Remember when we were kids and we’d sometimes have sleepovers and listen to the dark together? That’s what you called it, Anya, listening to the dark.
Sometimes we’d pretend to be camping. We’d set up a tent and eat candy and look up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, and the planets and meteors too. The stars were yellow and the meteors were red and the planets were all different colors. And you’d say let’s be quiet and listen to the dark and we’d listen for a little while but you could never keep quiet for long and you’d start asking me questions like what did the dark sound like to me and what was I thinking but my favorite part were those intervals of silence when we were not only listening to the dark but also breathing it and perhaps dreaming it. At least that’s how it felt to me.
And it was because of you Anya that I started naming different types of dark, listing them. Warm-dark, cave-dark, void-dark, womb-dark, sleep-dark, Eros-dark, blank-dark, siege-dark. And then there’s that anonymous dark that gets inside your head and behind your eyes and coils around your lungs and constricts your breathing. There is also curse-dark, which casts a prolonged spell, a pall. And then there’s lonely, but naming it doesn’t help. Not in the same way.
Now that you’re gone Anya and I’m still talking to you I wonder what kind of dark this is. Communion-dark, veil-dark?
We used to listen to the dark together as kids and now I talk to the dark with the hopes of hearing from you again. Echo-dark. Or better yet, Anya-dark. An entire category of dark devoted exclusively to you. How do you feel about that?
Photo by Anthony Distefano
Posted in photography, Prose, Publications, Uncategorized
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Tagged alley, anthony distefano, first love, John Biscello, New York, no man's brooklyn, shadowlands, street photography, the dark
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Signs everywhere: rectangular slabs of mildly glowing metal that warned in red lettering: Demasking is a crime.
It was in the year _______ that a maskless society had ceased to exist. A decision was made by people who made decisions of that nature (yes, the masks, the decision-making, the proper authorities, all of this stuff was no longer part of delineated hierarchies—who did what and why—all had become a cryptic jumble wadded in bowels of electric red tape, society had become a covert subset of gumballs.)
If you took your mask off, your facial pores would release an acidic chemical issued from micro-pellets which had been implanted into your face (the implants were government regulated), and your face would burn. And keep burning. It would be excruciating, intolerable, and it wouldn’t be long before you put the mask back on, which would defuse the acid.
Everyone was issued a mask. All the masks were the same. A uniform anonymity, a sea of samefulness, or rather there was only one standard issue mask with six different colors. Red, green, blue, purple, gray, yellow. The colors you were assigned to wear was based on zoning. Your location dictated your color. When a child was born they had to be registered with the M.O.D. (Masking Ordinance Department) and the implants would be surgically implanted into the facial pores. If child wasn’t registered, and the proper authorities found out, the child would be seized and enrolled in what was known as the Nursery. No one knew the location of the Nursery, or much of what happened there, but basically: the Nursery children were wards of the government until they were old enough to be released back into society.
There were the fugitives. Those who refused the indoctrination of masking. Fugitives, unfortunately, didn’t have a very long shelf-life on the outside. The barefaced ones stuck out like sore thumbs and were easy to apprehend. Some did wear masks, of their own stylistic design and color. These masks might be modeled after indigenous masks from Africa, from the Lakota-Sioux, from Zuni, they might be modeled after Venetian or No masks, there was masks of colorful anarchy, masks with long Zucchini-hose noses, masks engraved with floral patterns and imprints, masks of sleepy revolt, attic masks, eyeless mouthless masks with swirling riots of cursive, masks abstracted into vowels, masks of warbling translucence, masks that radiated a funereal whiteness, masks of glaring hyperbole and exposed hypotheses, masks that had frozen the contorted muscles of screams into the mask’s texture, masks with quizzical half-smiles petrified into question marks.
There was an entire subculture of people who crafted and donned masks to assert their individualism, or to place a visual and symbolic wedge between themselves and the Anonymites (how they euphemistically referred to the uniformly masked members of society) and they flung themselves and their radical masks into the thick of it all, like bombs in a crowded marketplace, bombs with the kamikaze intent of exploding umbilicial strands of mucus and magma. Their time out in society usually didn’t last very long. Anonymites would turn against them, turn them in. Bad apples exhibited in a public cart was something that most people didn’t want to see, or to be made visually available to the world at large.
White vans would roll up and men dressed in white linen and white caps, looking very much like crosses between milkmen and painters, would seize the Radicals and wrangle them into the van and they would not be seen or heard from again. Rumors had it that they went to a place called the Repository, though, like the Nursery, not much save for the notion that it probably existed, was known about it. The men in the white linen outfits and white caps were referred to as the Dogcatchers. No one knew who first started calling them that, but it stuck and circulated, and as a result the Radicals then became known as Strays.
Dogcatchers, Strays, Anonymites. The world had become quartered into agitated simplicities.
I have been in a coma now for sixty-seven days. No one reaches me anymore. And I don’t reach them. Everything that has to do with reaching—in, out—all of that is done. It is jazz that has lost its voice.
I am adrift on a blue glacier in the middle of the sea.
Here, there is no history, only invention, and hopes for survival.
Here, from my icy alien distance, I pitch a network exec on my idea for an interactive pop odyssey through American culture and void, I get all crackly and charged telling them how it will be the remix of a remix of a remix ( I get lost in layered Matroyshkan notions such as these, by which we feel there is more, always more, when I know there is always less, so much less…)
Yet being adrift on a blue glacier
in the middle of the sea
in a coma for the past sixty-seven days,
I am inclined to fill up all this
hobbying nothingness with my own set of illusions,
which of course are not mine at all but remixes
of remixes … you get the idea.
Here’s where the odyssey begins.
It is a book, it is a film. It is interactive. You are part of the action. You must participate—physically, sensually, imaginatively, etc.—in order for the venture to be successful, in order for the gaps to be filled in. You also have the choice to leave the gaps completely unfilled, empty. You don’t have to do anything. This book will exist without you, same as you’ll exist without this book. There is no mutual bond of dependency. There is the Mission Impossible creed, remixed: (now being spoken through the ghost of Tom Cruise through an aging grade school’s P.A. system, also aging: If you choose to accept this mission…)
You are aboard a space ship. There are lots of blinking lights, a multi-colored siege of blinking lights and cool-looking consoles that are both futuristic and retro, Star Trek as a stillborn space-baby. All of it is very thrilling, very exciting, you are intrigued and highly stimulated by all the things around you that are beyond your grasp, which is pretty much everything: the lights, the humming consoles, the ironing board on long spindly insect legs, the blue-skinned alien with a coiled pyramid of dark, glossy hair set atop her head, the way she is ironing a yellow shirt that looks like it might be Lycro, and the way the steam exhales from the iron like the hissy snortings of a gentle baby bull.
You are aboard the ship, you don’t know why. A dignified-looking gentleman, with dark eyes and spongy gray hair that stands several inches high off his scalp, turns to face the screen, that is to say the camera, and speaks directly into it (this he does after after all the people and activity around and behind him have gone into a freeze). The Captain engages, in a rulerthick stentorian—We, the characters? You, the readers, the audience?
We have stopped. When we start again, you will see a black screen.
Continue reading →
She stared
at the solitary gull
perched on a craggy rock.
The sea, like undulating slates
of purplish steel,
or bruised rust,
while a glaring wound
of a sunset poured scarlet ribbons
from its Martian gash.
The gull flies away, a dilating comma
with unknown plans.
Sometimes
it was nearly impossible to bear,
all this beauty and sadness,
the feathery crux of registered crushes,
excruciate in their due course
of perishing, and remembrance.
(For All Hallow’s eve, a “witch’s” tale)
Enlightened, perhaps. God-engorged hormones, maybe. Regardless of why, Joan, you were the rebel prototype
long before James Dean zipped up a red jacket,
or Marlon Brando mumbled and curled his upper lip into a totem,
before Louise Brooks and Josephine Baker and Mae West scorched bits of screen and earth and tore hearts to shreds with a flickering edge.
You, Joan, were the world’s most famous, cross-dressing heretic,
the It-girl of alleged sorcery,
a rebel very much aligned with a cause,
coursing a waxwork future and belated sainthood.
It was in your father’s garden, age thirteen, when you first heard the voices, saw the visions.
St. Michael, St. Katherine, and St. Margaret, a trinity of Beauty unbearable that brought tears to your eyes.
But they didn’t come to serve as spiritual eye-candy, or to bring you otherworldly comfort. They were delegates, delivering a message direct from the Man Upstairs, a command which, to any less a mystic, might have fallen on deaf ears, a task that would have registered as preposterous or impossible, but not for you Joan: faith was your stock-in-trade.
So you listened, took it in, an illiterate, thirteen-year-old peasant girl on the cusp of puberty, being told that it was her duty and obligation to help lead France to victory over the English, to fulfill a destiny that had been part of France’s prophetic pipeline for generations: a virgin will come, a miracle-worker, and she will restore France to its former glory.
You would have been happy to stay at home spinning wool with your mother, tending to the animals, gazing dreamily upon the milk-bearded faces of clouds, to pass your time as a humble girl quietly in love with God, but you knew it would be bad form, downright impious, to argue against a trinity of saints that had taken the time to visit you, just you, in your father’s garden.
Not to mention, when God gets in your head, like a luminous migraine, or a marvelous tumor, what can you do except abide?
The rest is history. Or myth. Legend. Pages from a tattered scripture in a gilded dustbin.
Something.
There were the victories over England, the coronation of Charles VII, at which you wielded your iconic banner, your capture and imprisonment.
If there had been tabloids, you, Joan, would have been splashed daily across the headlines:
France’s Favorite Maid to Be Tried for Heresy
Joan, the Teenage Witch, Refuses to Admit Allegiance to the Devil
Of course, as God’s cheeky, chosen daughter, you had no intention of going gently into that good night.
Several times you tried to bust out of the big house, often falling from great heights.
When the Inquisitors grilled and viciously quizzed you with the hopes of railroading you into an incriminating confession, you shrewdly sidestepped and evaded all their tactics, case in point:
Inquisitor: Are you in God’s grace?
Joan: If I am not, may God put me there, and if I am may God so keep me.
You had the bastards squirming, Joan, eating their own blasphemous piles of shit.
But, as it went, they rode a gross miscarriage of justice all the way to the stake, to that fateful day,
May 30th, 1431, when they burned you, not once, not twice, but three times, before scattering your ashes into the Seine.
You were nineteen.
Twenty-four years away from being acquitted at your retrial,
four-hundred and seventy-eight years away from beatification,
and four-hundred and eighty-nine years away
from official sainthood.
Which just goes to show that history may be written by the winners,
but the rewrites belong to a much higher and more mysterious order.
Images by Guy Denning
Posted in Artwork, Cinema, Poetry, Prose, Uncategorized
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Tagged arclight, Guy Denning, halloween, joan of arc, John Biscello, poem, realm of the spirit, sorceresses and saints, the passion
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At first there was darkness, and there had always been darkness.
Then the stars turned on.
And music played, as if silky notes drifting through a night-cloth dome of windows,
and in this way wonder entered the scene.
Wonder mated with music and seeded people.
People would go on to forget their original parents, but would long to return
to this mysterious unknown, this insoluble home.
There would be that tenderly agonized longing, that homesickness,
and there would also be the deepdown knowing
that emptiness knew the score, i.e., that they, the people,
are made up of so much more of what they are are not
than of what they are, or think themselves to be.
The whole thing was an opera, a fretted fiasco,
with the recording of a mute fat soprano
playing in the background.
Do not explain music
Do not explain dreams
the elusive penetrates everything
You must know that everything rhymes
—Wols
There is something deeply comforting about this, deeply reassuring. Everything rhymes. A universe of correspondences, of sequential richness, metaphysical jazz. It really is a world of poetry. Tuning in to the rhymes and melodies, and giving praise and honoring and playing. You’ve got to be playing. Participation is the key to mystery. To feeling into the mystery, allowing it to hum and hymn inside your bones, to gather inside you in tiny concentric whirlpools.
Everything rhymes. A never-ending stream. Now I know why the writers tried to catch waves in the stream-of-consciousness, why they chased after the shadows of darting minnows.
Sure there might be bigtime ego involved, but one thing doesn’t negate another, its ego plus the fact that there is a trust and belief in the ultimate rhythms and jazz and cosmic waves rolling ceaselessly.
The ocean. The bottomless qualities of the ocean. What if we ever made it to the bottom of the ocean, the very “bottom”, and we found that there is no stopping, there is no bottom to the ocean, no bottoming out, it just goes on and on and deeper into the mystery, or we are taken to another world, another dimension. The ocean, like space, may just go on and on.
At the heart of the deepest ocean, there might just be deeper mystery.
A wondrous endlessness to the whole thing.
Everything rhymes. Stacked layers of rhythms, a structural base of sound, vibrations, patterns, recursion.
Everything touches. There is no actual separation. Separation is an illusion, a con-job. The touching is the truth.
Everything rhymes, everything touches.
The creation of a new mythology. Rooted in most ancient, pagan mythologies.
The re-mythologization of art, return to a state of sacred devotion, the world re-sacralized, and we praising, honoring, playing, engaging.
A felt-sense of the world’s magic, or currents running without pause, a divine seething, a convent of pure feeling for the unseen, for the numinous. A re-spelling, through chants and incantations, to language as a vehicle of sorcery, and you create the world which simultaneously creates you.
Everything rhymes.
Nothing to worry about. No explanations needed.
No dry brittle logic or tortured rationale.
Everything rhymes. A letterless alphabet of sorcery. A hidden lexicon of numinous glyphs. To get there, you must not assemble or contrive or apply boxy logic to a sense of ordered architecture.
No, no, no. What you want to do: hallucinate deeply, and abandon yourself to a state of reverie. It is this state of reverie, this state of longing (for the elusive and inscrutable), this is the sovereign way of the sorcerer and the poet.
To get there, you must be in touch with the blue flame.
From the blue flame, within the blue flame, through the blue flame—sorcery!
Everything rhymes in this letterless alphabet of sorcery, in this bottomless soup of jazz.
See
the blue flame
a thin mesmeric
whip of a girl
dancing ever so slightly
inside the milky-opaque
slab of glacier.
See
the blue flame,
grow intimate with her,
and feel your world shift
forever.
In honor of the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s “death-day” departure for roads unknown.
When I was a young man,
a budding scribe
eager to blossom white fire,
and scabbed lotuses,
you meant the world to me.
You exposed me to velocity bop
and piggyback rhythms,
to applepie windowsill jazz
and summerlight porchswings,
to mesmeric wreaths of pipesmoke
and the windswept skulls
of railroad Octobers
in brown, turning earth.
You souleased
in such a relatable way,
the freight of boyhood
infused your eyes
with saloony verve,
your fingers jitterbugged
across enormous swaths of whiteness
and void,
you bootlegged
lyrics
Melville-style,
just to keep yourself
in the running with
Hemingway’s bulls
and Joyce’s Dublin,
whitewhale hunting
came second nature to you,
some people do impossible
like half-made angels
leveled by mortal booms.
Their very gimpness
embodies
the purest translation
of Heaven’s perishable blooms.
Yours
was the religion
of sweet, sad farewells,
the capered goofs
of littleboys spitballing
I love yous
to girls in pinafore dresses
at Sunday movie matinees,
or profane leerstruckness
at the silver crucifixes
resting
between ripening mounds
of sweatbeaded cleavage,
yours
was the racket of vaudeville,
commingled with a fanatic’s
fairground zeal,
the Zen weatherman
who once proclaimed:
The taste
of rain—
why kneel?
Yet
it wasn’t long
before
Fame,
that highly-sought-after
stalk-legged
dame
in a mink stole
and whitehot spray
of jewels
came along
and cornered you good,
and the Shakespeare of Lowell
quickly became
Little Boy Blue,
nowhere to turn,
as the flesheaters
closed in,
and all you could do
was blow wild, careening
solos through your trusty horn,
and pour
rivers of whiskey
over your soul’s
godgiven.
Recognition didn’t kill you,
alcoholism did,
but let’s just say
recognition
mixed with booze
in the redlight district
and pinkened sensitivity
of wounded souls
sharpens
and humors itself
through the gallows.
When names
balloon too big,
when the print is lettered
through the Hypemachine,
it is easy
to lose sight
of what it is we’re reading,
Fame’s overlay
the distorting veneer
so you are no longer reading
what you see or feel
but rather what you’ve heard
from a hivemind,
secondhand rumors dispel
direct engagement with mystery,
what others know
and say
becomes the order of the day,
and that long day’s journey
into night
is, by definition
and default, history
(its winners wearing blinders
while leading the blind)
but before the siege,
and after the deluge,
Jack Kerouac, Ti Jean, Sal Paradise, John Duluouz,
and all the other names that became you,
there were the words, the holy writ,
the godblasted scrolls of one man’s
selfspeak upon the earth,
that rabid seeking
as gilded sibling
to Dylan Thomas’s hilltop cloudcry—
Oh, as I was young once,
and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying,
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
You,
Mr. Kerouac,
were one of the wind-twisting
chain-rattlers,
frothing fringed baubles of sea
at the mouth,
as if to prove
you were nature herself
(this the way of angels, the way of children)
and when I look back,
I am immensely grateful
that you took the time
to give the spirit of boyhood,
its vim and keyturned sorcery,
as well as music’s
plasmic alchemy,
its reverential due
in a society
where doped dreams
register
way too much sleep
to ever claim their meek
as soundly vital
and golden.
Review of Hiroko Oyamada’s award-winning debut novel, The Factory.
The year was 1936, when an indefatigable tramp served as a working-class Virgil in guiding audiences through the hellscape of big business industry and assembly line madness. The tramp, of course, was Charlie Chaplin in his iconic film, Modern Times, which applied fool’s wisdom in overlaying its satire with calculated mania, circus-like antics, romantic aspirations, and a punch-drunk heart that refuses to throw in the towel. There is a visually brilliant scene in which the tramp gets swallowed up in the machine on which he’s working, a hapless Jonah churning within the gear-heavy belly of the industrial whale, and this image metaphorically underscored what Chaplin saw as the threats of dehumanization confronting “modern man.”
Fast forward to contemporary society, in which a sprawling factory, a city unto itself, is regulating, ordering and arranging its brave new world one rote directive after the next. It’s easy to imagine an emaciated Kafka stooped over one of the desks, half-obscured behind a tower of documents, staring out bleary-eyed at the ledge of a window where black birds are gathering. Across from him a nerve-bitten Nietzche, paces, furiously smoking a cigarette, and refashioning his notions of the abyss to fit the conditions in which he finds himself atrophying. The abyss, now an omnipotent complex, an unnamable morass with a bottomless capacity for soul-feeding. People are no longer staring into the abyss, they are wearing it, breathing it, speaking it, and perpetuating its slow-drip filtration to the staccato of the walking dreamless dead. And while Sartre might be hiding out in the basement decrying — Hell is other people — some asthmatic clerk on the fifth floor counters by scrawling on the wall in red marker: Purgatory is the void manifest as something you clock into and out of. That being said, thousands are employed here, including the three whose lives are chronicled in Hiroko Oyamada’s mordant fable, The Factory.
Posted in Books, Press, Prose, Publications, Uncategorized
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Tagged book review, contemporary Japan, fable, John Biscello, new directions publishing, novel, The Factory
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We live in a world
of alchemy and swing,
a freeform board game
for sounding and experiment,
and anyone
that tells you any different
has simply forgotten
how to engage the play
of their lives,
or sow the grit, resin
and bones of their
mineral-rich interiors
into viable grist,
the truth is,
every ounce of material,
no matter what its contents
and effects upon you,
carries within it the seeds
of an alchemy
seeking practitioners
willing to sync up
and align
with the everchanging
timeless course
of scat, swing and bop,
or to borrow and remix from the emcee
whose old-school gospel
made ceremony out of ash and siege,
If music
be the food of love,
play on you
alchemical romantic chefs,
play on.
John Biscello 