Tuesday, April 13, 2010

No Fool For April

I want to forget everything I've done.

Too much knowledge can hold a new creation back.

If I were 20, I wouldn’t know any better.

I'd blindly pursue a relentless passion. Passion would be my only fuel.

Nothing bad ever done to me—or a friend—would be on the radar, clouding.

No rules or philosophies would be in the way. It’s not like they made history or created greatness.

A rule is a has been. A philosophy is often a never been.

Erase.

* * *

Magic has no rules.

The best visions create a New World.

Things that can't be seen unless you believe...that's how the Harlem Renaissance came to be


Some say the Crossroads are like that...that intersecting transformation from good to great.


* * *

The people who create conflict or regularly make excuses—they are truly, exceptionally, unbelievably great at what they do. It just takes one of them to rule your world. To affect something you once loved (everyday).

I see old pictures--I remember the feeling i once had, no longer there.

Choose your enemies cause they will define you.

You could spend the rest of your life on what's bad (with or without knowing it)...what someone did to you. What someone did to someone else. What someone didn't do.



You could spend every life next to you. I got spent.

I read a tweet today: "Your life is who you are with."



* * *
I don’t want to be a clichĂ© of what I’ve done. It’s too easy to follow what worked. Or stay comfortable in what is. That’s how a formula is born.

Over time, soon enough, it goes stale. No formula works twice the same.

“relevant or passing? fresh or stale?” I tweeted today, after reading the same old.



Basquiat was here


Basquiat was here


* * *

Habits – good and bad – they keep things the way they are, stuck. A self-inflicted status quo. Limbo.

Attached to habits, convenient philosophies justify why. Why I haven’t done anything more (or less).

On most days you feel productive making perishables somehow. I photograph a lot of things that disappear.


* * *

With technology, everything's faster. What I saw the last second is no longer needed the next second. We live in a Disposable Age.

THIS is a throwaway.

There's always something new, right away.

* * *
I once wrote a book about life before 20. How everything you do is for the first time. And how more and more after 20, it’s been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.

How life is ruled more by money, love, or kids…how less and less is done for the first time. How more is done just to survive.

* * *

If I were 20, I wouldn’t think. I would just do.

Be free.

Let the wind take me.

* * *
The book was called Table 20. A conversation around a table of people who’ve lived older years talking to people doing things for the first time.

A woman, 20, became my muse. I had stopped writing for 10 years, letting everything be. She told me everything that happened to her for the first time. Unadulterated honesty, uncensored. Raw, uncut.

* * *


“I am leaving the center, going to the edge, finding that new frontier, that new art, that soul of inspiration,” I tweeted yesterday, after seeing a fictional place called Lipton Village become real.

Got Spine?

* * *

I have no doubt that leaving all that I know behind will go somewhere better. A journey not pre-determined.

It's why i know New York. Nothing expected happens.

No mockery of a self-fulfilling prophecy. No traps laid for oneself. No story where “you just fill in the blanks.” No fast track to mediocrity.

A jaded reporter, a national hero, a one-trick book author, once told me that quote while pissing into a urinal staring at blank wall.

* * *
It's key to see clearly, feel that clarity, only you can see


I want to forget everything I have done.

Sometimes too much knowledge holds a new star back.

I see it in everyone held back.

Erase.

* * *

Singer Kate Sland, headed to Ireland, once sang: "We will all be erased."

"All these nameless places, nameless faces, all forgotten after a day."

Today I pay tribute to that T-shirt store on College Street. Pictures of the disappeared. The store disappeared. Every word written outside on a whiteboard, erased.

1 comment:

X said...

written stream of consciousness after reading Amanda Palmer tweets and a doc on Gavin Friday. When he was young, Gavin and a few friends at age 12/13 made up this place called Lipton Village. They pretended they would be big Artists in this fictional Camelot for poets. Fiction became reality when some of them became one of world's biggest bands, staying together for 30 years. The band was called U2. For Lipton Village, Gavin named Paul Hewson... Bono Vox after a hearing aid store Bonavox in Dublin because he could sing so loud the deaf could hear...

http://bigthink.com/ideas/16638