Lyrics for an Electric Guitar

Pauly Has a Car He only Rides at Night:

Pauly has a car he only rides at night,
Pauly has a car he only rides at night
with your girlfriend, with your girlfriend.
Pauly and your girl go to Nick’s motel
Pauly and your girl go to Nick’s motel
Why not a hotel?

Cuz it’s your girlfriend.

Pauly’s car sits next to lonely men in the motel parking lot.
He’s got your girl in a love embrace
And before they get inside of Nick’s rotten place
He’s loving your girlfriend, he’s loving your girlfriend.

Oh Pauly has a car he only rides at night
That ain’t the only thing getting a ride at night
Ooooo your girlfriend, Ooooo your girlfriend.

Pauly’s car is blue black no license plates
He got it for a good price
In a nearby state
to pick up your girlfriend, to pick up your girlfriend.

If you saw the car Pauly rides at night
You’d wipe both your eyes and say ‘what a sight,’
He’s got 10 inch silver rims
and bucket seats,
carpet on the floor
For your girlfriend’s feet, ask your girlfriend.
Go on, ask your girlfriend.

Genocide: The Dignity of Statues

The dignity of statues.
The colors of conquerors.
The steam from the engines of history.
The totems and maypoles
alongside tall and swollen walls.
Unchanged faces painted all over carousels of ancient ruins
Sinister chariots which carry the skeletons of the dead
and the screams of dying people
who once genuflected.

Art and Words: A Girl and her Gun

[twisted justice for a twisted world]



The Spirit of Betsy Gladness

Meet Betsy Gladness’s favorite Gun
whose bullet spirits grow restless
wrapped in gunpowder
REEKing of talcum
brushed onto their metallic coats.

Kill---kill---kill – roars the Gun. Don’t shoot! -the bullets say and the Gun replies, mournfully-
You…all… weigh…me …
full…of……LEad

Whatisanartist if she cannot add
splashes of paint to herblastedcanvas-
what is a doctor if she cannot listento yourheartwith her silverstethoscope-
what is a gun if she can never shoot her bulletsinto a humanback-as if
nothing more than animal?

What ?
The bullets ask.

-That gun, My dear, dear bullets,
is an - oppressed -gun

Betsy Gladness’s hardware wasn’t always so angry-
and neither was she

News Year's Resolution 2009

May this year bring you more carnival, more spirit, more love and more light. May this light lead you into winding tunnels, widening roads, and may these roads be filled with lovers, adventurers, drifters and revellers, prophets and griots, calypsonians, rockers and dancers. And may you move your spirits until your bodies don't matter until your muses unfetter your imaginations and make you declare 'revolution.'

It is with much love, much passion, and much respect, that I wish you the 2009 of your dreams!

Love,

Tiffany

Moving Pictures - A Bronx Hip-Hop Bio-Collage-Take 1!

Moving Pictures

Catholic High School
a backdrop
my brother wears a flat top
with an arrow crowning his head.
My best friend’s brother shot in the face,
dead.
A girl goes crazy in McDonald’s
And breaks a mirror,
Fast food circus floor
Covered with shards of glass,
girl fights in front of Zaro's Bakery
females whooping ass.

Community College applications,
Voguing at Emerald City
and the Palladium, dancing
Joints thrust between my lips,
Head rushes from Indian cigarettes,
Grown men feeling my tits.
Locking lips with Chinamen,
locking lips with brothamen
fading bruise around both eyes
virginity was a holy gift to me,
protecting, controlling light
blinding my guilt
and my eyesight.

City Island Blues
in a horny young man’s Hyundai Excel,
my mind too busy to mend
never denying my thirst as I ran from
the perils of pleasure
with broken running shoes
filled up rum bottles with water
after I drank the booze.

My mother slipped my feet in heels
for a Coming of Age Debutantes Ball.
That was my first fall,
winners were ones who knew how to raise money
and had no new ideas or poise at all.

Too lazy to run
sneakers and heels tied anyway,
tried anyway
to go away
to college
which I did,
17 just a kid,
still just a kid.
Bone straight hair touching the back
of my upright broken chair,
my cubic circonian engagement ring
thrown at a moving car
on the Bruckner Express.
Outside my mouth pretty
inside my words a mess.
Martinez and her generous mother,
her dead, very young brother
lived with her Puerto Rican Grandmother
who loved me but saw me as a nigger
separate from her,
another.

In the early 90’s there was a jungle in my head
2008,
The jungle is my bed.
Years before I would smoke a Jay,
I would fantasize about going back to Cali
With L.L. Cool ‘J.’
His full lips
a chain around my neck.
He need love, I need love
he would whisper to me in his
pre-concert microphone check.
L.L. Cool ‘J’
Teen magazine page away,
body on my dirty, paint peeling wall
worshipping fantasy because
reality was weak to me,
imagination always wins overall, y’all-
CUT!

by Tiffany M.

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')

Gangsta Lean - Tip that 40 or that Unsweetened Iced Tea to Someone's Memory

I keep hearing the song 'Gangsta Lean' by DRS in my head. It reminds me of heat, innocence, violence and hustlers at my school in Louisiana in the early 90's. It reminds me of this year of great loss, and trying to fill an unimaginable void. It reminds me of the stigmatized borough (the Bronx) I grew up in and people who are incarcerated, ill, or have passed away. As a nurse, My Mother used to tend to many of these people, most of them young and poor. She made them laugh through their suffering and subsequent deaths. She heard the stories of their lives and witnessed their premature deaths and this broke her heart. She worried about her own children getting 'caught up.' Growing up in the Bronx in the 1980's and seeing so many young people die, one of my Mother's major fears for my brother and I was that we would become drug addicts or get infected with AIDS. At the end of her life, she had many nightmares of this. Particularly of us becoming drug addicts. I hope that she gained some peace about this before she left this world and came to realize that the only thing my brother and I were addicted to was her love.

Hug your homey even if they're caught up in something you do not have any control over. Cuz your homey is human, too.

"There is no MUST in art because art is free." Wassily Kandinsky

There is no must in Art. Creativity is a fluid, unstructured thing. And listen, when I tell you that it ALL has value. From art that society approves of and considers intelligent and legitimate, to pop art that this same society considers shallow yet entertaining, to art created by those ‘untalented, clueless and trite’ little heathens known as children. Having the ability and wherewithal to express ourselves in the creative manner we see fit should be at the foundation and creed of any society looking to transform, develop, expand and advance.

It is Capitalism that insists we impress upon the one, unfettered avenue of our lives, structure, form, and perspective. Capitalism insists that we must sit collecting dust and debt for the privilege of attending an expensive school, which may teach us to draw, write and even act in acceptable ways. It is important to accept that there is room and need for it all. Our minds are much deeper and better than what we have allowed them to become. What is it that we fear exists in the 90-95% of our brain function we either ignore or do not use? What new forms, what answers, what mirrors, what great wealth and abundance of visions, images, ideas, lay in wait for us to tap into their richness? At times, this place in our minds reveals itself to us when we sleep and dream. Some allow these revelations to inspire their lives and expression. Yet, most of us forget the wildness of our dreams, their colors, or lack thereof, their defamation of time and boundaries, their distaste for rules and mores. We continue to exist, instead, tethered to our fear- driven visions of art and reality, in which we rely only on the external standards imposed on us from when we were children.

I would like to address and discount common multi-cultural perceptions of brilliance. White European brilliance did not begin and end with Shakespeare, Einstein or Picasso. The brilliance of Black Americans did not begin and end with Toni Morrison or Martin Luther King, Jr. or Barack Obama. The brilliance of Latin Americans did not begin and end with Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Frida Kahlo, Raul Julia or Junot Diaz. The brilliance of Anglophone Caribbean artists did not begin and end with Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Wilson Harris and Earl Lovelace. And on and on. All of these artists were lucky to have someone in the mainstream recognize their brilliance and publish them or give them visibility as an artist. Some of these artists created work and spoke out against injustice which has altered the course of the world. We do not have to appreciate their work or think even it’s good at all. Those opinions are entirely up to you to form. What their mainstream success means is that these artists found or demanded an audience for their voices. Perhaps, they happened to have attended the right schools or happened to have met the right people. I am not suggesting that each of them did not work hard at what they’ve created. What I am suggesting is that their inherent brilliance is separate from the opportunities they’ve had and the accolades they’ve gained – as it is with the rest of us. Their minds were always brilliant but they channeled this brilliance, got their work into the hands of the right people and the rest is in history books. They are no different from you and I.

How many people channel their brilliance in their lifetime? How many people do channel their brilliance but because of a lack of resources or poor education do not find the opportunities to shine in a global way? Brilliance is not academic, though it can be. Brilliance is an illiterate man who can heal you by moving stagnant energy throughout your body. Brilliance is a highly educated woman who graduated Summa Cum Laude with a degree in chemical engineering from a top tier Ivy League School who writes an avant-garde masterpiece in honor of ancestors she’s heard of but never knew. People have been telling stories, and scratching forms onto walls since man’s perception of the beginning of time. YOU are the standard. YOU are the form. You are such a fabulous human being that you should be arrogant about your right to exist. Develop a sense of entitlement. This especially goes for black and brown people and poor people of all colors. We all have the right to create what we wish in the ways that we choose. We have the right to devote our entire lives to this effort and we have the right to choose our own instruments of expression. You may never have your work hung in a reputable gallery or get your poorly punctuated, yet visionary masterpiece published by a top level publishing house or at all. You might not make any money or you will– but this is not the point. The world will not move in the ways we want it to if more of us do not engage in unfettered self-expression, and if more of us do not express our visions and ideas with integrity. Our basic explorations of human, superhuman and sub-human natures will stay limited. As will our explorations of the universe – space shuttles and satellites, be damned. We will allow the flow of our visions and impressions only to the extent that they are approved of by people whose validation we seek. We must stop taking classes and going to schools and take risks instead. We must keep taking classes and going to schools and take risks. We must challenge our professors. We must challenge anyone who says with our art we ‘must’ and do, instead, what we ‘must not’ but have to. Create something because you do not have any children. Create something because you do. Create, Slavehead, because you are and always were blissfully, deliciously free. Begin now while you have time off from that job you despise. Happy Holidays!!!

Coming Soon: THE SILHOUETTE STARS ON SAD STREET

In the City of Profound Sadness just around the corner from Madame Melancholy's Make You Happy Minstrels and Mistresses, past the Church of Bootleg Liquour, The Church of Saturday Night on Sunday, down the street from the storefront Church of Stained Glass Grafitti and just past the Church of Light, Shadow, Silhouette and Sirens, up the hill called Harold's Hedonisim, and, of course, down the sickled Street of The Downward Spiral, you find in the broken funky artery of the city, Sad Street. Home to Humans Beings with Hearts in the shape of starfish. People and Presences of carnage, then carnival who fortify their diets with the meat from not chitterlings but starfisherlings. When parts of their hearts break, another artery forms then grows back, albeit deformed, but functional, sort of. People and Presences, though in presentation unusual, not at all so different from you and me.

Over time you will meet Madame Bassa, The Victims of Yellow Lights, Charlie Christ, The Remains of the Overhill Opera, The People from Over the Underworld, and many others.

"The Silhouette Stars on Sad Street" is coming soon to the Theater in you.

Folks, A Serious Condition (WR-LSD): WHEN REVELER-LOVERS STOP DANCING

Are you and your lover suffering from WR-LSD?
No Worries, No Worries, I have researched and dicovered the cure for this malady:

You must first bless yourselves with prayers to God, offerings to your ancestors, your dear Papa Legba, then Oshun. Begin mind dances with your lover once every hour, as necessary. These 'imagined' dances will turn into a dance of your two spirits. You will find your body moving in mysterious ways. First your shoulders and torso, then your hips. Let your hips move, involuntarily. Let them spell out stanzas of love to your lover. The language of your hips will be hard to decipher because it is encoded in hieoroglyphs. Keep the body dancing. Finish off with a shot of rum mixed with a teaspoon of creamed coconut, a pinch of sugar and/ or a bottle of Guiness. Worship, drink, dance, then kiss. For THAT is carnival. BASSA BASSA

Totems and Toys

Savages Are So Wise Wanting You To Cut Class With Passion

Tales of imagination activation through hedonism and truancy. Why did I waste all those years going to school? The real learning came to me when I was doodling my boyfriend's name on rooftops long before I even had one, writing poetry and littering the letters throughout the streets. Why did I go to class when I couldn't even sit still inside my head? I was everywhere else. Reading sand letters to poor schools of fish on the beach, kissing boys in movie theaters while pushing metaphors into their mouths, and of course, of course, pretending I was the color red. Being the color red. Go to school. Stay in school. Endure school. Escape school. School.

And then the question, why these words with these images? Who are these beings and what do they have to do with cutting class? Were they the dream-savages who helped me escape, long ago, while I endured another math class? What companions would they have been? Are those their club clothes? I wish I could remember those dreams. I think.

THE REVOLUTION WILL BE CARNIVALISED

SO HURRY UP AND STOCKPILE YOUR MASKS!

Original artwork by: Tiffany M./aka Bassagirl/aka osedra
ink, pencil and pastel on paper

Please, Please, Please, No More Dead Mamas - R.I.P. 'Mama Africa' - Miriam Makeba

Is it possible to feel both awe and respect coupled with complete resentment at the cycle of life? Of course it's possible because that's how I feel. Miriam Makeba collapsed on stage last night in Italy after singing her famous song, 'Pata Pata.' This is her singing 'Pata Pata' in the prime of her life - Brazil, 1968.



This one is dedicated to all of those whose mother's - including those who thought of Miriam Makeba as 'Mama Africa' - have passed on.

WHEN I'VE PASSED ON sung by Miriam Makeba

Oh My Stars, I do Believe I am on a Natural High

Could it be because it's my Birthday? Could it be all the cups of green tea I've consumed? Could it be that Barack Obama was elected President? Could it be all of the above? Because I must face it, joy or not, I am a Blues Woman and I wear this badge with pride. I romanticize the hell out of it. I joke about it. I make big efforts to try to change it. But it remains true. Blues women love and cry hard but fight even harder and we do it all with soul and style. So my highs tend to be higher and my lows, lower, and then I need some feel good, honey.

I do not recall how old I was in the picture above but I look hopeful and happy, though I was a blues child in the making. I started this morning of my 34th year by jumping up and down on the bed. I used to love to jump on the bed as a child. I am so glad I have not lost this spirit or at least put on enough weight so this might pose a problem. I feel happy today. Empowered. Giddy. I feel that my ancestors are proud. I am honored to stand on their shoulders. I am becoming more and more of who I am. And this is how it is supposed to be. Here's a little rhymeless ditty I composed some years ago:

When a Revolutionary’s Gotta Eat

You have led me toward marijuana,
Moodiness, magic
and finding men to get me high
with smoke and words and flesh feeling.
You have held my hand so carelessly and pushed me into
saltwater with prayers to the mermaids to
hold me in their sea foam so I can drown.
I was the little you except
Born with something in the bank
And the belief that a little black girl
Could eventually grow up and be somebody
I would never have wanted to be if I never knew
what wanting to be a somebody would do to you.
You have tried to exorcise from
My marrow the blessed spirit of revolution
Because it was exorcised from you and so many others
In the service of oppression
But here I am black and pissed but free and unfettered
And though you hurt me profoundly
I understand and I forgive you finally.

Barack Obama and The Black Radical Imagination

I told myself I wasn't going to blog about Obama's victory on Tuesday night. I told myself I wasn't going to write about what has already been said. I told myself these things on Wednesday morning when I had time to reflect on the events of Election Tuesday, the events of my life, and the Event of this year.

The last time I saw my Mother alive was when I rode the train into the Bronx to vote for Barack Obama in the New York Primary on February 5th, 2008. I went to visit my Mother first. It felt difficult to leave her, though it was getting late and the polls closed at 9pm. As I visited her, trying not to reveal to her my heartbreak at the sight of her condition, my heart broke some more. I knew she was leaving me and there was nothing at all I could do but let her go.

My Mother was born into poverty on the island of Antigua in 1933. Many years later she would make it to America, meet my Father and give birth to two children. She was a beautiul woman, a witty and elegant woman and a religious woman. And though we would clash later on in life, she and my Father, early on, gave me such faith in the power of my imagination. They believed in me so much and this belief has carried me to this day when I reflect back on how difficult it became as I grew older and realized the limitations that racism, sexism, and classism put on my imagination and how I had begun to internalize these societal ills myself. But still, I had the love and respect of my parents to count on in those days when I lamented the lack of resources available to artists, and felt held back and humiliated that I was black, female, wildly imaginative, and from the Bronx. All around me I had images of what I was supposed to be; pregnant early, drug addicted, incarcerated, and HIV+. And because none of those things happened to me, it did not mean that I did not engage in risky acts that could have ruined or held back my life. I was no different from the people around me. I just happened to not get caught. I clung instead, like an immigrant, to the dream of this country that had expanded my parents imaginations from the islands they came from. I inherited this. Slavery was over. Mental slavery, however still had us. Well, it certainly had me, though I struggled hard to loosen each shackle. Which brings me to Dr. Robin D.G. Kelly's wonderful book, "Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination." In it he discusses the many movements in history blacks started and were apart of from slave rebellions, to the Back to Africa Movement, The Black Feminist Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Communist Movement and my personal favorite, The Surrealist Movement, and so on. What I took away the most from Dr. Kelley's book was the notion that though some of these movements failed or did not go as far as people hoped they would that the capacity to dream a life that is better than the one you have, where there is equality and respect for the imagination is the most radical a person can become.

Is this what the Republicans feared about Obama? Not so long ago it was considered illegal to educate slaves. Knowledge meant rebellion. Responsibility. Justice.
Change. Of course, Obama would seem a threat to people who believe this. Many Republicans poo-pooed his vision, his hope. They ridiculed his experience as a Community Organizer. This has its roots in slavery. If people were to come together...? If the slaves were to organize and plan, slave owners would lose their labor.

The Radical Imagination is not a dangerous thing. Our imaginations, in their most natural state, unaffected by any form of oppression, is blissfully unfettered. In society's such as ours which run on the oppression of others, those who dare to dream a different dream, who say things others won't say and suggest we all deserve a fair share, are considered radical.

Read 'Freedom Dreams' and know that the lenses Dr. Kelley chooses to examine the radical imagination have little to do with race. The wisdom and right to our imaginations is our human human heritage and we can explore it with excitement, freedom, and love.

So today as I celebrate my 34th Birthday, I think of my Mother on the last day I saw her alive moving her head in such ectasy to the song 'Ave Maria,' playing on a CD I bought her for her last birthday. In the last few months of her life, it was all she listened to and though it pained her to do so, and though she was humiliated by how her illness made her look, she danced in the way that she could, dreaming (probably) of returning to a place she learned as a child there would be no pain. And I wept, wept, wept without her knowing, wept still clinging to dreams of her full recovery, Never doubting that at the very least, it was possible, even though that recovery would never come. But I don't for a moment believe, even months after her death, that my belief in a full recovery for my Mother, even in her weakened state was at all denial. I may even be radical enough to say that the possibility of my Mother's full recovery was even likely, and this I know she knew.

To My Dear Sweet Mother, Igena, I thank you deeply for gifting me with such radical dreams, and a wonderful, wonderful life. You are so loved. So appreciated. So missed. Ashe.