spring eleven autumn 12

[Jim Hayes]

hEY! This is an excerpt from the current chapter of the 120 Loop, my latest masterpiece, ha! I sent my essay about the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion to the band for any corrections. It doesn't have a title beyond: spring eleven autumn twelve. No I'm not drinking, gimme a break. Yeah the new JSBX is probably the album of the year with that Man or Astroman single behind it: chunklet.com. Yeah what i wanted to do was make it an edition of 34 for the solstice. I hope you feel better, thanks for reading! leave a comment, drop a line! I spend my time worrying about the institutional avant garde and my ability to project a certain image. I sat on some church steps and I watched the runners go past for about fifteen minutes. There I was lounging, my shades reflecting the light, my leather jacket-the writer as the rock and roll animal himself. Being a rock star means attempting to live by your own rules, or at least saying that the rules do not apply. The institutional avant garde rock critick tries to erase the separation between lies, art and commercial television. The train blows its horn, it rumbles past. I see the word “Crowley” emblazoned across a blue car.

     The 120 Loop is the road that circles Marietta Square. The 120 Loop is a manuscript about the soundtrack of a movie script about an American writer (while “he” writes about other people). The 120 Loop sees drug abuse as script that needs to be flipped. Perhaps faith and magick are a way out, a diversion from the 120 Loop. You fall in love with somebody and it just drives on forever. Every day you travel the same road, and every day her face replaces the billboards. The license plates all add up into her name. (Once in Athens after coffee with a local occultist back at my car was her name on a plate along with a bumper sticker displaying discordian ideas around number 23.)

      At a weekend Art fair or a farmers market I was sure I saw some witches. One of the deceptions constantly played is that you’re only one that’s ever experienced certain things. When you play the tape through you realize undoubtedly that you’re describing Psychic Television. The bi-polar voices, the strange coincidences, the ubiquitous patterns: when life turns into a tessellation. The empirical data always comes with a self-censoring disclaimer: you’re alone, so uhhh don’t discuss it. It’s like having an affair, or pretending your life is a movie and you are the star. Sometimes you just have to be Dash Snow, that’s all there is to it. It’s not who you are, it’s who you make them think you are.

Sometimes a man must turn into Dash Snow to deal with the pain of being a man.

This cute chick at the roadhouse was mocking me. “I’m sitting with Marietta’s only legitimate rock star” and I bought a few drinks. My ego is expensive. The glamour of being an avant garde artist somehow connected to the cultural mother ship. Every man and mail artist is a STAR. (Well it was cool in seventies anyway, Ray Johnson died for your sins.) But looking fabulous and being a traditional post-industrial avant garde artist meant exactly that-you were fabulous because all Neo-Neoist post-Fluxus artists are just a Homage. With the Fluxus obsession with “life” as material for cultural products, we’re all just chasing the White Whale man. The white whale. Now they’re just somebody that I usta know. “I haven’t called you because I don’t want to talk to you.” Pain is just a matter of sensation. I saw a license plate that read “epiphany”. And that’s when the Suboxone gets into my blood and it hits me. It’s like having an orgasm during a dream; opiates are the opiates of the masses.

     I destroyed all of my notebooks except for a few choice pages. Yeah from June of 1984 to Spring of 2004 I shredded about thirty or forty hard books of notes, poetry, letters and journals. Then late last year i took the journals from 2004-2011 and i destroyed all dozen of them. Your love is your weakness. I don't see any separation between my compulsive creativity and my life as such…That was the day i moved to Georgia. Marietta is my home now. I really love it actually, it's quiet and green. A decaying limb on the outskirts of the empire. It’s a place where magick is practiced on a daily basis. The idea of using spiritual means to get what you want, in effect, to “make shit happen” is ubiquitous. A thousand prayers.assembly plant marietta