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Then there was Charles Bukowski.
Not the kind of poet who arrives wearing a clean shirt and asking politely whether you have a moment for literature. Bukowski came through the back door. He smelled like cigarettes and cheap whiskey and long nights and bad decisions. He wrote about drunks and gamblers and loneliness and women and racetracks and office jobs and the strange little humiliations that make up a human life.
He had no great interest in pretending that people were better than they were. And maybe that was his gift. And that’s what I love about him. Because Bukowski looked at the world without washing its face first. He found poetry in the places where poetry wasn't supposed to be. In a dirty apartment. At the racetrack. In a bar at two in the morning. In the terrible silence after somebody leaves. In the man sitting alone with a typewriter, wondering whether anybody on earth would ever understand what he was trying to say. He understood failure. Not as a concept. As a daily visitor.
And yet there was something strangely romantic about him.
You see underneath all that bitterness was a man who desperately believed in something beautiful. You don't spend your life writing if you don't believe that words can somehow rescue a moment from disappearing. That's the contradiction of Bukowski.
He tells you life is ugly, and then spends thousands of words proving that it can still be beautiful. He tells you people are ridiculous, and then writes about their loneliness with an almost unbearable tenderness. He tells you not to expect too much from the world, while quietly expecting everything from the page.
Bukowski never asked us to become better people before we were allowed into the story.
He let us be tired.
He let us be angry.
He let us be broke and lonely and confused and a little bit drunk on a Tuesday afternoon.
And somewhere between the cigarette smoke and the bad coffee, he'd remind us that being alive is already a strange enough thing. You don't have to win. You don't even have to understand it. Sometimes you just have to stay up late enough to hear the typewriter. And if you're lucky you might hear a poem coming through.
—
-Roll the Dice-
if you’re going to try, go all the way.
otherwise, don’t even start.
if you’re going to try, go all the way.
this could mean losing girlfriends,
wives, relatives, jobs and maybe your mind.
go all the way.
it could mean not eating for 3 or
4 days.
it could mean freezing on a
park bench.
it could mean jail,
it could mean derision,
mockery,
isolation.
isolation is the gift,
all the others are a test of your
endurance, of
how much you really want to
do it.
and you’ll do it
despite rejection and the
worst odds
and it will be better than
anything else
you can imagine.
if you’re going to try,
go all the way.
there is no other feeling like
that.
you will be alone with the
gods
and the nights will flame with
fire.
do it, do it, do it.
do it.
all the way
all the way.
you will ride life straight to
perfect laughter,
it’s the only good fight
there is.
// Charles Bukowski, written near the end of his life in 1991.
ink, watercolor on paper
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With lyrics that are unabashedly risqué, provocative, and laced with biting sarcasm, wrapped in music that is simultaneously playful and exquisitely melodic, Brian Eno's second solo album, “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)”, released in November 1974, refuses to submit to the convenience of labels. Art rock, glam rock, experimental rock, art pop, avant-garde, surrealism, conceptual pop—every category captures a fragment while missing the whole. The album exists in the fertile space where irony dismantles convention and melody disguises subversion.
Its magistral cover offers the first clue. Photographed by Eno's then-partner Sarah Greaves, the image presents him in military attire, suspended somewhere between historical fiction and absurdist theatre. The title itself comes from a revolutionary Chinese opera celebrating the Communist capture of Tiger Mountain during the Chinese Civil War. Eno was captivated not by ideology, but by the poetry of the phrase "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)." He transforms military strategy into artistic strategy, replacing propaganda with ambiguity and certainty with imagination. The cover is not an illustration of the music but an invitation into its labyrinth, a place where myth, performance, history, and parody dissolve into one another.
Long before ambient music became synonymous with his name, and before he became one of the most influential producers in “contemporary” music, Eno was dismantling the expectations of what a rock record could be. “Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)” is not an album that seeks approval through coherence; it celebrates contradiction as a creative principle. The sixth track, “Third Uncle”, is the ultimate example.
More than fifty years later, the album remains startlingly modern because it refuses to explain itself. It simply invites the listener to enter its strange world and rewards anyone willing to get lost inside it.
You know, puzzles have been around longer than most arguments and shorter than most regrets. Somebody hands you a handful of pieces and says, "Here, the world's broken. See if you can make it whole again." That's a pretty optimistic thing to do when you think about it.
A puzzle doesn't care if you're a banker, a baker, or a barefoot hitchhiker with two nickels and a bus ticket that expired sometime during last year. Every piece fits somewhere. Even the one you've been blaming for twenty minutes, convinced it belongs to another box entirely.
People think puzzles are about finding answers, but they're mostly about learning how to look. Anybody can stare at a hundred detailed pieces and call it the sky. It takes patience to notice one of them is really the reflection in a puddle beside an old mailbox where somebody once waited for a message that never came.
Life's got a habit of scattering its pieces under the furniture. You find one when you're twenty, another when you're fifty-seven, and another falls out of a coat pocket you haven't worn since a winter that seemed like it would never end. Funny thing is, the picture changes depending on when you finish it.
Some folks race through a puzzle like they're trying to beat the clock. Others leave one piece sitting on the table for days, maybe because they're not ready for the picture to be complete. Every ending closes a door, even the happy ones.
There's something comforting about cardboard certainty. In a world where tomorrow changes its mind before breakfast, a puzzle still promises that every jagged edge has a companion somewhere. The trick isn't forcing the pieces together. It's recognizing each one when it finally comes into your hands.
So if you've got a puzzle spread across your kitchen table tonight, don't worry too much about finishing it. Sometimes the best part isn't seeing the whole picture. It's watching a little corner of confusion slowly begin to make sense, one quiet click at a time.
Handmade puzzle, acrylic on cardboard.
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BUT Binoculars Still Needed To See Features..."--Wyatt Matturs (Associate Editor "To The Burning Manner Born")--OSWA (OneStrokeWaterArt) MRI (MysteryRepeatsItself) The World's First 'Bowhammer Cymbalom' CD Uniquely Repurposed On A Selfie-Stick" For Alternate-Optic 'Playback' (Silent Save The Sound Of Water Already Falling-From-The-Moment's PEAK--Laser-Refracted Spectrum / San Francisco Baylift Into Full Moonlight (Snapshot From Anchored Raft...)
MAIN GALLERY CURATION IN PROGRESS (From Thousands)
Medium- Acrylic on canvas
Size- 5'x10'
Year- 2009
A group of Artists from the African Diaspora,were part of a Mural project titled, "Artists Speaking For The Spirits"
Hasselblad 500 CM + Planar 80mm + Kodak Tri-X 400
© Luis Campillo 2015
Model Ane Sehnsucht. www.anesehnsucht.com
1984, Aspen, Colorado, USA --- Musician and Artist Terry Allen --- Image by © Christopher Felver/CORBIS