Attention All Artists: Welcome the Strange in All You Do

Madame Bassa says:

Welcome the Strange in all that you do. Greet it with an ‘it’s been so long,’ sit it down in a chair and bring it a cup of tea and the newspaper. Watch as the Strange changes the tea into a wine called Ambrosia and tosses the newspaper into the fire. Relax into spaces of abnormality; they are cavernous, shallow, and as infinite as the abyss. These spaces will reveal all that is not normal in you and this may at first feel unpleasant and frightening, as if you are losing your grip. Insanity is nothing more than avant-garde cinema, made for under $100 bucks, Insanity is inspired poetry written by the under-educated and overworked. Insanity has become a slur and its newest meaning to our culture dishonors our ancestors who did not write stories but left them hanging in the universal consciousness we create out of, called, ‘The Oral Tradition,’ or more aptly, ‘the wind.’ Let me tell you what The Strange reveals to me everyday: ‘Normal’ is a philosophy stricken upon the masses by uninspired leaders. Strange is our birthright, our ancestry and our heritage. Strange is in the rattle of our DNA. In your arms, the strange is a bronze puppy with not paws but small, tightened fists. In each fist is a wisp of cigarette smoke in the shape of your past. Strangers, you
cannot see the rest of my body, but this body still exists and what is not visible to you is that my gown shelters a corridor of children stuck in ornaments. When I laugh, these children glow.

Shut up those who say shut up your nonsense instead burn some incense and bring yourself first to an incoherent babble, which evolves to you speaking in tongues. Call on your ancestors of the enigmatic and angelic, complicated angels dressed in demon chic. Why such savage style because they have become unraveled and uncivilized and all this is blessed from my point of view from the strange point of view as right and just. Become again a human mixed with animal, mixed with holy, mixed with crushed leaves, shards of glass, beds of nails. Enjoy the lovers you pick up on bar stools in other worlds, smoking cosmic reefer, drinking pigeon wine. What does pigeon wine taste like? It tastes like cities and bread crumbs handled by older women and men. It tastes like the filthy hands of neglected toddlers perched high on windowsills in underworlds.

Come, now, normal children, draw yourselves up in a strange way, erase your eyes and your ears and see with your toes, hear with your hips. Say hello, then goodbye to the narrow road of the mind and the human history of the imagination. What defamation, strangers, what defamation. All along schools should have been having you compose odes to the strange with the drawn blood from goats and chickens in order to use that sacrificial ink on paper.

The next time we meet may your art and your life be a little stranger, a little wilder, and may this strangeness bring you more love of your strangest self, insight, enjoyment bacchanal and peace. Until then, mi Bassa Bassa! What about you?

Madame Bassa
(from 'The Silhouette Stars on Sad Street')