Our newly hatched Kabuto Mushi (stag beetles) have been jousting all night for the past several days, taking just enough time to sit down with some pine-jelly to recoup their strength, then they’re back at it again: tumbling, blurting their wings, striking their horns together. They knock off about 6:30 A.M. and resume just when the night shift starts at about 10 P.M. We have 20 of them sitting in terrariums in the hall and around four in the morning you can imagine some little cowboy movie being filmed at Miss Kitty’s Jelly Bar.

Yo, Maya, Tenn and I just returned from an incredible Sunday spent at the Kawamura Memorial Art Museum in Chiba. What is almost as unbelievable as the collection is the ride out among the rice fields to get to the museum. The Kawamura Museum is located in the middle of countryside that reminds me of Nagasaki prefecture, yet once you arrive you are greeted near the entrance by a monumental piece of sculpture fashioned from massive scraps of steel and iron by none other than Frank Stella himself! The piece looks like a verticle train wreck or an airplane disaster balanced on end: an immense encounter that exudes a modernity chewed up and spit out by two world wars and every wreck of every Edsel rolled into one great Kodak anti-moment. Yet the feeling of Stella’s giant object is peaceful, the dreadul peace of the moment after the bomb has gone off or the gun has been fired or the plane has bellied in on the landing strip with its landing gear still undeployed. Before heading to the Klee retrospective on the second floor, we spent time with Monet, Braque, Picasso, Schwitters, Ernst and Arp. We moved into a hall of wonderful Joseph Cornell boxes and Tenn called out that she needed paper and pencil. The guard lady kindly gave Tenn a pencil, as pens weren’t allowed, and my daughter spent time sketching “The Hotel Star”. Maya hastened us on and I was totally unprepared when I–without knowing–stepped into the middle of the Rothko room, which contained some of the best panels of the Seagram Mural. I couldn’t believe my luck! These paintings are so huge and so subtle! They radiate a kind of od-like energy that is absolutely palpable. I wanted to spend more time with those pictures, but we had to hurry upstairs to flash through the Klees before the museum closed. We’re hoping to get back to the Kawamura Museum before the end of this month. We need to take more time with the Klees and sit longer with the Rothkos.

Dear Mr. Glass:

Yes, I received your book [Enoch]. I thought that was lots of fun. About that drunken professor being lost amongst the sunbeams and the light years, and to and from Vesuvius.–But persisting on anyone like that being a member of the Church of God? Now, I am a listed socialist at the police station, so this isn’t anything for me to drink ever again. Possibly some nice girl to cure this professor of drunkeness during the light years? Is she a Christian?

Well, I am that kind of a poet who can’t do anything else, but poetry. I don’t really read poetry.. So I am not much of a critic.

That would be no proofs for anything else I do for the rest of this. Abraham Lincoln never proved anything like that.

Immune,

Alfred Starr Hamilton

The Pain Journal
by Bob Flanagan.
Seniotext(e)/ Smart Art Press.
180 pages. Paper. 2000.

I met Sheree Rose last December at the Ahadada reading at Beyond Baroque. She was slightly buzzed, I suspect, and talked about Bob as if I knew–or should have known–all about him. “They treated us like gods in Japan,” she said. “Oh really?” I said and smiled. Now I understand Sheree’s logic, I think. Beyond Baroque used to be pretty much run by Bob Flanagan, and on top of that, Bob was the incredible fellow who had Cystic Fibrosis and lived to the ripe old age of 42, and on top of that he was the fellow who writhed on screen in the cult movie “Sick” while being punished in various fashions by Sheree.

I found Bob’s site on the Internet and decided to pick up The Pain Journal and give it a read. This is a remarkable document because it takes us inside the head of a bright, articulate individual as he staggers, crawls, and sometimes even sprints (in spirit) toward the Great Unknown. Mostly we get to see what a bore dying is. Bob complains about everything, including complaining too much. Nothing is quite right, nothing suits him. Sheree snores too much, the meds aren’t working, his mother doesn’t seem to care, or maybe cares too much. Television doesn’t interest him, though he watches long hours of it, unable to sleep. Still and all, we have to admire the guts Bob had to continue writing and doing what he did until almost the end. He had that much hope that he continued on. Some parts remind me a bit of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata with the all-knowing Mind of Tolstoy ripped away leaving behind a sky denuded of metaphysics and strangely backlit by the steady-state half-life of greater L.A.