I put a small chalkboard in a junk sculpture beside the front gate so I could do a few strokes on my way to or from the jobs that are keeping me from my work.  Other people put their marks there too and then it started to look like art.  I liked this as an improvisational exercise to loosen us all up, and have a visual conversation with as few preconceptions and assumptions as possible.  Then I thought, why not make this the educational component to Casa Goofy International as an institution of lower learning?  Or could there be a college or a universe city, a city in the universe based on unlearning those sad old habits so called an education?

 

To invest further in that premise, I took an old coffin I had lying around in case my body decided suddenly to go the way of all flesh and stuck some chalkboards in it, one for the upper lid and one for the lower lid so that the same exercise could be done on either and both boards but the whole picture couldn’t be seen until the process was over and we opened both coffin lids. Also I placed the coffin so that when the upper lid was open and the blackboard beneath that was being improvisationally conversed upon the original little blackboard that was first placed in the junk sculpture couldn’t be seen. Thus I arrived at my own version of “Exquisite Corpse”, the exercise French surrealists did in the early nineteen hundreds in which they each drew a piece of a human body on a folded up piece of paper with no participant being able to see what was drawn previously until the final unfolding.  So like a life, eh?

 

So could we have a university based on jokes and improv and transient conversations of, by and for a transient population within a transient species and written on the living air between us?  Could I revive some old exercises in probing the unconscious: “Child Drawings” in which you draw yourself as a child according to a playful format and you send a piece of it on to start the next person’s drawing, sort of like starter culture for yogurt.  “Dinner Drawings” in which up to four people draw something based on their child drawings and a challenge question together, “Community Murals” in which a larger group of people participate in a performance art piece based around a big piece of photo backdrop paper hung on a frame.  Could this work?  What does work mean?  And would the world and “The Banality Gang” that is the force behind the Trilateral and all the other commissions allow me enough time off from the jobs that keep me from my work?  Could I supply my “generic map” , “universal clock” and “manual  compass” to participants so they could get their child and inner asshole from then to now, here to there, I to us to me to maybe just be?

 

As the man in the trench coat and slouch hat who hangs out, microphone in hand, in front of large imposing public buildings is wont to say, “Time will tell, and questions still remain.  And now back to you in Tucson, Dennis.”  Ok he never said that last part, I made that up. OK I made it all up, I improvised the whole improvisation workshop, so where are we now?  As the red tail lights float down the highway to Nogales and Mexico City and Guatemala and parts south learning less and less about more and more until they disappear into the night that darkens all the cities and towns of the world.

 

It all started (shortly after life began on earth from the key elements, water, ammonia, toilet paper and peanut butter) with a little college in Black Mountain Tennessee that I heard about one night when one of its former professors, Robert Creeley, happened to wander in to a bar in Albuquerque, already drunk, and scared the shit out of me by treating me like a person instead of a student.  Black Mountain had an amazing array of students and professors, Charles Olson, Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, Joseph Albers, John Cage many of whom became part of the NYC Renaissance of the fifties.  They were taught learning and unlearning and skilled trades as backup until they could make it in art.  I don’t consider skilled trades or farming as backup or something to fall back on as much as holes to fall back into. Or if you want to make God laugh tell him/her your plans or that you’re going to support your art by going into business for yourself.  I always wondered where I missed the boat that I didn’t get to be part of Black Mountain.  I should have been grateful just to take courses from Robert Creeley and his tape recorder the size and weight of a small kitchen sink that he lugged around to various unknowns like Fielding Dawson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac...but the shock of all their combined emotion was so heavy on a hick from the sticks that I skipped class one night and went horseback riding instead and got a horse that was too boney and tired to ride and just walked him around trying to think about what I’d experienced and what to make of it. Bob used to also scare me by asking my advice in class like I wasn’t an empty vessel waiting to be filled....and that would send me back to horseback riding (or horse walking) back to the dirt, where I put my hurt, seems like an old familiar song, sometimes...

 

I thought I had my own little nyc renaissance a couple of times, once when I got to host the Dark Bob, Michael Peppe, & Giudetta Tornetta in my “West Coast Performance Festival” and got to interview Karen Finley and Eric Bogdosian on community radio, but you know how it goes, just when you think you’re OK.  And then when we started up The International Arts Center, an international art and artist exchange, it was like technology, it almost worked, for awhile but along came the gentrification steamroller and plowed it under for the progress and the dirty politics of man, not to mention a preacher who robbed our souls to save us.  OK so screw it, that was fun, let’s do it again.  I vowed to get revenge in the best sense of the word, by living well and doing good, by reinventing the old International Arts Center as a program modeled after student exchange invested in COMMUNITY instead of big buildings with money targets on their butts.  And here we are now with three blackboards where we’re chalking things up to experience and figuratively and literally running out of chalk and begging for spare change or for any change to be better.

 

Ludwig Wittgenstein, mascot philosopher for Camp Goofy,  said a very good philosophy could be written consisting entirely of jokes.  So can there be a corollary to that, a universe city in a little junk sculpture in someone’s messy yard in sun baked Southern Arizona where you gotta have a sensa YUMA, where people practice emptiness as form and form as emptiness and unlearning as learning?  Is this some kind of joke?  I seriously hope so.

 

Could there be an invisible university for an invisible community that could provide a forum for a conversation about the end of the world as we pretend to know it?  The world that is always ending and beginning at our feet?  If I could invent just that one little mousetrap, would the world beat a path to my door or would it beat me down?  I find that anytime I’m trying to do a good thing people will try to break me, not by attacking major issues but with petty rules and gripes, gossip, general animus, an uncontrollable anger that expresses itself over the tiniest of things, an anger they haven’t researched much less dealt with, so I can’t deal with it.

 

Now that the arctic is free of sea ice in the summer and dark open water is now absorbing the radiant heat of sunlight that used to be reflected by ice and snow back into space and tiny microbes once frozen in permafrost have awakened from a thousand year sleep and are eating the biomass and billions and billions of their nano farts are going up to thrice warm the stratosphere and methane is also bubbling up  like champagne from warming biomass beneath the waves because this ocean has flipped from carbon sink to carbon emitter and the mutually exponentially accelerating feedback loops roar on oblivious to the idiotic denial of public officials, church fathers and even scientists?  Maybe, said the giant President to Mother Nature, we could make a deal?  Let’s call a reduction in the increase a decrease in emissions, and just let bygones be bygones and buy off the feedback loops?  But Mother Nature doesn’t make deals she makes thousand mile wide hurricanes and the feedback loops don’t need our money because, as Charles Olson (see above) said,

 

“the feedback says

the feedback is

the law.”

 

What can we do that would be of any comfort whatsoever with so much mass in motion in a black hole in the bottom of the ocean? 

 

Like I’ve been screaming into the speaker of the radio in my service truck for years, it was always more of a communication problem than a physical problem

 

What can I do before I’m cut down like so many friends and favorite artists?  Can I draw a picture of a frog before I croak? Can I have, can there even be just one little place where things can work the way they oughta, in natural balance, energy neutral, nothing wasted, nothing hoarded, even art directed, referenced and reverenced back to the source of all art, the dirt beneath that poor, tired old horse’s feet?  

 

Maybe I can’t have that, maybe it’s time to just sit and wait for God?

 

But could there be a university that encourages each of us to just be, accepting the eternal transience of our presence here, while we do what we can, be as together, enjoy these last precious moments as much as we can stand,  while we each do what we can, what we are, to make to ache to ask the darkness to ask the unconscious what it means to have a conversation that doesn’t try to mean anything.  Since meaning has always been just beyond our reach, since we can no longer preach.  Can we act like little kids when mom comes home, try to clean up a little, pay tribute to all that we destroyed?

 

Could there be a universe city that could handle dark open water, send little disappearing dots of people out to surf hundred foot waves never seen before and the difficulty of being, the impossibility of saying... anything and yet still needing to talk like seagulls perched on some shit strewn rock overlooking a vast (or half vast) ocean beyond?

 

Could that university be called Casa Goofy International, could one of the colleges be called Camp Goofy, could another be called My Little Black Mountain Backyard Blackboard?  Or could we at least at most just call it that before we call it quits?