America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be [...]
The American is a nomad. A bastard son. A criminal wherever he goes. Cut loose in his own country to wander and wage battle. The parents are merely stand ins and those who raise the child for its life of brutality along the highways and streets of the city where it scrapes along, in search [...]
from The Atrocity Exhibition
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE GENERATIONS OF AMERICA
These are the generations of America.
Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert F. Kennedy. And Ethel M. Kennedy shot Judith Birnbaum. And Judith Birnbaum shot Elizabeth Bochnak. And Elizabeth Bochnak shot Andrew Witwer. And Andrew Witwer shot John Burlingham. And John Burlingham shot Edward R. Darlington. And Edward R. Darlington shot [...]
America is where only memory divides the present from the future, and where the unconscious dreams of the people who live here understand that the Declaration of Independence was signed after Hiroshima, not before, and neither has yet happened (33).
People with nuclear imagination not only conceive of the abyss and confront it, but are liberated [...]
The most insane, the most radical, the most mind-boggling piece of cinematic art this side of whatever. Period. Said I.
“We will kill them all.” Chilling.
L.A. is all that’s left of America the Delirious. Long ago, in the movie theaters of the land, L.A. collectivized the American dark; it cleaned up the depraved whispers and messier impulses of America’s deeper recesses and reduced them to archetypes or, even better, commodities. L.A. insisted that the subconscious didn’t own us but we [...]