The spectacular vernacular song of myself. This is a love letter to the city of broad shoulders, broads, and pork shoulders. She's had plastic surgery, but her nose is still broken.

 

I like bricks, and, Jack, she's a brick house. She's a skirt steak, free fries with a shake. She's got the meat and the motion. She's got a Jiffy Lube and a notion . She's got a Great Lake, not an ocean.

 

Cheap rents,

sleeping in tents --

attention, gents

that's my bottle.

 

Old-man bars,

rust-bucket cars,

pennies in jars

for your thoughts.

 

Hanging around,

nothing to do but frown,

rainy days and mundanes

always get me down.

 

Dry hump,

fly dump,

don't sit there like a lump,

acting like a chump.

 

Punch Drunk

went out to lunch

with a sucker punch.

(He'd had a hunch

it was a supper club.)

 

Down at the bar and grill,

at the far end away from the chill,

sits a girl who's about to spill

her guts from too much coffee and swill.

 

A 5 o'clock shadow falls over a stumble bum corner. Pull down the shades and call the coroner.

 

A shave and a shine

above a place where you used to dine.

Come back to the five and dime,

Tom, at the counter where time waits.

 

Hubcaps and cheap sox,

raindogs sleeping in a box,

"cheat you fair" --

what do you care?

Shut the door and check the locks.

 

Kickin' rocks

she plays the squeeze box,

cold as an icebox,

while their eyes lock

in a street shot.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXX

 

Found while wandering the streets and back alleys of Chicago/ collecting seemingly random thoughts and observations/ compiling collages and soundtracks from the collective unconscious/ deconstructing the landscape of symbols and meaning/ colliding with coincidence/ running at the mouth/ consuming and puking beauty... "Truth" is a tentative and tenacious thing. As the neon invitation to the hotel announced, "Transients Welcomed." The revolution WILL BE commodified....

XXXXXXXXXX

 

Here I was, hoping to franchise a chain of typewriter/8-track/vcr repair shops. Guess I'll just go back to developing that chain of buggy whip boutiques...

XXXXXXXXXX

 

Like dollar stores and the poor,

we'll always have Cleveland.

xxxxxxxxxx

 

Cityscapes and pretty scrapes,

drinking of the finest grapes.

Busted noses and rubber hoses,

busted dreams and unkept roses.

 

Forgotten faces, empty spaces,

lipstick traces on pillowcases.

Foreclosures and abandonments,

breaking all the Ten Commandments.

 

On the boulevard of broken dreams

in space no one can hear your screams.

Turn out the lights, turn off the beams --

everything's not what it seems.

 

xxxxx

 

Let's get lost

 

Outta business, baby.

Like nowheresville.

Gone, daddy, gone.

Nobody home.

Splitsville.

Out of time, out of space,

no time left, no sense of place.

Erase your face.

End of the race.

Negativeland, negative space.

Gone.

 

xxxxx

 

"Hey, don't dis the Pei -- he "rocks" (as in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.) And of course, he who lives in glass pyramids shouldn't throw rocks -- he should employ robots to wash his windows.

 

xxxxx

 

Pulling on a past thread on the resurgence of the mix-tape, dig this local community project of sharing mixes via discreet public spaces.

www.illcutyou.com/tapes

"leaving found audio, mix tapes, loops, sound projects and other recordings in... an alienating environment that is often tuned out by the senses"

 

For your own copy of "Ladies Room / I Dig Chicks", visit Pitney Ct. (in Bridgeport) on the southwest corner of Archer Ave. Side A kicks off with The Monkees riffing on the Rolling Stones with "Valerie", followed by Bobby Sherman with another tiger beat, "Julie, Do Ya Love Me?" The flipside opens with Sammy Davis, Jr. covering "There is Nothing Like a Dame" from South Pacific. The sole copy of this original mix can be found inside a hole in the stone & brick wall along the west side of Pitney Ct., approximately 7' south of the corner.

 

xxxxx

 

And speaking of stardust, what of the connections between Dennis Wilson, Charles Manson, Squeaky Froome, Gerald Ford, Chevy Chase, Henry Ford, and the Ford Theatre??! Don’t even get me started about the connections between Cousteau, Serling, Nimoy, and John & Bob Denver!