It’s all just a show…

La Vita Nuova -

Due to the celebration of our ersatz independence in this lovely country of mine, there will be two, that’s right TWO first Friday openings this month in the Crossroads. Tomorrow, July 4th will mark the initial birthing of my show, however next Friday as well, July the 11th will continue the sordid nativity.

Complications will follow throughout the rest of the month.

At the red-light Gallery.

Details:

red-light

323 Southwest Blvd.
Kansas City, MO 64108
816-421-1484

red-light@sbcglobal.net

July 4, 2008 - July 26, 2008

Opening Receptions: July 4, 6:00 pm - 10:00

July 11, 6:00 pm - 10:00

Saturday hours: 12:00-5:00 pm.

Or by appointment, call: 816-421-1484

“La Vita Nuova”
a multi-media installation by
Jonathan Douglas Duran
presented by
Kenneth Gentry

“LaVita Nuova” consists of works which restlessly blur the

line between the tired associations of medium;
aural and physical textures coexisting outside of the accepted
constraints willfully hoisted upon what many may call ‘style’. To wit:
music, photography, painting, film, sculpture and the written word;
avatars of human communication, static and evolving, immaterial and
tangible, all represented simultaneously through a series of works
which will confront the viewer and arouse an active and fervent
response. However diverse the choice of mediums may be in any
particular piece the overall message remains concrete; eloquent
coherence via frenzied incoherence; the inescapable dichotomies of our
contemporary psychological zeitgeist.

red-light remarks:

I feel like the rather buffoonish Polonius announcing the
arrival of the traveling players to Hamlet, mad north-north-west.
Polonius goes on to provide a litany of the actor’s skills in the
traditional genres, as well as a quizzical variety of mixed-genres. “La
Vita Nuova” is very much in the vein of the latter. Imagine, if you
will, Pasolini meets Voltaire, Poe meets Buñuel, Dante meets Rimbaud, Bacon meets Fellini, Dostoyevsky meets Arbus, and so on. Be prepared to be discombobulated. K.G.

La Vita Nuova ~ Independence Day

Return to Babylon

A trailer I cut for Alex Monty Canawati’s newest film, Return to Babylon.

A fantastic celebration of the silent film era and a tragic-comic and beautiful catalog of its faces, talent and almost endless debaucheries.

A fantastic cast which includes Maria Conchita Alonso, Laura Harring, Tippi Hedren, Debi Mazar, Ione Skye, Jennifer Tilly and many others portray the royalty of cinema during Hollywood’s legendary golden age.

Drugs, orgies, egos, demons and murders… the stuff legends are made of.

You’re all going to die…

DADA

I Stand Alone

I Stand Alone

Enharmonic Intervals -o1-

A goodbye to a few laborious chapters in my life.
An incantation to purge the (sometimes poisonously distilled) spirits of my past.
A collection of songs which span from 1997 through 2007
Newly remastered (honestly, most of these have just now been mastered for the first time!) by me in 2008; these are what I consider to be the definitive versions of these songs.

These noises have been living, almost exclusively, inside my head for a long, long time now and I’m eager to finally get rid of them for good. I’ve cleared space for new sounds, new textures and fresh ideas… however I am proud of my past and do not wish it to be purposely lost or discarded. I’m done with these songs, but now they’re out there for anyone else who wants them.

All the songs in this collection are protected under a Creative Commons license:

Info regarding license

So that means, share and share alike. You can sample the living shit out of these songs, you can use them in your work (whatever that work may be), you can even distribute copies to anyone you want for free. The operative word here is FREE. As long as you’re not charging people or selling a product with these songs they are yours to do with as you wish. Just be ethical and give credit where credit is due, eh?

This also marks the first time I’ve ever attempted to put a price on any of my music and sell it.. it is confusing to say the least. However, if you would like to (monetarily) support my work and my art, the album is available now at the following online shops, but Amazon is recommended, as it is brings with it the cheapest price and the highest sonic fidelity.

second, let’s just say…

• iTunes U.S.
• iTunes Australia/N.Z.
• iTunes Canada
• iTunes UK/European Union
• iTunes Japan

• Rhapsody
• eMusic
• Amazon MP3
• Lala

Otherwise, please look for high bit-rate torrents on your preferred sites…

or download a 256 AAC rip here

Enjoy.

I knew this would make sense eventually; slightly revised…

Just the silhouette.

Grace of form, a body, a shadow thrown against light. Subtle yet violent movements that betray everything you thought you knew. A world hidden away inside of every gesture, a world continuously new and frightening. A world of illusions, composed of dust, where love and chaos form new words of fetish that few are eager ever to speak… let alone live.

Prose floating along on the streams of sunlight, beaming through the cracks perforating the wall. A place unchained from the contempt forced by the fidelity of unjust resolutions. A protest inside a skull, all marching, screaming and blood.

A revolution against accepted aesthetic form. A plague of ideals and emotions unsullied by avarice. Controlled creation still fully confused, pure and free. Naive to the dispositions of commerce, apathetic and uninterested as to their modus operandi. This grace can be tamed, broken, saddled and rode into the darkest woods of the sons of man. Opening the doors of useless protections along the way, baring the rooms and halls within as empty; facile as broken strings.

It was a parade, a farce, an imperial march in step with a funeral lamentation. One must ask; “is our worst lie simply to assume our fate is only to suffer?” We deserve to arrive at this question armed with a thousand different bibles, a million different chains (locked and anxious to perform) and one open mind. It bears repeating; just one mind, open, malleable… thirsty to force into the world the only true parameters of art: honesty, divorce, and revolt. The songs of slaves echoed through a barren and dead land, covered in the salt pouring from our wounds. The wounds of discovery, of our ancestors, of our crimes. If this is only for you (it isn’t), I’ll be candid: That salt is sweet, that salt is all life and all joy crushed together under the intense heat of pure desire, the fire of many open hearts begging to witness a sea of hands reaching absentmindedly towards a cracked and bleeding sky. Oblivion of intelligence, the death of freedom and alleviation. The merciless religion of ambivalence. Swallowing up whole lives, moment by moment, word by word… compromise by compromise.

Nonchalant suicides bred of boredom… slow pressure insanity.

We do indeed all carry the same fears, desires, obsessions, etc. We all just have different tricks to ignore, placate or destroy. Then that certainly leaves lucidity, alone on the pedestal upon which only it was created to sit. No compromise, no lies, no masks, no souls. Ignore the contrived grandiloquence of those disgusting charlatans; desperately parading their fear of death. Creating idols out of their need for explanation and definition. Upholding that arcane fraud nailed to their filthy cross of control. Let us run across the muddy backs of angels, forever dropped to their knees and begging forgiveness over something called “sin”. A hard shield and a sharp sword. A belief that there is something which is right, just and controlled. Some kind of point to all the pain. A desire to believe that right and wrong even exists. That there can be justification for the poverty of our actions and someone who can forgive them. Someone who has the answers to what they believe are the questions. Thinly veiled egotistical fantasies of eternal life. A ridiculously narcissistic delusion that I’ll live on… I’ll get to see all of my loved ones again. Mental masturbation on a fantastic scale.

It is just a show. Hollow slides throwing up a blindingly white square onto the wall. We walk into the light and what appears inside the wash of negative space, begging to be filled with something disguised as whatever one will choose to believe represents a simple truth, one which is pleasing and comfortable? Only the shapes we create. Only what we choose to let live, breathe and grow. Yourself, not another.

Not what you can claim, allege… imitate.

Only honesty.

Throw morality away as a fool’s errand, ethics are what matter. Ethics, the way you act, the why, the reason, the TRUTH. You never prostitute yourself… you never impudently plagiarize and pass yourself off as something you are not. You never steal something from a friend. These are the simple rules, the part you just do not understand. The reason you are not, and never will be, an artist.

So fare well in your bulimic mediocrity.

Blind, in the infant’s head of uncertainty; all fear and misconstrued ambitions.

Plainly: It’s not what you do… it’s how you do it.

Decisions then must be fatal… a blade of truth to slit the wrists of the globe.

Grace of form, a body, a shadow thrown against light.

Subtle yet violent truths.

Not real;

Just the silhouette.

Manufacturing Consent

Degradation is the enemy of intensities, endless, delirious and pitiless pursuer of honest passions.

You must only concern yourself with your own head, writing what you hear, what you believe, what you know to be true even if it is a lie. Block out the world, block out the opinions of the people who suffer their insecurities upon you. This whole world is designed to drag you down and every rat in it just wants to be on top of the sinking ship.

Sit in front of that blank paper, that throbbing screen, sit around waiting for answers. Is this pain or is this love?

Also:

~A night when the emotional energy needed to do much of anything was too much to muster, I became maudlin:

We are all going to die. Is that supposed to be sad? Because I’m certainly having trouble seeing it that way. With so much to live for, I still find my self ambivalent, apathetic towards our inevitable, total destruction as a species. How long do we have, until our greed and our hatred reaches the point of pushing our buttons for atomic explosions? I’ve said it before and I’ll definitely say it again; we deserve it. It is no coincidence that I used the word inevitable because no matter what, we can’t stop it, we cannot stop ourselves. A runaway train; a confused giant lumbering around in a wounded frenzy, destroying everything underfoot in the interim. We want everything our own way and are unwilling to compromise with other people completely. Sure, we pretend to be tolerant and caring and respectful, but when it comes down to it, when it comes to the people who are truly in power it comes down to ridiculous inventions of their own; money, invisible lines marked out on maps, objects and books you pray with, the color of our skin. It’s all so distasteful and sordid, so pathetic… but absolutely true nonetheless. So our conflicting ideas about god, about civil liberties, about hairstyles and human rights will be the collective finger pushing the button engraved with the word annihilation.

Our human nature will undo all of humanity. ‘Destined to lose’ is a phrase that comes to mind.

Yet still, artists don’t give in to despair. We must never give ourselves up to abstract ghosts of future sufferings. We must focus and wring out every drop of life from this filthy rag before it is washed clean. Seeing beyond the apparent disgusting horror in the bleeding tumor is what makes us serious doctors. Surgeons with tools that should not be sterilized before use. So let’s operate on this dying patient, we cannot save it, but who knows, we might learn something worthwhile.

Bah— purge coming…

A short history of decay

Silence for a spell;

on the other side of the country for a change, warm winds, thin drinks and calloused fingers.

“In the midst of winter, I found within me, an invincible summer”

moving images from my past

Woman (2003):

and

Pull All the White Strings (From Your Trashy Heart) (2000):

More old shorts soon?

Chemicals and guns

The news will break your heart -

Love is just a silly ego-ghost

A luxury for the insane amongst us…

Every drink I take tastes like you, the false prophets, the shallow few.

The woman of the night, that phantom shining violent-bright

She’ll suck you dumb and never let you cum .

 

So easy to recall how it all begins,

the knots your heart gets tied up in

At Esther’s Request…

See…

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.  ~Ray Bradbury

 Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.  ~George Orwell

I will not allow myself to be destroyed

Today, a new act debuts.

No longer a tragedy.

Enharmonic Interval (deceptive cadence)

*Author’s note ~ This is a random excerpt from a currently in progress novel.

… Don’t look for the pain in my heart, my suffering is crystal clear and worn on my face. All you need to know of hatred and grand failure can be read through my eyes. I have transgressed and I am eager to atone. I’ve lived a greedy, selfish life; always demanding more, always wanting what I didn’t have - trivializing and insulting anything real which I might have been fortunate enough to actually hold in my filthy hands. I’ve lived professing a love for beauty, yet continually killing and denying it in actual practice. I squander what I have while others starve. Realizing in private that, deep down inside, when I’m truly honest, there’s nothing honest about me at all. I can’t even be honest with myself. The fog, the confusion, the distraction of myself blinds all my attempts at understanding how I feel-what I need and what I should do. What is right, what is wrong… what do I love, what do I hate? Honestly, I cannot tell.

All I have is want; “THIS” , this very second and perhaps not at all the next. I never know if anything that happens is real. I never know if what I’m doing is true. As if I’m paralyzed, yes I move, talk, act, fuck, shit, breathe… but I’m immobile and atrophied inside. I’m a sad and contemptible excuse for a man. I’m horribly poisonous and I’ll ruin your life. A creature of vice and artifice. A sham nigger. A ridiculously antiquated joke which has run its bloody course, wearing out its welcome long, long ago.

I feel everything, acute, sharp edges which dig into my heart. Yet I feel nothing at all. I’m pathetic. A distortion, an aberration, a disease… and I’ve eagerly , gleefully infected so many innocents throughout my life.

Yet a heart may grow too hardened. A mind as sick as mine can evolve to the point of wishing for nothing more than a bullet to break through its skull and bring with it a brain whose only thoughts will be oblivion. A mind can demand that the lies truly end. My mind fights an endless, foolish war, an eternal war of internal genocide. Just senseless chaos and mania. All feigning sacrifice, all jumbled lies and affectations which taint every syllable sliding around my tongue.

And my heart refuses to pity me. Even for just a second… no, no I’m cursed to remember. I ostensibly remember everything and all attempts to destroy those memories have been in vain. My mind desperately clings to them… stirring up my fears greedily. Tenaciously demanding that I live in constant knowledge of my self-inflicted pain.

Miniature deaths

Here is my small red mouth, filled with lies to spit at you.

Here is my long dead heart, filled with fears to torture you.

Libido Sciendi

I present to my readers the prologue and partial first chapter of the novel I’m currently wrestling with. Be aware: This is very much still a work in progress and almost certainly subject to very definite and far-reaching changes. For your consideration:

Where are we?

The death of an actor (sad or pathetic clown?)

Prop my bones up in a cage and push it out onto the stage.

Place a top-hat atop my pile of skin and pontificate about my dreary end.

Feed my meat to the starving priests who only got one little boy last week.

Communion wafers fill the seats… watching and waiting for tongues with which to meet

My audience is ferociously deceased and not afraid to laugh in between syncopated beats.

Every final line repeatedly spoken through exquisite whines and cries.

A prison full of holocausts and criminals absolved of their crimes.

 

And herein lies the rub. Herein lies it all.

 

Stub your cigarette out on the horse’s ankle; the one that violent, red conquistador is riding in your dream.

The apes of god will eat the plump and juicy grubs dancing through our hair. The apes of god will pick our heads clean. So please, prothelize to the paralyzed amongst you. Grab every cripple by their withered limbs and dance on top of them while inventing medicines sworn to cure their life-long ailments.

One of many Beatrice’s in one of many infernos…

Ferdinand enveloped in his night, Barbusse’s nameless narrator peering through his crack.

Allusions to literary metaphor.

Silent, scarlet picking though this grand new year, an optimistic premise promised with sickening cheer. So please, pull up a chair and take a stand for all grand intentions. List your resolutions then kindly re-arrange them. Departmentalize your wicked wonton ways, tell me all about yourself but spend the most time on the things you hate. Pull out all your inefficacious and ridiculous disguises; put on a simple act but perform it with abandon. Put your heart and your soul into the fire. Burn your thoughts before you think them, burn them up and take their stink in. But also, please help to convince me that I’ve not quite dried up; started to whither and wilt away, sinking into dust, the ground, any biological unbecoming that proves I’ve built and retained nothing. The pacific coast out there glitters like a sea of bitter diamonds, you’ll gladly cut yourself to shreds attempting to swim through it… yet we limply sit along its banks as it laps at our backs and only damply disappoints them.

Oh, this tragic search for the infinite…

A new year begins. So what have we done and where exactly are we going? What have we done and where are our allegiances. Will we stop running through the night, naked and vomiting? When can we stop pretending and simply live the way we want to? If action is desired then action must be taken, led as a lamb to slaughter to purify us heathens.

Run for your life

Your mind is a skeleton key which can open any cage.

So, who’s still trapped?

defunct dandies

An artistic invalid leading an ascetic legion of anti-theists into the apocalypse!

Shuffling through these insulting myths… stubbing our toes on effortless, broken lives.

That familiar poverty of the heart and the mind.

Troche humaine?

Troche humaine!

I’m so tired of the endless charade. Sick and fucking tired of the curse that is memory. These goddamned nails rattling around in my head, skewering grey matter and rusting while resting on my moist lobes, remind me how inefficacious insults have been. Every drink I take tastes like everything I’ve ever thought of, or wanted to think about. I will wrap myself in semantic drivel to keep myself warm. I will begrudgingly trudge onward… but end up going nowhere. How difficult must it be to LIVE by the philosophies which you invent, subscribe to like magazines you’ll only ever leaf through while defecating. A sad circle of compromise and banality. But what of it? What of it all?

Point, counter-point.

We must cut all unnecessary activities from our daily lives like the sour tumors they are.

the minimalist’s approach to even less than very little substance

distortion(s)

Day after day

Spitting blood with my wine tongue

coma slip (goodbye)

I want to be flames and chaos.

Cities leaping out of my mouth disguised as consonants and vowels. VERBS

A religious deception of grand ideals, a limitless dilapidation of liberation.

Complete and coupled, dogs in heat, cock stuck inside; all swollen and red.

A ringing in my ears with nothing on my fingers. I stand up and wait to sit back down. I slink, I crawl, I jump and fall… children’s rhymes - rhythms of differing kinds. A jumbled fucking mess weighing down on my chest.

I have to stop. Demons drive.

ambitious, yet ultimately superfluous

Surprise!

The homo-sapiens feel like rape again.

I shake my own hand and scratch out letters on the page, symbols… myth, mystery and metaphor for misanthropic malcontents. I need a way to say ‘POWER’… a way to remind people how useful and important they can be if they try. I need a way to remind people that they should be writing their own bibles, everyday. Then tear them to shreds the very next day when they pen their new collection of laws. A determination is sorely needed… a conviction and a faith for faith in the future of human evolution.

 

Words are weapons which may be made razor sharp, able to gut even the toughest pigs.  

 

Post script:

The ice age is coming.

Egress

The key stings the lock.

the vomiting tumor:

the vomiting tumor:

An ageless fable in 3 acts

27. la vita nuova

 

And so this will be my decisive act. I choose and simultaneously the world will cover its ears to escape the sounds of my certainty. I’m spinning and sick all over, yet for the first time I feel whole. My only faith is in the absence of everything I thought mattered, everything I attempted to pacify myself with. Subtle, as if that sense of under-evolved pollution taints my tongue now. Before; holiness and pollution not yet differentiated, now; razor sharp lines my toes brilliantly bleed over. Once again I fumble with the grip of the gun, once again I am reminded of the ugliest language. If the problem is yes then the answer is no. From this point on, let it be clear, everything I’ve thought, written, or cared for has now been thrown away. One valiant and powerful motion that erases an entire life. Annuls an entire existence of convictions. Capture every image, fill every frame… I used to be so naïve. That’s when life will stick its knives into your back. You have been deceived.

All your little plans. Pulling everything now, in absolute desperation, out of my tired little bag of tricks. All style over substance. I demand a fresh and unfamiliar world. White and cold, and bright as snow.  A rousing disguise full of hope. Falling forever with every kiss, the silence of god above our screaming fists.  But inevitably everything will drop away just like it always does, exposing all of us for what we are. Our thoughts and our ethics; punctured and spilling away. I used to feel, I used to bleed… I used to be something other than what you can see.          (an inability to externalize) I used to think, I used to fear… that I was nothing and would always be.

 So what did I lose and what have I seen that’s changed everything? Here I am again… spinning, sick, vomit and death. Words torture me at every step, every time I fall they seem to be present. Every slight falter; semantic insanity. Words like ticks. Letters like leeches. Parasitical paragraphs…

Please, don’t talk to me about better things. I’ve exposed that lie as the lonely and afraid man’s attempt to hide. How did I get here and where will I go? Does it even matter? Does it even matter if it matters? DISTRACTIONS! Stop believing and I’ll stop too. I promise. I need a new disease to latch my fears onto, this one has run its course and I fear… I fear as I fumble with the grip of the gun. I fear the sounds of the ugliest language. I fear the smell, the taste, the temperature. The biology, the reality.

So stale, so obvious, so ridiculously authentic.

I fear… no, I won’t give you the satisfaction. 

Half starts stalled midway through,  works in progress… things to do.  ACTION IS NEEDED. The melodies of beauty which rattle through this defective head. I need all these little deaths; use them to build up to my own. ob(li)vious… the shadows hurt, the sky compliments my rage. I ran away but I cannot escape. I need to scrape away appearances and look at things as they truly are. My soul is a crippled little pile of junk. I want my lungs to fill up with snow.  Discipline: focused and razor sharp;

I want the world to bleed when

it brushes up against me.

26. medium

Do I have anything at all to say besides the scrapings I collect from this well, destructively soured with hallucinogens? Does my right hand write with a limp? Is there a defect, a retardation which won’t allow a certain word or idea to be formed through a specific set of movements? Am I too stuffy with preoccupation? Or am I just tired of beating this dead horse? I have after all, written endlessly about what I perceive to be the “important” issues in this life, I like to think that’s all I write. Have I just finally realized it does NOTHING but waste my time (and the time of whomever is unfortunate enough to spend reading it)? So why do I even bother? Why do I feel the need to continually comment, retort, speak against, argue, refuse to accept? Because… I know, I know how ugly it can be, I know what it is capable of. And if people like me stop using their voices only the false voices will find their way into all ears.

25. just remember

Just remember; what you feel will only kill you.

 

I want a snake to crawl inside my belly, eat up my insides and direct the course of my flesh through the rest of this play. Lucidity and lethargy.

Lethal injections of reality.

 

24. realization (provided by the previous desperate act)

I am an imbecile.

23. a desperate act

There’s a hair stuck in the back of my throat. After the first few weeks I was scared to death it would never dislodge, never go away… now I just accept it. We fool ourselves into believing in the idea of purity. There’s no such thing, there’s no such thing.

22. today

 

Today was one of those days. It occupied my thoughts for every minute. It came as a surprise. When you find yourself consumed, it starts to reveal an aggrandized, veritable self.

Villiers-le-Bel Manifesto For Youth Revolutionaries

To all my fellow Surrealists, by freely admitted title or not: labels are ineffectual and useless when staring down the barrel of a rifle. So then, to re-start with all pretensions and assumptions aside: every ear (even the stone-deaf) in Villiers-le-Bel , comrades, artists, humans, REVOLUTIONARIES…

21. superficial supermen, artificial souls worn thin

If I were to blow my own horn it would sound like an air-raid siren warning me of my impending doom. However I shouldn’t be so foolish as to thrust my assumptions upon such a methodically faked life. I would not be so brash as to disregard your explanations, so by the same token I hope you take it upon yourselves to make no assumptions on my behalf. The title of this collection is indeed a noun and not a verb. The clear lines of language will show us this truth from now until the end of all things.

20. another log in the fire

 

Please excuse this overwhelming urge to paint personal worlds of ego and compulsion. Sick and obsessive, sticky and forever. Strung up like christmas lights around the necks of every innocent little girl. Shadows that are deeper than the real thing, and darkening all the time.

19. jaundiced and chilled

It’s cold in here and my stomach burns from hunger. I have a sick feeling, I think drawn from emotion, that permits me to take a weak form of poetic license. I pretend I’m working only so I can pretend you interrupt me. Ridiculous. I lie to you, I lie to myself… what’s the difference, I feel the same either way.

a SURREALIST questionnaire

a SURREALIST questionnaire

Name: Jonathan Douglas Duran

Party Affiliation: Independent as a hog on ice! (Voltairian Surrealist) “I’d never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me as a member.”

Links to you online: voltairiansurrealist@gmail.com

1. Who are you? Not you, for sure…

2. At what age were you born? Some men are born posthumously.

3. Describe what the future sounds like, bleeding out of a speaker. Dissonance. Cars, televisions and sound waves of pure cancer - oozing as open sores. Gunshots and drumbeats… indistinguishable from one another.

4. Which month has all the days crossed off on a calendar you will never see? No one reads the papers around here, pal.

5. The virgin mary’s favorite television show is: Hookers at the point. Real Sex (all of them, the whore!)

6. If Jesus Christ (assuming the worm existed) came back today the first thing he would do would be: Vomit the compassion right out of his heart.

7. Two of the conditions surrounding the inception of god were: Giddy superstitions given ridiculously ersatz validity by scared and angry old men afraid to acknowledge their animal ancestry that dangled between their puritanical thighs.

8. The blood of others will be: Red with embarrassment.

9. The most violent shape is: North America

10. The most beautiful sound is: Wounds healing

11. To choose the right verb you must: Let it choose you.

12. What sort of hope do you place in love? The hope to momentarily displace some senseless pain.

13. How do you picture the passage from the idea of love to the reality of loving? Much as the idea of defecation to the actual reality of the smell of feces.

14. Would you, willingly or unwillingly, sacrifice your freedom for love? Have you ever done so? Yes. No. No. no. No. Yes. Well, maybe, sometimes though I…

15. Do you believe in the victory of love’s glory over the sordidness of life, or in the victory of the sordidness over love’s glory? SORDIDNESS. I envy that word.

16. Addition or subtraction? Addition can be subtraction and vice versa when utilized correctly.

17. The opposite of art is: Slavery.

18. Surrealism is: Complete freedom of the mind.

19. Rebellion is: Necessary and unavoidable. It is right under your skin, behind your eyes and throbbing through your fingertips.

20. Freedom is: Surrealism. (see above)

21. Your personal manifesto in one sentence: All power to the imagination.

22. Where can people find you? In the last place they’ll look for me.

23. The precise formula for dignity is: Two parts intelligence and four parts bleeding fists.

24. (association) Woman: nigger, menstruation face/glow.

25. Pages yellow, skin ____fever___________

26. Your hymn to the night, please: Ever present, enclosing, enveloping, unending grace and spite. Both sides of the worthless coin spread across the sky, represents the night. (but there is always a way you can light up the sky)

27. The great victim is: The human verb

28. The great evil is: Anything which diminishes, deigns to devalue or attempts to trivialize any individual’s imagination.

29. Please create your own question and provide an “answer” here:

List your top three reasons for wanting to fuck JESUS CHRIST:

1. Those wash-board-abs, mmmmm…mmmm, good!

2. Wine.

Anytime.

3. Wash-board abs!!!!!!

beaten

I definitely have some pent-up aggression issues!

18. i choose

 

Do you believe in an aesthetic sense? That everything is placed and perceived by us out of a perfect and beautiful necessity?

17. here I am

 

I had a dream that you dreamt I died. Same images all the time; burning flesh - falling sky - silhouettes of empty high rise. Nicotine stains swing triple time, everyone is everything all the time.

 

16. proof

 

Last night was amazing.

 

LOVE (Version 2.0 - open source)

    Dark times my friend, confusion reigns at home and abroad (a sad truth no matter where you live). Everything is a bit old and rotten, even perfect innocence one day oozes out a thick black oil of vitriol straight from its very heart. Then you have to put it down like a rabid dog. Shotgun to the brains and then the silence of release.  A slow, painful trickle of complete loss. You have to be able to look this death in the eye without flinching, you have to stand tall and vibrant against this increasingly dull and soggy world. We are comrades. We must write about love. We must lead by example. Prothelize our agitprop of apropos absolutes. The love of everything all at once, screaming, bleeding, fucking, passionate love of love. Life is worth love. We must stalk this elusive lion and pull the thorn from its distorted paw which has been piercing it for far too long. Substance and purity have been leaking out around the wound, causing a dilution. Love is the true liberation, without it there is no Surrealism. Without Surrealism there is no one to fight on the front lines for love. Take bullets and punches, have our guts removed by bayonets soaked in paint sold to us for far too high a price. The days are meaner and more vicious to the human verb by the minute, the skies more poisoned, our food more vulgar and plastic. We continue to slink away, afraid of recognizing our increasing dehumanization, or increasingly devalued minds, emotions and desires. We’ve been manipulated like poor, dirty puppets, all gnat infested potato sacks and old, rusted buttons. We must soak these trappings in our genocide-supporting petroleum and set the match of love to ourselves in order to purify our lost selves. Only when we truly let go of the meaningless fodder; the world they’ve invented, interpreted to us and addicted us to, will we start to use our eyes for the first time (all three of them). A flower, a woman, a man, a child, a mind, an anything, EVERYTHING even the worst of ourselves can be enriched, supported, created, fulfilled and convinced by, and with, love. Please throw away all trite, grandiose pre-conceived notions about the futileness of “love” and its complete lack of conviction and or power. Love is not a limp, static word which sits, impatiently on the lips of teenagers on the brink of their awkward hormones. It is real, it is a power of unbelievable force and it is not fragile or banal. When known, it is more destructive than the atom bomb. It is the force of a million explosions, sitting ready, buzzing and coursing through every cell in your body. It is the bomb shelter of the soul and the ultimate weapon of freedom simultaneously. It is that moment, while reading a book, when you have a moment of understanding, of great learning - and suddenly a whole other part of your brain lights up and functions in a new way that you never imagined it would. It is a drug of potent addictive qualities. You taste it and it only increasing your hunger, driving you to the point of insatiable dependence upon those brilliant, bright colored flashes of peace and understanding. A silence after a hum…

 

 

 

 

(Think about this, and contribute your own paragraph in this space)

 

 

 

 

 

So we must stand up and shout, yes. Not only shout, but we must believe our convictions. We can only harness the limitless potential if we truly carry the faith and remain honest in our brilliant insanity. A hundred different choirs singing a thousand different songs. Dissonant, perhaps, yet deeply, richly textured with beauty, with creation, with art. Love. We have no choice but to understand, to bend and be loyal servants to the tip of our swords.

 

You have my support and I appreciate yours, please send people my way if you desire, I will never turn them away, I have an open door and bread under my roof which they can chew and get stuck to the roofs of their mouths.

15. not all of paradise is lost

A hard, heavy pit in my stomach. Filled with cancer, with fears, with thoughts. Filled with that familiar lie of compromise. Sitting as heavy and inert as a boulder. Our bodies, meat, bone, fluid, muscle, etc. Ostensibly playing out this act of living. They lead us around, passing our gasses and filling them back up again. The science, the truth behind our bodies, how biology refuses to let loose of our hands. Leading us into our inevitable death.

 

To live is to feel, to die is to make good on that promise.

14. that won’t help

     Let’s pretend, just for a moment, it was a hot and balmy summer day. Right in the middle of one of those weeks when you’ve tried everything to break the hold of the persistently brutal heat. We had been swimming, seen a movie (air-conditioned), sat in the shade with the ice in front of the fan, everything… and still the clamp the heat had on us. Stifling, weighing on our porcelain shoulders like another layer of skin, thick as steel and matted down like sticky fur. We took off all of our clothes, no escape. We sat naked, wet and slimy like large newborns wallowing in their afterbirth. I got up, opened the refrigerator and stood at the foot of the door. Pathetic; barely cold enough to keep the milk from turning.

Let’s pretend together what happened next, that heat, the inescapable discomfort.

Vomitous death of temperature.

Vomitous death of memory.

13. the ambiguous shape and arrangements of the words on this page.

 

The family of wolves,

The family of snakes.

 

A large yacht, christened the “Oyster Yellow”. A brownish sky filled with viole(n)t voices from a foggy past.

Undecipherable, yet precise.

 

Parallel           to           the              idea           of                          death,

soft               and           wide   as               shadows.

 

Take back your book of lies, take back your poisoned skies (I never asked you for anything). A hasty formation of knowledge in rhythm with that liquor that pumps through your veins. I still have my father’s heart. A great blinding son, a question of responsibility that seems impossible to distinguish from an overhead silence broken like a child’s favorite toy. A collective fight, a will to power. The accepted construction of deplorable aspirations. A fever drenched in sweat and urine. Forever just a bolt of lightning with no preceding thunder. A sky split open, large and gray, by a burst of electricity, the splinters of science.

The ambiguous words crawl on for hours, in complete disregard of their simplicity. They hold my hand and my mind in contempt.

Meanwhile the ambiguous crab sprawls across my floor, belly laughing like a secret superimposed over an infant.

 

p.s., I wrote about you today.

12. the loss of dreams

In my sleep I wrote a small novel, chapter by chapter with a great ferocity. The words and story were very specific, very complex, yet the work flowed effortless from my pen.

11. viva la muerte

    Don’t expect anything from anyone, ever. Don’t believe in altruism, only lust, only want, only self-preservation. The human animal: the human disease. Flights of enormous fancy that fall from your mouth like teeth, spill off your tongue like wine. Simplicity simplified. A contradiction shopping at a thrift store. Becoming a hand me down, a used piece of kitsch. Perhaps the Surrealist object. Nothing ever really defines itself in large, bold, and broad brushstrokes which illuminate the night. A colorless form, a ghost of glass and diamonds.  An obscure repentance of sin. Vice controls/vice consumes. Bury all your art in the garden, plow and till, ignore and fool. But DO NOT slip into self deception, into compromise. It strips all the words right off your spine. The poetry on the page: a joke in spite of control, in favor of contempt.

10. The human verb

Woken up too early and continuing my dreaming.

A vicious feasting - carrion impulses, a straining and collapsing, a frightening point, a sharpening of views, so strained and so forceful, a straight-laced disciple.

But nothing’s of significance, nothing is necessary, pictures are fallacies, moments of treachery, drawing on our smiles, the faking of everything, time will come when time’s undone, hide ourselves, shit of our souls, decomposing bags of bone.

And you’re so welcome, and so faithful, so perfect, and so fucking everything. Empty bottles strike out broken prose while painting on a certain majesty, notes taken underground, I play the guillotine. Poetry pulled from banality. 

9. if there is something

If there is something inside you, you should be able to find a way to extract it, to remove and distort it. Separate it from its base and use it for devices previously not thought of and not designed for it. I’m speaking of course not only on the meditative qualities of personal Id, or of self-effecting intellect solely for intellect’s sake. The most formulaic and pre-determined notions can and somehow must evolve into a creature/movement of great predatory power and function. Predatory not in an exactly physically destructive sense, the material world is far too ridiculous in its excesses for something as prurient and level as (at this point) un-bridled brain synapses: our basic biology.

8. woman

I want to run from you. I’m so tempted to use you. To subvert you. To crawl inside your head and shake the dust from the shelves. I feel a weakness in myself when we make eye-contact. I feel unsure, confused. I’ve no idea where I’m going but I want to string you along as I decipher the signs. I want to please the flesh. Confuse and obfuscate the senses. The drugs don’t work anymore. I need to throw everything off the track and pretend to focus. I love to teach as I fuck.

Where are my goddamned questionnaires?

You know who you are!

Please put your monkey backs into it, I’m getting bored.

voltairiansurrealist@gmail.com

7. poetic relapse

To become yourself again. What can nurture this natural disaster? Do you need to tear every old, yellowed and brittle frame down to see the pictures in a new way, with new eyes? What of consequence,

what of method?

6. the return of ghosts

The deficiency, I want to  be CLEAR with someone, have a true connection, but it is so difficult to condition yourself to be totally honest. There’s always the pretense: pride, shame, jealousy, love, hate… etc.

5. reshuffle\

So I had to stand in line. Waiting for a check of all things. True, I took part. I was forced to. I’ve liberally bent over for the “dollar” on so many occasions throughout my life that I no longer count them as significant. I use the dirty god muscle of money only because, in this world, this façade they’ve built up, I could not survive without it. Everything is owned and rationed out for far too steep a price. It would be near impossible to live in this country without taking part in the dance. So we apply ourselves, languidly; up and upon our gods. Sodomized in our minds.

AUTHENTIC, REAL, IMPORTANT.

4. abortion

3. all power to the imagination.

The seductive disease of these beautiful trees, it seems sometimes like paper, brittle and thin. Vulnerable to the point of disintegration, barely real enough to hold itself together for my benefit.

2. vicious as coitus

I could finally hold my breath inside words… Spatial consequence, physical and obscenely tangible. The honey from a deadly nest. “Obliviously on he sails” - that’s what we call a quote. An idea, feeling or suggestion that we borrow from someone else to help validate something we personally think, feel, or suggest. Just one of the crutches we use; other people’s words, removed from the context of the whole. Supporting ourselves with our distortions. We faint and demand that the world faint with us.

I AM THE FIRE THAT FLARES UP AGAIN

i am the fire that flares up again

selected writings by

jonathan duran