Sunday, May 6, 1984

Ken Larsen's MA Thesis, Art and the Bourgeoise, a dissertation presented on ribbons

Conceptual art piece, Ken Larsen's Thesis, Art and the Bourgeoisie, a hand-calligraphed dissertation presented on ribbons attached to a sunhat, and read aloud to his thesis advisor, Bruce Hackett in J St. Park, Sacramento, CA, May, 1984. I got tired of Ken's procrastination, so I interviewed him, and distilled the dissertation down into a dozen threads. Bruce read the entire dissertation aloud. It took us several walks around the park to complete the process. Ken got his MA.

Tuesday, May 1, 1984



Just as I was beginning to forget,
you arrived at my doorstep
and music burst from your eyes
even before I could hear the wings of Icarus
whisper danger from the sun.
Broken wheels in the desert are as useless
as the arms of a saguaro's embrace.
The yucca-pale dreams brought a deluge of rain
and I am drifting in the lake of your eye
once more.




All right, it's over. With these words
I redeem the human body.
We rise to the surface like parasitic fish,
leap clear of the water and fall heavily back
 to shake loose from the depths
 the snot in our lungs.
Light, like faith healing these cancerous bodies,
 brings us forth into day.

In a school drill, we crouched under our desks,
shielding our eyes and necks with chubby arms.
We sat in rows on the playground to watch the flash
drain color from the sky
when they tested the bombs at Jackass Flats.

At the hospital, the black toilet seat
is split like the thighs of some hairy sex.
A nurse keeps me from falling down
the long, cool tubes where consciousness
is an escaped bubble trapped in the bends of a pipe.
The coriolis effect on water swirls it to the right.
The opposite is true south of the equator
but there are flaws in every system, including the weather.
Remember that durning nuclear winter.

The frozen wings of starched hospital gowns
 threaten to carry us off,
but the nurse brings in the choke chains
 and we tumble from air,
 tumble from water,
 tumble from grace.
 Virgil, Prospero, Icarus—
we're too close to the light.
 Return us to the waxed plain
 of checkered hospital floors
with beds arranged according to patterns
where an enormous game of chess is in progress
and the beds are the only pawns left playing.

Falkirk Center, San Rafael

Another old ascii riddled rescue piece. Date? I'm making them all 1/180. Hopefully I'll find my lost MSS binder. Otherwise there's no hard copy of most of my work for 2 decades. Yikes.

Miracle, I found two typed versions for lines.