The Art of Weaponry & Woman Weaponized

"Only through the imagination is the advance of intelligence possible."

"Imagination is not to avoid reality...It affirms reality most perfectly...creates a new object, a play, a dance..." -William Carlos Williams

In a sageless age of poetry, we must look for meaning and worth in the climate of imagination by finding makers of other things. The works of Will Hayden, poet of weapons-grade steel, and Alexander McQueen, poet of needle and thread, evoke nothing less than awe from the beholder. They make creation dance with destruction, woman and man messengers of death.

The Art of Red Jacket Firearms














Will Hayden, American man-at-arms, is the Da Vinci of modern weapons. In his shop, history and innovation collide, resulting in the evolutions of both the hardware and science of killing. Master anatomist of the steel structures and organs of guns, a sage of ballistics, he resurrects a 145-year old cannon, takes the challenge of building an AK47 with an internal suppressor, and creates a shotgun-assault rifle hybrid designed to breach doors and engage heavily-armed bad guys in seamless, deadly transition. He's also made a sniper rifle out of an AK, and, for shits and giggles, explosive-tipped arrows.

As a boy he absorbed the history and art of warfare from books. As a young man, since he couldn't afford the guns he wanted, he built them. The Marine Corps forged his warrior spirit. Today, at Red Jacket Firearms, he commands a small team of gunsmiths and apprentices who execute, again and again, what most deem impossible.

Alexander McQueen: The Dark Poet Who Turned Woman Into Weapon

Fuck androgyny. Fuck the "post-gender" talk.
If McQueen's poetry was written with high-carbon steel and thread made from fibers of earth, Woman was his page. Informed by history and possessed by visions of the uncanny, the macabre and the sublime, he, more than any other designer, celebrated, empowered, defended, and eternalized Woman.

He even weaponized her. For just as you wouldn't fuck with a person packing a piece from Red Jacket, you would not fuck with a lady in Alexander McQueen.

Yet amid wars and disasters, he wanted to reminded us of the beauty in the world.
(How many ever picked up on that?)

The Animal.

The Oceanic.

The Historic.

The Romantic.

The Fantastic.

From these realms, and with the eyes and hands of a consummate craftsman, Alexander McQueen wrought entire worlds from cloth, beneath which heaved the rise and fall of a woman's bosom, of civilizations...

Convergences

Both possess supreme craftsmanship, virtuosity, imagination, dexterity, and intuition, as well as the Vision of their master-predecessors, and dwarf their contemporaries.

Both "demolish the rules" but "keep the tradition."

Both have an elite clientele that sustains their creative momentum, yet inspire others who come from similar, humble, origins to greatness.

Recommended viewing:

Sons of Guns (on the Discovery Channel)

Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

Albert Ayler & Suicide Silence: Free Jazz & Deathcore, Heart-Love & A Hate Supreme: An Anatomy of the American Scream

I first heard the music of Albert Ayler through a set of headphones as I was crossing 1st Avenue just a few blocks above Houston Street years and years ago. I can't remember exactly where on 1st Ave, but there was a part of it that rose like an asphalt wave at the orange Manhattan sky of summer dusk. An old man walked on the crest of that wave. His rounded back mirrored the round earth under his feet, and his head hung low. It looked like he was holding up the sky. In my head explosions from the horns of angels told of the first days of creation and the births of mercies to humankind and mourned the slaughter of martyrs and the pulverizing of earth and man.

I first heard Suicide Silence through a set of headphones as I ran on a trail that runs like a black vein through the dark heart of America's military-industrial-intelligence complex in northern Virginia: a glass quasi-city erected in the dead of an American midnight by the wizards of war and conflict. As waves of sonic violence poured into my skull, Alex Lopez's double-bass drumming reminded me of the steady thudding of the M2 machine-gun. I saw a wall of angels descending from an ice-blue sky but realized they were not angels at all. They had seven fingers on each hand and wore their mouths on the sides of their faces. I was listening to the mathematics of destruction.

A rhyme lives in these two disparate musics whose audiences are of wholly different human tribes. Albert and Don Ayler and co. were stamped with the seals of prophets, baptized by the East River, by the River Jordan, by the Mississippi. Suicide Silence is scarred with the marks of demons. Ecstasy of Pentecost, wrath of pentagrammic plague.

The scream from Albert Ayler's horn is the scream of love's big takeover of the heart. The scream of Mitch Lucker, Suicide Silence's vocalist, is the decimation of 10,000 virginities. The traditional martial music of brass rhymes with the gears of war conjured by vibrations of deathcore distortions.

Albert Alyer's music was made during the Vietnam War- a war of napalm death and necklaces of human ears worn my men getting swallowed by jungles. It was a time of upheaval. Civil Rights. Anti-War. Assassinations.

Suicide Silence consists of young men whose generation is fighting today's war- a war of midnight commando raids, daylight renditions, and round-the-clock torture. It is a time of sleep. Of hypnosis.

Man discourses with angels.
Man encounters a primitive genetic cousin and is torn to pieces.

Both are musics of action.
Albert Ayler's divinely-inspired cacaphonies, harmonies, and testifying with wind and reed is energy music. In any given song Music is the Healing Force of the Universe.
When asked what was behind the name of their second full-length album No Time to Bleed, Suicide Silence's vocalist and guitarist said that the purpose of their music is to incite- that there is no time to waste, no time to fall and then sit around and bleed- that there is "way worse shit going on than your bullshit problems."

Though their screams travel on different trajectories they spring from the same source: the human lungs. Somehow they managed to intersect at the particular point of this listener's skull. When I first heard each of them, an awakening occurred. Their music is not for everyone, but perhaps neither is awakening. Nonetheless I dare you to experience the music for yourself.


Recommended Listening:
Albert Ayler
My name is Albert Ayler (1963)
Spirits (1964)
At Slug's Saloon (1966)
Live in Greenwich Village (1966)
Suicide Silence
The Cleansing (2007)
No Time to Bleed (2009)

Adonis, the Silk Road, Civilization, and Oblivion

Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) comes from a village between jagged blade of Syrian mountains and liquid blade of Mediterranean Sea. Frankincense and myrrh, seers and generals, caravans and armies, prophets and empires, untouchable priestesses and the Queen of Sheba...All passed through that land of cherries, rock, and olives; a place that knew the Hellenistic flourishing of Ptolemaic Egypt, the silk of a distant, ancient China, the bone-crushing march of the Roman Republic, the fierce expansion of Parthian nomads from the steppe…

Approximately 64 BCE: The Romans annex Syria, and Mesopotamia becomes a warzone. As they battle the Parthians, the Euphrates changes hands like an old rope, and heads and limbs are flung into it.

The Euphrates rages,
daggers rising from its banks,
towers of quaking earth and thunder,
and the waves are fortresses.
I see the dawn, its wings clipped,
and water, its floods sharpened, embracing its spears
-from Stage and Mirrors, 1968

Byzantines came later with God, shining purple silk, and blood. Caliphs came with God, heaping mounds of spoils from conquest, and blood. Crusaders came with God, swords, hunger, arrows, wine, and blood. God’s original tribe came with walls, siege, and blood.

All the while a man speaks to trees, transcribes the speech of stones, relates to us his conversations with lightning, archives the rains, and sings of the beginning of wind.

It is from this tapestry of Earth and Civilization, Creation and Oblivion, that the poetry of Adonis emerges, surges, heaves. He writes in the Arabic language, but to merely confer upon him the title of “major Arab poet” ignores his truly planetary poetics and the universality, the humanity, in his work. With the elements of nature, humankind builds its world. With the elements of time and language, with variations on the themes of love, beginnings, wounds, and death, Adonis seeks to build Another Alphabet.

Nonetheless, when you read Adonis, you traverse the entire span of Arab poetics: the orality of the Bedouin poets of pre-Islamic times (some of whom spoke in numbers) and their pagan, earthian songs; the supreme prophecy and dynamic textuality of the Qu’ran; poetry and philosophy’s rebellion against jurisprudence and theology; Arab poetry’s absorption of the seismic shocks of modernity. All these can be found in a single poem, sometimes even a single line, of Adonis.

Damascus. Florence. Yemen. Paris. Kufa. New York.
The netherworld of the blind poet Al-Ma’ari exploding with visions.
Cadmus. Euclid. Nero. Solomon. Nietzsche. Tamerlane.
Plato. Apollinaire. Dante. The Antichrist.
(Some of the places and inhabitants of his vast poetic terrain.)

Surrealism. Nihilism. Feminism. Masochism. Criticism.
Heroism. Orgasm. Romanticism. Sufism.
All these pulse through his work.

Many call him infidel. Apostate. He would never admit to being a mystic. His vision takes him beyond most understandings of belief. He cannot even utter the word. He forgot it upon being buried in the Divine’s cosmic dust, upon nakedly touching the Ultimate, upon learning its language. He is among those blessed, damned, to only have language as a home.

Recommended reading:
(in English)
Selected Poems, Yale University Press
An Introduction to Arab Poetics, Saqi Books
Sufism and Surrealism, Saqi Books
(in Arabic)
Musiqa Al-Hut Al-Azraq, Dar al-Adab
Al-Muhit Al-Aswad, Al-Saqi

Hasil Adkins: The Original Hellbilly, An American Treasure

There is nothing more punk rock than singing about cutting people’s heads off and putting them on your wall – in 1950’s America.

In the backwoods of Boone County, a lop-sided nugget of West Virginia known for its strawberries, tobacco, lumber, natural gas, and coal-mine explosions, a little boy heard Hank Williams and the Drifting Cowboys and thought that Hank Williams was playing everything. This boy vowed to make all these beautiful sounds himself too someday, and so became a one-man band through whose veins flowed the primitive mud of Appalachian country; dark, booze-infused rivers of blues; and a hidden archive of rock and roll comparable to the scrolls that were found in the Thousand Buddha Caves.

He lived in a trailer in the woods and ate raw hamburger. He drove a car off a cliff. He ripped through a wet Boone County midnight in a beat-up car, smashed into a light pole, and “hunched” in the back seat with a girl. Her brothers came after him with pistols and sawed-off shotguns, and they shot it out on another Boone County midnight but no one died because they were all too drunk to hit anything.

Girls lived in his trailer from time to time. One girl got mad at him and called the police, telling them that she was kidnapped. The judge couldn’t bring himself to throw this wild man who made rock and roll records in a shack in the woods into the penitentiary. He even had a couple of the records himself.

He sang about girls, death, dancing, loneliness, the law, love, stars, moons… Only one other man played the same damn chords in a thousand songs yet managed to forge his own rhythm. Bo Diddley had his beat, but Hasil Adkins had a beat you over your got-damn head with bass drum, cymbals, gui-tar and empty liquor bottle.

The real gigs took place in a hillbilly jukejoint with a few metal folding chairs, stained plastic tables, an old pool table, and a scuffed-up dance floor. Everyone drank from bottles or plastic cups. Everyone danced. Women got into fistfights over who would sit next to Hasil on the next set.

Or maybe you would find him playing at a satellite repair shop with a tent in the backyard in the middle of nowhere with a bunch of drunk, potentially violent motherfuckers under the cold medallion of a Stone Age Appalachian moon.

Woody Guthrie, Son House, John Fahey, Blind Lemon Jefferson…All are treasures of American music and are not only worthy of the attention of historians, musicologists, anthropologists, biographers, and cartographers of language and folk traditions, but demand our pride. And so does The Haze.

Recommended listening:
Out to Hunch
Moon over Madison
Peanut Butter Rock and Roll

The Fighter and the Writer

What is poetry which does not save nations or people? A connivance with official lies, a song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, readings for sophomore girls. -Czesław Miłosz

The octagon is a page; blood, saliva, breath and sweat the ink; fists, elbows, feet, knees, arms and legs the pens. The authors, hungry men who cannot fight their demons or the world without facing death or incarceration fight there. The fighter steps into the octagon merely to write his name, but he might write a legend. At some point, no matter who he is, no matter his depth of skill or vastness of heart, his opponent will name him Defeat.

Boxing is dead.

For today's fighter to survive he must learn and combine the martial arts of the past and invent a new one. Something no one has ever seen. Something with which he can conquer. The only thing that can beat him but the secret to which only he has.

Poetry is dead.

The novel is dead.

The page is an octagon.

For the writer of today to endure he must combine the jujitsu of poetry, the judo of fiction, the fists of history, the knees and feet of philosophy, the indestructible spirit of theology, the hard shins of earth, the leverage of physics, the chaos and mayhem of cosmos, the order and precision of biology…

Both fighter and writer get better only by doing it every day. The fighter who does not give more of himself in training than his opponent, the writer who lacks discipline because he has talent: both lose and never amount to anything. This does not mean that they need to fight and write every day. Sometimes reading is writing, watching is fighting.

He might step into the silence of the octagon just to hear the silence of his feet or slip the punches of his own shadow. He might sit before a blank page and write two lines and then erase them. Be forewarned, reader. When either of these two step into the octagon or onto the page, you can expect blood. Be ready for something you've never imagined.

Rebels in Letters, A Rebellion in Letters

When the poet protests the death he sees around him, the dead want him silenced…
He speaks openly of what authority has deemed unspeakable, he becomes an enemy of authority. While the poet lives, authority dies. His poem is forever. -Bob Kaufman

Slim Memed

He wore a silver mounted belt. A Circassian dagger hung from his left hip, beside it a gold-embossed pistol and holster given to him by a nomad chief. The bullets laid cross-wise on his chest over his hand-woven silk shirt, black field-glasses hanging on his neck. He wore brown trousers dyed with walnut juice by the villagers of the Taurus mountains. His rifle stood upright on his shoulder like a steel hawk.

His land was a magical, shining land of ancient abundance, but he was born into poverty, slavery, and debt. There were men who woke up, smelled the deep earth of fertile plains, and raged at not owning it all.

His rebellion began with love, and then the love became vengeance, which became love again, but with the speech of bullets. Property owners and debt-masters feared him, the state mobilized against him, but mountain rocks, melon gardens, and fires in the homes of villagers hid, healed, and nourished him.

Though every time you shoot an Abdi Agha another takes his place, he taught the people that the earth belongs to those who work it. He taught them that they can rebel-- that they can set the thistles ablaze and sow new seeds after the fire.

Joaquin Murieta

His red-brown skin shined with the red-brown earth. The men who rode with him wore king-sized mustaches, ponchos belling in the air. They came to the California hills singing of love and riches, but became composers of rebel songs with bullets aimed at gentleman swindlers and cross-burning bloodhound gangs.

He came from a continent of revolt to a continent of invasion, expansion and plunder, and met their Manifest Destiny with his Insurgent Destiny. The exploited man, degraded man, wronged man became insurgent man, and then became ten thousand men, and then millions.

His rebellion first sprouted from the fields of poverty, then from the fury of love and vengeance, and then became the very sun itself. They kept his head in a jar of alcohol, but never got him to stop speaking. His birth certificate was written in song by an aging man in distant Isla Negra.

Literature

Is not a game. It is not entertainment for the elite or mental exercise for the educated. It is not a tool of politicians, kings or merchants. It is all part of the infinite, universal human saga.

It recalls our oldest histories and recovers our most hidden ones. It renews age-old legends, replenishes language, and revitalizes the most ancient and exclusively human attributes of mercy, love, hope, and compassion.

But this is not an age for mere chronicling and research. The age requires a rebellion with letters, a rebellion in letters, an insurgency with the only life-giving weapons that ever existed: words.

We must take back meaning from thieves, war-makers, and architects of lies. Make the invisible visible- yes. Name the unnameable- yes. But also give voice to the voiceless.

Recommended reading/viewing:
Memed, My Hawk by Yashar Kemal
Splendor and Death of Joaquin Murieta by Pablo Neruda
Poetry as Insurgent Art by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Dead Man, a film by Jim Jarmusch

McCarthy, Baca

Men paved the way West with blood, scalps, and buffalo hide. For gold, glory, oil, or just the peace of the open plains, outcasts of civilization made pilgrimage there. There civilized man encountered his origins. And decimated it.

The Judge rides with the Glanton gang through sharp rock under bone-white sky. Piles of corpses behind them. A village, town, camp turned to towering fire. The Judge: hairless titan who knows Scripture like the back of his hand since it was tattooed on his soul at the beginning of time. A metaphor for J.D. Rockefeller: hairless wraith. Patriarch of the ultimate American wealth led there by God Himself. The Judge: Reciter of ancient esoterica by the fire. The legal voice for mercenary adventures, imperial expansion, and massacres. The Judge: Author of the Anti-Book with the pen of oblivion. He writes so as to erase what was created.

Cormac McCarthy's west is the twilight of the West. A place where civilization crumbles and returns to the earth. But it is not without its heroes. It is not the twilight of humanity. That is preserved by two friends who the reader comes to know very well, who the reader cries for, but who become nameless even to him. One dies at the peak of his youth in a knife fight in the rain fueled by rage and love, the other returns from his adventures in the badlands to a society that he does not understand and that does not understand him. He dies old, passing his wisdom to wanderers that share the stone shelter of the highway overpass with him.

The poet was buried under a mountain of Indians, laborers, orphans, hustlers, and convicts. He emerged in the cold walls of a maximum security prison, building universes in a cell. Language exploded in silence. The freedom of creation was unleashed on lockdown. He meditates in the prison yard, the valleys of ancestors, rivers of life, mountains of four winds, and barrio corners and streets. Life on this planet appears in places and under conditions most hostile to it. So does poetry. And they thrive.

Jimmy Santiago Baca's borderland is not primordial brimstone where the lost come to die, where a man stares at his own bleached skeleton in the desert. The rocky hills are refuge. Places inhabited by ancestral eagles, not altars of sacrifice for the descendants of Cain. The Poet walks with a feather, the spirit, the deathless, in one hand; and thorns, blood, and mortality in the other. What is parched, cracked, place of the End to some is crystal murmurs of streams bursting with scent of sage and birdsong to him.

The legacy of his people knows no twilight. They were always there. They will never leave. They need not own the land. They are the land and sky itself.