fuck art
lets kill

nothing makes me feel older than going back to the music of my youth. okay, everyone does that shit no matter how old you are. and the beauty of the passing days is that everyone gets older, no exceptions. and frankly, what is time anyway but an accretion of days, months and years. duh, you say, and i agree but we all have moments where we remember something that happened years ago and think it was just a few weeks ago.

anyway, last night hanging out with a group of poets the discussion turned to the problems of, and the lack of success, being publishable, teaching and so on. all relevant topics i'm sure. at any rate, i wonder what the hell we mean by success. our discussions were not specific about poetic success, yet a couple of the group are young, early to mid-20s, and by nature younger writers start by feeling out the ground as they try to establish the art of writing in their lives.

which again brings me back to the music of my youth. lately, i've been listening to a few songs by the chicago-based industrial band ministry. i hold the band as an exemplar of metamorphosis for when they first started in the early '80s they were a rather derivative faux-english synth-pop band. by the mid to late '80s they transformed themselves into a nihilist, thundering wash of distorted guitars, steely synths, using samples from movies and speeches while the vocalists, both al jourgensen and paul barker, distorted their voices by artificial fx. in other words, very little in pop music had heralded such a change in tone and sound from a band.

so then, ministry was a group that i focused on as i was moving toward poetry. what i liked about them, and still do, was their nihilism. i was not a hardcore nihilist but i was approaching life and art as interwoven parts of a whole as existential tendencies began to burble in my burgeoning identity as a man and poet. listening to their music i worried less about art, which i held then, and honestly i still do, as sacrosanct and turned my attention to the making of my chosen fields of expression without thought of audience or the unforeseeable future. and tho ministry achieved considerable popular success i wonder if that was their goal when they changed their sound. in the mid '80s only a few cities, largely populated like l.a. and nyc, had fm alternative music radio stations. and back then radio airplay was the main vehicle for any sort of commercial success.

which is a long way of saying that as i was feeling my own way upon the ground of contemporary letters ministry was one of the influences that pointed a way toward doing whatever the fuck i wanted to do and not worry about whether it would get me published in antioch or poetry. who cares. yes, i made mucho mistakes. i still do. it's that art of doing that makes a life, ain't it. so fuck art. lets kill.