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SHELFLIFE #15A: BUT THEY DON’T BLINK PROCESS
SHELFLIFE #15B: MY RULES »
SHELFLIFE #14B: TRASH TANKAS FOR LADY STARDUST
Thurston and Byron have always been models of “doing it right”. Take this zine. They wrote this ridiculous, yet visionary, thing–a David Bowie discography in the form of a set of 27 tankas. The guys cranked out 100 of ‘em on a home office printer, stapled them, numbered them, boxed them up and took them down to Galapagos (when it was still down on N.6 St in Williamsburg) from Massachusetts on a particularly snowy night in 2002 for a reading. As far as I remember, they sold them cheap–for gas money, I reckon. They wrote a fucking book expressly for a single poetry reading–and you know what? It wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t the last.
Why? Why the hell would someone do such a thing? Because those motherfuckers write tankas and like glam. Why the fuck not?
When people have not just multiple passions, but also unique personalities–they have a responsibility to concoct mediums thru which to share their knowledge and perspective with others in interesting ways. That’s what creativity is. It’s what art is–making impractical things that have no business existing and no viable market, then loading your bladder with them and pissing wildly from the tallest barn, bridge, rock or tree into a gale wind and seeing what happens. People tend not to know how much they enjoy an accidental golden shower until they catch a couple of drops on their tongues. Next thing you know, 100 people are flipping Webster’s open to T to figure out what exactly a tanka is and then browsing thru the Bowie discography to see just how much sense this truly makes:
HUNKY DORY
(RCA 1972)
limp wrist hoot rock gas
naive enough to make lou
spit out a mouthful
on john giorno’s old black pants
very same place andy did
