We learn to do things and then we do them. That’s about it. I eat. I shit. I sleep. I wash my face. And I know how to do each one correctly. I totally know, and so do lots of people, except a lot of them really don’t know how to do things the right way even though they think they do. Sometimes I try to tell them, but they don’t always like that very much. It’s all pretty simple. I learn to do things and then I do them. What else am I going to do? Life doesn’t exactly come with an owner’s manual. They say you should stick with things you know. These things I know. I brush my hair, I put on the right clothes, I say the right things, I go to work.

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WHERE I’M AT  ::  This seemingly innocuous post reflects a lot of concerns I have about, among other things, the rigidity of human behavior and ideologies, and the usurpation of culture, autonomy, and livelihoods by the digital state. My freelance verbal branding business (lorangerNAMES) has been in decline for more than a year from the increasing use of AI in marketing (more like mar-cutting at this point); this has been the case with so many freelancer writers that I know. One friend who’d been doing, among other things, production work for the Black News Channel, noted recently that “the whole media industry is imploding.” He’s hit zero savings several times so far, and I’m down to a few months worth of rent and bills before I’m there as well. Those of you with steady or corporate jobs might have no idea how broadly this is affecting humans around the country, at least not yet, but you will soon enough. Am I doomsaying? NO! I’m truthspeaking. The shit is only millimeters from the fan. So in the spirit (actually the necessity) of reinvention, among other things I’m waving arms around about Power Unit 17, my Literary Services business. Should you know anyone who could use help editing their creative work, putting together a chapbook or manuscript, or are in want of workshops or literary events, please direct them to https://powerunit17.com, also linked above, where they can check out my services and reach out with any questions (or some work!). My rates are more reasonable than AI, I guarantee. I also wouldn’t mind hearing about any work the you think I could handle in these my emeritus years (lol!), or anything that might help me to arrive at a better retirement plan than a tent.

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Rip the walls down if you want to live. There’s no other way out of this house. They’ve been building it around you while you sleep and here you are in a doorless tomb they call a palace. It’s got everything you could possibly want, projecting your desires on every surface and clamping you to a sugar IV. You don’t want to leave but you should smash, SMASH before you find yourself blinkered and speechless and swaddled in a bin. Speechless! because you no longer know which words mean what and what sounds come from where. Before you cannot read or write, that’s just around the bend, and you’re two blends away from soup in a slurry.

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UPCOMING EVENTS  ::  Reading on Sunday, May 5 with Zeitgeist Press at the fabulous and psychedelic Art House Gallery in Berkeley, CA. Along with myself, in-the-flesh Zeitgeist authors Jan Steckel, Deborah Fruchey, Paul Corman-Roberts, Anita May, and David West will be reading the work of spirit-realm Zeitgeist authors Eli Coppola, Julia Vinograd, and the Recently (I) Passed Andy Clausen. (Btw you can find a poem that I wrote last October for Andy Clausen’s 80th birthday at the bottom of the Fresh Words page. It’s pretty sweet.) Hosted by Poetry Flash and Zeitgeist publisher Bruce Isaacson. There will be beauty.  ::  After a blessed silence, on Saturday, July 13 I’ll be doing a reprisal reading with Richard Modiano and friends K.R. Morrison and Milo Starr Johnson at Medicine for Nightmares Books in San Francisco. So looking forward to that.  ::  And finally a heads-up for a time of Revelation: Beast Crawl is slouching it’s way toward downtown Oakland, CA, with an ETA of Saturday, July 27. You’ll want to be there and be sure to bring a tarp.  ::  Deets for all on the Events page.

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I am making, I am making the world with my thoughts. I am making my mind manifest. I am manifesting, making your world. Here, it is yours. See how you like it. My mind is here for you, my mind becomes you, see how easy it is, like water. I am water making you, I am pooling everywhere, I fill the world. I fill your life. I am making our world in my image because it is a good image, a good mind. You’ll see. You’ll thank me. Because my mind is good, in fact it’s more than good, it’s clear and sees exactly how things should be and I’m making that, I’m working it out, it’s so easy, I just think and move my hands and there it is, growing and blooming and expressing itself on everyone and it’s the best way, my mind, my mind is destiny, it is manifest, it is power. And you’ll love it. You’ll see. You’ll bow before it.

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REFLECTION ON ART  ::  Born a Problem, multi-media installation at Gray Area in San Francisco, April 28 – May 5, 2024

On May 1, I went to check out Born a Problem, a super interesting exhibition in the Mission by Paula Te and Edward Gunawan. It investigates and unveils a dark period of oppression in recent Indonesian history, which the artists hope to give further recognition. Namely: between 1967 and 2000 a CIA-installed authoritarian government initiated a series of anti-Chinese policies that led to massacres and cultural, socioeconomic, physical, and sexual violence against the Indonesian Chinese community. The exhibition is essentially a piece of text art presented as an erasure poem. The artists took the full text of five Indonesian laws from 1958 through 2000 that progress from stringent definitions of Indonesian citizenship through increasingly oppressive laws limiting Chinese residents which provided a platform for the cultural violence, to finally a repeal of the laws in 2000. The text of the laws is printed on 13 hanging maroon banners about 2×9′ each, and is almost completely redacted with black lines with the exception of occasional white words that combine to create the poem. Hung around a small gallery space, the oppressive feel of the banners and the stymied text is visceral. The multi-media aspect of the piece resides in an augmented reality app (created by Te) which allows you to point a phone or tablet at any part of the banners to watch the black lines explode, revealing the laws underneath. It then allows you to read the entire text of the laws unimpeded. Apologies for not having a photo to share the initial effect.

I attended the Artists’ Talk which featured Gunawan, Te, and sound artist Colin Sullivan discussing the background and creation of the piece.

The exhibition is only up through Sunday, May 5 from 3-8 at Gray Area, 2655 Mission Street in SF. If you happen to be in the area, I urge you to stop in and check it out.

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There’s sort of a code of empathy, isn’t there, of treating others with compassion. But why is that a code exactly? Because it says to pay attention to one range of emotion over another. Because it asks, isn’t the world brutal enough? Because if you’re prone to it, and certainly not everyone is, you have to remind yourself to have compassion, or to maintain it, and sometimes you have to force yourself or talk yourself into it. In that way it is a code, what I think they call a sense of principle but doesn’t that get corrupted fast, hey, so I prefer to think of it as a sense of humanity, of what might or could be, of being human. Of working toward something instead of ceaselessly competing to own it. And as we remind ourselves again and again, we begin to re-mind ourselves as well. Let’s re-mind.

Sincerely,
Richard
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