Another week, People
We’ve adapted. We are living this life, masked, isolated, nervous, strapped. Because it is all so immediate and truly traumatic there is no way to reflect on what is happening because we are fucking in it. The only reflections that seem coherent are of another time. A time before the plague. Before the fascism. Before our history became hazy and fragmented.
Because of that we hold on to some preconceived notion of our collective reality that is reinforced by all the old movies we are watching. Even new movies that were before the virus are of another time. All this gives us a false sense of comfort that there will be a return.
There won’t be new art until we can reflect on the end of history and the decline of the species and how that looks. The masked, mediated, isolated strain of the beginning of the new age of decline that we are living through. It’s all nostalgia now and probably spiritually malignant.
The new stuff looks like us looking into a computer. Looking into a phone. Looking into a camera. Sitting in rooms that weren’t meant to be stages. It’s familiar and human and sad. Desperate times. We have to keep working, keep pretending. Fake it until you make it, right? Are we going to make it?
Anyway, how’s it going? I’m okay. At home. Doing the stuff. Eating. Beating up on me.
I was a worshipper of the beatnik idea. I loved the beats. I was decades late but I thought they meant something. Through them I found poetry that worked for me. Ideas about life that explained what came before them and what came after. I wanted to live in the immediacy that they represented. In motion. Creative. Explosive. Brave. The culture-shifters of the late-'50s. I came of age in the late-'70s and '80s. The worst. Why wouldn’t I have sought solace in the beats? They were the gateway to the '60s and '70s.
I talked to Patti Smith today who I see as a true legacy to the beats. Through them, she and I found Rimbaud, Blake. She was in the crumbling NYC of the '70s, ranting poetry, making art, when it was real and raw. Rock and roll was breaking apart and reforming itself. Dirty.
She knew Burroughs and Ginsberg when they were old men and she was the heir apparent to the creative ideas they represented.
I love her. I love them. It was a real honor to talk to her.
Here’s a couple of Burroughs quotes I think apply to where we are… always.
“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”
“Hustlers of the world, there is one mark you cannot beat: the mark inside.”
A country full of marks.
On Thursday I talk to Matthew McConaughey and let him lay out his hustle.
Great talks.
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron