I’m working to slowly rid this site of outdated links, former friends and things I generally have lost interest in. This means I need better things to put in their place – I’m always looking, but, as always, drop me an email and/or a comment if you’d like me to check something out. I need the sort of stimulation that only comes with begging and well-pointed advice.
It seems that inspiration is so few and far between anymore. Stepping outside my front door affords me very little save the cigarette slowly burning between my fingers, and the irreparable damage I’m doing. Many of my old tricks just seem, well, old, and even the snippets from my phone are as tired as soggy eggs. You look around and find your friends bore you beyond your capacity to accept such things, the art on the walls becomes desaturated and mute, movies blend together, even the music you listen to becomes one long note in one ear, through the brain and out the other, taking any patience and passion you had with it. Even albums that have never failed you before numb your senses, like the frustration that builds when your method of masturbation just doesn’t work anymore. Winter has begun, the season to button down and get to work, but instead you button down, layer, button again, layer, take a benzo until finally you’re in a cotton cocoon, relaxed thanks to the chemicals and not because you’ve accomplished anything real. Night and day mean nothing behind black curtains. Aches and pains are your ghosts of Christmas present and, as far as you can tell, the future as well. Sparks try to light, and for a moment you’re sure the fire will roar to life so you’re forced to remove the aforementioned layers with deft fingers to lie bare against the carpet.
Life becomes frozen pizza, and computer crashes. It becomes dust and almost’s. Your heroes are getting married, or overweight and droning on and on about God, or their underage girlfriend, and their simply FANTASTIC relationship with both, or throwing out scraps that try and pass as art, bullshit.
No city waits for you, no one waits. As a good friend once said, “no one dreams anyway.” You’re overweight with the things that don’t matter, starving for the things that do.
Any healthy man can go without food for two days – but not without poetry. – Baudelaire
The aeroplanes sound so far away.
for two seconds / one syllable
/ takes so much
effort. my / therapist suggested i try
but she’s /getting
paid
and i’m not. - jmt
Where do the Orphans go when the shops close until further notice?
Turn on: Two ugly little ill-colored pills. 20mg. I’ve officially flipped the switch in my subconscious at the end of the day, when the shadows become reality, when a liquid projection screen is draped across my stomach, the quilt a child would use to hide beneath becomes the thing I hate. I turn_on when I turn_in.
Tune in: Laughter, the crowded, suffocating sounds of a cafeteria in middle school, influxes on words that aren’t there, spoken by tongues of people I don’t know, and don’t care to know. Everything amplifies – the sound of a heartbeat, of electricity moving through the wires of my home. Each loosened leaf hits the ground outside my window with a microscopic crunch. Sleep is not the stuff of dreams.
Drop out: I fall asleep, but keep falling. I fall asleep, but keep falling. I fall asleep, but keep falling.
It hasn’t changed here. My struggles are the same, and I have spent nearly an entire year in the abyss. But something calls to me, despite the things I see when I close my eyes: the girl in a blue dress, frayed rope, a voice begging to just. sleep.
“And I can’t…I can’t ever wake up…”
After an artistic crisis of faith, an Anne Sexton poem shoved my face into the bed and asked for one last request before it died. I asked for it to live.
…They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
- Anne Sexton, The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
My sanctuary has never been my dreams, it has been my pen. I’m starting to realize I’ve locked myself out using the same key to get back inside. How many people hold the same keys?
you’re gonna love me because i’m psycho.
i’m bare faced and my little girl tongue
is stuck where you can’t see
i’m addicted and flying when you’re crashing
when you’re convincing me therapy and empathy
are the two roads to follow
the insides of success are paved with something far more sour
like the tea leaves you read
you fucking fraud
i’m starving though i might look otherwise
i’m trying motherfucker,
i’m failing motherfucker,
i’ve a simple heel with a sharp, calloused curve,
a short line to the back of the knee, the hills of the ass,
a dip into the open-air back, an exposed nerve, a torn attempt,
a broken neck, a bobble head, a nervous mouth, crooked teeth,
and somewhere underneath that mess, well,
you know. - jmt
Jingle, jangle, jingle, jangle, the rumble of an upset stomach, of bullshit in the distance. I’ve reached the end of the glitter era, of the era that peacocks more than it makes art. Of the era that is in direct violation of the message to begin with.
To the Orphans, who never orphaned me – we begin…again.
40+ submissions. 1 acceptance. A year later, it’s in a national publication. The Great American Poetry Show. I hold the hard-backed book built on such hope now, in my hands. Would fate be so funny as to send it to me now, nearly 6 months to the day of my last post? Surely not. Even my muse rattles his cage with laughter.
Wake up, wake up wherever you are. Remember dreaming, remember believing? Remember applying such things to your reality? Pick up the wand to your respective mediums and wave it through the unrelenting air. It will give way, it will part for madness. The onslaught of madness. That wry smile on every face screaming, “Stay mad! Stay relevant!”
Thank you to Larry Z., Ai, M3, Mat D. and of course, as always, to the Orphans. xxoo
It’s been a minute since I’ve posted on G&D. It pains me, it is my child. That being said I’ll get straight to the point:
I’m going on vacation. I can’t devote the proper amount of attention to this site, MOD or my writing right now. As most of you know I’ve been in a writing slump for quite some time–and I guess I was hoping maybe it would lift in time for the new year and I would have a ton of new content for G&D, new submissions, new jet sets…but it just isn’t happening that way. So I’m taking six months to recalculate, reacquaint myself with my muse, re-launch and revive. The guilt that overwhelmed me when G&D went without updates finally came to a head when I realized I needed to take a step back and give myself room, without detailing every bit in G&D posts–this is not a diary, it’s a description of artistic faith, after all.
It’s been fairly quiet on the music front in my neck of the woods, I’ve yet to complete a single submission so far this year and MOD, as of right now, is effectively suspended until further notice. My book will still be available but as for the rest of it I don’t have the energy or frankly the desire right now to do a full-scale launch. I once had a very specific dream of what I wanted to be creatively and publicly. Now I’m not sure where that dream lies. Consider this a pilgrimage to find out where it went.
I guess to be fair I could say that I have an entire book’s worth of work in a little green folder next to my computer. It was written during a few of the most dire months of my life last year. It needs editing, focus. One day it’ll come out but I’m just not excited enough to chronicle it here right now. I guess I should say it’s not that I DON’T write, I’m just not excited about anything, there’s no passion. I can’t keep promising and not delivering. It sort of ruins my credibility.
So, to whom it may concern, I thank you, but I’m checking out for a minute. Keep creating, keep believing. I’ll catch up with you soon enough.
A Postcard from Hopeless Beach hanging in my office. "Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (Sets for sale soon at modernorphandesigns.com)
Years ago I was going to help a girl friend write a book. We talked about it often between 2005 – 2008 and I was extremely excited. For a while in 2005 I identified myself as “the co-author of x’s pending book.” It filled me with accomplishment, desire and a drive to succeed. Numerous people could potentially read this book and the idea of nourishing not only a friend but my creative child was lucrative.
Needless to say it never happened despite many promises, plans and proclamations that I was the “perfect person for the job.” (Oh how my praises were sang from the balconies!) For a brief moment I didn’t know how to come to terms with this, but then it all seemed to fade away.
When you define yourself by someone else you glean nothing of yourself. When you place that burden upon your head you automatically become heavy with a needless weight.
Today I’ve released my first book (before she has), have a pending merchandise line and have signed my first national publishing contract. I’ve started to gain my own recognition, pay my dues and carve my own niche on the surface of the Earth. Before I was too ignorant to believe in myself by my own merits and it hurt me for many years. That wasn’t her fault and it wasn’t mine. I just didn’t know better. After the abrupt dissolution of the potential book deal I slowly regained my bearings and started incorporating new ways of thinking about myself, my creativity and how they connect in my life.
Launching this site was the first step in that process. A year ago Gossip [&] the Devil proper was born. I’ve conducted interviews with some of my favorite artists, people changing the game in the art world, written reviews and forged genuine ties across the globe. G[&]D has served as my main house for everything artistic and has virtually taken on a life of its own. That isn’t to say it came easy because I assure you, it didn’t and I will continue to fight for it until the end of G[&]D and on through the birth of something else. I believe in this, I believe in art, I believe in the belief of dreaming out loud, as gaudy and joyously as you can. I believe in experiencing every facet of life which is why you’ll find posts about pills, jetsets and regrets. About music, muses and musings on revenge. Those are some of MY facets, excavate some of yours. Sincerity is free, run through life with armfuls of it, with mouthfuls of honesty and always an ever educated eye on the mistakes of your past. Don’t give in and don’t define yourself by anyone else.
Found in the Red Line subway station, Chicago. "Broken pockets are / leaking poems on the ground / gather up the words." A haiku by a Columbia College student. (Columbia College has rejected me many times. One day though...)
To help me celebrate my creative birthday, editor Larry Ziman, who you should by now know from The Great American Poetry Show, called me a few nights ago. (If all goes well, and all of the poets get their proofs back on time, Volume 2 will be released in June 2010.) We went over some technical stuff for “Voyeur” and discussed poetry vs. poems, how many bad poets get published with the help of bad editors and my potential status as a demimonde (demimonde = a woman on the outskirts of respectable society, usually with many rich and well-to-do benefactors). He said he’d never had someone as excited as I was/am to be published in TGAPS. I told him Pushcart Prize nominations aside, I worked my ass off to secure a spot in Volume 2, submitting 40+ submissions before ONE was finally taken.
In further celebration it has been a busy month for me personally on a number of levels. Namely the installation of my new job with I absolutely love and am extremely grateful for. It’s been a long time since I’ve got to put my juices to creative use at a place of employment and it feels refreshing to be able to do that again. My new employers are some of the nicest, kindest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting and I think it’s no coincidence they came across at this point in my life when I needed some gentler guidance than I’d previously been getting. In fact some of the harshest violence was coming from myself, which was far from productive and likely contributed to some of the writer’s block I was experiencing.
One of the things hit hardest with this lack of creative flow has been the Billy series over at Troubadour 21. While it started out as a single piece of microfiction I somehow thought it’d be a great idea to morph it into an entire series. I’m not sad to say, but it’ll be coming to an end very soon as I’ve simply fallen out of love with the characters and the story, which represents a time in my life I’m trying to move past. I’d love to do another series one day as working with the short story editor Paquita Roth has been an absolute pleasure, but only after I’ve secured fresh characters and a desire to flesh them out over a series. For those of you still following, part IX, titled “Two Worlds Collide” has been posted here, with part X titled “Checkmate” to be posted soon after.
I think 2009 taught me about darkness more than anything. It was arguably one of the worst years of my life, though it brought me some wonderful things (my book, my collaboration with Natascha Artworx and the artists I’ve interviewed among them). People will leave you in life. They’ll love you and lie to you. You’ll do the same to someone else. You’ll regret. It’s part of the experience. You’ll wake up in the middle of the night and know what the darkness feels like, you’ll feel it seep into your very pores. You’ll step into the sunlight like it was your first time. You’ll make promises you will and won’t keep, many times to yourself. Take these things and DO something. That’s what I aim to continue to do in 2010.
