The International Style (notes on urban development)

Le Corbusier is sipping Le Courvoisier on the roof of an estate building,

At mid-night,

Counting stars and flies, flies and stars.

How did this urban sprawl called form come to be?

A glorious Functionary of the B&W,

An avid turn-piker,

A vision of the tower, not built for clocks but for a timeless sitting,

On a stoop, metal railing,

Lying, squatting,

Loitering, squallering,

Leaving the space blank for the 

                         multi-faith prayer room.

The blue print is named "Anadonia",

It has been approved by the one and three quarter star general,

Who got the post,

Rubber stamping at the bureau.

"Ornament is crime",

The obit. Read,

Written in limestone,

That will dissolve into obscurity come the first rain.

Crisp neighborhood Leisure Park,

Where pretty kids, with locks and cornrows come to know who is the king of the Monkey 

 Bars and play in the sand box,

Filled with rusty nails and shard glass,

            The gold locks become Persian red,

                   Especially after a game of

                           rock-paper-scissors.     

                   

                                           Cony Island subsidized housing

A Eulogy for Stieglitz (a Cultural Critic)

What a way to go - to drown in a glass of champagne. 

Looking from the inside out at the party, the band is playing an up tempo tune that you remember from your childhood, but it is muffled, distorted, from that sweet dry effervescence that once filled his heart and is now filling your lungs. The chatter of the party goes fuses in with the bass beats until all you can hear is the fermenting sugar going wild as it let loose in the rocket shaped glass. The bubbles get into your eyes as you struggled to focus on a past love that was being wooed by dark haired socialites. Everything turns sepia; the old age of the grape shows its ugly side. 

It was like a 1920’s comedy of errors shot in three days because of budget cuts. The socialites are circling around your old flame like a cackle of rabid hyenas, showing their teeth and their tails to each other, jumping in the air like show dogs to the sound of her coquettish laugh. 

You stroke with all your might but you don’t know which way is up anymore; you are suffering from a case of The Bends. You free-dive deeper “in-glass”, the tannins in your head are ready to burst. For you there will be no great escape. You won’t have a chance to breath. 

As you go deeper, your head is fizzy and dry, you see your old flame leave alone, her red train leaves a red wet mark on the floor. You become light-bodied and are beginning to ferment. Finally you close your eyes, breathe in the tangy thick semi-liquid. Let your body float, carbonate. 

Your soul, your dreams, your truth will be realized like those fleeting effervescence of a grape; through your rigor-mortis.

Eruditely

It seems a bit German, Doesn't it?

Great Neck and Dandilions

Look at her

Sun like geraniums creeping up her legs, make "it" shine like a vivid childhood memory that lurked in a strange corner of your brain, waiting for the ultimate death to pounce

The solar panels reflect in the wet, cool desert at dawn

She twirls around, trampling on the flowers one by
one

laughing wickedly
   or innocently

which is the same
  in a child's mind

I would like to beat her for it

But instead
   I take snapshots of her
snapshots that will never see
   the light
because I was
  overexposed

                                          Tel Regev/Untitled

Stieglitz

Yes, it’s weird how things turned out but the signs were there. 

 Stieglitz is not like me. Sometimes he can write five pieces in one go, typing hurriedly and aggressively, the clattering of the keys making a sound of verbose downpour, filled with references and lubricated puns, something between Edward Said and a CAT-Scan. 

I could spend days, musing in bed, only to wake up three days later or in a different season all together. I couldn’t help it; my mind like a computer filled with leach-like viruses and despicable pornographic images. His words were soliform, an entity of pure energy that hit the page directly, like the jolt a madman gets in an electroshock treatment. He is the “Man” among men, a true bureaucrat of language and form, a stickler for synonyms.

I was the intellectual-buffoon, a juggler of words, the high-rope walker of semantics and semiotics, the Svengali of syntax. 

Once we were inseparable: weekends down the shore, dramatic readings of Beckett or the TV guide. We wore the same green checkered suit (He wore the jacket, I wore the pants). 

But the job of the critic is to mystify the job of the critic. Stieglitz, like the Wizard of Oz, planted seeds of contempt in this Tower of Babylon in order to create the illusion that he is larger than the munchkins. But unlike the munchkins, he ceased to live in Technicolor. Soon enough his parables came to serve as a deep insight into the psyche of a housewife ironing on Valium. He was the proclaimed prophet of plastic. 

Today Stieglitz lives on the 25th floor overlooking some river or some municipal building or some tree. I live in a hole in the ground or in the tree overlooking a large glass building