Note: This is UNEDITED. But that’s alright, for its thrust is more than enough. This archived site is not meant to be perused without direction. Each entry was written for a specific purpose, a particular audience, and not knowing context a given article, etc. can be puzzling, even offensive. Ideally, only what’s directly recommended to the reader deserves heartbeats. Remember as you read, if you will, that Cloudland is the realm of the poetic imagination. Where I live with all of my first cousins. Seat belts, please.

Playing Around North of Rome and Rot: A Felt Foxy Trot
Maybe Paola should never have called my writing lovely, perhaps Sylvie should never have saved my life, Marcello not have given me life, Mr. Marley refrained from his writing
by Blu Bue Lunedi

“Art should be so strong it changes life.” — Peter Weiss (who wrote what we call Marat/Sade, what should always be referred to as The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade)

When I write, I very often make words mingle whilst I tap my toe to music. The death of children deep in my heart — unnecessary demise, incessant suffering sickening me — doesn’t keep me from ecstatic, radiant bloom bursting throughout whatever is this me.

This is meant to be.

Our dilemma is not dual, just as Weiss’ play is not about the clash between the possibility of a perfect society (Marat) and the conviction that humanity cannot be perfected (Sade). Our challenge is to enjoy ourselves in the midst of murder, whilst working toward honoring some version of the Native American proverb, “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.”

And not at an arthritic snail’s pace.

It is no more impractical for me to declare that I will end all war on earth during my lifetime than it is to think that my children will have a life worth living for if we don’t do something collectively to stop our horrid momentum. That is a fact of life much more true than the blue blue nonsense, that man and woman are meant to be at war with one another or with others.

Bue Love is all we must do.

Practical? Save the world? Oh my God, what is not being seen!

Here’s just one little scrap from the top of my Rap Head: Instead of moving heaven and earth to get a university to pay $$$ to some so-called Peace & Justice figure to feint left and right at the lecturn on a stage whilst a well-behaved very very young audience nods and gets goosebumps from The Obvious, let’s have those high profile, highly-paid well-meaning souls learn something by coming to play north of Ronciglione, play the real music of Peace and Justice… by learning how to return home with a new paradigm for action. I mean, ACTION.

There IS something new under the Sun. [Pause.] I say so.

Tennesse Williams, leaning over to kiss my cheek, once told me, ‘Richie, Mother Courage and Her Children’ is the greatest drama of the twentieth century.” Then we talked about Lysistrata and Trojan Women on drugs. [Hard on the heels of The Gnadiges Fraulein failure.)

We need a The Party is Over Party, not politics, a far greater delusional than anything Ten and I ever took. But we can't follow in Che's footsteps either. For the rivers he drank and bathed in in Bolivia... today... would be too toxic to take. We must awake and sing embracing a new thing, a fresh model for action.

And that new paradigm has zero to do with marching in circles with placards or any of its first cousins. And even less to do with what Villanova University and Xavier University and their first cousins are doing with their programs for peace, their programmed, obsolete agendas fueled by impotent heartbeats.

They are doing such a bad job, so guaranteeing our demise... we don't have to have an intellectual itinerary in place to justify inviting them to play north of Ronciglione. For anything would be an improvement.

My blessed mother, Betty King (Minnie Gink), used to tell me all the time, "Richie, you have more personality in your little finger than they have in their whole bodies." Then she would hug me. ["They" were kids in the neighborhood who didn't know who Oscar Wilde was. Which was everyone, it seemed.]

Paola hugged me when she said, Ciao… when she said my writing was lovely. I will never forget that.

There are many moments I will never forget. For they are deeply, organically connected like an umbilical cord to my obligations, my rare as flawless chrysolite obligations.

Musical break: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN5fMpMoP38

To Ten, to Brecht, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Paul Robeson, Howard Zinn and Aristophanes and Euripides. To Marcello and his first cousins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O6WD1yzQscE

Merci, Paola. Thank you, Paola. [Pause.] And Grazie mille, Paola, ahead of time.

Just posted (8/2/10): “Uncle Max and the Contessa”