Thursday, October 28, 2010

AN OPEN LETTER TO PETER MURPHY.


Peter,

Before I begin I would like to make it clear that I am not sure what this is all about.
The more time passes and the more I am absolutely sure I know X, Y, or Z,
the more convinced I have no idea what or why I do things. These things come
from a deeper place than I can often quantify.
I am doing this for a multitude of reason not the least is an almost overwhelming sense
of frustration. As an artist of many years in discipline you are one of the people I have
had an intense and unremitting need to communicate with on some level. In point of fact,
I have tried several times to reach you through various people we both know, at least tangentially,
to no avail. The photo I am posting I submit in evidence.
As someone who identifies as Sufi, for better or worse,( I believe I am something of a Qaalander, or it is the closest equivalent. the "line between the devils teeth"?) I have found your journey so personal I simply cannot ignore it. Your work cuts deep. It rings true.
I often think you write from the third person to enable you to look inside with a kind
of universal/personal double meaning. Your work has driven me to objectify a word, a
phrase in my own work. If you look, for better or worse, you will find ideas of yours
re-made and re-worked in any number of my own pieces. Is this a lack in me, or the true nature of art? Art has this ability to cross over disciplines and become something else while staying true to itself. Is this what is going on? Sufism is not an answer but a process.
One is one or not...though various Murshids have different opinions about this. Master? No master? Does it ultimately matter?
Four years ago I undertook the task of creating a vast piece of work that I dearly wanted
to quote a line from a song of yours, one that cut to the core of my artistic experience.
" The power of poetry lies in it's ability to defy logic, defy logic often."
I was A: worried I simply didn't have the available capital to pay you for the use, or B: that I simply could not find you out there in the world. Believe me, it is not easy to "go it alone" with no support of any kind. I had cut the corporate umbilicus several years previously and
simply sat down to create something of real worth. I think I did. But I still regret not
being able to quote you. I suppose in the long run, a minor disappointment, but it rankles to this day, on the eve of publication.
One lives with regrets as one does with ones years.
Why should your path, so different from mine seem so deeply familiar? Every time I listen the same question hits me with terrible certainty.
There is this shape in the darkness just beyond my lantern light that haunts me.
Either I am absolutely mad, ( a good possibility.) or there is really something there I need to understand.
I wonder.
Peace,

Michael Zulli.
iridescent idiot.



Tuesday, October 26, 2010

PEARLS. ONE OF THREE.


A series of three posts that have nothing to do with much of anything.
They are simply random thoughts and impressions that I want to write down
and say things in a manner that makes me happy. Read into them what you will.
I am simply being myself.
M.Z.
...................................................................................
Opium.
arrangement for quill and vapor #1.

Summer withers and autumn arrives silently at first,
with flocks of field dusty little black birds on telephone wires.
There is a kind of unspoken urgency just beneath the feathers
cradling whispered longing for companionship,that takes flight
in waves turning them into shadow fish howling into ocean waves
of air.
Green becomes ocher in formless steps and vague sleepy lurches.
Smell the earth under the feet, ripe and smokey, it sings of days fading
old women at the graveside of a dead mother.
The sky is ripped open to reveal the bones of flying smoke, tattered,
racing into polar revelry.
Fallow fields spent and exhausted kneeling to the axe of the harvest.
This is my time.
My apocalypse, my dream time my epiphany.
Ideas bubble up from the soil and rock split by the staff of some
demented forgotten prophet.
I live for these days.
I crave them like drugs.
Autumn my high season of soul whispering spirit freedom.
No one takes this time from me on pain of excommunication and exile.
No on will be holding my heart from the shadow fish sky's.
How dare you try.
Never.


Never.










Monday, October 18, 2010

REMEMBERING THE BLUES

It's best right now to bear in mind I am not in the best of moods at the moment.
That being said, I am essentially writing about something that has been on my mind since San Diego. Well, off and on. I just happen to kind of stuck on it today. Obviously due to the excess run off of my recent run in with to much politics, to soon. A kind of psychic belly ache.
In effect, I am purging after a binge of non caloric, low bulk useless mental intake.
Feel free to hose off anytime.
It's those old Puma Blues memories again baby.

It came as a very real and welcome surprise at San Diego how many people came up to me expressing their really heartfelt and profound reverence for the book. It really affected a number of people. I had no idea. At the time and I can't and wouldn't speak for Stephen even if I could, but there was a very real sense of both endless possibility and solidarity that very quickly turned on a dime and ended up as us against them bunker mentality. Couple that with the fact that we were definitely on the earn as you learn plan, and largely being ignored except when we served as punching bags for bigger guys with major beefs to work out, the least I can say was, that it was a real ride. One of those "hang on and hope you don't fall off, and remember to lean into the turns " kind of rides.
I look back now and am ruefully amused at the effort. Gavia's father left him VHS tapes. the "high tech" computer screen he watched them on was nothing more than a big television set. No digital flat panel thing on the wall. A huge satellite disc sat on the roof of the cabin he lived in. State of the art for better or worse my friend. A kind of nascent cyber punk ethos by way of Iggy Pop and William S. Burroughs. All anxiety and conspiracy theory's, that almost spiraled into a kind of mental illness, twentieth century homeland security soul tumor.
I was absolutely committed. Or I should have been.
Funny thing, since then what we tried to do and say is now almost common place subject matter for all kinds of comics.
Please bear in mind I had utterly no idea what I was doing, I just did it.
This leads me to the inevitable thought for better or worse, of just what Puma would be if by some nearly insane confluence of events Stephen and I could do it all over again today with what we know now.
A kind of, I can tell you that it would be really scary good. Utterly beyond "out there".
A series of perhaps three original G.N.'s, that would give time and room to play in detail beyond the hurry up and do it good and right fucking now thing a monthly comic must by definition agree to. Start right back at the beginning and overhaul the whole thing on the bare bones of the original. The thought makes me squirm in my chair.
I almost want to.

There is not a chance in hell this will ever happen, but, it's worth the cloud fancy tall tale spinning I tend to do now and again....well, to be honest, I do that shit all the time. That's just me.
In the long run, I suppose I should just say thank you to Stephen and the friends and supporters of Puma for the oh so very kind remembrances and just get on with things.

So, my friends, that's just what I'll do.
Thank you all for remembering us.

M.Z.










Sorry About That

Ok, the last post was an aberration, mostly.
I was raised a basically a political creature at my fathers knee. He was a news watcher, paper reading staunch Democrat of the old school. I suppose these days he would be labeled a flaming liberal nut job by the far right center corporate news machine in this country.
My last post as mysterious as it may have been, was simple me on to much politics.
I made the mistake of reading to much at once and the fall out was inevitable.
Rage morphing into despair into rage back into a kind of almost cosmic and surreal fugue state of swirling shadows and screaming faces.
I was simple venting my utter disgust and soul deep sadness at the world we've made as a whole.
I should have kept it to myself. It served no real purpose.

My apologies.
M.Z.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

PATTERN RECOGNITION


" They nailed Jesus to the cross,
Put a hole in JFK, put Hitler in the drivers seat,
And looked the other way."

tonio-k. "life in the food chain."


Yup, it's that old soft shoe,

the small print,

three card monti,

the old shell game,

bait and switch,

it's, "hey, twenty bucks to run this bag across the street",

"hey man, this is the good stuff",

buy now, pay later,

you would if you love me,

checks in the mail,

mr. carpet bagger,

just sign here, and here, and here,



Words to the wise.

M.Z.