Byline: Mean Spirits

Buford Youthward
stockcap@hotmail.com

Doing things in the name of some lame fame game is a bit too twentieth century for me.

Feeling and integrity are the criteria capturing my concern, searching for pure forms that connect to nothing outside of the forms themselves.

It sounds mysterious but far from it. The logic in discovering the unique reasons for writing on walls and unpacking those reasons individually benefits our own sake not our tribes. The collective is condemned. Seeking consensus in art or creative endeavors reeks of insecurity. Atlas shrugs as the struggle continues.

Your approach to what you do results in what you get. Attitude comes through in production. Face the serpent head on. When you feel inclined to vent, circumvent instead. Actions create identity not possessions. The highest reward for labor is not what you get for it but what you become by it. Mere things are baggage and shadows to true skills. One person's desires are another person's pliers.

We are in a constant state of disappointment because we continue to trust oil companies to control their oil, financial companies to control their finances, police to police themselves and humans to act humane. Graffiti is the answer for a world where corporations spend a million on charities then two million to let people know it, where insurance companies claiming to be hobbled by fraud find the funding for broadcasts and billboards publicizing how hurt they've become and to report your neighbors because "we're all in this together."

This quandary of our lives, this longing endlessly unfolds, like the infinite manipulation of melody, harmony and rhythm, ceaselessly borne back into the past, beating on like so many great American novels that speak to and from out of time.

Sobriety is underrated in the great race. I dry out and get my head in a tranquil place. Change is never welcome but it always finds a way to ride shotgun. In a parish full of pariahs there's nothing better to do than set fire to the fire wall.

The lizard of oz is quick to get bitter but with medusa loose the city is easily seduced. New wave concrete poets find a will to live, caress the darts from our heart, extract a biology greater than reason.

Exploring and imagining the possibilities, increasing features, decreasing moving parts, the mean spirits in the latest decade of the new century from the current millennium reach for the free, the perfect and the now.

Right about now.


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