Review of the book After

http://www.blurb.com/b/1986861-after

I have recently obtained a review of my book After by Marta Pombo Salles.

“As a reader I truly enjoyed the book After by Mario Savioni, which I would define mainly as a strong claim against human injustice. This wonderful collection of poems reveals the author’s main concern about unfairness in the world. Some poems are critical of the capitalist system: ‘I look to our leaders and I see that/There’s money in stealing/In lying, in raping/Out of some fear that there would not be enough.’ There is also strong critique of America’s imperialism that leads to endless wars such as the conflicts in Afghanistan and Palestine, and greed for oil in the Middle East.

“America’s discovery and foundation appears to be the result of ‘The disease of man,’ ‘Killing the Indians/Building ugly towns.’ Yet the author sees hope in America’s initial good moral principles that have been perverted since the beginning. In general, he sees hope in our world even though life is hard for those who suffer. In this group of people the figure of the artist/writer, a truth and beauty seeker, appears as someone not being valued in a too materialistic society, not making enough money to live and by his dreams: ‘I think as artists, we dream and never wake./The blue sky is the work of our pens/And inks that cast a failed light.’ Under these circumstances love becomes very difficult. You can love a woman but you fear financial problems that won’t make the relationship last. Some of the poems deal with the impossibility to fulfill love and to attain a lasting relationship. Moreover, the artist/writer sees himself as part of the collective psyche co-responsible for allowing human injustice.”

Finding and Supporting Great Contemporary Writers

In response to:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/features/50-classic-books.shtml?cm_mmc=soc-_-facebook-_-MERCH-_-link

We need to read the new writers too, or else, we are only feeding the mouths of companies or descendants of dead writers. Things are being said now that are at the cusp of truth, that have meaning in this context. So many writers are not doing their writing for a living, but on the side, in distraction, piecemeal. They starve, suffer, and end up lost and confused. While, I support and am often with some dead writer’s tome, I am ashamed of myself that I am not also with books of the living. Aren’t there any contemporary Jean-Paul Sartres, Deleuzes, or Heideggers, for example? I did buy a book by a New York Times Critic about critiquing, but then I also bought Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love and Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception.

Do they have jobs for those who survive broken hearts?

A Response to:

10 People On The Moment They Quit Their Job To Pursue Their Real Passion

https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/38584051/posts/952942442

I had a medium heart attack while on the table having my arteries cleaned about 15 days ago. I have a separated shoulder, torn rotator cuff, and fractured fibula. I have spent my whole life in the restaurant business. In ’93, I left Hawaii, where I happily worked as a room service waiter, while also attending school, writing for the school newspaper, and living on the top floor of a hotel about 100 yards from the beach. Sadly, the school newspaper only paid $20 for a story and $20 for a photograph. I wrote and photographed for 6 months and then had my master’s equivalent, one-man photography show, which culminated in a state of utter bliss.

When I arrived in ’93, I wanted to be in the art business, but there was a recession in full swing. I walked up to a hotel and have been there for 23 years. While there I published about seven books, table top photo and short story-poetry. I also got a paralegal certificate and absolutely loved the education, garnering straight A’s. The problem is I graduated and went immediately to reading novels, then philosophical tomes, and never looked back. I wanted to brief cases and write memoranda, but I was too afraid that it would take me too long to brief cases and write memoranda to make any money at it. Besides, my attorney buddy said they wouldn’t hire me. I was too old.

I respond to art. I also just respond to life and have narrowed my focus to writing, although I may be better as a photographer, where I can get some distance. But, I am afraid of that too, never thinking that I could make enough money doing art.

I really have never been able to qualify what exactly I want to do: Photography or writing, and until recently, I must be violently pushed to do anything else, but I am not fulfilled and felt during my heart attack that there was no purpose in my life. I want people to hear my poetry, the music I have written but stopped writing, the art work I have made. I want to be able to make art 24/7, but my job takes everything out of me and I almost died.

Still, despite myself, I feel a change coming. I believe in the advice that you just have to keep creating and eventually that snow bank slides off the roof of your house and comes crashing down and it gets noticed. Perhaps, it takes someone with a crush on you to plow through all the words and images to find something like the hidden structure of snowflakes that isn’t obvious if you aren’t looking. Everyone of us has these dreams. There are only so many small columns of text about something new to garner a readership or visit to a gallery. But, if you are like me, which I am sure you are, we are always buying books and looking at art because frankly there isn’t anything else in life that matters, except perhaps the design and scent of a new lover and all the drama that affords and how that intimacy is pretty much why we write or make art in the first place. I am still in love with a woman I met and made love to say twenty years ago and who probably still hates me. Life is like that, the high points of love-making and then a lot of days just looking out the window and thinking about that. Is there such a job that rewards the pining of a lost lover, that pays big money for the sadness exemplified in every thought of the automaton clearly meant only to spoon in the quiet of the smallest and darkest room? I know how to get in touch with her, but I know in my heart that if she didn’t know that she needed to apologize as she stood at the gas pump on the late night when I said nothing and merely looked over that I can’t break the silence. She started a relationship with me when she was already in one and I told her to break it off and wait 6 months, but then I reneged and wrote back saying we could just be friends. And, boy were we friends, so much so that I became intoxicated by her. Her body was like crack cocaine and I had never done drugs before. Her voice, her reserve, her long brown hair, her small face, her coyness that she was so much of the world and I was not. She was my Kim Kardashian to my face in a crowd at a concert that was clearly over decades ago. She wanted to lie around and make babies, but as I said, I was only a waiter in a restaurant who was recovering from a heart attack.

 

Do they have jobs for those who survive broken hearts?

My First Heart Attack

As I lay in bed on the morning of the 2/24/16, I had made it through the night and could not have imagined making it to the 4PM deadline, when Dr. Forrest had planned to continue with the angioplasty. On the day before, I watched as the secondary arteries had disappeared upon the passing of the “snow plow” over their driveways and I became sweaty, or at least I think it was then, and I asked that the procedure be stopped as I couldn’t take it anymore to which Dr. Forrest complied.

The ultrasound showed that part of my heart was not getting enough oxygen and pumping half-heartedly, pardon the pun. I felt it, although the sensation was akin to my chronic stomach aches due to diverticulitis, the fact that I was hungry, that the first two meals contained wheat or that I had not slept, prodded by the nurses wanting to take my blood pressure or to take blood especially after the first procedure, when they needed to know when my faint heart’s chemical cries had reached a plateau.

It was at a point in the morning having made it through the practical prodding and displacement of various soft glue attachments and arm wraps, the blood taking, the lack of sleep, hunger, constipation, gas, sensing that I smelled of the sweet vinegar of death.

I was so tired and in pain that when I saw S-, I started to cry. I hid my face under the sheet and blanket, knowing it was obvious, but there was nowhere I could hide. It was then that I sensed that she had rescued me. I asked her with my eyes to come close to me. I felt as a lover might that if there was some spiritual tie that I wished she could feel it and acknowledge me. She did, I think, and brought her clean, perfect face to my stench and weakness and my sister said that she kissed me. She allowed the sacrifice. I was already warned of her child and husband, but I was selfish. I stole that kiss. Why would any employee be willing to make that sacrifice? She saved my life.

As a man, we do not know pain, except as endurable or unendurable and the unendurable comes over time and it often surprises us and yet it is quiet and we accept it. We do not fight death that is meant for us and we do not complain, except to ask questions, in my case: “Was this the point of life? Have I achieved my purpose?” I didn’t think so. I lay there with the understanding that I had done everything I could imagine doing. There are no degrees of pain, scales 1-10, smiley to frightened faces. How do you measure such a blunt sensation? It has no personality. If you are able to make it through, that’s enough and if you are making it through, it has no subtleties.

Liam Everett’s “Untitled” (Teotihuacan), 2016

http://www.altmansiegel.com/exhibitions/the-elephant-calf/

 

Liam Everett’s “Untitled” (Teotihuacan), 2016

Acrylic, enamel, alcohol, and salt on oil primed linen

153.7 x 198.1 cm

60 1/2 x78 in

(LE-F16-07)

Currently located at:

Altman Siegel Gallery

49 Geary St., ste. 416

San Francisco, CA 94108

tel, 415.576.9300 / fax: 415-373-4471

http://www.altmansiegel.com

What I saw: The journey of impressions, the painterly form and indentations of things, most likely waste. I sense the neon of Times Square, the cheapness in trinkets at all the major landmarks. I see Hello Kitty, Michael Wolf’s photographic images of Hong Kong cities (http://photomichaelwolf.com/#architecture-of-density-2/5), a matrix of slightly artifaced honeycomb, litter, my French neighbor who wants to have children.

I see the spray-painted explorations of graffiti artists, the city itself, probably San Francisco that doesn’t yet have the hopelessness of Americana written all over it, but I could be wrong; there’s confetti, like from marriages that are just based on love, and you know just as soon as you see one, that the end is near.

No, this is the texture, what we’ll find in a thousand centuries where human life itself is just one line in the layers of earth. It’s the party store, the Dollar Store, that section of kitchenware with all the colored plastic bowls and glasses, napkins, Windex bottles, the cover of my copy of Women in Love, which is basically just turquoise and lettering: “I love you S-,” and that’s so silly to say because the remnants of us are crushed like the word “no” in the last conversation. I see how you took your hand and pushed everything off the kitchen table and it fell to the ground breaking any silence and peace. It was the structure of my every effort lost by the effort of trying. I tried too hard. I littered myself with the desire for you. Yes, this is the matrosexual landscape of infatuation, the too-colorful sweater that I wore the last time I saw you and pretended not to see you.

I wasn’t someone you were proud of sharing and how you pushed the paint in your fingers and made everything what it was.

I wish I had seen the car after you had put the roses. What that must have looked like before your second thoughts. Cards and crayons. In the middle of the street, someone must have seen you. Did they recommend otherwise? What changed your mind?

I already know. There was just too much pigment in my cheeks. It made you uncomfortable: Too much emotion/desperation. I looked like I was on fire, and you went Bull-in-a-China-Closet and I put small candles on the bathtub ledges and pretended I wasn’t looking at you while you had your panic attack.

The fundamental law of my very self

Friedrich Nietzsche: “What have you truly loved? What has uplifted your soul, what has dominated and delighted it at the same time? Assemble these revered objects in a row before you and they may reveal a law by their nature and their order: the fundamental law of your very self.”

Response to e.e. cumming’s “into the strenuous briefness” and Kitty Shafique’s illustrative photograph supporting it

Yea, I see the brilliance in his grace
Reminds me of a blood-in-water video at
Catherine Clark Gallery when it
Was on Geary and Grant.

Everything changes when you
Lie looking up.
If we just make one gesture
In the opposite direction,
We might realize we will land.

In April, there was darkness
Before the thunder.
The crack woke me,
Raining of flowers
From standing up too fast.