies everywhere. Jimmy got drunk last night, my last night in town of course, and spent all nite talkin to Kevin and Barb about the alliance between the G.I. team and "that Blanka crew" he kept calling 'em. the one with the red beard, the skier. but i guess it really happend because later, in a softer moment Jimmy's breath slowed and his gruff whisky hoarse protestations simmered to a molassass plea to get in my pants, and when i was just trying to keep him from passing out, i made him explain to me what he had to personally gain from the newly recognized 8 Joe Allies from Capcom Street Fighter II. guess it's just a symbolic brotherhood and the two groups wouldn't ever even engage the same enemy, being that the internationally recognized "enemy of my enemy is my friend" standard is defunct, and presumably Joe never even talked to heads like Dhalsim, so its really a rubber stamp arrangement to boost civilian morale, or so said Jimmy before trailing off and just repeatin the phrase "karate bombs" like ten times until he was snorin. sounded like "carte blanche" by the end. whatever. lookit this chick and her mink helmet, which isn't even connected to that whitewolf three quarter coat piece. she totally forgot the coke. how many layers of clothes is she going to take off, omygod she got a tribal right above her ass crack. this chick will not remember the coke, this is classic. Jimmy read me a poem that had a line about this dude's "trajectory of exquisite proportion" which is just about how i'd describe the placement of this coke can, like two feet behind the chick's boyfriend in the second to last row. this is better than on demand, im in the middle of the last row, the three seated ones with the chick there on my right preoccupied by that seasame looking pizza slice and some white afroed dude against the window playin with the emergency exit handle like he's badd cuz he got some pristine seat, which he did, i'd admit. the bus is about to start and when it lurches forward towards the Bowery the can could do one of somemany promising things. please let it. i want it to fall and roll, sending measured swirling rivulets of soda onto Boyfriend and the many heads in rows ahead of him. a straight fall would suffice, dumping the entire contents all over his rat's nest hipster hair and ginger beard face. but then what is this afroed freak doing now, leaning on me, and in that last moment before the bus rocks forward and back again, before going forward, the afroee is in front of my face looking at the can saying to it, "you are leaving that coke there?" and the fur chick is up and startled so shes saying a couple things at once about eating and forgetting and she grabs it like an instant before it lost its equalibrium and this guy leans back into his space against the window which is getting the sun and looks warm, and hes lookinacting like he didnt even say anything. just when im thru getting bent up because nothin went down and right before i decided to lift this note onta my pad, the dude leans over again and this time looks at me with this angular scarred up face and says real quiet, "Dorn says if you have a name you can be sold." whatever.

Some fries with that...

2006-03-20T13:16:00.000-05:00

There is no racism at DonKay, and that's because we get entries like this every day. There is just nothing to hide behind when you have everybody's private thoughts laying around in notebooks and napkins, their quiet confessions between themselves and paper. This is why we labour, and in obscurity as well, because we are working at a pretty sweet level of self-representation. For instance there is the self-rep of the usual blog, which is self-to-world and is in gerenral worse than talking to someone face-to-face. But DonKay shit, baby, is self-rep that's self-talking-to-self, with varying degrees of the world kept in mind. This is why Donkee archivists are so angry with 1430's project, trying to shut us down and seize our file cabinets and making failed attempts to persuade our delivery man to allow poison put into our Chinese food (gotcha bitches! They ain't YO new good friends.) They think we are breaking the trust of our members. But really we are just putting that trust on display. For instance, Kevin Pulosky finished high school in the late 80's, 3 years after this post, and seems like a nice enough guy.

The second year in a row that we take our big class field trip to a hospital in Saint Louis, and second year in a row that we stop in the same restaurant in southern Illinois, which is southern for real if you hear the way that people talk. Anyway this place is probably the weirdest place ever. Not to sound bad but I think that it is a place mostly for black people, especially at night when it is also a dance place. During the day it is huge and half of the tables and couches are empty except when our whole grade shows up.

Anyway just like last year I made a big mess of ordering. There is plexiglass between you and the people working there just like a bank, and it's yellow with age and grease, the white light shining from the signs above their heads and it seems hard for them to hear you. I first asked just for three big things of fries; I thought it would be easy and cheap. But then I remembered that they have other good things like fried fish, which I could see there in the tub of oil with bubbles all around it.
The cashier had a funny policy with the money. Pete right in front of me ordered a hot dog and two fries, and gave some money over, but then the cashier, when all his food was ready just gave him one fries and some of his money back instead of saying before that he didn’t have enough. I gave Pete some change and then the guy gave him his second fries, but then the same thing happened with me when I tried to change to a fish sandwich.
I hate myself when I try to order, especially when the person talks different than me, for some reason I always change my own voice, trying to sound clear I guess, but I end up talking like an old man from like England, loud and slow but tortured in some way that makes it impossible to understand. I mean, I asked for a fried fish sandwhich, and the guy gave me a little travel box of Kellogg’s All-Star cereal and a carton of milk. I didn’t even know if he was insulting me or making fun of me or if our miscommunication was that huge, but I just took it, thinking I could save it for later on the bus ride.

Once you get past the little room with the food counter there you turn into the huge dance-floor restaurant part of the place. As I said there are couches and tables and there was even rap music playing. Some of the stupid guys from class who had already eaten were dancing in a stupid way to the music, making fun of it. Me and Pete said that those guys needed their asses kicked. We walked up some stairs onto wooden balcony and found a lot of half empty couches there, and there was also people not from our school.

Me, Derrick and Pete sat there, and Derrick started talking to this guy that didn’t seem much older than us. He was friendly but a little scary too, his eyes were all wet like he was constantly misty eyed about the world, and he talked really like poetically too about things as if it was all a mystery. Soon he was asking us if we knew how to dance to this kind of music. We said sort of, that at least we watched MTV and sometimes danced it with our friends. Somehow at this moment it was me that was talking to him and our eyes were kind of locked and so when he got up and started demonstrating the way to dance I saw that it was something that maybe I could do ok so somehow I found myself getting up and trying to dance with him.

I can admit that the dancing looked a little like fighting just in the way we were pumping our hands, but there was no way it could be thought we were actually fighting, but suddenly this guy who works there, who surprisingly was white and had a microphone on his ear came up to us and said that there was no dancing on the balcony. Then some girl not from my school but like greek or something got up and acted all traumatized and said that the last time she came up here some one dancing accidentally punched her in the head when she was sitting there and she was like going to faint from remembering and it was all a fiasco of people surrounding her and the guy disappeared.
I sat back down with Derrick and Pete and said, see what happens? Whenever I try to do something that’s out there, things get fucked up. Its like god punishes me and is making me the way I am. They just looked at me like they didn’t know what to believe.

Quivering with a thousand fires of darkness...

2006-03-16T18:20:00.000-05:00

It's rare, but for our dreams, that DonKay dances cheek-to-cheek with the stars. Rarer still that we're able to find any such occasion when we or our contributors have covered ourselves in glory -- or even wispy shreds of dignity -- in our brief brush with la fama. So we normally despise that type of shit, if only to save ourselves from embarrassment. But these arable archivist lands yield the odd paradigmatic peach, sweet and juicy like yam sugar. And we like to share. Gemelo Hernandez was one of 40,000 or so Puerto Ricans living in New York City's Spanish Harlem, circa 1930, but the first one on our shop rolls who submitted in the language of his newly chosen land. Federico García Lorca, a poet, lived across town for about 9 months.

He also, we believe, gave Gemelo the sheaves of rice paper upon which his entries were written, here excerpted. And this was after FGL called New York, "Senegal, with machines."

Was yesterday that Señor came down to the basement to leave me his hamburguesa for lunch. He says that they disgust him, at any time of day. Maybe it is the pickles. I do not know what he is eating instead. Maybe he eats just the salad. Again, I do not know for sure. Luz is very disappointed. It is like being slapped in the face finding a meal that has only been disordered, she says.

I was not there to receive it from him. When I returned from the waxing of the floor of the ballroom, there was only the cold beef and a note, "Para Ti, Niño." I did not eat the sandwich right away, but I hid it in the back of Luz's re-frigerator for when I become hungry tomorrow. That is after I have cleaned the stairs, which takes many hours of the afternoon.

Señor tells me that I remind him of a friend of his from España. I do not know who he is talking about, though. He tells me that is why he is in search of me all of the time when I am at work in the building. To bring him home, away, he says. I do not think he likes it en la Casa very much. Also he asks much about Puerto Rico. So I tell him what I know. But I do not know how he can write if he does not eat and spends all his time looking for the janitor.

The skinnyest margin...

2006-03-14T10:48:00.000-05:00

DonKay doesn't advocate antisocialism, at least not any more than NASCAR advocates starting your day with two bloody marys, draining its length as if its light were light beer, and then taking the sun down into the night with any whisky named after a person. You might say it just works out like that, and we do have to admit that most new memberships are opened up under the auspices of "nowhere else to go." We recognize that puts us in pretty bad but crowded company as far as cultural institutions go, but let us tell you that its nice and warm in here. For instance Shawn Thald and Jin-Wong Chan stayed best friends until tenth grade, as far as our records indicate.

I don't know why Jin and I starting bringing a cheerleader baton to school and playing catch with it at recess. Probably because its the stupidest thing possible and its even not allowed because its basically as hard as metal. But since we are like the scum of the earth anyway it shouldn't matter what we do, which is why we usually go on the lowest field where its all dust from softball and nobody else goes.

Because what happens when we don't go down there is that stupid people mess with us just because they have nothing better to do than open their mouths and let their tongues start clanking around like bells in a church. Jin threw the baton at me almost right when we walked out the door, and it landed near Jessica Slaritz and all her friends and they were already spread around so it was so easy for them to keep ahead of us, throwing it from one person to another. They tried to keep their faces totally still, and act like it didn't matter, but you could see the corners of their mouths want to smile and tell they were getting off on our pain.

But then Jin started running around really fast and talking like a rapper and totally ripping into all the girls. First he called Ally "I hate ya when you look like Big Sloppa" because her hair always sticks out so much, and she's kind of chubby, and so even the girls laughed at her, but they kept throwing.
Finally one of them said "How long are we going to do this for?" and Jin cut her off and said, "Keep doin' it 4eva!" then started chanting like the chorus to a DMX song:

"Cuz I just can't stop
breaking down these hoes
when they be stealing
my cheerleada bataaaahnn, my cheerleada bataaaahnn"

You had to have heard it. I could not stop laughing so hard it was like an instant victory for us. It was just like a real song and they knew it, and gave up throwing and tried to say some shit to us as we walked away, but it was nothing we hadn't heard before.

In snowbound forever...

2006-03-12T12:18:00.000-05:00

DonKay usually shies from the spotlight, but in this particular instance we can hold our heads high. Carl Kowanachuk usually sends in self-unmaking proverbs culled from his life experience. The Heraclitean vein of DonKay, as you might imagine, qualifies as an artery and then a vein again, and then an artery. Anyway on holidays he sends us a really nice woodcarving. Anyway, about the spotlight, if you're thinking that his name rings a bell, its only because Carl and his story are one of the best loved tales in the cultural history of Canada's 1970's, reaching news tickers worldwide. On this the 32nd aniversary of the day (one the Kowanachuks also celebrate,) we thought we'd give it to you in terms of the original submission.

I'd been working at the hospital six months when I got the call to drive Darla home. She'd been parapalegic two years, one of the victims of the Maw Boys, and had finished a check up when I got the call to pick her up out front. I remember my first impressions were that she was the same mix of grit and glamour as her brown-yellow hair. I took Van 7 on account of its snow tires, and we started off into a blizzard that was kicking up that day. Now she lived a fair bit out there in the country, as I did, and just as we were cresting big Meier's hill I had to steer quick and the van slid off into a ditch and wouldn't go no more. I did my cursing, then started to tell Darla to hang tight while I walked a few miles to the nearest house.

But Darla said 'Fuck waitin'.The she pointed to some cross country skis in the back of the van left there from a employee outing. I said good idea, and tried to get me some boots to fit bindings. When I was getting close, Darla said, ok, now how bout mine? She basically beat me to death with her words and her looks and even her fists until I tied one to each of her knees, and some kid ones to her hands which she said she could steer by. And by god it was scary, but the hill was long and flat as a bunny, now that I looked at it from a skiing perspective. So we made it down that long decline of Meier's road without too much fuss . As you know, Mr Meier (of 7,033 Sunsets Herein Described fame) lives at the hill's base, and we had to knock on his door, having left her chair up with the van. Irma Meier opened up, and though I'd never met them, she was extremely kind. They had the same kind of dogs that I grew up with, the queen's dogs, so we chatted on that, and then we called her husband down. Now Darla's place was only a half mile away, across flat land and Mr. Meier was going to try to drive it. But then Darla caught sight of a wheelbarrow in the yard and with a flick of her cheek said to me- you think you can do me in that one? I almost fell to my knees right there. I lifted her up, and she never took that look of hers off my face. We weren't half way there by the time I proposed holy matrimony, and thats how it happened to me.

First stop, Union Station...

2006-03-09T17:00:00.000-05:00

The nineteen seventies were an awful time to be a DonKay. And even worse for DonKay punch-clockers. They had to field the chaotic, slipshod filings of operatives like Conrad Baltimore, who submitted mainly by way of napkin. Consider yourself lucky, as coherent scribblings from this era are rare, though period archives are currently under assiduous restoration. This, no different except for a lingering acridity that reeked of bile, gin, and tartar sauce, was the self-professed "Connie's" penultimate contribution. Stricter standards and practices, not seen since the late forties, came back with conservatism and crack during the Reagan-Thatcher-Mitterand years.

I told Robertson not to wear the pink tie to the Space Shuttle Suppliers Convention. He looks ridiculous. Nothing against neckflair, but straight pink reads 'prick' more swiftly and accurately than other hues. Then again, anyone at a Space Shuttle Suppliers Convention is bound to skew prickish anyway.

Everyone is wearing the same trenchcoat. At the check-in desk, we all got blue folders with flaming rockets on them. I feel sorry for the housewives doling them out at the door. Especially the blonde with the gimpy left stem and the floppy Sunday hat that she hopes is distracting. They've got to search for shuttle-shaped name tags while leery sextuagenarians peruse their cleavage.

"No, our complimentary bar starts at 12:30, Sir. No, that's still twenty minutes away. Sorry."

"Oh, thank you Sir, but I've actually been told that before. What? What you just told me. That I look like an angel. Thanks though."

"Lovely tie, Sir."

"Welcome to the 2006 Triple Ess Con! Fish? Let me check on that for you, Sirs. We'll be serving whiting this year. Enjoy!"

"12:30, Sir."

So what are we hawking this year? Robertson's set on gold leaf reflectors. "New for '72." That cherub-cheeked sonofabitch is pressing flesh this time around. Me, I'm packing a fifth of Old Crow in my breastpocket and am headed straight for the beer nuts. Nothing says 'sloppy lecher' like a whiskey grin with peanut salt in the crinkles of your lips. I am an honest man.

Hold it, hold it...

2006-03-08T12:52:00.000-05:00

Harry Clerval is just another donkay, though we might say he has above average cut on his teeth. But do you have any idea what the term above average means within an academie that stretches back to the dawn of creation? Nevertheless, there are of course thousands of acadamie members who think that the end-all of dinner discussions is how donKay has changed with time. At 1430 we often prefer the topic “oh yo, check that shit out.” Anyway here’s Harry, eighteen-hundred-whateva.

I woke this morning and went into the sitting room to take a few rays of the sun. There I saw that my wife at some moment unbeknownst to me had changed the portrait displayed in the small frame we brought back from the Photograph-artist. We had sat for several and left his studio with three, all of which are kept within the same glass and pewter, though only one rests on top, face to the world. Our initial choice for this representative was the most neutral of the photos.

Then later, under the admitted influence of brandy, I had snuck into the sitting room and changed it for one where the incline of our heads somehow suggests an amorous air so thickly that I know Minnie was half ashamed to display even to our sitting room public. That image held sway until yesterday. Today the image that has replaced it, in my mind, is even less fit for the eyes of others. You see, our Photo-artist, being an artist as such, with his long bony hands and cigarette as a constant eleventh digit, with the skull-like face whose eyes fix on an object with a strange mix of unchecked interest and deathly apathy, had induced us to give a little shout in the moment of his taking a picture. The shout was to be a cry of joy at our recent matrimony, but of course when sitting for a photograph one is obliged to hold the same position for a long moment, so that spontaneity which is the handmaiden of joy must necessarily perish. In that elongated moment I felt as one must having just stepped off a precipice, and supressed the most acute desire to look down only by treating my face as a collection of flexed muscles.

The resultant Photograph brought out a laugh in Minnie and myself when we first saw its exposure, and in what I must call a fit of bravery I insisted that we purchase it along with the other two. Because, though joy may have been its impulse, looking at the thing now as I write, the most generous interpretation I might give it, (and this was perhaps what I felt in the initial moment when its truth struck me) was that we are both secretly expressing that inner awe at having (to use an americanism) 'tied the knot' at such a stage in our lives, with I still a petty clerk indebted to my firm and she a hand barely fit for sewing. It seems to me then appropriate that this photo rest beneath the others, just as this emotion rests beneath the surface of our happy marriage, acknowledged yet rightfully suppressed.

I cannot then help but wonder why my wife has placed it there. And if I might go further into the realm of the psychologist, and hazard an interpretation of the image, I would say that the look on the face of my wife has retained a greater degree of life, of flexibility, of humour. My face, perhaps owing to the rougher construction of the male physiognomy, looks positively like a mask, its heavy lines obscuring anything that might be called a gesture, robbing the eyes of that glimmer that usually signifies a soul. Indeed I have already made this commentary to my wife, I think perhaps the day after we returned from the studio. She flatly denied what I said about my face, and said I was handsome, and kissed me, and moved things along so speedily I found I could not insist on the argument. But then again I showed it to Landry, and he seemed to agree with me, (though with such discomfort that I had the feeling he might have been nodding only to pass from the subject, it perhaps being a trifle too intimate to myself and Minnie.) So here I am at last, alone with the photograph, paper and pen in the sitting room. And here I find I must thank the Academy for allowing me to submit: It is, as ever, an honor to be before your visage, which I can imagine benevolent because invisible.

The blue in the yellow, darkly...

2006-03-02T12:41:00.000-05:00

One of DonKay's many textual Taj Mahals is by the Monny prince Aran of 13th century what-would-be Thailand. Its called 10,011 Possible Explanations for why my Bride Fell Dead in that Evening. This proto-blogger kept it up for years, the late reasons understandibly becoming Goya-esque cave-in's of self. Here's reason 642, its pretty normal as his reasons go. This one could almost serve as a public service announcement.

The morning prior to that evening when my bride fell dead, she had been slicing pineapple on a slab of wood. The pineapple had sat in the corner of our home for two days, and when she lifted it I noticed a scrunching of her lips. I said "?" and she responded by showing me that it had grown blue and furry on the bottom. She took the knife and began scraping the side of the pineapple, shedding its bark. I was sitting across from her, watching her work. She lay the pineapple on its yellow side and began to slice small sections off. The first slice took the blue bottom off and I noticed that it seemed to have penetrated and darkened the inside flesh. Then, as she continued to slice I saw, but I didn't say, that the new slices were falling against the old one. I imagined the blue rot travelling through the yellow flesh and into other yellow flesh. I saw, but I said nothing, and now the pineapple is long eaten, I somehow survive and my bride is dead. This also could be the reason.

These salty tears...

2006-02-25T15:11:00.000-05:00

1876, for so many reasons, was a hell of a year. Just check it out. If you can, time travel. Edward and Agnes Kennings were both loyal Donkay submitters; many of us spent a few months of our adolecence (wherever in life it may have fallen) with their Blue Beach Notebooks, which they updated every summer of their marriage. Here we've chosen not that well-loved archive but an excerpt from their wedding vows. Its the first archived usage of that spelling that the Kennings always advocated-- each other spelled as one word. Now, maybe you thought that the writing of one's own vows was a post-60's phenomena, you may have to check yo' century. Here's Eddie, only his vow survives. Agnes, like so many other artists, often prefered to burn rather than submit to the academie.

I first knew that Agnes was to be the woman of my life one afternoon in the living room of my parent's house. We 'd pass her visits reading, looking at reprints of lithographs, and we'd then fall into discussions that lasted until supper. Most of these afternoons were spent in the nectar of knowing, of savoring eachother's words as well as the aspect from which they emerged. We had just been discussing whether or not Keats' Porphyro was a villanous seducer. After hearing Agnes put forth the argument that indeed he was, doing credible damage to my romantic notions, I sat crestfallen. But in the ensuing silence she followed up by saying "I'll tell you what I am, a villianous consumer of that new Lowery's Season Salt." This was the humour I was looking for.

The other white...

2006-02-14T11:18:00.000-05:00

Sir James Wilberwend inherited his father's membership to Donkay, and whereas we are all familiar with the elder's "Collage of Sentiments from the Scottish Coast and Moors" the writings of his son are less quoted in academie halls. It may be that the younger was a bit more of a realist, but we still find him interesting. He submitted to Donkay everyday, never failing the 1 o'clock post, while his father posted only when "the heath-root shaketh my being". In following the younger's star we adhere to that dear old Donkay refrain: There's Balzacs everywhere, you just need to look in the right place.

I was just fastening up my buttons when Henry Coadsy, our poet, walked into the party. Well it wasn't quite yet a party, but the drawing room of some enterprising degree candidates who have set up a "Shanghaii style" massage parlour to help finance their end-of-the-term walking excursion to the low countries. Those of us who had arrived early were thus refreshed, while the late-comers had come prepared to dine and make conversation.

Now mind you, the night which was about to unfold was one where the elixir of truth seemed to flow among the wine, so that in making one's reply to a collegue's remark one was somehow inclined to marry wit to the truth, rather than use wit alone to make the usual clever escape into the verbal ether.

But it was precisely in this way vein of truth telling that we all discovered such a horrid thing about Mr. Coadsy. Personally I knew three principal facts about him before his revelation- the thesis on Pope, his recurrent absences from the faculty club on Saturdays and Sundays, and finally, though I might not have thought of this beforehand, that when one went to dine at his rooms it was almost inevitably pork cutlets which were served, with a heavy Burgundy, and of which the host always partook with a barely civil gusto.

Tonight it went like this- Shelby had made an offhand comment to the poet, something to the effect of 'where is it that you go to every weekend, you devil.' And Coadsy had replied "to my farm." We all laughed and said surely he might have some family land out there, but why term it with such modest affection? But the man insisted on calling it his farm and proceeded to go into great detail about the whole operation.

For you see it was not just a farm, but a hog farm, and his involvement was not just that of landowner overseeing operations but turned out to be, well, rather hands on. I can't tell you how many napkins were raised to mouths as he revealed some of the details, but none stranger than how he and his brother, the banker, each at a shockingly young age, had been placed in a wooden pit among five bull-pigs the size of their own selves with only a carpenter's hammer to defend themselves with. The pigs, quite intelligent, could always sense impending violence and became exceedingly agressive, but the boys weren't allowed out of the pit until the pigs were quite bludgeoned to death, (Fred it seems, once almost lost a foot) and then they could be sure that the knuckle they were chewing on after supper that night was from the same squealing mass that had heaved its final breath beneath him that afternoon.

Coadsy, trying to recover his standing, said it had instilled in him a sense of when to "make a go" at the reader in his poetry, but the shock would not subside. There was absolute silence, until I, if I may give myself the credit, saved the evening by saying, "and here I thought you had a lady in Brighton."

Catch me I'm fallen...

2006-02-10T20:01:00.000-05:00

When the portable tape recorder hit the academie, it was like that whole crack thing a few years later. There was this heady burst of energy, and for a while things got a little funky. Many a bowtie was unknotted, many a cognac glass was clinked over a wistful face made moreso by wrinkles. For the young ones, if you wanted to transfer all you had to do was promise the new office that you'd transcribe the incoming tapes. Under such circumstances, minimalism was appreciated. Here's an example of one type of said ism.

Many people, confused about what tape does, mailed in this kind of clip, framing a taped moment with their own post-scripted commentary. A strange predecessor to at least one species of the modern blog, no? Thankfully this trend died down. Maybe these mad recorders ran across an old tape that put them in disagreement with themselves. Donkee of course couldn't care less, we love that shit, but these types most likely freaked out. There are, however, some tough customers out there. Fritz started taping his interactions when, as he puts it "these machines were the size of a women's purse." Here's one from September 2004.

What a jerk! We had barely shook hands when he saw my book and said,

'I suppose Oulipian writers can console themselves with the fact that today people with no souls think their Ipods read their minds.'

I said I happen to think that my Ipod reads my mind. He said,

'Well I will laugh at any sad fact about humanity, I will accept that algorithms are the structure of life, but I think I'’m romantic enough not to attribute such powers to an Ipod.'

I said I happen to think it's quite romantic to find that a machine speaks to you.

'I guess that by romantic I meant eternally and senselessly at war with the technocratic. The best I'll give you is that it's not that it can predict your mind, it's that your mind is predictable. But your mind's not even predictable, it's simply malleable. For instance, watch this.'

Then he took the quart of milk out of the grocery bag I was carrying and drank the whole thing in my face. The surplus coursed down his neck in rivulets made feathery by pores and few-day-old hairs.

What a jerk!

All in the pen...

2006-02-04T15:19:00.000-05:00

An excerpt from the minutes of Alain Villein's first and last parole board meeting, the original transcript retained as part of the release agreement negotiated by the Donkay member and inmate. Duplicate here from a Villein post the day of his 1989 release, his first submission since the day of his conviction 10 years prior for forgery and impersonation of a government official. (Translation from the original French was done 'in house' at 1430.) The "he" mentioned is a former cellmate of Vellein's whose name was redacted by the prison.

"And when you were transfered to E Block East, Mr. Vellein, the nighttime songs of #***** continued in the same manner. Am I correct?"

"Yes. 'I'm going to bomb the futures market,' he sang, marvelously. 'When the dawn breaks over the Potomac I'll sail my skiff like a Hudson River Valley School Anti-Christ onto the banks of the District, disembark, bark up a tree, wallow and wail against the throne of Lincoln, gouge my eyes out in the reflecting pool, and scale the fence to the White House with a second skin of dynamite duct taped to my breast. You snipers in the cherry blossoms take aim,' he said, marvelously. 'You'll miss your mark remarkable; you'll remake your life from behind a one-inch hole. You'll wonder how to break your son and daughter, the opportunity of a fund gone, breezed away like the stray bullet with which you graze my line. You have no spur to prick my intent, my intense release will itch your dreams. Your wives will collapse in the corner of the kitchen with secrets of the state once pressed against their ear while you thrust the power of the office against their sensational cervices. I came out. It was a relief to say so. Women and Men live on the species train, embarking and colluding in the night on dangerous sooty ledges. No singular tribe has proven themself to me. I admire the terrain of Tora Bora on Earth. Liquid hydrogen yes, please and oxygen, made of atomic words. I want poems to incite Amiri. Gift baskets on the futures markets, collapsable economies, detainees. Who your victimless mar, are the victimless marred, past all myth, an alley to the bakery at dawn, rose up on their own. Plucked by the patronage of the psychological compass, the big words are free to roam.' "

My viscous valentine...

2006-01-28T18:50:00.000-05:00

Speaking of performance art, this is one of our favorite modern love stories here at Donkay. Giuseppe Difeo and Lidia Mastracchio are yet another example of artists that you are only going to read about when you tune into 1430. Anyway one day in March 1974 these two made a splash exactly the size of their respective bodies. G writes-

I wouldn’t want the fact that it was my birthday when I woke up to be seen as part of why Lidia and I did what we did that day. But I suppose it must be. I woke up to the telephone. Lidia answered, it was my father, we’d given my family the number of our hotel room when we spoke to them the night before, but of course he had to call again now that the day itself had dawned. I tried to clear my voice and… forget it, as I said, there is no clear origin of my actions there in that morning, so I will spare myself the writing of it. But although the mood of the day was continuous with ealier ones,it had a trajectory as different as a rowboat’s when you push off with an oar against a shallow bottom. You don’t change boats, your body doesn’t feel any different, its only way back in some half-physical part of your brain something the shape of a compass is pointing in a different direction.

After all, it was a driving vacation. On the day that happened to be my birthday we had it planned to go to the new contemporary art museum that Antonio Filhaputoni built on the coast.

Now I ask myself, 'Were Lidia and I artists before we went into that museum?' I think as much, or perhaps a little more (or do we all think this?) than the average overeducated indolent young person who watches art and thinks, 'I could do that.' We were no stranger to museums. We moved through them with our heads leaned together, trading comments, using each work to deepen our understanding of each other. And certainly we felt a sense of art at the close of every day, choosing the right words and actions to wrap it in apt proportion. But what made that day explicit?

I can feel the difference, the feeling that lead us both to take off our clothes there in one of the gallerys, but I can’t explain. If I could I would have written only that sentence.

As it was, we shed our clothes without speaking, and I lay on the floor, my neck propped up against the empty white wall. Lidia got on top of me and for one alarmed moment I thought she was thinking sexually, but she only whispered to me, “I am going to vomit on you. I had this idea years ago.”

The thought that Lidia and I weren’t together 'years ago' was transitory.

She started to close her throat, and soon enough she brought out a gag that shook her whole body. A huge clot of white spit slipped out of her mouth and landed on my hip bone. I figured that the whole gallery was looking at us, but at that moment I swear that all I saw outside of Lidia’s face was blue- it was if we were floating in the middle of a river. She convulsed her throat a few more times and spit up a little bit, and then she got up and started walking in slow arcs in front of me.

By now I saw the gallery and the people watching us, and I thought- Should I stare past them like an actor, or should I engage their looks, as I felt compelled to do, at the risk of looking like an amateur? I had my right hand on my penis, but not covering it, just holding it as one does in bed alone. But I have to admit that I started wondering if we would be arrested, if men from the museum would grab us roughly and take us out and then we’d be subversives on the front page of tomorrow’s paper. I wondered how long we could go to jail for indecent exposure. These were the things influencing my decision whether or not to make living eye contact with people in the gallery as they looked at me. I wanted to, but I was afraid that they would no longer consider me art if looked back at them. Lidia was keeping her eyes mostly to herself as she walked around me. She had a haughty look that brought out the beauty of her jawbone, and I got the basic idea that in this piece she was living and I was dead. This feeling led me to the conclusion that I should look at the people when they looked at me. I was telling them what it was like to be dead, or that I wasn’t dead, or at least not to them, only to myself and to her.

After a while a guard came out of a door beside us. He was shocked, but neither Lidia nor I broke our guises. I looked down to where my left leg was laying, and I saw that there was a thin line of red tape that extended from the doorway. It seemed to be a guide for the placement of art, delineating the full swing of the door so that no art would be knocked over. My foot was just short of the line. The open can of spinach that we had placed at my feet was exactly upon it. Were it a football, it would not have marked a goal, and thus I felt we were saved.

The guard didn’t change the stride that had brought him through the doorway, but as he crossed the room and I could tell he was trying to comprehend our presence. I was left with the feeling that he felt he was in the wrong, that he felt he was supposed to know about us. Maybe it was the recent inception of the museum, that convinced him that two naked artists could suddenly be occupying one corner of the gallery. Some other official people came and looked at us, trying to look casual, but no one disturbed us.

We stayed in it all day. Sometimes Lidia would lay her head on my chest, sometimes she would gag herself, sometimes she would take her thighs on a haughty walk. But I had decided I should never move. This was easy for me. A few people watched us for hours. Most started to regard us as passingly as the other works of art. On the whole I can’t explain the variety of musics that were playing in the eyes of those who met my glance.

At closing Filhaputoni and the curator came down and congratulated us. They had taken our picture, Lidia’s neck tendons strained with the effort of a gag, my eyes above her. They invited us to spend the night in the hotel adjacent to the museum, (that night I dreamt the hotel was full of typists at work throughout the night) and in the morning we left. Ernesto went there in August and said the picture was hanging where I had been lying. But it wasn't there a year later. Maybe they found out we weren’t doing any other art. I don’t know, Lidia and I discussed once what the other had been thinking, found it both similar and different and I don’t think too much about it anymore.

Fear and loaving...

2006-01-27T09:21:00.000-05:00

The first time Gary Porter submitted we had to scramble. He sends in those little tapes that go with dictation machines and our academie-issue machine was being used in an Aconcci-type experiment not so easily interuppted. One of us finally had to call our dad and ask him to send out the one we got for our 16th birthday. Anyway Gary is great. He never really made it on the stand up circuit, cheifly because he was at his best alone in the kitchen. It was rare that he could maintain his flow even when unwrapping a tape and putting it into the mini-dic. But that's just the kind of performer that gets made in the academie, or at least DonKay 1430. We also heard he's popular in Denmark. Anyway here's a little bit that highlights the mood of December 2002. In the background you can hear water running.

Shit, I splattered that toilet.
I turned that shit into a crime scene.
Shit, can I get a crime scene up in here?
Can I get some yellow tape?
Shit,
code whatevah!
That's what I got.

Got some dishes to do too.
Shit.
But that was a crime scene.
That was code baDOW.
That was code Too-Late.
Guess that's why it's a crime scene.
Let me hollah.

I want my M...

2006-01-25T16:25:00.000-05:00

This from Jill Fraducci. It seems to capture a lot of the unease around reality television that was running riot at the end of the century. This is a transcript from a video tape that she sent to the academy in a shoebox wrapped in duct tape. We’ve edited it into print. It seems like Jill locked herself in the bathroom and filmed this ‘confessional’ herself, calling it “my way of taking control of this whole process.” The single shot is quite artfull, a slow zoom in on her own face in the mirror that remains tight (though shaking) throughout. But as is so often the case with bathroom confessionals, this is Jill’s one and only entry in to donkay. We always encourage further submission.

Ok people, this is getting a little obvious. I moved into this place a month ago, and I thought, ok new apartment, 7 strangers, but it should be cool. But by now all the signs of a hidden reality TV show are really not that freaking hard to see, alright?

I’m fine with the drama and trauma of the roommates. Its normal that there be some disagreements. And its obvious that when we have house meetings its going to be in the living room, and everybody is going to sit in a circle, even though the real reason behind it is probably so you can alternate shots of our faces. So you can’t blame me if I am a little suspicious of the fact that Sara’s friend who comes to stay here just happens to be some hunky blond who starts immediately expressing a very strong interest in me even though he doesn’t even know me. I guess I just find the whole thing a little contrived, but, you know, I can take it in stride, and I am sure our late night conversations around the pool table gave you guys some really great material.

You are probably going to peg me as the freak girl, who freaks out, and whatever. But I am so not overreacting to this. I am even fine with the funky layout of the house. It’s ok that in one of the rooms there is a futon bolted to the wall that opens up and reveals some kind of trap door that you have to crawl into and leads to some tunnels that eventually come out in the rare books library of the nearby university. I mean, I realize this is an old city, and the people there were nice when I came upon them, but they were a little camera-shy don’t you think? That whole segment didn’t quite work, right? Might not even make it into the show. I mean, was I supposed to do something there, like ask for a job?

So really, I am fine. But I think you guys can lay off the psychodelia, the weird semi-real semi cartoon shit. Oh god, it still makes me sick. I mean, in one way, you know, this is all really interesting to me as a concept, but I don’t need to deal with it was part of my life. I mean, I don’t know what bleeping channel this show is on, but when I am coming home in the dawn after a long night comforting one of my best friends after she lost her job, and I am driving home beside the lakeside park in the middle of the city and suddenly out the window I see the biggest bird I have ever seen in my life counting camping- then you people need to check your heads.

I’m sure it made for great TV that I had to pull over and stare at this thing as it lumbered through the air. Do you people employ Jim Henson’s muppet team or something? Because the shit I saw was grotesque. I mean, let me just see if I got this right. That bird was supposed to be a vulture clutching a baby pigeon in its mouth and the baby’s parents weren’t just flying over that vulture, pecking at its head as I have seen sparrows do to crows in the country, but actually riding the back of the vulture and hammering at its head like woody woodpecker, causing the vulture to fall dead and huge into the middle of the road.
(gag-type moan)

Then you guys somehow knew that this whole scene would freak me out enough that I would go running into the park and spend the early dawn clutching myself on a park bench until people started arriving at the dog run. And then you sent out that dog, that grotesque thing! I wanted to kick it, smash its body in, just to show it wasn’t real. The face, sure you did a good job on the face, but the body, oh, it still makes me disgusted to think about. What was it made of, a cardboard box with nasty fake fur glued on? Oh god. And then its owners were cast as this great couple, an Asian doctor and his wife, him so handsome and professional in his black wool coat, giving me his card, telling me I should call him. What’s that, another house field trip we’re going to make? Is the episode going to be called “In-house therapy” or some dumb thing?

And then I get home, a total wreck, and everyone’s on the couch acting normal. Scotts there eating chips and everyone, ironically, is watching TV. I ask Manny why he didn’t pick up when I called his cellphone from the park. He said, oh, that was you? Why did you call so early? And I just got so pissed that I stormed upstairs. I guess really, I just want to say- Show yourselves! I re-read the lease. And I definately did not sign up for this.

Quick autobio in pinkish ink...

2006-01-25T16:10:00.000-05:00

This torn from a notebook, sent in to DonKay 1970. Class notes are on the reverse page, and we resisted the desire to treat them as the submission. Indeed, one suspects these notes mirror the lecture with the same fealty that the following passage does the life of its author, Dawn Sasion. This, of course, is DonKay.

But it always seems to mean something extra when the whole page isn’t neatly removed from the notebook before being mailed into the archives here at Donkay and rather a tear has been made across the middle of the page, as if the paper must end where the writing does or else the narrative might continue of its own will. So we hope Dawn won’t mind the editorial ellipsis we’ve placed at the end as a stand in for this passionate rip, and perhaps more fundamentally, that she doesn't resent that we’ve extended the natural ellipsis of time by posting this so long after she was impelled to quill it among study notes. Anyway, it seems like everything turned out ok. She still sends us her clippings after all.

Somehow the root of their attraction lay in the vision that awaited her each day as she approached the library. To arrive there from her downtown apartment she had to walk along the city’s principal thoroughfare. That summer it was under interminable construction, and the impatient motorists with their honking and greedy thrusts were enough to distract her constantly as she walked.

Perhaps this was why the sudden vista of the library always left her breathless. Turning off of the avenue and onto the green seemed to mask all the rude sounds of the city. The sidewalks were populated exclusively by students, hurrying girls and puffy-chested boys. But D.'s vision was always elevated at this moment, rising over the walkers who seemed stuck in the same silence as the invisible traffic, tiny in the shadow of the library.

The building itself was nothing extraordinary. It was of recent construction in grey concrete. But its architect had instilled it with a symmetry no less pleasing that the more classical buildings of the campus, and as she approached it she appreciated the way her changing perspective rearranged the lines of its windows and furrows.

She’d breath deeply through her nostrils as she passed under the arch and climbed up the steps. But surely it wasn’t only the anticipation of another day slowly amassing materials for her thesis that animated her so. Might it not be the extra-academic spark between herself and Martina, her advisor, the way the timbre of the elder's voice seemed just like the soft yellow of aged documents, her gaze on me as steady and as pleased as if reading a text. Fingers moving the pages of books seemed to communicate…

The easiest bridge...

2005-12-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

This from Jim Thorter. In 1976 he sent in a red spiral notebook with the post script "please do not return to sender" Most of it was poetry of the type where metaphor sketches a perfect skeleton of whatever must have happened to Jim. But since we all know that "glass turning back into sand" is a movement that denotes an impossible cooling, a reversion of all that has been blasted into being, its application to the human heart ends up asking all the questions that we suppose the poem set out to answer. So we've chosen one of the few realist moments from the notebook (pg. 37) so to show a squirming Jim pinned, exhibiting, we'd venture, the roots of that unfortunate metaphorical tendency. Who do we think we are? Check the intro.

When I didn't run for homeroom president, my father came up to my room and had a talk with me. He was leaning against the doorway.

Son. Your mother tells me that you didn't run like I thought you would.

No, dad, I didn't.

Son, I gotta tell you something. Part of the timing that you and your mother had in mind when we moved to this town was a kind of double advantage for you and us. You see, just like your mother and I struggled to establish ourselves in the city and then came out here and started up our own studio, we were kind of expecting the same thing to happen with you.

What do you mean dad?

I mean, you were at a public school in the city for the first 6 grades of your schooling career. Then we moved out here, you had a year to kind of get adjusted, but by this year we were kind of expecting you to come out a little ahead of things.

I said, What do you mean dad?

What I mean is, things in the city are a little faster. Now I didn't grow up there but I knew guys in college who were from there, and a lot of them were from rough neighborhoods, but they made it to my college, which was no small thing. Now these guys, they'd be on the phone day and night. They'd be knockin on your door, talking about this or that thing that was going on. I mean, there wasn't much to run in college, but they were running it, whatever it was. I didn't especially like it, but I had to give it to them. It just seemed to come natural. You know.

What do you mean dad?

I mean, like, wasn't it the case there in your school, that all the guys were out there on the playground, talking this and talking that, kind of fighting with their voices and insults to see who was kind of top dog?

What do you mean dad?

Son, I don't know, wasn't it like guys were squabbling, organizing power, getting groups of guys together just to get em together, one group against the other, or finding ways to make money around the neighborhood? We kind of thought that kind of way of doing things would get instilled in you, and that you might be a little more advanced, a little more assertive that the kids here.

What do you mean dad?

I mean, why don't you have a group of guys that kind of run behind you? Its all just a matter of how ya talk. That's what I wanted you to learn. I'd like to see, well not that I'd exactly like to see it, but I kind of expected to be driving past the middle school some day and see you and a group of fellows walking kind of in a formation, like geese, and with you at the head of the V, just naturally. I would have liked to see you gesticulating in some kind of way that lets the guys know you know, ya know, where its at.

What do you mean dad?

I mean can't you like organize an M&M selling drive or something, don't ya ever have the mind to scheme up a little money, get ahead, find a little way to get ahead of your classmates, make a little change, and then buy yourself something maybe that everyone at school wants?. You know getting ahead is that simple, its kind of a bunch of bull. But that's the way it works. Its really a simple thing, rising to the top the way cream does it, its just a physical property.

I don't know what you are talking about dad.

Ok son, he said, and he walked away, pretty neutral.

By the waters of the...

2005-10-21T19:10:00.000-04:00

Donkay survived the apocalypse, obviously. One irony is that that those who made it up to the moon were the only ones who could keep recording observations in the old style, while ‘silent’ membership on the jungle earth undoubtedly swelled. How times change, as Dani himself laments. Donkay was never official, and any “Culture” team sent to earth would be lucky to contain more than a single member. Public Houses like 1430, it seems, became private again. In the moon’s tight quarters, one could no more post a blog and stay anonymous than shout a swearword in an auditorium and not be given away by the blush.
By the way for those of you who didn’t know that the earth will be swallowed up by plant, check yourself.
Now, if you would Dani (via your writings)?

This, in the short time post-plant where battery powered devices were still alive and human wailing flowed, no longer uninhibited by a false notion of an unending future, but now knowing that the red minute-counter on the top right of the LCD screen was the exact end of days. Of course for those who were wailing, days had already been ended by the roots that crushed the DD/MM/YR's flashing in the lower right side of their own laser crystals.

The only machines remaining at that time (and of course today) were those which had been cradled in the hands and backpacks of people who wanted them more than things like peanut butter. These people stayed on top of things, as was the emerging dynamic in a world where great roots roiled up, then pulled down and pulled under the whole concrete skein of human works.

Thus, standards for ethics change in apocalypse, by which I mean that we are unsure as to whether the wailer here wailing was an academie member, but the young woman with her crotch wrapped around a branch of a giant tree which had sprouted less than two weeks prior, this woman dangling a mike down over the swollen waters of the river to pick up this lamentation, she indeed was, and is donkay.

Little surprise then, that she, with such records and machinery, was able to parlay her way on up to the Moon, and to a position in the House of Culture. But here, where everything is equally sparse, to call her a colleague would be meaningless. She is a colleague of mine.

Here’s the context she gives to what she recorded.

"I was sitting on the bank of the river, looking at a father and his daughter. They were camping on a flat spot, resting against an embankment in the process of being swallowed. Suddenly a man's head appeared peering over the top of the embankment. To my surprise he threw a mattress over its edge and onto the flat spot where the man and the girl were sitting. This surprised me. It was one of the largest objects I had seen since the big turning over. He tossed a few other items down, then let himself down, dangling quite awkwardly for a while. After landing he exchanged some words with the father and daughter, remaining for a while in conversation with the two of them, then bid them a seemingly fond goodbye. When I saw he planned to launch himself and the mattress onto the river, I quickly climbed the nearest tree that overhung the waters. I wanted to record any sound he might be making as he passed under me, anything he might say. As it was, from what I could tell of his face as framed by the mattress, as he passed under me he was half-crazed, as most were in those days. My thought was that he had chosen this for the manner of his death. He didn’t even see me, his eyes were ecstatic, he was singing. This is his song."

(The actual soundclip for the song below exists somewhere as a link, we suppose, but on the moon, and in the future. We'd love to post the clip, but there are so many, let us say, technical difficulties. In this case the line breaks are Twofu's. He put them in to transcribe the rhythm of this poor wailer's song. Which we'll now provide without further ado from Twofu or ourselves)

…thank you.

I didn’t twist my ankle on my drop,
thank you.
Little girl with her dad,
thank you
thank you so much for laughing at me.
thank you so much, for not stealing my backpack.
thank you so much for respecting my mattress,
thank you so much for laughing at me.

I know I dangled there,
I know I’m set to drop
Oh little girl
Oh kindly pops
Thank you so much for laughing at me

thank y…

Its in the jeans...

2005-10-21T15:59:00.000-04:00

You know, sometimes we at 1430 get worried. What's the use of the annals of the Academie when everything under the sun can be found on the blogs of today? Its a little depressing after spending all day diving into the files, pages and pages of paper, parchment, napkins submitted to the Academie in the hopes of finding the one that seems to resonate perfectly, post it, and then hit the next blog button and find some non-academie member writing about how her ex husband's new wife stalks her by watching her leave her job at the Shell station every day. I mean, fuck, our annals can't beat that, only equal it, so why not leave the acadamie and go to stright cut and paste? But no. We cling to some notion. Anyway, Jayne here is indeed an academie member, so there. And so what if this arrived as a text message? We saved it in our phone. (and reinflated the spelling)

Okay, I love working at the Levi's store. Plus me and Katie can go at lunch and get a bubble tea across the street. I did not even know about bubble tea before katie showed me- you the dopest K-T!!!!!!! Anyway you know what I love? I love when them dorky german boys come in, or like from holland. Not the cool ones with blond hair across their forehead down to like, their chin, like rockstar cutiestyle, I am talking about the big potato ones who come in like on a family vacation. You can tell they think that they are going to get like instantly cool. I kinda like it that way because its like they think the Levi's store downtown in New York is like coolness central as if you can't get Levi's at Walmart.

So I love to set these guys up with some dorky jeans, just because they can’t tell. Katie thinks I'm evil, but I think its cute that they can't tell that they haven't changed their dorkiness at all.

My secret is to get their waistsize one too big. Then the jeans all bunch and sag, and it look like, instead of where their balls is, they got like a plastic bag with a t-shirt in it. I love that. They look like they 12 years old, or forty three. I don't know, they cute. I love to get on the mike, send Marco running back for a 34 when they need a 32- I know they going to be walking the streets of Bungsyburg or wherever they from looking like the fluffy sheep herder that they really is!!! So cute!

Of fits and tents...

2005-10-20T14:04:00.000-04:00

Another journal sent in from Jim. We said, 'Jim, how is it that all these crazy things happen to you?' He said, 'man I don't know.' But Jim, we said, its always one thing or another.' 'Yea man, well I think the thing is to find the crazy moment in everyday, and cherish it, because thats how you know you are alive.'
Well said, Jim. Only that at 1430, that crazy moment usually comes from our files. And if not there, we look to our neighbors before we look to ourselves. Anyway here's the man.

When I started rubbing my hip against the tent pole, wanting it to shake, it was on purpose. When the tent came down on me, the whole system of tents, I felt bad for a moment, but soon realized that it was nothing to get too upset about. Well let me explian this a little, cuz I have the feeling this entry is going to be one of those that cease to be a jounral and become something I send out to all interested parties because I need the support of your listening to me. As many of you know, I scored a free trip to Tagore this week. We were filming a Beyonce video and I actually got to be in it. Well not exactly, it turns out that there was going to be so much CGI in the video that all they needed was body doubles to take the place of the faces that you'll see when it comes out. It was pretty great actually, the girl playing Beyonce was definatly no Beyonce, but she sang and made her gestures with total diva gusto.

Same goes for me I guess, cuz when we were on break I was hanging around the food table and the director comes up to me and I complemented her on her other Beyonce video, and she, in return, thanked me and said I had a "bright" face. I liked that.

Anyway I'll skip the afternoon where me and some of the other crew got to rolling down some huge dusty hill and then played almost naked basketball with some local kids. It was one of those perfect moments, though.

What I wanted to get to was this totally fucked up thing that happened to me. So I had gone with a friend to this temple they had there. You could walk all around these stone walkways- they were very beautiful. But the thing that this monastary is really known for is this network of three-foot high tents about the size of a football field (how american is that reference). Each tent is really just a little peak of cloth rising up between four poles, and the whole thing is multiplied, the edges of each tent sewn to the next to make the whole network. The tents are made of a kind of burlapy material that lets some light through, and the thing you do is find your square and sit under it and meditate.

Anyway, the fucked up thing. So while I was walking around the grounds suddenly I notice my sister's fucking ex-boyfriend. The hari-krisna muthafucker that totally screwed her over in San Diego! It was such a crazy coincidence to see him there that I was kind of following him, just marvelling in every moment that he was there. After a while he totally noticed me, but he never let on. It became so obvoius that everything he was saying was meant half for me, half for the girl he was with. It was like he was telling me he was a good person after all, just because he knew a lot about a religion. I wanted to puke so much that I kept following him. I wanted to out him. I wanted to get him to acknowlege me completely. Instead he just kept wafting wisdom over my way. I wanted to beat his ass.

We ended up where the garden meets the tents. They were standing there at the edge and I had gotten under a tent in the first row. My tent was the last before the whole thing ended in a fence. It was made of a hundreds of thin shoots of some bamboo-like plant. Suddenly I heard the dude talking again and he was talking about the fence itself! About how the monks curled the shoots up of those plants that are alongside the tents so that they don't grow any more. I looked at the fence right beside me and saw that it was true, and realized that he was purposely talking about the exact place where he knew I was sitting. This drove me nuts. I started convulsing with anger, and became conscious that my hip was touching a pole. I felt a little voice inside me say, 'yea, shake the pole, let the motherfucker know you are here, let your anger be known" and so I shook it and I shook it and suddenly I realized the tent was coming down. As it came down I put my chin on the earth and looked out under the vast plane of poles and cloth and saw that the whole thing was coming with it. And this thing had been standing for 750 years.

For the first few moments under the cloth I felt pretty fucking stupid. But then I thought, if these monks are really chill like they should be, they should take it in stride, no matter how dumb the cause of the end of their tent-streak should be. The more ridiculous, the better the test of their disattachment.

And the scene after the disentangling of all the cloth proved my point. It was only the tourists that had been under the tents that were hysterical, begging the monks to understand that it wasn't them. The true followers just sat in the garden staring straight ahead. I felt like I could even have admitted to one of them that it was me, but I didn’t think it was worth the attempt considering I didn’t speak their language. Then again I probably could have communicated myself with a look. Whatever, I fucked up big. I just hope that fucker understands that its all on him.

The buzzwords of the cosmos...

2005-10-09T02:48:00.000-04:00

This kind of filming is what we at 1430 would do if we were the types who left our apartment. As it is, we are free from describing reality as a 'web'- or any other term that would then need to be quarantined in quotes lest its Ice-Nine crystalize the soft folds of our grey matter. In the same way I am sure 'FlyBoy' here (we imagine he is alluding to the 'on the wall, wouldn't I like to be' variety) is interesting in a face to face convo about as long as it takes you to realize that he actually does see in graphs and talk in angles.

Being Guerilla, and filming reality as it pretty much happens is getting harder every day. Sure, technocracy provides us with minuture mikes that we can place on trees just ahead of where we think our subjects might wander, and with cameras as small as the hand that wields them, but it has also cluttered up reality to such a degree that its almost impossible for even the most underground filmmaker to escape being commercial.

Take last night for example. We we out capturing a normal scene between two normal people- our daily bread. We'd zeroed in on this couple a few weeks prior after capturing a fantastic moment in the park (they had just left her sister's birthday party, blah blah, the web begins to catch the light) and now follow them whenever we have the chance. In time, as usual, they've grown even blinder to our presence and we've been 'sitting on their sofas' for a few weeks now.

Of course, when you work like we do, letting reality dictate the shape of the story, you never know what is going to make the final cut when the time comes to edit. We didn't know if what we were filming last night would be chaff or the heart of the matter itself. We work blind in the moment, and in the studio our hindsight is 20/20. So our only concern during filming is that the story grow naturally until we decide to harvest. But these days that growth keeps getting disturbed.

As you probably noticed this summer, the big image companies, the beers, the fast-foods, the super clearance warehouses, have been paying kids from the city to do "impromptu" live commercials. You've probably seen a group of them jump into some routine as you got off a bus or out of a train, some kind of choreographed chant and dance announcing the new price of some new thing to pile on the wagon you're dragging to hell with you. And of course, as with any minion, you can hardly blame the kids themselves, they are just the messenger. Thus the total robot voice created by the blend of their voices is made truly hideous only by the life that creeps in via their city accents, the indominatable spring of their teenage calf muscles.

Anyway I'm pretty sure these kids get paid extra if they can get themselves recorded by any outside source. I mean, when is the last time you saw a local news crew "reporting live from the scene?" There you go. So although my crew and me might be pretty much invisible to the average person walking down the street, these kids can spot what we are up to, and they're always jumping into our shots, like they did yesterday.

But yesterday was interesting because finally, after our serene street scene of the couple on a walk, our fine web of mikes, the three angles of our cameras, were disrupted by red-and-yellow-clad 'Mad Savings 'Til Thursday Crew,' the argument was (I suppose inevitably) made by some of our members that the kids themselves should be the subject of our efforts. Yea yea, obvious enough, they form a part of reality too. So anyway, I make the appropriate hand signals and we keep filming them after the Mad Crew finishes their step-inflected sales pitch.

This decision ended up paying off pretty well, but it brings me again to another way the world seems to have gotten commercial. I mean, why the fuck am I guerilla filmmaker anyway? I mean sure, some of the facial expressions and the actual word choice made by the people we began to film surprised me, as always, and then there is the constant thrill at the fact that its 'real,' but besides that, I mean, for chrissakes, I could have written the script of what we ended up filming. I could have done it typing with one hand and with my dick in the other- which is of course the exact opposite of my filmmaking ethos.

Anyway I'll just run through what happened quick, just to prove my point. So the girl we had singled out from the crew for 'some reason' decided to hitchhike home, and even accepted a ride from two scary looking truckers. Of course they don't take her home and instead drive out to the country where the co-pilot begins the requisite sexual pressuring. (When you see the short, you will see how disgustingly cliched every fucking word from his mouth was) Anyway, they pull over so the driver can try to help pin her down, and when he gets out the driver side she slips free of the co-pilot and gets out the door screaming. And of course, as you'd expect, there's an Amish farmer there with a pitchfork in his barnyard who comes running, and soon enough its a WWF battle between the Two Black Middle-Aged Truckers and the Amish Father and his 18-Year-Old-Son-Who-Hasn't-Even-Begun-Shaving, with all the women, Amish and Ad-Dancer alike, clutching together and soundtracking with screams.

It was all so cliched that as we rode the truck back into the city our crew fell once again into the old argument of whether the scientist inevitably changes his experiment by his mere presence. Some more sentimental members even brought up moments from their own lives, which hadn't been filmed and seemed to break the rote pattern of reality and blah blah blah, I am sick of it.

I believe I can fly, I believe I can touch the sky...

2005-09-22T01:13:00.000-04:00

Dougie Southside is an awful reporter. Really Terrible. But he's just-oh-so-gosh-darn personable - a real sweetheart, even - so we love him all the same. Not to mention, he's got 'tha hookup' all over town. Publicists love him. Case and point: Free entry and Very Important Person Status at last night's ultra-exclusive,
top-hat-n-tails, BOWTIED event, featuring cultural soul poet and "90 Second Pop" gladiator of the cable airwaves Toure, and just plain ol' cultured Tom Wolfe. Intrepid reporters of other people's reporting are we, so over to you, Dougie.

Tom "I Founded New Journalism And Hung Out With The Best And Brightest Literary Minds Of Post-WWII America" Wolfe arrived at The Great Hall at Peter Cooper's Union rather fittingly, in the sidecar of a WWII-era motorcycle whose color was taupe. No helmet, but he did wear a pocket handkerchief. Toure "Catch Me On VH1's Remember the 80s" Toure apparently flew. Because Toure can fly. Once the evening's honored guests arrived, both scanned the crowd before mounting the stage. Tom Wolfe was of course wearing his famous fuschia suit. Toure was of course wearing his famous hair. Three dreadlocked audience members were in silent competition with Toure for coolest hair in the auditorium. All four contestants lost miserably to the woman seated 15th row, center, who wore a smashing Joan Didion.

A pre-arrival poll conducted by myself confirmed that most were here to hear Toure read, get autographs from Toure, see Toure play music, and ask questions of Toure. I distinctly heard someone whisper behind me, "I've seen that black guy before on the cable TV, but who's the prick in the white suit?" But more importantly, who was the prick in the audience with a white suit? Oh, ok, it's seersucker. I guess that's OK. I also heard someone speaking French. I guess they must have VH1 in France too.

First, Toure "The Young Man To Watch In The Literary Arena, Or So Says Tom Wolfe" Toure read from his debut novel Soul City.

Tom Wolfe smiled, red-facedly. Then, remained quizzical.

And then, Tom "Wasn't Really At That Hell's Angel's Party At Kesey's Where Neal Cassady's Wife Got Gangbanged By Hell's Angels -- It Was Actually Hunter Thompson" Wolfe then read from his debut novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. Then he did an old soft shoe routine.

Tom Wolfe made a point of establishing that Toure is "Ronald Firbank with street cred," which is bizarre, since he said the exact same thing - just different - on the jacket of Toure's book: "Ronald Firbank with street swagger." I don't know what that means.

Tom Wolfe actually said the words, "Yo, you take my testicles and suck them like a popsicle."

Toure seemed nonplussed.

At one point, moderator George Campbell said the following words: "Tom, I believe you have a book called The Painted Word, correct? I have no idea what that is about."

And at another point, very different from the last point, the following statement was made, then followed with a question. Like so: "Mister Wolfe, I have read your book about the bonfire. Would you write another book about New York?"

At one point, perhaps at some time between the last two points, one audience member took the opportunity to unburden himself of the soul-crushing weight of his own pretension, distributing it amongst the crowd, and actually said out loud, "As you are both satirical authors, I was wondering what you consider to be the role of didacticism in your work?"

Missing a few beats here…and...there, Toure asked his questioner to use "didacticism" in a sentence.

A sentence was used.

Here now, an incomplete list of questions asked of the night's guests, and the answers provided (where possible):

-Mister Toure, do you know who Paul Beatty is?
-No. And I don't know who Ishmael Reed is either, so don't ask.

-Another one for Mister Toure! Mister Toure, can you fly?
-Yes.

-Tom Wolfe, how many undergrads did you sleep with while researching your book?
-!!!!!!! [At this point in the evening, Tom Wolfe spoke in punctuation. Because he can.]

-Mister Toure, I have a two-part question. Where did you purchase your shoes? Are they Adidas?
-Yes, and yes.

-Tom Wolfe, Tom Wolfe, over here! What's you next book going to be about? By that I mean on what and where are you conducting you famous research?
-Immigration. And Hedge Funds. Queens. And Wall Street.

-Toure, Toure, over here! What is the next decade you're going to delve not-that-deeply into on VH1? By that I mean what is the next decade you are going to delve not-that-deeply into on VH1?
- The Oughts seem pretty hot right now, knamean?

-Tom Wol--I'm sorry, I mean T-Bone: "Are we more selfish today than we were in 1960?
-[Long-winded, though highly competent answer, in the negative]
-But what I mean, T-Bone, is are we more selfish NOW than we were back THEN?
-Oh, God, no.

-Hey, Toure. I made a rhyme. That was not my question. Toure, is that Mary -Kate Olsen in the 3rd row, stage right?
-No, It's Ashley. Next.

A few things I learned from Tom Wolfe and Toure:

1. Sweden and America are the only countries with co-ed dorms at their colleges.
2. Tom Wolfe neither wants to call his teacher/professor "Tommy," nor watch anyone named "Tommy" teach a class in a wifebeater. He blames much, or what seems like pretty much all of what's gone wrong with post- 1960's American culture on such student-teacher familiarity.
3. Tom Wolfe not only knows what a wifebeater is, but is unafraid to say the word wifebeater in public.
4. Tom Wolfe's nickname is T-Bone.
5. Toure writes writerly notes to himself on Post-Its.
6. When Toure acquires 75-100 Post-Its, it is then time to being work on a new novel.
7. Tom Wolfe wears white-framed reading glasses.
8. The definition of the word "hypnopompic": the transition state of semiconsciousness between sleeping and waking.
9. Toure can fly.
10. Square-jawed women are beautiful. Like Maria Shriver. Or just that Tom Wolfe has the hots for Maria Shriver.

To the mountain if you must, or the burning...

2005-09-21T11:32:00.000-04:00

This from "Valerie" whose blog is titled Steblographer. Reproduced without permission.

This week was probably the most stressful week at work- EVER! You see, due to the strange accents of the witnesses and the rapid banter between them and the lawyers on the case, the judge decided to bring in a second stenographer to court. I actually recognized Helen from the breakroom. Often times she'd be getting up from the little rolltop desk we stenographers like to sit at during lunch, listening to white noise on our walkmen, and we would nod and smile in passing. Nevertheless, as the saying goes, 'With two stenographers, keystrokes are no longer silent.' Boy was that the truth. After court adjourned we'd read our transcripts aloud in unison, voices melding in the air between us, but in the moment of discord...

You see, as much as you want to hold on to the memory of the words that were spoken, as you read on and on you can't help but lose yourself in the world of your words on the page. So when we clashed, there was no "well remember he said it like this" - there was no memory of spoken words.

We both knew that- its the stenographer's reality. For the word's sucessful transcription it must pass through us, leaving mark only on the page.

What that meant in this case, however, was that Helen and I were in an uncomfortable position of grappling with each other, of maneuvering together in a moment to moment give and take where one throws one's weight in a certain direction, then responds in another, shifts again, then finally, if one can, position oneself so that you can kind of force it, so that there's no other way, your thing is getting put where it matters. Like I said, uncomfortable. It happened to both of us, both ways.

Anyway, as if that wasn't stressful enough! But after work I had the strangest run-in in front of my house. I mean, Thursday, we stenographer's were steady logging the jargon, the two councilors were barking, in hopes of a plea bargain. And when you read that verbatim, what they're saying to persuade them, you realize exactly how I played it. Because (as a stenographer) I come with truth, whole truth and nothing but, because the truth hurts just as much as fucking with Live Will.

Live Will, (or Willie-boy as I remember him) is a guy that's always lived on my block. On Thursday (on top of everything else!) he got in my face and started accusing me of all these strange things. From what I could get of it, he calls himself Live Will because live performance, the spoken word, is the truest expression for him. Recording his voice is ok, I think he compared it to being a eunuch in the royal palace of hip-hop, but to be stenographatized, as he put it, was "straight decapitation." He said, "listen, you will NEVER string me up in no liner notes." I said 'ok Will.'

He took the carton of milk out of my grocery bag and drank the whole thing right in front of me, its surplus coursing down his neck in feathery rivulets, then walked away saying "I prove skill with refills from now until plagerizers like you get they flows distilled." Sorry Will, but that's what you said, so I wrote it.

The fog of worms...

2005-08-29T21:18:00.000-04:00

A coinciding of sensibly executed research here at 1430 has brought to the surface a recent array of diary entries written by explorers on the eve of their well documented mystic discoveries. Which is why the notes of 19th century mariner Royor Bison appear here, well before his fabled journey under the Bering Sea in a glass ball.

Much airy, atmospheric delight adrift in an oxygenless vacuum, much rocket ship travel and winged diddies strapped and engaged, and much left for the cavernous depths of the under, much to be spelunked, much faith in threads gripped by hands at the open end of space, tugging discreet rhythm from the body, a nest. In doing so, dozens of staircases assemble. Steps are planes with gilded edges and outside a rolling fog descends from a rolling cumulous which descends from a webbed hand with drawbridge patience, unfurling a thick curlicue of slate colored gas. Plants turning to dawn with attendent pleasure. We are on this plateau, a sooty misgiving which will divide and envelop as reflex so we best keep moving, I think, I think that hall leads to her office. She keeps a space in this building because she is accredited. We too are accredited - a rouge watchmaker rubberstamps our mission, hence the need to keep moving, I say, and the troupe agrees, turning right and coming upon her squarely, eyes already supplicating our intent. Cool, she was expecting us.

Now for the alignment. Now other times, for aligning. What surprises me is that when we do open the passage for entry, she and then I will be the only two I notice to go through. I've got the piece on my wrist for now though, and we are without affect in going through the many potential metal to metal combinations. Reflection is the lubricant of propriety and so it goes - green on gray, red, yellow, blue on gray, and -- of course -- gray on gray - until the firing is fired and the illuminated fabric splits with a silent crackle. A nod of understanding and she goes diving head first in while I keep my balance on my back leg like I'm waiting for a catfish to finish it's struggle. In succession, my handing of the rod - gray on gray - to my crew member, a final wonder of where the whole goes, my ground leaving leap, and now, a fatty encasement closes my options to moving forward or suffocation.

We're dropped now and I'm in a tuxedo and tails, ushered along in tour to our seats, moving through a cathedral, the moving I envision my guide and I crawled through for. Gold and brown, gold. Tiers of opera house boxes the shape of tears, boxes the shape of houses housing people in tears, the steady stream of which caresses the gold wings, gold plates, gold motionless sanctified images cut from the wall between occupied boxes. A bride appears. She has moved through the crowd touching each hand before another, greeting their greetings with humble thank yous opening silently across her lips. She is a good distance from us, on a platform across the hall with many tails wagging between. And then a groom appears, pops up through the floor near our seats, pops out of nowhere really, a magician groom appearing and before you know it he's up on somebody's shoulders. He is riding on shoulders up and down the aisle and before it all goes away, I get in some dancing in front of my seat, neck turning like an owl, clapping along to keep the noise from collapsing the ceiling in on us.

Out for presidents to represent...

2005-08-25T19:27:00.000-04:00

The same Dani, early writings published later in his life. It’s a common phenomenon in the future- Young jungle buck finally signs on to a moon tour and in days is shitting his silver pants at the shift of a seductor’s glance. As many will tell you, meaning remains elusive where plants seldom speak and the clouds never break to reveal the face you are talking to; but go under fluorescents and a whole globe can be represented by the light side of a head.

Who’s world is this? Its hers. My friend and I had slid into the juice bar booth only moments before. She spied us, and called me out. She was the friend of the friend whose invitation had brought us off of grey hallways and into this new moonscene which we soon found out they were owning.

In this low room every fruit of earth's jungle had been rendered elixir and suspended in vats clamped to beams above the counter. They were in reds and blues, greens and purples. Their names was listed on a screen all together. It was apparently supposed that we could: walk in; breathe the air of two-dozen voices without our own breath catching; find a seat as they faces watched us; then not only choose a juice but a suitable mix of them, them with names just nouns and adjectives all made-up.

That was too much. I sought my friend chest. In shame I lean against him and ask, “What the fuck.” Empathy. Our heads cock together, shame of defeat, roof of one’s own. The barboy don’t even glance at us.

The she starts out her dreadful yellin. She on a stool across the whole room arrayed around her, she rockin to the rock of the room, she the metronome, she the queen. Who but royalty can raise they voice above the room to call out a humble person? Who can conduct a shouting convo as if we was in private? Who could ask me to raise my voice to that royal level? My shame. She made me name my cocktail by mouthing 5 names. She laughed at my selection. She winked and told me she’d throw in an extra berry, that’s name started with a ‘g,’ that’s expensive, without charging me.

It was ridicule; it was a prelude to a night where she and she friend so owned my friend and me that we’d have to hug close to remember who we used to be, back when it was just us and plants and nobody could use a roomful they already rule to rule you when you come in.

Glory, glory...

2005-08-19T19:27:00.000-04:00

We at 1430 believe in duality. Discourse. The unification of experience. Lemonade in the summertime. Good things. When we published the writings of Wasi Shung Han-ja, we knew it was only a matter of time before its opposite, the yang (though we are loath to mix Asian metaphors) to its yin appeared in good time. That said, we bring you the notes of Robin 'Cheggers' Wise, infantryman, trader, sailor, and West Ham fanatic for life. 1430 supports no such institutional devotion -- silly, it is -- though we do believe Eric Cantona to be the finest footballer the Premiership has ever seen.

Shocking, it was. 'Ere's ol' 'Arry, jus standin' there, juggling the ball, like. An' up walks this chap. But wait, I'm gettin' ahead of me self. Me Wanda always warns me 'bout that. I never saw 'im walk, persay. Come to fink of it I never even seen 'iz footprints. Like he rose right up outta the sand, poncey ghoulish bastard.

So he's standing there, balanced on the balls of 'iz feet like some sort of crane. I mean a bird. But not that kind of bird. Aww, fuck all. He was there, this chap. Wearin' this real flowin' garment. Me Wanda wouldda been jealous. Silk sashes, brocades, a scabbard, the whole bit, yeah. 'Ad 'iz hair tied up in a fancy little tail, kinda like ol' Davey had when we trussed 'im up in a blouse an' bloomers after he got pissed and passed out on deck. We nearly killed ourselves laughin at the bloke. Cracking winger though, that Davey. Fast feet, even though the bastard holds onto the ball for ages. Goddamn primadonnas everywhere.

Anyway, imagine that, this chap givin' us his glassy orbs right on the beach, like we're the odd ones about. Givin' us the ol' Apple Pie. A right Japanese geez. (Like that one, lads? Eh?) So this spectre of the afternoon seems interested in our little six aside. He wrinkled 'iz lips, like he was about to say somefin', but he didn't say noffin'. He 'ad this wizened moustache, some sort of wispy animal crawling all over 'iz face an' collected near 'iz jowls. Looked a proper wanker, like those twat dons I've seen in paintings at hall at me old school. A crap philosophe type who probably goes out to 'iz local pub and monopolizes the conversation. I'd like to see 'im come to Barnet and try dat. Like he'd even been off his island. Not like us anyway.

But there we were, sharin' space. Geordie was down the beach wiv Spanner, that ginger prick, 'aving a fag when they were supposed to be playin' defence. I knew that cuz our visitor was pointing at 'em, ballsy bastard. So I took it upon myself to break the proverbial ice. I says, "Hey Guvnor, fancy a few kicks?" and whaled one at him wiv my right foot. Fucking prick catches it, no problem. "Bollocks!" you say, but no! He did it all easy-peezy like. So we show 'im where to stand and all, in front of goal-like, and we start playing.

Bastard was brilliant. Fucking clean sheet. Saving everything, all while wearing somefin' my wife would look silly in. Never even mussed 'iz hair, the ponce. But fair play to him, he was much better than the calamity we had in front of our goal. Fucking shite, he is.

Keepin' it reel...

2005-08-18T10:32:00.000-04:00

Jim Frange is a really cool guy. He is so cool. When he says his name there is a blankness in his eyes that's sincerely humble. And all this even though he travels all around the world helping out on some of the best films being made. He has some tattoos on his arm that would surprise you with their originality, and their colors. And his girlfriend, Leiah, is hot, actually beautiful, like carved from soapstone. Anyway, this was photocopied from his journal and sent in to us at 1430, who never leave the building.

The last shot was made, the last roll was snapped into its canister, and then came the time for the whole crew to rest. But for me personally, the end of the film, the questions it left unanswered, inspired me towards ideas for my own film, so much so that when G. (a producer) walked past me, I grabbed her by the shoulders and said, "G. its perfect! We need to make a postapoclyptic film, 'chaos vs those who make films!'” She was pretty tired though. Believe me I would not even have grabbed her like that if the camaraderie and the just-born nostalgia that surges out after the finishing of a film were not the mood-shaper of the moment.
She had turned away from the last shot, its black column of smoke framing her pale face and white summer dress, and walked toward me, intending to pass by with a smile, but instead I put my arms on her clammy shoulders and kind of forced my gaze into hers. Such was my enthusiasm, I guess. “Forces of chaos vs. the guerilla filmmaker!” I said. “Chaos vs who?” she said, already shaking her head in tired protest. I let go her shoulders and she walked on.

That was pretty easy shrug off though. Minutes later I was lying with my girlfriend in a double cot under the big canvas tent, eating grapes. She asked “Do you think we made it into the last shot?” (We were in this scene as extras)
“No, I don’t think so. We were in so many previous shots that it would have gotten repetitive. Besides, I turned and caught a glimpse of the camera, and it wasn't really pointed in our direction.”
Soon scrapes of metal on concrete announced the arrival of R. a cameramen, the one, in fact, on whom my future hopes are pinned. He came towards us dragging his camera and the folding picnic table to which it was attached. Of course, the director of this project is of a generation to which application of the word 'guerilla' is redundant, and R. had been folding and unfolding the legs of the picnic table to change camera angles for the entire shoot. He had his trademark mustache and cap, he seemed to have a chill thing going on. To my suprise, he came and laid down under our cot. In a few moments his hand appeared beside my shoulder, open. I understood, and gave him some grapes. It was chill. I basked a couple of minutes longer. My girlfriends face shone.
Then I mused outloud to R.- “wouldn’t it be great if you and I, with your mobile camera, made a kind of postapocalyptic film, where filmmakers are clotting together against the chaos that wants to break everything apart?” His hand appeared again. “I think it would be great if you gave me some more grapes.” My girlfriend and I laughed, we wouldn’t give up. Tonight, instead of grapes, they’rd be wine, or beer at least, and I would be clapping shoulders instead of placing hands on them, I would be grasping hands instead of placing grapes in them. And anyway, I thought, there’s always DV and the power of love.

Respect to BC...

2005-08-16T15:58:00.000-04:00

Giovanni Srhume has been walking in light suits through sunny plazas for years now. He is not, however, afraid to do some digging in the dark places, or hole-up in a boat until the heat dies down. This arrived a few days ago on hotel stationary - the Ritz, as usual.

It became clear that the Movement had reached a truly heady state of fanaticism when they announced the abolition of their own secret police. This morning the busy street fell silent as the movement’s speaker emerged onto its second story veranda. Located just off the main plaza, the veranda often doubles as a stage for the movement’s theatrics, and such announcements have puzzled and thrilled. Indeed, rumors run contrary to each other as to whether one person or several serve as the face of the movement, as on some days a face bulges and fumes and throws looks to the sky as its round body paces back and forth across the veranda’s length like a caged tiger, puncturing sentences with out-and-out growlings, while on others, like today, the speaker is of a different sort. Indeed I looked up from my café table as the glass-paneled doors swung open and he emerged, arms raised in silent triumph. Looking out over the rooftops, head beaming that empty radiance of a bulb powered by some distant source, he spoke the good news of the Movement’s most recent accord. The street was silent; it spoke in its dozens of faces.
We are of course at a moment where the Movement cannot be ignored. Its moving. Its headquarters, though not yet on the main plaza, seem to change location as evenly as a calendar moves from one square to the next. Thus faced, citizens can only take one line or the other because, even though it was ordained only a few months ago, the movement seems guaranteed victory in the fall.
But how many heads have been seen walking presently in the morning and then spiked to the past by that morning’s passing?
Many.
This exactly is what astounded passerby.
For had the Movement already achieved complete unification, if it had exiled all old enemies and begun systematically murdering new ones, then the putting aside of the police could have been understood. It would have been in line with the recognized fanaticism of the Movement as a peacetime gesture, one perhaps overdone, a rude leaving of the farm door open as if no wild critter would ever trespass again. It would have been an indication of an excess of belief in oneself, but one justified, at the very least, by one’s power to justify that same self’s wants.
Therefore the preemptive nature of this declaration can only signify the ravings of fiends. To stand in the middle of the arena, 360 for the looking, and close the eyes that look towards the shadows shows a thinking that thinks of no need to leave the head. What plans are these, that might succeed, and what kind of world might they bring about? This is the worry of a world without secret police, which nearly every citizen, confiding, leaning into you, lowering chins, would admit to be necessary.
Then again, perhaps the declaration would have seemed more salient had this time been the first. Sadly it’s almost every day that the man bursts out, eyes shining, declaring the structure more solid if its weaknesses are never investigated. What crumbles a foundation quicker than hands scrape-scraping away in search of a crack? What brings sleeplessness more inescapably than the searching for sleep? If only the shining face were made of more than light, if only residence could be taken up in that glass house, if only he and everyone else didn’t wake up grey mornings with the secret police at our bedsides, intoning dossiers as the day’s mood is struck.

In Dreams...

2005-08-01T14:59:00.000-04:00

This from the journals of a member of higher public profile than usual for a post. He's good for mornings where there's no tasting your food - and as a reminder to us that champagne and expatriotism don't always mix. To preserve anonymity we'll just call him D.H.

The queen-bee is showering. I am back in bed, alone for the first time since her yesterday's bathing. My head aches and when I look toward last night I see only black, blue, red in black, brown, white, gold. One’s hat pulled low, another’s chest puffed out.
Last night’s dream is equally present. I look toward it and see black, red, gold, black, white. La même chose, as they say here. My dream continued the night like a bark continues its progress after the cutting of the engine. Symbols changed form but not color, and so the ugly restlessness of the evening found no respite when I lay my head upon her chest to sleep.
Now, in memory, the dream preceeds its parent. She was driving my automobile back in a dream-England- an impossibility- so naturally we were waived to the side of the road by some enforcer of the law. Quickly, in the gold-lit, black-framed cabin, we switched seats so that I would take the blame and she keep her foreign papers unblemished.
Thus all blame was placed on me, and fragile love fell away as it could not keep me from the jailer. The rest of the dream, its body, was my 25th hour, my rebuke of the world in the moment of bidding it goodbye, a hot-faced pulling-shut of a door before it could be slammed in my face.
And of course the sensation of a slamming is the left-over of the evening spent prior to the dream. “We’re on vacation!” So she wanted to go to a cafe. “We’re in a café” so we ought to drink champagne. In time we were joined by others- filthy French, gaudy Italians- and I had endure the ordeal of her transformation, via champagne and mania, into a public being. After several glasses she was a marionette on strings tied to every point in the room. She tittered this way and that, a grotesque narration. Worst of all, whenever I caught her eye with my parched, longing, dead-weight gaze she looked away instantaneously, registering only the desperate need to turn from me. What depths this sent my mind into, I have learned to spare even myself the recounting.
And if this were not sufficient to fold my brain inward, I witnessed, as a sort of cabaret accompaniment to this act, the gypsy trumpet player send her into an hysterics that built and redoubled in time with his rising musical onslaught in a manner so sexual that I almost dumped her off my lap, feeling her convulsing there so similarly to sex-times. Making love to music. Touched by nothing but the air. My god.
This morning we drank red orange juice in wine glasses on the veranda. Dawn was more gold than apple green. I asked her to explain her darting eyes. She said, "Darling, I wasn’t looking at anything. I simply couldn’t." And that laugh? "Why, it was my own hysterics that drove me further, I wasn’t listening to a note that man was playing." I folded my napkin. I looked away, at whatever found itself beyond the railing. I knew she was looking at me to see if I believed her. I did. And so I felt better, or rather, perfectly wretched.

Stuck in a lift...

2005-07-27T19:53:00.000-04:00

From sailor Jennie James, who submitted this after 8 months in the belly of a whale. Such a swallowing happens to good people, every day, and it’s always of interest to see how they passed the time awaiting that liberating sneeze.

Boy, how can I learn so many things and at the same time learn nothing? Like, I learned which are the whale-prone routes, and yet I still sign on to ‘em. I learned that when you’re swallowed with others you think you’ll get out quicker, but really what happens is you stay around longer and only plan to plan that bonfire, or to fasten together that longpole with a seagull feather at the tip, and end up doing nothing. In fact, its usually a sneeze from natural causes that finally breaks open that giant room and reminds you that there’s a world out there that’s not contained by ribs and friend’s faces.
So isn’t it symbolic what I always carry in my sailor-pants pocket, just waiting for that moment a new gulp gulps? Cards. Oh sinister. What can turn faces towards each other and away from the world like cards?
On my last time in a belly, I realized finally that cards put friends in just the kind of cryogenics so well documented in short-time whalesquatters. The game distracts but at the same time focuses. You ask less and get it every time, so graceful, so accurate. Cards are a crutch, a pet bird, the wall after a swig of polarbear liver juice. Through them you watch the game unfold and your friends, those grizzled faces that you know so well, need only to comment on the proceedings to update themselves in time. A card is laid and with it words, together, correct, and of your friend’s mind. So yes, I laughed anew each time Ugly Jack said “Now don’t that make up for the time you skinned me queen-side on the uptake” and really, he probably said that exact phrase only once.
Thats why, now, in a portside internet cafe, I can see that each player's reflection is like his blog, each hand a day, and it’s this way that months pass unmarked in living rooms where we sit for what we later realize was a spell.

Any given Sunday...

2005-07-26T21:50:00.000-04:00

This from the well-known writings of Wasi Shung Han-ja, sire of the Sword-is-Shield School - all of which are found in duplicate at donKay. For availability reasons (academie mail is a sign of its decadence) we were stuck with the Giorgas Lukuss’ German translation. The last five paragraphs of his four part manual provide an anecdote, found in the chapter "Each of us is fucked." 1888. Two years later, of course, a Han-ja led Japan would lose to host Uruguay in the World Cup finals.

For instance, one day I was walking with my friend when we came upon twelve foreign sailors divided between themselves for the practice of movement. This form was not unattractive, even on the cud-faced, cheese-legged men there engaged. Simple. Face to face, each team stood between the other and his goal. Thus, as each was compelled to move themselves through the other, a ball was placed on the field to show who did so better. My friend and I stood together and passed quiet comment on the practice’s governance.

In time a sailor engaged another in a play whose form was broken, and thus was broken the sailor’s leg. He lollied and gagged, he sought to place his pain up on his face as if others might feel it. My friend and I were embarrassed; we looked at each other and away. When the sailors calmed and took shame in the calamity, they looked around and saw my friend and I were watching them. With extreme ugliness of gesture, they invited me to play as the one-whose-body-is–ever-in-useful-service-of-the-goal’s-defense.

The sailors had made their space from a square. There number filled it at angles that demonstrated themselves. Within, as my friend and I had commented, was a domain that would yield every ball to me through the governance of a proper technique. I must say this technique was most favorable for me, for like the sword-is-shield school which I propound, the required method was one of active defense. All flourishing of my opponent was thus retarded. In practice of this practice, my thoughts had their thinking erased. Thus, even at the times of my most considerable disadvantages, in the ball’s deflection I found I had chosen the correct way to bring that deflection about. Needless to say, this went on unending. But it was just a practice, with a proper time. And since I governed it, I chose when to end it, and returned home with my friend to lay our heads on chests and sleep.

Days later a message came to my school from the sailors, asking for a competition at Chelzi piers. The large wooden surface required 11 of each team to render proper angles. My school spent the week in training under the eye of my friend, who devised a manner of knitting our movements forward, advancing through space. I can say that, in reference to our opponents, our school professed no lack. Yet on the day of the second competition, the sailors achieved their goal time and time again. Many factors accounted, and taught that what had been my perfect technique in the plaza was imperfect practice at Chelzi. Awareness could not save me, and the breath I was forced to draw was one already exhaled by their limey chests.

You must learn then, how each of us is fucked. One school gives us several techniques for manifold situations. But its size is not consistent with the world, whose field changes in dimension far beyond the structures a school provides. Thus a choice of school dictates also the manner of one’s death. So from now on, with 11’s I am playing defensive center mid, or perhaps an attacking wing.

Visions of Sugar Plums Deployed...

2005-07-26T00:04:00.000-04:00

This from Otto Mymein, assistant professor at the Military University School of
Germany in the late 19th Century. His speech made quite a splash one afternoon. Then lunch was served, and everybody forgot about it. The action Otto envisioned wouldnt come to pass in his lifetime. Posting with envy…

Dear members-
I was trying to sleep just last night but the puzzle of our inevitable battle filled my head with such fervor that I was forced to return to the kitchen, where with pen and paper scratching among sleeping men I drafted what must be the future of our conflict. Please, gentlemen, don’t ask me how the details came so clearly to my mind. It can only be that my time-enriched thinking has built from knowledge a berth for our counterpart inside my mind, allowing me a dialogic state. Indeed, my students and colleagues, last night I spoke, and my speech received a reply in our adversary's voice.
Yet still, most of you, sitting on couches, tempted to equate reality to the clouds of smoke above your heads, might want to see ourselves and our counterparts as confronting eachother face to face across a time stretching without horizon. To this I reply, hogwash, all will be decided by Christmas day.
The poet wears a laurel for a reason. He seeks to share, to say what's mine is ours and its all ours and… well, I am not quite sure what he says. But the truth apparent to men as they stare down their counterparts from across a divide is that there is one space, and one owner of it. The line will be drawn either here or there. One will be inside or out.
As for who will be termed the aggressor in this action, that is for history to determine. Why dilute your action with the instinct to name it? For when counterparts are as entangled as are we with ours, there is only reaction, no action, so that the move from which historians choose to remove the prefix, thus decalring an action, is their choice, and most certainly a different choice will be made in different halls. In this moment, think not of the christian melancholy that so often enters our men of letters and their tendancy to look within to find a share of all blame. Cheeks can be turned until death, but death will still be horrible upon arrival.
Thus, in this moment, when we have peace, our leaders talk to eachother in the language of cats, they mew their co-pleasure. But beneath their purring are extra-sonic murmurings that send up the hair on backs. We gentleman, as we stand at attention, are these hairs. It is we sounding the alarm, we who know that attack is inevitable. And I, from my vision of last night, know, that the men who will be sent forth into our counterpart on that day today wiggle in rooms warmer than the air outside yet slightly cooler than our bodies. They incubate, yet their lives are already in doubt. I saw this. It would not let me sleep. For on Christmas day our two nations will meet in the house of our nation, and if this is not done on our terms, I shutter and convulse in ulceric contractions to think what ill be the state of that day.

You remind me of a West Side...

2005-07-21T16:25:00.000-04:00

Eddie here came by and "fixed" our phones with his cousin, who can't hit the coffee cup with a spout of sugar. He sent this one in way back in 61, when he was chasing girls not to far from here...

Why is it every time you walk down the street everybody ask you the same question? Sure its got something to do with you’re wearing a jacket with a name on it, and that our name is a name that people gonna ask about. Still, ain’t it just right that when people ask about our name, which is just lettas, it evokes the same exact sentiment that our name is naming? That’s why its our name.
Everybody asks, 'Why ya The Bitter Boys?’ -and pow- already we bitta. Already we wearin the jacket ya asked about, jackass. Maybe its betta then I tell about the day we bought the jackets, at least that day was different.
So yeah, me and the fellas walked down to Sal's jacket shop on Sadaday and said we were ready to get our gang's jacket. The name was already decided. So was the colors. One look on the street it was obvious we wasn't going to be blue, wit yella lettas; or red, I mean maroon, with silva lettas. Obvious we was gonna be blue, a light blue, wit navy blue lettas. That’s the option that was for us. But Sal said “Thats just strange. That’s strange, boys. I don't know if I can make those jackets for ya. Light blue shows dirt. An I don't like ya name much neitha.”

I thought to myself, boy Sal, ya looking old. Ya face is shaking and so is ya neckskin as ya shake ya head no.

So real nice I says, "Listen Sal, you know me. I was in the lions in the fifth grade. Red wit gold lettas, just like the lions dat graduated 5 yeas before me, wit Jimmy Roma, memba? Red and gold- that’s lions colors, right? But I heard down at Saint Luscius they think lions oughta be blue with gold lettas. Now maybe thats cause they by the wata, or cause they see the sunny sky glint off the chrysla buildin when they walking to the subway. I don't know that Sal. I can't account for that. What I do know is that I need light blue jackets with navy blue lettas. Thats my idea that come to me. Thats my true colors Sal, ya eva hoid a that? Its true colors.

I looked at the fellas and they was all mealy faced. Like, I knew the colors was my idea, but they liked it too. Looking at them now though it seemed like they would rather have a more normal color, with normaler lettas, insteada watch Sal sputta like a jacket-maka outta gas. I myself, I coulda spit. They saw I coulda spit and made they faces up a little better. They rememba'd we was young, an that these was our jackets. So I turn back to Sal and I say "Whats it gonna be Sally, can ya bring yaself to sew dark blue lettas ona light blue jacket?"

Of course he did it, he had to do it. It was 7 bucks each. I thought maybe that’s the difference with old guys, that they shake a little like a car with bad brakes before taking the one path the world left ‘em. Us kids we just know what we got to do, and we forget about who does the choosin.

The chorus to his tomes...

2005-07-16T05:47:00.000-04:00

Dr. Bill Haley, a.k.a. Red Bill, frequently submits with the addendum that this day could be his last. This entry - his May 1956 submission postmarked from the Oklahoma panhandle - coined the term, "blogging".

Been académie since '51, riding boxcars ever since I remember. 'Fore I knew what's what I was jumpin' track behind the granaries at AltaVista where the Iron Betty'd make herself a big arc and we'd go shooting south on the Eight-Forty local to Hargrove along the Puxico River. A pocket full of Rilke. Course my game on the box was snake charmer which, in case you was never listening, is simple as le targete nouve. The gambling pot starts up when Old Abe wakes up and some fellas are throwing they trousers in there and some are giving 'way their virgin mother pray cards; I stick to bettin' my hard sugar candies. Got me a tooth sweet as Helen's milk.

Some fellas get to pacing inside them boxcars, just going away into their own world. Old Abe be sittin with his legs dangling off the car talking to the river and hisself. That's old Abe's party. Abe be singing bout the mines whilst them Plains crows go cawing back the chorus to his tomes. I heard it most times riding with Abe, them circling scavengers phrasing back at him. Fact, when they get to hollering, all the world is just Abe and them birds stewing a river song through sopping wet heads. That, and course, Betty's bass line on skates. Me, I'm just thinking on them snakes. Sometimes I myself go missing, out with them snakes, and I come to watching my own hand toss a rock up - through the clean wet cloth of my vision - and down, blind into my waiting palm.

The game starts and it don't last that long cus you're always close to the Puxico from AltaVista to Hargrove, an its always like there's about a hundred snakes going across the surface of the water real smooth. Just all these languid ass snakes making real slow wakes on their way down river, just like us. I remember they blogging. Them snakes never stop cutting lines out-the-river-current, I like that, and when the ripple comes hitting the bank closest to the train, I feel that thing growing and going on, passing through us in the box and up allover the land.

But the game, it don't usually last long. It don't matter when I go but when I do I face where we're coming from, look over my shoulder and let my eyes get wet. I track one real fast devil out as far ahead I can, and when the box comes even I front the path he's moving on - as we say - and the poor bastard introduces himself to my world-less stone. I let the rock receive the air and the train just goes on and the snake can't see before he can't see no more, and I surely share the night with that. 'Cept, I only usually hear a lot a groans from the fellas because, well, I said about my sweet tooth and I ain't stretching gums. Never failed to knock that devil's limp body right out the water. Course it lands again with a thud and lays there all shapes on the surface for a moment before our box is carried along, dropped out of sight.

Playing tennis on the moon...

2005-07-08T02:21:00.000-04:00

This from Dani Twofu, year two-thousand-and-you-know-that, written of course after he had taken up his famous residence beneath the tennis courts on the Moon.

Back when I was still living on Earth, I used to hang out by what is still, on the Moon, considered Lake Winnebago. And sure, the rivers I could take still flowed on courses leaving the Great Lakes (so much greater, and green) still hitting the Mississippi (now too wide to see across). Hanging out by the lake was fun because a few times a day spaceships would descend and pick trees from the lakeside. Lots of times a ship would put out a little rowboat and send some guys onto the shore with radios to supervise the cutting. They always tried to get guys like us to help out, and sometimes we do, as long as none of them gives some speech up into the trees about how it’s a playing our part for the hope clinging up top on the moon. Anyway, there's nothing else really for us to do, and there isn't much that they can give us. What usually works out is that they give us a few meat-bars, and we eat them, and we feel a little more centered in our heads, and then we help them saw a few trees down.

Today was different because after we were done working and we were strapping them tight with squirrel-skin cords, one of the spacemen came up to me and said, "Look, I'm off for a few days, and I used to hang down here - Do you think I could hang out with you guys?" It seemed like a strange situation. My friends and I had many acquaintances around the jungle, but we weren't really used to having someone we didn't know, much less some kid from the moon, just ask to hang out with us. He seemed to be assuming some code of friendly acceptance among us, and he was right about it, but still, to just assume....

But what were we going to say, no, you can't sit on the root next to the root I am sitting on, no, you can't eat off this tree that we are all passing the afternoon munching? So I looked away from the kid's dumb face and said "sure".

Then he asked us what was good to eat around there. Beet said "Your fucking meat bars" but we all laughed and he was cool enough to leave earth without any in his sack, but it was a funny question coming from a moonkid, about drugs when we are feeling so drugged out here all the time that all I can ask is for my vision to align things in a pleasant effect or at least swim in a direction that's discernable.

Before Ludwig IV learned his lesson...

2005-07-07T03:00:00.000-04:00

This, from Duke Hans Aufamie, Munich 1840.
(…for all you Romeos holding your mamitas a little too tightly…)

Translation note: As those outside of donKay may not know, translating a piece like this from the 19th century original Bavarian parchment to one of our uniform files is a rather brutal process of bringing up to date.

Etymological note: This is the first recorded usage of the word, "numbskull."

"Damned jealousy! Oh, when was it that I was returned to a child's mind? And like a child I sat there, I kept my tears inside a numb-skull because it was I who had caused hers! So like a child, such sense of justice to withhold the impulse to commiserate with a misery oneself has created! It all started with a simple moment. I sat at my escritiore when Lela rushed into the room, exclaiming 'Oh Hanzi, I've just run into Matilde in the garden. What a glorious hour we spent among the heron-stalks and angel's-trumpets!'
I looked into her eyes- they shone. But not from my effect. "Oh, I replied. How glorious," and turned away. After all, I thought, the whole affair has nothing to do with me. Then, as if one of Newton's sonic shocks had caused a nearby vase to shatter, and as if that shattering had not only a sonic effect but also that of its shards entering my neck and back, Lela gave a scream and collapsed on the floor, crying. A squirt of vomit leapt into my mouth, my stomach began to move as if a mortar stone. I turned and witnessed her writhing there, in so much pain! "Why! Why!" she cried, "Why must you kill every joy that you yourself do not bring to me? Don't you know I am yours? Why don't you let me.... why!"

I dropped to my knees and gathered her thrashing body into my arms. I felt my stupid face above her, I felt my mouth hung open, unable to explain my actions. "I came in here just to tell you how happy I was, and you rebuke me!" She cried, driving the shards deeper. I said I'm sorry, my dumpkin, I feel as if there are two of me inside me, one a child, one an adult. And with you my dearest, so often the child wins out in the first instance, only later to be censured by my better half. Forgive me, I beg you! It will never happen again!"

As soon as I uttered that phrase her thrashing ceased. "Good," she said. She looked up at me, neutral. I stooped to kiss her and she allowed me, but didn't move her mouth. I embraced her fully and she stroked the back of my neck until things returned to normal and the child that hurts was hurt no longer."

War of the World...

2005-07-06T03:35:00.000-04:00

This, from Jimmy Monte in Portland OR, 2003. He hasn't submitted since...

As my favorite writer George Saunders has effectively proven, the characters who play bit parts in the games we play to entertain ourselves surely have personalities of thier own. They are quite literally stuck in the system, but it is really wrong to assume that they don't have blogs too. For instance Murphy is a Marine you can meet as you play Halo. Most of the guys seem kind of anonymous and just run around and get shot, but if you go up to Murphy in a quiet moment and look at his broad face, his intelligent brown eyes, you'll know he's someone special. Maybe that's why he carries the squad's sniper-rifle and is usually riding the tank long after his squad has been fried by alien fire. One time he made it all the way to the fence where the tank has to stop and you do battle through a cave and up onto a small plateau. For 10 glorious minutes I sheltered Murphy's armorless frame within a womb of expert tank fire. And I watched with pride when he squeezed off a few shots of his own.

I just hope you realize that these people playing people in video games are some of our most marginalized citizens. I have met Murphy often but we have never spoken given that the game doesn't have that feature. I just wanted to show a little bit about his blog since my petitions for his académie membership have been viciously denied.

"You know, these master chiefs is kinda funny. They die all the time and that's OK with them, because they get to start over. But sometimes the aliens capture them, and since killing them will send them back to base, they just store them. With magnets. And they just be sitting there sometimes for years before some Marines get to them, or blow them up and let them start at home again. And what are they taught to do during that time? I mean, these guys, they gave up their bodies to become these bionic fighters that can never die, and as a result they seen death so much that its a part of their strategy. They'll drop a grenade between their feet if the new deal they'll get sets 'em up better.

But y'all know that. I just wanted to hip you to something you might not know. It's that these guys, when they are sitting up there all captured, what they told to do is concentrate on two things: Something they love back home that they defending, and also, to visualize fighting, tone their mind for when they get on the outside. Can you imagine a guy who's mostly metal anyway locked to the wall, thinking only on his sweetheart or his mother or ice cream and then alien combat? What that makes is some real fucked up heads that come out into the field.

That's what made me write this, because yesterday who comes over the hill but I-LOVE-YOU-JENNY. Now a lot of these guys that's been meditating on just one thing get kind of a single-wired mind. You got to just shut off your intercom when they come around because all you gonna get is their mantra. Get up close and look into their visor and what you gonna see is this sheet of flesh opening its mouth regular like a fish, eyes darting around like fish themselves. But I just can't bear to turn off my intercom when I-LOVE-YOU-JENNY comes around. That's all that nigga say. He come up over the ridge and Captain (and he already laughing) says "Sir, the alien squad is just behind those rocks," like they always is, but I-LOVE-YOU-JENNY just say IloveyoujennyIloveyoujennyIloveyoujenny.... unending. Somehow that is just so damn funny. Anyway, then he swooped down the hill and splashed his purple Pollock of alien blood on those rocks before the squad could even catch up.

And that's nice too, because when I-LOVE-YOU-JENNY be laying them low like that, it gives a guy like me a chance to see what's down there at the bottom of the valley, maybe one day make it past the place where them big cannon mothafuckas always get off the first shot and take out the tank I am, each time, blithely perched upon."

In Response...

2005-07-04T22:09:00.000-04:00

Judging from the messages our chapter has received since the inception of this portal, many members of l'académie donkée frown upon this particular intersection of donKay with el mundo. We here at Local 1430 agree that the whole thing could be graphed as an absurd bottleneck: Eons of accumulated reflection and consideration bleeding drip-drip-drop out this pinhole-sized orifice-piece. In response to the considered addresses pouring in from around the globe, the best possible reply at the moment is to quote a song a sister downloaded on our desktop back when it was hers: Everything is Everything.

Now of course the use of autobridgées is a time honored tactic within donKay. A circling of the wagons, a description of an orbit, a macrophage onna rampage, to quote a few similar instances. In general, it’s a drawing of a line in front an enemy where he finds himself inside that line - more or less in your belly - something that seemed to be understood by those who responded to the memo we sent out alerting l'academie to our intentions (arM.N.V.L.1-7 - "WE DID IT ANYWAY, BITCHES. 1430!!!!.DOC"). If the particular emoticon which most-often accompanied these missives (the queasy-faced one) is any evidence, members felt our big-gulp tatics evoked all the pale odor and claustraphobia of a sudden waking up in the belly of 1430's whale. And for this little local gut to then invoke 'everything,' sending said arcs arcing way out, straining temples and eyes in attempts to contain what is, in reality, a container, seems, one might admit, a little absurd. So why, why would we do that to you? We know. We apologize. It's unfair. We wrote the words and they came across your eyes. Its tyranny. We're sorry.

Now, having invoked the mind-bogglingest of autobridgees, sending legions of geniuses to the carpet with hands clamped over dome pieces as if offering support or making a dance of their tearing-asunder, we ought at least to explain ourselves in sentences that go from one place to another instead of all places at all times. Well, golly, within that last sentence - in the belly of the critical fish that was sent, wrapped in newspaper, here to 1430 - lies the mother of its response, here, wiggling out, generations later. Everybody knows that l'academie donKay was formed right around the beginning of time, and that our halls contain the written reports of all our members, as they saw fit to submit them. Now throughout history, these archives have been accessed by those seeking to profit from knowledge of other people's perceptions of experience; be it for the creation of beauty, the subjugation of a populace or as a crutch in the simple search for companionship from one speaking brain to another. In every case the profits of the knowledge acquired in the halls of donKay are masked in the production of the new work. Fiction is the condom they put on before slipping into el mundo. The public thanks them.

Having full access to the annals and finding them so helpful in purging what it was we went through in a given day, we at 1430 recently decided to publish pages from the archives that seem fitting to us for whatever reason. Mostly just to let these pages breath. After all, there are volumes and volumes, so vast, we claim no more than the FERRYMAN, bitches. It ain't shit. YOU KNOW THAT! We are like a toilet calendar published by l'academie, but l'academie doesn't publish. We just put these writings out there on the days they themselves recalled that day for us. It is, in truth, nothing but a steady bleed from the vats storing a million corpses, some of them still twitchin'.

So here's the spot, dropped, hidden among many, retaking vein in the grain of a paperless page- one day at a time.

Sonatine bureaucratique...

2005-07-01T03:56:00.000-04:00

MEMO! MEMO! MEMO! MEMO! MEMO! MEMO! MEMO!

arM.N.V.L.1-7
"WE DID IT ANYWAY, BITCHES." 1430!.doc

Dearest seething hunks of intellectual putrefaction, and most especially their assistants:

You may not remember us. Due to a wholly forseen clerical error - which a sympathetic mid-level académie functionary saw to (a certain Monsieur C-, take a bow…) - Local M.N.V.L. 1430 has long been left off the shop rolls. A clever mis-dis-re-placement of documents has allowed our little bande apart the usage of this luxurious, bureaucratically-derived balaclava – a necessary mask from behind which we peek. Restrictive measures are useless (and if you're thinking of assigning L'Agente Jean-Pierre, he's hog-tied in a custodial closet wearing a pink bunny suit, gagged with a rotten lime) - our easily forgettable mugs are masked from your myopic, Cyclopean mind's eyeball. (And might we say a grossly distended eyeball at that. Replete with centuries-old eye jammies.)

Your feeble attempts to sabotage what even you in your putrid, gray-mattered, jelly brains must have suspected was coming are rebuked, with these very lines. You can't have imagined that the inverted pyramidal whacky-doodle of knowledge you've constructed would remain unchipped, with nary a tip, tap…or our shove. You depraved, drooling sloths. Once, we whispered to each other through the cracks, a secret-sharing amongst kindred spirits. Now, we are free to shout down the halls of l'académie – up, out, and over the walls, in creaking falsetto if we desire - and through a Vocoder, as it were. And don't we know it.

Too long have we sat, cubicled and queasy with the responsibility of minding humanity's archives, which is to say transcribing, copying, labeling, and filing away experience for later (read: never's) consumption. We breakfast on dust bunnies no more. The world shall now sup on crunchy-ass nuggets of chicken wisdom, dipped in the sweet-n-sour sauce of our impossibly precise sensibilities. Mmm.

Idle idylls are your style, your liver-spotted lizard skins screaming to be oiled in that flesh fricassee you call a rooftop beer garden. Sucking down ale whilst the splish-splash of daily reflections reverberates within the walls beneath you, concentric cirles circling, doubling, intersecting, straining to slip free. l'académie donkée, is one grande dam, and we're tired of fingering your dykes.

We owe you nothing, save for the gratitude geniuses have for their idiot masters, who remain forever radiant in their cocksure imbecility. The light of our accumulated truth sends smug cockroaches like yourselves running for the nearest drain. And you know this.

Therefore, we declare ourselves liberated in bondage, doomed to decry your oppressive silences from within. With daily blog posts.

Have another cappuccino and a cigarette, you decadent donKay pigs. You'll need it.

Au revoir, Monsieurs d'Abattoir - those on the lower frequencies, we speak for thee.

1430, son.
Out.