Unhinged Lyricism

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The Found Manifesto of Unhinged Lyricism~

~February, Two-thousand-and nine~

~Assembled from the Obscene Outbursts and Silent Epiphanies of Vagabond Geniuses, Wrapped in Steamed Banana Leaf and Smelted in the Fires of Our Ardor.

From these Forlorn Shores of the Forgotten Spanish Empire’s Northern Metropolis, we set sail the galleon of Unhinged Lyricism into the frigid waters of American art. The voyage perilous and the booty scant, we troll for the pure lyricality of word and image in a sea plagued by the parasitic overgrowths of cleverness and calculated effect.

With our gleaming canons, we sound the death knell of conceptual art— Crash and Down with your nihilism! Kaboom and away with your devastating irony! Kerplunk and curse your solipsism! The serpent has already swallowed its tail! Nothing remains but your vacuousness! With our cutlasses aimed at your quivering throats, we say ENOUGH! No longer will art dominated by those who despise it!

Barring intervention, who knows how long the public--that hideous eunuch parade of academics, critics, and their legion necrophiliac followers--—would have marched to your monotone fanfare? You have composed the score to the suicide of civilization, and were it not for the paralyzing cry of the Unhinged Lyricists, you would have merrily piped the rat-children of our civilization right off the abyss. We have come to restore melody to the music of art. Your 4 minutes and 33 seconds of echo-chamber idiocy and vindictive masturbation are over!

The penetrating gaze, the analytic probe, the theoretical lens--these are the torturer’s tools that you, inept apprentices, have stolen from the academic’s abattoir and smuggled into the studio. Your canvases are the essays of illiterates, your drawings the frustrated rhetorical scribbles of imbecile orators. You have made art the superfluous companion to the true embodiment of your animus-- the ponderous artist’s statement. Under your watch, art has become a third-rate form of art criticism.

Unhinged Lyricism seeks that primitive intoxication of word and image. Why do we make art? Our answer is the same as the child’s, the asylum mate’s, the cave dwelling scrawler of the Pleistocene’s--—because we want to see the image, to see the word, to hear their melodies. We want to feel them and become them-- to experience ourselves as the eternal reverberation of image and word.

Take heed of our tenets:

1. Unhinged lyricism sings with the universal “I”-- the “I” that dwells eternally in the ground of being. We condemn the dualism of subjectivity and objectivity as a grotesque fallacy of ego.
2. We proclaim the doodle as the essence of an art that is in good faith. Unthinking and spontaneous, the doodle makes no pretenses and no claims to sense.
3. Anyone who does not doodle impulsively, compulsively, joyously, should burn his or her portfolio and decamp to the nation’s humanities departments (alas, if only you could read!), where countless overeducated cripples are waiting with knives sharpened to teach you how to gut a work of art in the name of cultural critique. Or better yet, retreat to the convent, so aptly suited to your life-negating asceticism and sterile minds.
4. All artist’s statements should be ripped from the binders of galleries and shipped to the Unhinged Lyricist campgrounds, where they will contribute to the upkeep of our sparklingly clean anuses. The only thing worse than your art is your prose.
5. Unhinged Lyricism is aimless whistling on a wooded path, bicycling poultry in a sea of tears, wandering horsemen in the kingdom of time, ailing poets in the backwash of history, cascading children in the bellies of whales, half-eaten apples in the armpits of gods, besotted nymphs in the boots of Cossacks, and untimely prophets in the gutters of greatness. If they can’t resurrect those dead we call living, nothing can!

Mother's Diary

Dear Diary,

Gosh, I wish I had fourteen children. Then I could buy that fifteen-passenger Hummer I’ve had my eye on for so long. I just couldn’t justify spending that kind of money on a luxury in this economy, but you can’t argue with necessity. What kind of horrible parent skimps on their children’s safety? Besides, there would be incalculable emotional benefits. This Hummer, unlike the false promises of the Subzero fridge and the Showtime Rotisserie cooker, could be the product that finally brings our family together.

Just imagine-- after a quiet Sunday breakfast of 32 eggs, a side of beef, and six gallons of orange juice, Junior, Humphrey, Harvey, Lefty, Whitey, Snake Eyes, Squishy, Ohno, Goodgod, Genghis Khan, Anti-Junior, Cherrypicker, Deadweight, and Eleanor, and I would all climb in the family Hummer and go for a joyride.

Maybe we would go to the beach where I could work on my tan while the kids built a sand castle. Fourteen unhinged minds with twenty-eight groping hands can really move some sand around. Though Squishy would have to hang back on the towel with me, on account if his sand allergy. And Humphrey is not allowed near California coastal waters until he’s eighteen. But, boy, we sure ate lobsters aplenty that night. First time the kids had a fancy dinner. They still had to share plates, but they were beyond thrilled just to be eating something that didn’t come out of a 30lb bag and wasn’t shaped like a bone.

Or perhaps we’d cruise Route 1 and stop somewhere scenic for ice cream. Of course, Squishy would only be able to have a cone, on account of his milk allergy. But he seems to enjoy gnawing on them with his tooth. And to think that quack dentist said all his teeth would fall out. Let me tell you, that tooth is going nowhere. Not even Anti-Junior could knock it out with his blackjack during one of his episodes. And I still open a beer on that tooth every morning before I give Goodgod and Deadwood their bottle. Which reminds me, I’d have to pack an extra six-pack for the drive (another reason to the get the Hummer—built-in state-of-the-art cooler) because the babies get really irritable when they don’t get their taste (they’ve been like that since they were in the womb) and, lord knows, they’re not getting mine.

Come to think of it, that Route 1 gets pretty curvy. I better let Lefty drive. He hasn’t had a seizure in weeks, so as far as I’m concerned, his epilepsy is cured. Or it never existed—just another conspiracy by that commie doctor trying to push his abortionist ideology on me, as though it weren’t my god given American born right to have as many children as I want. Every child is a blessing from Christ. Except Ghengis Khan. He really is evil. There’s just no mistaking that mattoid grin for anything but pure malevolence.

But I still wouldn’t have aborted him. I might have left him at the fire station once or twice, but he always finds his way back home. Unlike Whitey. Sometimes I forget Whitey in the grocery store or at the track and when I finally do a head count and realize my mistake a few days later, there he is right where I left him—frozen, eyes rolled back into his head, and white as a sheet—just like he always looks.

Oh, no (no, not you, Ohno—get back in your cage). I just realized how long I’m going to have to wait in line for ice cream with fourteen kids ahead of me. Normally, I’d be first in line, but I’ve been reduced to a slow limp ever since Anti-Junior thwacked me good in the knee cap with that blackjack.

Yes, come to think of it, life really would be hell with fourteen children. I should just be grateful for the thirteen marginally healthy darlings I already have. Maybe I simply ought to recognize how wonderful my family is and what an amazing job I do as a single mother, and then reward myself with a fifteen-seat Hummer.