“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!”
devout buddhists believe in sonam--an accounting of righteous deeds that, when large enough, enables one to escape the cycle of birth and rebirth and transcend forever this world of pain and suffering.
But for me, at least, as the summer twilight shaded into full night, the exhilaration of this “Hair” was tempered by an exquisitely sad taste of the ephemeral in life. This revelatory production’s anthem turns out not to be its title song, though it’s performed with marvelous gusto here, but the haunted ballad that Claude sings shortly thereafter. Its title: “Where Do I Go?”
Walking the soil of a desert island holds one anchored to the rest of the earth; but in their penthouse, with the telephone disconnected, Wynand and Dominique had no feeling of the fifty-seven floors below them, of steel shafts braced against granite--and it seemed to them that their home was anchored in space, not an island, but a planet. The city became a friendly sight, an abstraction with which no possible communication could be established, like the sky, a spectacle to be admired, but of no direct concern in their lives.
CITY of orgies, walks and joys!
City whom that I have lived and sung in your midst will one day make you illustrious,
Not the pageants of you—not your shifting tableaux, your spectacles, repay me;
Not the interminable rows of your houses—nor the ships at the wharves,
Nor the processions in the streets, nor the bright windows, with goods in them;
Nor to converse with learn’d persons, or bear my share in the soiree or feast;
Not those—but, as I pass, O Manhattan! your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love,
Offering response to my own—these repay me;
Lovers, continual lovers, only repay me.
"i would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of new york's skyline. particularly when one can't see the details. just the shapes. the shapes and the thought that made them. the sky over new york and the will of man made visible. what other religion do we need? and then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. is it beauty and genius they want to see? do they seek a sense of the sublime? let them come to new york, stand on the shore of the hudson, look and kneel. when i see the city from my window--no, i don't feel how small i am--but i feel that if a war came to threaten this, i would like to throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body."
calvin johnson, a co-founder of the project and a leader of the new orleans trip, says the marathon nature of the events helps promote a feeling of disorientation and discovery. "there's a sense at about five a.m. or six a.m. where basically your defense mechanisms break down," he says. "by the end, it feels like an acid trip without acid."
She had big breasts, slim legs, and blue eyes. That’s how I like to remember her. I don’t know why I fell madly in love with her, but I did, and at the start, I mean for the first days, the first hours, it all went fine; then Clara returned to the city where she lived, in the south of Spain (she’d been on vacation in Barcelona), and everything began to fall apart.
One night I dreamed of an angel: I walked into a huge, empty bar and saw him sitting in a corner with his elbows on the table and a cup of milky coffee in front of him. She’s the love of your life, he said, looking up at me, and the force of his gaze, the fire in his eyes, threw me right across the room. I started shouting, Waiter, waiter, then opened my eyes and escaped from that miserable dream. Other nights I didn’t dream of anyone, but I woke up in tears. Meanwhile, Clara and I were writing to each other. Her letters were brief. Hi, how are you, it’s raining, I love you, bye. At first, those letters scared me. It’s all over, I thought. Nevertheless, after inspecting them more carefully, I reached the conclusion that her epistolary concision was motivated by a desire to avoid grammatical errors. Clara was proud. She couldn’t write well, and she didn’t want to let it show, even if it meant hurting me by seeming cold.
“Each day is like a work of art to him.” This is his manifesto: Seize the space, fill the void, defy society’s soul-killing laws, define yourself through action.
