Tuesday, May 5, 2009

If the dog does not stop barking I will kill it

The year I watched the Cremaster Cycle all in one sitting except for 10 minutes in a theater in downtown Atlanta I'd never been drunk. I went alone to the theater for the whole day and sat in a room and did not eat. That was a day. I was in there. The projector broke during the very end of Cremaster 5 and we had to come back a few days later to see the last 10 minutes. I did, alone. For that first day only, and the bonus extra completion time, I guess, that specific screening room had several thousand doors in it, doors that were no longer there in other days when I came back to the theater.



That year I had not yet dropped out of music and realized that music essentially is repeating itself with very few exceptions. I had not yet stopped believing in music beyond the parameters of wallpaper and joke, with the exception of the few certain albums I could not and can not still listen to on actual air as they represent too much of another period of time that is very dead and very gone. Most of these records exist note for note inside my head and can be accessed without thinking.

This may or may not have been the same year I dreamed that I was listening to my then favorite album, laying on the carpet in a room of my best friend's house in my younger years, where we spent so many days playing role playing and eating sugar. In the dream I was laying between two sofas and listening to the album, and the album entered a random access groove in its playing that allowed me to hear a track on the album that had always been there and yet no one had heard. In hearing it, I levitated between the two sofas and hung there on the air.

Another year I dreamt of the house I was living in at that time, as if I were awake there in the sleeping, and in the house I went upstairs from the room where I was sleeping to the upstairs where I could hear a friend who also lived in that house with his door locked listening to a record made of music so new and unlike anything else ever recorded that I could not move inside the dream. The dream had the actual music in it. My friend came out of the room in my pausing and his body was completely covered in sweat. He told me the name of the band playing this music was 'Gulange and Godfather.' He shut the door again. When I woke the music was no longer in my head.

Sometimes motherfuckers get real.





One of the things I will never forget is day the kid showed me the cut out section of glossy paper picturing a woman's vagina that he had pasted into a set of origami paper legs, we were standing on a black road that became dirt slightly ahead of where we were, there were several others all around me, the kid with the paper woman was smiling, he closed her legs, later that day I bled and this was not a dream.

The year I gave Bill H. in third grade a picture of my younger sister and he drew over her face with black marker and cut it into slivers and kept it in his desk and sometimes would take the pieces out in class or otherwise sit there staring straight ahead.

The first time I said 'fuck' was to a black kid on the playground that same year without knowing what it meant, we were on a wooden bridge looking into a metal tube, I can remember his eyes.

Shit shut me up I have been laying in the floor all day and deleting words out of files and eating cranberries and bran.

I feel a force of negative power wanting, and me wanting with it.

I need the gibberish tattoo.

I need money that I can spend believing in anything.

Today and yesterday and.. I can't find focus on anything but blip.



Next time my dad is in the backyard burning things in the barrels I am going to help him no matter what words might be in my head.

Do you want to go eat Mexican food with me.

What is the best way to stop trying.

Once even Oprah had a couple teeth:



If I could see everything that blurry. If I had a good haircut and a suitcoat.

Right now someone is outside the window calling for someone to come see.

9 comments:

davidpeak said...

prurient + detroit = dreamy

Ken Baumann said...

I liked reading this.

parts I went 'uh huh, yes' to:
_____________________________

I feel a force of negative power wanting, and me wanting with it.

I need the gibberish tattoo.

I need money that I can spend believing in anything.

Today and yesterday and.. I can't find focus on anything but blip.

What is the best way to stop trying.

Anonymous said...

Sorry to be an empty suggestion machine, but if you are thinking along these lines, have you seen Ryan Trecartin's strange cloning/carrerism/pastel movies? This one is online at least. They stick with me. . . .

http://www.ubu.co/film/trecartin_area.html

BLAKE BUTLER said...

i like david

i like ken

i like anonymous and will check them vidsz

dancing goat man said...

yeah. now you're talking.
I still havent seen cremaster properly, only standing in the guggenheim. wish they'd put the whole thing on video.
keep talking. coat your computer with vaseline.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

they seriously need to dvd-ize it. it's an experience. particularly parts 2 + 3. if he never lets it get released i'll be pissed. i know you can download them but the quality just is ehh.

vaseline exploder

Matt DeBenedictis said...

You should have gotten a trophy or something for experiencing the Cremaster Cycle in its fullness. The trophy should have been sharp, came brand new but already stained, and spoke in riddles when the feelings of horniness were around it.

BLAKE BUTLER said...

hi matt: i kind of did get a trophy, exactly as you describe, in my headflesh. i still think about it all the time. i still have the stubs for all 5 films. it was an important experience. i hate when people call him overrated, which seems to happen a lot. i think he's underrated. :)

Anonymous said...

I want to eat Mexican food with you. We can have beers with lime and rage at existence or something