Daniel Higgs

Each 2pp spread of this has an image of Daniel's to the left & a numbered paragraph to the right. Daniel supported himself for many yrs as a tattooist. He once told me that he only wanted to tattoo flash art - a small body of basic designs that he'd tattoo over & over again, the prefab kind of designs that one sees on the walls of tattoo shops ready to be picked by customers of limited imagination & thoughtfulness. The images here are stylistically similar to such things except that they're show more not generic. There's a winged torch, eg. It has the outlines & the shading of a tattoo design & the images aren't that far off from the quasi-readymades of the shop.. but it's a little too original. There's something about it that fits a genre but still manages to stand alone. & that's a description of Daniel & his writing too.

This bk is distributed by Last Gasp & many of the images are remininscent of underground comics that I might also associate w/ them - strong, iconic imagery not associated w/ any narrative function. The picture opposite text 23 is roughly symmetrical. There's a central baby swaddled in too-neat bandages more like a geometrical cocoon w/ escutcheon-like flags crossed behind it. One of the baby's eyes is open, one is closed. Overtop is a hovering non-electrical clothes-iron w/ apparent heat-lines radiating from it surrounding the baby's head like wavy tresses. Surrounding that, in a semi-circle, are 7 simple line-drawing birds in flight. Oddly, the flaming bugeleisen, the steam-iron either burning or floating majestically thru the air, is a symbol of neoism, a symbol of severity - something I suspect Dan's completely unaware of.

It seems to me that Daniel gave me this bk one nite when we were having a particularly interesting conversation about hermeticism - specifically about hermeticism as a tool for asking questions that lead to other questions. Questions for opening the mind. Both the words & the pictures are like tools for this: they strike me as strongly intuitive ritualistic evocations - but not evocations in a ceremonial magikal sense: there's not necessarily a stated purpose, it's more like channeling for the sake of channeling, for the sake of feeling the power of it coursing thru you. Text 23 reads as follows:

"The road shrugs grass off its back - Distilling threats from hollow shacks - I'll pay you back in digital notation - The point at which we become birdlike alert illiterate streamlined unemployed charioteers measuring obstacles with the width of tongues - The single germ axis rotating a galaxy as 10 billion eyes witness neither - The song of debt and bill paying - The terminal memorization of a brittle creed - Pounds per square inch - Suspended shapes spinning a talkative spillway - The glory of liars for instance - Aerial photographs of the sex industry delta - A memorandum explains that the pilots though seemingly ill-trained will be alerted by a guiding migraine"

In a way, this is surrealist writing - but there's no reason to pigeon-hole it as such. There was stream-of-consciousness before surrealism, there was surrealism before surrealism & this belongs to the older flow. I can easily imagine Higgs intoning this, I've heard him read, there's an intensity, a spirit burning - & audiences respond, Daniel has a following - people love the intensity, the presence - the words are a medium for the energy to flow thru from wherever - thru Daniel to the audience - Daniel's the medium, the listener just might feel stronger afterward w/o having to have the words have a specific meaning.. they have a feeling that the meanings both support & bypass. This is a pop apocalypse, the positive side of the out-of-control that the audience may feel surrounded by. Perhaps Daniel makes it feel like it's ok w/o downplaying the death & destruction of the seeker's challenged life, a type of soothing, a type of soothsaying. show less