sah-GAY-shus

sagacious

"of keen and farsighted penetration and judgement: discerning"

did you know that with the merriamwebster ap for the iPhone, you can just talk into the phone and it will recognize your word and bring you the definition?  do you have any fucking idea how incredibly fucking fantastic this is?  this is going to mean i can actually read books and understand what they mean.  i'm going to understand what the books mean, riffling off words verbally into my fucking iPhone ap, god damn.  like boom! boom! boom! "sagacious", gotchyou bitch, i know what you mean,  yeah bitches, "miasma!" "pallid!" "portentous!" "parabola!" i got you figured out, no more what the fuck does that mean.

i am one sagacious motherfucker.  discerning, farsightedly penetrating, penetrating that shit with my goldenrod mind, inside the cave of the dweller, thresholds crossed and transgressions forgiven, i'm the motherfucker with the opium, got you high off that natural disaster type shit

"my word play is jay z's object of study,
oops just scrabbled j into a fuddy-duddy 
tricks and treats i got in the bag
with a knife in the apple and Eve on my ass
i'll give you a phrase for a mil' and a gram
sit on your throne and eat your ham"

that's just some introductory shit.  you don't even want me to start getting serious.  i mean like taking it to some eminem educated shit, bout to use my masters degree on this shit, pouring lyrical greatness into your half empty, my half full cup.  i mean didn't we lose lyrical greatness back in the early 90's.  it's been a wasteland for the last 20 fucking years in hip hop.  gangster rap.  conscious rap.  well, i'm bout to change all that fo sho, nobody even says fo sho anymore, not even in walnut creek.

i gotta admit there are other sagacious motherfuckers out there.  i'd like to highlight just a couple.  harvey milk.  this motherfucker was one sagacious motherfucker.  he had some shit figured out a long time before your average joe in nebraska still elaborating his homophobic vaccuum of a mind.  dumb nebraskan motherfucker.  not to pick on nebraskans, that's just like homophobia.  jesus.  i'm so fallible. (had to use the merriamwebster ap for that one)  i try to say something right and get it wrong. i get it wrong.  i get it wrong.

"i get it wrong! i get it wrong!" - that's a good punk song chorus.  think dive club, spiky, mohawk dude with all kinds of tats and piercinings black torn jeans, "black flag" t shirt also torn, just ripping up a $100 strat, all fucked up and chipped and shit.  but he's wailing this shit bullet point stylee.  can't understand anything.

"i get it wrong! i get it wrong!
my mother's a fucking prong!
i get it wrong! i get it wrong!
my father takes it in the gong!"

DAMN.  did you not bear witness?  i just switched it up sagaciously, emphatically, hip hop to punk, limp bizkt style, cutting edge, 1993, mashing before mash up. potatoes.

okay, so i have to admit something.  i'm listening to the airborne toxic event.  i know.  but it's catchy.  i kindof like it. "wishing well" has this nice vibe to it.  it's cute.  that's so condescending it hurts.


And you think to yourself,
"This is it, this is it
This is all that I have
All I can stand
Is this air in my lungs
And this coin in my hand"


listen, i know, this posting is about hip hop and gay visionaries, so just continue to keep it real.  did you know that i'm a scholar of hip hop.  (or i was?/confusion)  i wrote my undergraduate thesis in 2002 on white suburban kids and hip hop.  it was that general.  i have no idea what i was trying to say.  i wrote 50 pages and it probably could have been a solid 5 pager.  damn i love you guys, gay, straight, bi-sexual, transgender, questioning, in transition, in scandanavia waiting in the operating room for the big switch, i love all you girls and guys and people for whom those words don't quite work.  i love you for your bravery.  it takes some balls to be a lesbian in this country.  so just know someone is appreciating that fact on a day to day level.

love to love,
Anthony

hip hop is not dead.

Big K.R.I.T "Hometown Hero"

ps - just to be clear, i'm upset with homophobic nebraskans, absolutely not the entire human population of nebraska.

Iris

when my nana returned home from the hospital and was laid on the bed in the room with the biggest window facing the street, she asked, while she was still able to articulate full sentences, that my family play Pavarotti's Nessun Dorma in the time before her death.  this music was to ease her transition.  I was too young and too scared to visit my nana more than one or two times after she returned home.  my father and younger sister spent a great deal of time with her during this time and were close by when she passed.  they wept while Pavarotti sang, next to my father's gentle sister Missy and the nurse who had cared for her.  i now wish i had spent more time with her even when she could do little but sleep.  she was such a radiant person.  she was the daughter of Italian immigrants and must have kept the recipes from the home country.  every Tuesday she spent the whole day cooking the most delicious pasta for dinner that night.  my father, mother, sister and I, along with my father's many cousins and one Uncle Norm, a lovable curmudgeon if there ever was one,  would come to her house in Berkeley every Tuesday night to argue about the price of groceries, how best to fix a leaky faucet and national politics.  but the real reason they came, why we came, was not the pasta or the lively discussions.  we came for my nana, Iris, and her glowing life.  we came to be next to her glow, to be a part of it, to feel the warmth.

is falling asleep each night practice for dying?  even if we sleep in the same bed with our partner, at some point we roll over into our own darkness and must face the transition from being awake to falling asleep alone.  we fall asleep, we fall, we let our bodies go limp and tip from the edge of the highest skyscraper scraping the top of the sky and we close our eyes and let gravity pull our limp bodies over the edge and begin the fall, our muscles cease to flex and the air currents pull our arms and legs and torso, slowly rolling, putting up a hand as if to ask a question and then a leg and foot pulled up upside down head snaps back and we roll again, falling downward, and it escapes, the fear the anxiety about sleep about death escapes, and our whole bodies make peace with the falling and slow tumbling until we reach a place...and the observer on the street with his head craning to see, sees something and then nothing, and Pavarotti is on stage in Paris perfectly, perfectly, perfectly, the only thing every perfectly done by a human, wailing the final lyrics, "vincero! vincero!" "we shall be victorious!"

my nana, laying on her bed with eyes closed, knowing she is very close to death, has a moment of terror.  she is painfully aware that her life is ending.  she will soon slip into sleep and be protected from this fear in the haze of the final transition.  but for this moment she is lucid and the fear strikes her body.  it is a visceral, deeply emotional fear.  there are no accompanying thoughts. it exists in a flash of bodily discomfort.  but then she hears the music, which has been playing since the beginning, and in that moment the music washes over her.  she is comforted by the voice and the orchestra and the fear dissolves.  there is only acceptance and meaning, the knowledge that she lived a purposeful, wonderful life and protected the ones she loved with her radiance.

Pavarotti "Nessun Dorma"

bravo.

with a belly full of love,
Anthony

tall white guy

"fuck them bitches" he said.

this man of constant sorrow and perpetual anxiety said again, "fuck them bitches"  he was sitting at a bus stop next to a woman wearing a powdered wig, like a british barrister.  the man was reading Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, Letter Number 8.  he was facing a great challenge and thus feeling sad.  he did not like the exposure, exposure to the winds of change, hard driving winds blowing in currents of the forlorn and the gloom.  he felt the gloom in the winds of change and had to sit with one hand clutching the modern, green, bus stop seat with its rounded trapezoidal holes.  with his right hand he clutched the bottom of the metal seat, and with the left hand he held the book, the tangible book, with pages.  he used his thumb and ring finger to spread the pages open and his pointer and middle fingers to support the back of the book.  in this way he held and read the book.

"fuck them bitches"

the woman looked at him and assumed things.  she wore the wig out of conscience.  she felt like a more moral person with the powdered wig, with its curlets dropping down around her neck.  she felt more like a bird this way.  she associated birds with greater moral clarity "even though the hawk swoops down and tears the throat out of the mouse".

they both heard the buzzing at the same time and turned their heads to the left.  coming towards them about a block away (it had just turned right onto Van Ness) was a fly.  the fly was at least three feet long and starch white with bulging black eyes.  its wings, and there seemed to be hundreds of wings all flapping in psychotic synchronicity, were dark green moving into black.  they glimmered just a bit.  what beautiful contrast, this black on white.

the woman, who did not like bugs, was paralyzed by the fear.  she wanted so badly to move from her seat at the bus stop, but the shock was too great, and the man, soft and forlorn, just squeezed his butt cheeks together.  he could move, but only in a reverse bowel movement, muscles that in this situation aided nothing.  maybe running home from school, 6 years old, shit struggling to come out into the world, these muscles would have helped.  but in this instance, their clenching, the great power of their clenching did nothing.

"fuck, fuck, fuck" said the man. the book dropped, Rilke in super slow motion, the dragons and princesses from the text projected out into plain view; the man now both hands clutching bus stop seat.

the freakish white fly continued toward them, each foot closer producing exponentially greater anxiety in both the wigged woman and the bowel man.  excruciatingly closer and closer it flew.  the flapping, more like lightening, each unique downward propulsion a spear into the heart of anxiety, man and woman.  great distances imagined, deserts of miles and miles, this fiend of a fly was coming for their hearts, it would eat their hearts and fuck them in the in the place they both craved and feared.  what coincidence! what charm! eating and fucking, eating and fucking, gizzards and rectums rescued by the gorgeous giant winged creature.  a horse of a fly.

and it flew right by, tipping its cap. kept on going down the street.  one block further and then left on Turk probably to a bar for a drink.

a great deal of time passed and no bus arrived.  finally, the man said "fuck them bitches"

"yes, fuck them bitches"

fin

with all kinds of love,
Anthony

Lost and Found

This week my boss asked me to send an email out to all the PhD students about the department's "lost and found".  The Psychology Department at UC Berkeley actually has a lost and found.  It is located in such and such a place.  I let the students know that the lost and found may contain items going back several years.  So if they had lost something at some point, they may want to check it out.  If a student hadn’t lost anything, then it would not make sense to check out the lost and found.  The lost and found, for me, conjures up an image of a wooden box in a Kindergarten classroom with lots of single shoes and socks and toys and books.  Probably one sock is hanging over the edge; it is a Spiderman sock.  The lost and found conjures up a time when loosing things was much more common.  Kindergarteners, who are people too, lose things at a much more frequent rate than adults.  However, adults also lose things, hence the need for a lost and found in the Psychology Department at UC Berkeley.

But sometimes adults lose things that don't fit in the small, wooden lost and found box.  Sometimes we lose things that are alive with a fleshy, muscular heart pumping blood through veins and arteries.  We lose people.  We lose people who play a major role in our lives for a length of time but now are gone.  And we are left with an empty box.  And although an empty box creates sadness, if we remember that the lost and found is not called the lost box but the lost and found box, we know that the box will be full again and we will be found by another person who will bring a different joy to our life.

This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)


with affection,
Anthony