21st Century Space Race of Sustainable Housing

“My version of the American Dream…it’s not about having stuff, although I do have nice things and I like them, what I like even more is time, time not to have to work to pay for a lot of crap that you probably don’t really need that you bought because you think you were supposed to have it. If you don’t have a mortgage and the taxes are low, how much do you really need to keep going?”

From the film: We The Tiny House People (Documentary): Small Homes, Tiny Flats and Wee Shelters by Kirsten Dirksen

Sustainable housing and the race to own is part of the fundamental underlying psychology of American and Western life. Making the shift is becoming tougher as the laws that govern mass society tighten their hold. I live in an apartment that is 18 (width) x 21 (length) feet. I've been living here comfortably with my wife for almost two years without complaints.

Read one of my recent publications on this theme at Outward Link

_________

With unspoken clarity, the Voodoo eyes of an Andean homunculus trespasses my mind with the depth of innumerable multicultural narratives; a grandeur of spiritual insight in the night of youth’s upbringing, synchronized in the silent sweep of imaginary play and the experiential divide of my true, hard-felt ascension atop a cavern mount of an empty and dark fate. Memory brushes oblong throughout the imperceptible, brittle light, a medium of failed intent in the thoughtful bondage of gross time. I look up, and to opaque, starless night.

Effigy Bottle by Anonymous (Recuay)

The human sky of night’s imagination dawns, as a cloth of plaster and wood, incinerating in the buzz of a static electric mire of projected brain, as follicles of neurons splay magically in a host of speechless disquiet, the air is pockmarked with the living breath of subconscious flesh downpouring its rain of enmeshed golden ash onto my waking perception with the rife torrent of singular mystery, the subtle crossing, tread between inner sight and the outer eye.

Travellers surprised by rain by Hiroshige 

The mountain seethes. My father’s forecast beckons truth from my brain, spouting a translucent passion, to see through the entertaining fires of apocalyptic forbearance. Yet, it is true, and in three days, the temperature rises through the Earth. The seas boil and the atmosphere blinds with stinging fright. The core, inflamed, invites solar lust in an embrace of human extinction. The rich, whose dire plans to descend into the safety of well-stocked caves, are burnt away as the fire breathes an exhale from below, and all else are incinerated with the dry lick of the inhaled flares of our sun, dying at an astronomical rate in a cloudless space of astral silence.    

________

We drank in the rains
        Big drops that fell like ignorance
        over the spout-stopped Manhattan rubber
                Atop the fashioned grave, splitting at the seams
                         To unravel the blistering mummified dives
                                  In the panegyric future
                                  of the African ankh

...
In the breastfed porridge soup American city,
        Our children bred to be poor
              After the Baby’s boom
              turns to the Baby-bust generation

excerpt from "Daily Bread: Drug of the Illiterate" 

Waiting for the God in Godot, A Drunken Youth Wakes

Estragon

"I was asleep, why will you never let me sleep?

Vladimir

"I felt lonely."

Estragon

"I had a dream."

Vladimir

"Oh, don't tell me."

Estragon

"I dreamt..."

Vladimir

"Don't tell me!"

Estragon

"This one is enough for you."

From "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett

________

I know here. The green wafting streaks of sky, the iris of Venus and tail smoke of the passing jet on the wide-open horizon. Manhattan is a gorgeous home. The winds pray a unity between every passerby and neighbor, lifted into the star-born heights. I pass by a group of peers, walking towards the underground concert. My building is a popular one tonight. Rows of followers bedeck the graffiti concrete sidewalk pathways down into the lair of raw music. Above, my apartment teems with life. The partied flaw of a missed generation of youth wails with unheard rhyme in the melodious burn of smoke and cash. 

After a drink, I stammer underneath the foundation. A wealthy set up; simulacra of electric night, urban fantasies of steam and the stroboscopic hunt prepare the space for a name, a god, an image, a face, a sound, and the restless warning of day, undeserved in the hollow loose of masterful ceremonies. In the post-modern dirge, plain and simple yearnings for the breath of magic in life, waning in the new moon phase of skyward lust. The discolored throat opens to emit its holy hole under groundless feet moving to the belly of earth’s final tempting before she retracts our wasted tongue of divinity.

________

Drunk

"If drunk on wine, you will be fortune in trade and love-making, and will scale exalted heights in literary pursuits. This dream is always the bearer of aesthetic experiences...Drunkenness in all forms is unreliable as a good dream. All classes are warned by this dream to shift their thoughts into more healthful channels." (iDream)

________

alone, centered by intoxication and my forlorn host,
brother, in demise,
a lonesome paradox in disguise,
read and weep, as the ancients' rowing

cabins alight with pages
in the eyes of warring children
who cry in blood
and tear from the sod with teeth, cracked
amid the skeleton earth, war torn

greed, strapped aimlessly to the butterfly
home bearing Trotskyan steeds
in the fight to bring back wealth
to the lands of Zapatista

covered with stark, oppressive emotion
and chained, now
to the oriental rug

- excerpt from "turning over the ashes of the unnamed"

The Story of MAY DAY Returns upon Waking

A May Day Garland for 1820 by Samuel William Fores
"Dance away my Friends, I have been the cause of all their fun by your Help and Money - Edward the Instigator!"

"This is the story of the rootless ones. Your bones already know the story, though your mind does not yet understand it. One day, in the waking world, this story will come back to you."

- from "The Witch's Child" a brilliant zine on MAY DAY

___________

In the old-fashioned aesthetics of a New Spain colony, the federal district of Mexico in the 15^th century is featured on a piece of black and white cartography. The historic document is imprinted in my memory as I glare out over the Manhattan skyline. The urban grid lies before me. I am headed towards the last line on the grid, one hundred and something street. Atop a bristling hillock in the strong spring winds, a fair temptress bounds effortlessly over sprigs of dandelion-bloomed grasses, her clothing flaps wildly as she mounts my hip in a leap of embracing lust. She’s asked me to find my way past the blistering outcrop of one staggering urban nightmare, a chaotic mess of colonial history, a Tenochtitlan of North America, sprawling in a frayed mess of abandoned wires and charcoal heat. In an apocalyptic vehicle, I brave the incendiary beyond. 

__________

Heat

"To dream that you are oppressed by heat, denotes failure to carry out designs on your account of some friend betraying you." (iDream)

__________

“as we swallowed awful breaths of meager and sinking failure

she gave it her all and courageously fit into the brew of my panic, and surprise

and we could figure the rains, as they hit charred disdain in our unfeeling dream

of croaking drink, and vile moans 

that troubled our disgraced, fugitive blame”

“as I sought out your Gaelic whispers with a charm for sage-grass forlorn

there spun a hint of deranged angst for the painful distance 

expressed in the age of a silent rasping damage

to condemn an unknowing

in the broken guilt 

that goes aimless and unforgiving

as the bellows of sorrow and the un-chosen regret

of a million graves violating the entrenched sky”

as journeys go

afraid into the wild

calls of a single space.

- excerpt from "Breathtaking Images"

In Defense of the Dreamer as Individual

“The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual.

This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources.

In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.

C.G. Jung, 1934"

________

We climb the old-fashioned narrow wooden staircase to the humble apartment where my grandfather was born in Lower East Side Manhattan, 1915, into a family of Greek immigrants. The colors of the neglected wood panes and creaking floorboards radiate with a rustic golden aura. The internal structures are mostly charcoal etched, as a black and white drawing, pockmarked with rough patches of oblique pitch darkness. I am accompanied by my Iranian friend who peeks in abandoned night table drawers. Searchingly, he endeavors to reach through a pile of handwritten pages and small books. He begins talking to me about Eduardo Galeano, all the while correcting my Spanish pronunciation in conversing over the dense terminology. At that, he leaves with a few leaves in his coat jacket. I stand amid the bare walls, as the airless womb of my ancestral birth in this country is revealed. I sit at a gothic typewriter. Copious thoughts string in a massive upheaval of soundless striving through the mind of a creational writing that ceases only with pure death, and at once, below me are the distracted lives of my parents. Their televisions blare mindlessly with brainwashed floundering. I empty a nearby drawer, seeking madly for a worthy object, a true talisman, to invigorate my standards of inspiration before this all-consuming pyre of human intentionality, transmogrified by the immense distance of a screen and its subjects never felt by palm or breath. Does their lower meandering mirror my own creative origins on lettered key before the abstract maw of my own typographic lore?   

________

Typewriter

"To see a typewriter in  your dream indicates that you need to open the lines of communication with someone in your life." (iDream)

________

“from the mountains' worshippd gaze

I am estranged as a foodbank flourishing madly

in a churlish booth-fountain

spurning liminal trespassers in a just tirade

isolating occupied human vats”

- excerpt from "Spare my Spit"

I Dream to Honor Our Greek-Jewish Ancestors

(Visit My Sweet Canary YouTube Channel)

It was a dream of mine to share the unique heritage of Jewish-Greek culture in my city. I saw a great opportunity when the film "My Sweet Canary" began their North America tour. An event which links the history with our very own Greek Rembetika band, The Rembetika Hipsters. 

After extensive correspondence with Roy Sher, filmmaker of "My Sweet Canary" and the Greek Community and Hellenic Society of Calgary, I finally contacted the Rembetika Hipsters band, our local Rembetika music.

Here's what bandleader Allan Baekeland had to say:

"This is a fantastic idea...I'm not sure you're going to get a lot of help from the Greek community. There is a degree of ambivalence and even hostility towards rembetiko music amongst the local Greeks...unsavoury lyrics about drugs and criminal behavior, its Turkish origins, etc...I think we can get a good size audience for such an event in the fall."

______

I am sitting around a table at the Kehila Kedosha Greek Synagogue in Lower East Side Manhattan. This is the last remnants of Greek Jewish culture in the area. I am with my extended Greek Jewish family, dining upon some traditional delights. There is some argument at play. My grandfather stands out among the crowd, somehow dissatisfied. In my reflection, I see the argument revolves around the ancestral name. Did our name change upon immigration? In order to find the answer I travel outside of the synagogue, outside of the city limits to a small hut, in which an American hermit, living out in nature in a small, ramshackle hut often recurs as a returning dream-character. When I arrive to his hut, he greets me graciously. I ask about how to attain filtered water without a filter, after which he points me in the direction of a stream. Unaware, I lead the way and find that his once-densely forested nature hermitage is now interspersed with half-destroyed concrete buildings and functioning industrial office rooms. I enter one of the offices to let people know we are here to understand how to filter water without a filter, they look at me ignorantly and distractedly brush me off. The hermit then leads me to a stream, where the water is rushing clear as a cloudless sky through a gorgeous array of stones. I feel I’ve found what I’ve been after, but there is more, now faded into the forgetfulness of day.  

______

fire light  

widening, the open mountain 

crevasse of grandfather's memory

"God's country west" 

Mt. Rainier

Washington is there 

"is he in you?"

- excerpt from "on the importance of clothes..."

Through a Subterranean REM Dreamachine Train

Are the effects of REM similar to that of a film reel, where the mind develops a way to conceive thoughts with equal momentum and speed as one would perceive, in simultaneous function with the the faculties of memory to create images, sound and other sensory phenomena experienced in dream as in memory? 

Is REM the Dreamachine in the flesh?

_____

In this Dream Series, I ask what about the recurring and unusual instances of action in dreams which remind me of the function of metaphors in myth and poetry. For example, the train seems to be a passageway, or link between worlds, memories and times. Next, there is the “emptying of the fridge” in Venezuela when the Christian world is coming down, and the frozen, armless hand of an enamored singer vying for my attention at the final dream cycle.

The dreaming begins with my wife and me traveling to the East Village of Manhattan to see a friend. This friend allowed us a place to stay and offered his peer support as a successful musician to my wife, who is also a successful musician. In the dream, however, instead of a musician peer to my wife, the individual who we are staying with is a friend of mine, a fellow writer, who engages with me in very healthy ways to support our common goals as writers. When we meet this man, we find that he is extremely effeminate. He wakes from his unkempt bedroom and greets us warmly, however bedraggled and immediately throws on a pink, fishnet, sleeveless shirt and walks out the door, we don’t see him again, but he offers us his place.

Later, I find I am late to pick up my parents at the airport, as they are arriving to visit with us during our time in Manhattan. I am very late, and we have missed dinner, as the time reads after 10, however they are relieved to see me.

As I am returning to the East Village, I find myself in what looks like it may be Bedford-Stuyvesant, where I once walked through, with intimidating hooded men standing motionless in small groups on street corners. I feel out of place to say the least. I band of small Latino kids face me and jeer and bat at my clothing as I try to walk away unseen. I offer them money and they simply reject my idea that they are Mexican or somewhere in some poor country in Latin America and need my money. They don’t take beggar’s money, they say. Finally, I meet my wife somewhere in the city and we board a subway train. The train pulls off at what seems like we are now in Venezuela! There is a choral group busking beside the benches in this very outskirts subway stop. I flip them a coin behind my back so as not to let my wife see, as she dismisses them. As we walk from the underground train platform, we walk into a realm of pitch black darkness. There is no way to go, so we head back to the subway. The choral group is gone and the platform is completely empty. I try to find my coin, but find nothing.

______

“The Pride of Bedford-Stuyvesant”

Interview with Randy Weston on Democracy Now!

"I grew up in a very powerful, spiritual, cultural area in Brooklyn, what they call Bedford-Stuyvesant...Everybody had to take art, you had to take piano, or trumpet or violin or dance, that was in the neighborhood, and economically everybody didn't have money, but culturally it was so wonderful.

[Marcus Garvey's] philosophy of Africa, is our ancestral home. We were taken away, those of us who were taken away, we have to give back, we have to rebuild our motherland, which is Africa, and all of humanity comes out of Africa anyhow, so he was way ahead of his time. 

Your history, your ancestry is your foundation."

______

When we exit the train at the next stop, we are still in Venezuela, only there is a field of sparkling light before us. Within the field, my father and step-mother’s house lies empty. In the field, a highly religious ceremony is taking place. They are enacting the end of the Christian world, the last Christian rite it seems! As the high-rising organs sparkle with incandescent crystals as one would believe heaven to appear, everyone present forms a mass around a ceremonial hearth of heavenly glow. My wife and I dive inside the house, wishing to escape such highfalutin religious activity, and begin emptying their fridge, cleaning their expired foods out from their dusty and neglected icebox. All the while, we see on television, the center of the Roman Catholic world crumbling away, as the central image appears, where the great Jesus statue in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil falls down the mountain like Saddam Hussein’s statue in Bagdhad.

Then, out from the ceremonial mass, as its Christian imagery begins to fade into an archaic celebration in precious stone, naturally encrusted over a celestial mountain of pipe organ, I am somehow called out into the midst of the open field, and led into a palace of sorts. There seems to be royal intrigue about, a changing of the guard causes slight anxiety in those present. One lady, however, turns to me and begins chanting and singing lightly to calm us. She gives me her hand, which freezes in the grasp of my palm with effortless burden. She then turns, leaving her hand in mine while singing to everyone present, calming the vibration of the palace, near-crumbling at the end of days with her strong, human voice. She comes back to me, though leaving her hand in mine, her palm is now mangled, fingerless and bloody, though she is calm and so are we.  

_____

in the livid pull of train wreck desire

the followers’ sneering crimes become awake

to the rush of the wading horror

that thrives innocently on beer and hate

while our nonplussed singing escapes into the cruel, driven spines of the wicked slink of fame

that shines like hosts in a steaming ballroom of creative play

and shaved rasping throats blunder over towers of hypocrisy

engraved mores of hunger and celebration link together within insane, aesthetic duality

to please the entranced few 

in a skinny pathway across ever-shrinking pores of history

wearing narcotic bracelets and shaming our alien tours with priceless need

in the random chores of spurious fornication

on bedside hordes that tame the blue African skies to dried jungles

that feel free with deserted lies 

in the political waves of a corporate, shark-ruled tribe

swearing and leaning into the hounds of biblical law

- excerpt from "When No Stars Appear"