Welcome to The Society...

Welcome. Really. Make yourself at home.

Just to start things off here, check out the new YouTube VideoPoem, "FREQUENCY" produced by some of us at The Studio, submissions by artists Alex Radin and Coralia Pastrana-Brown, photographer Chip Redd and a few selections from another upcoming "online book" of poetry entitled, Bad Zen.

FREQUENCY -- A VideoPoem

FREQUENCY is an experimental work. It is a team effort, a product of The Studio (http://www.thegatstudio.com/).
Click HERE to see it.

STATEMENT/QUESTION: What are the implications?

BabyFace

CLICK to enlarge

By Coralia Pastrana-Brown

STATEMENT/QUESTION: How much of me... is you?

Surgeon Seeks Work As Unemployed Forensic Cosmologist

In my previous capacity we cultivated and harvested
living souls for research,
not an altogether undesirable nor
vainglorious preoccupation;
it paid the bills while designing various styles of eternity.
Faced with the somewhat presumptuous task of
conducting autopsies on breathing imaginations
left us and our sweaty palms
to toil beneath magnified lights,
absorb the flash of reporters' cameras
crowded in the gallery,
while in the center of the velodrome
we operated on the stage
as cycling teams of racing sins
spun furiously round and round and round us
screaming, "Work! Work! Work!".
I remember when we labored long enough
to sense a rupture, break the shell, get inside,
trigger off the flow and shock them;
they would sometimes cough themselves back to life,
sometimes.
Supposing that to be a good thing,
I often asked my patients for their autographs
as proof glued in my surgeon's scrapbook,
evidence to blackmail those who later may
threaten to expose us as
charlatans or scientists or perhaps even, politicians
bent on charring secret files
pulled from the Dead Sea scrolls.
I used to think there was a pattern
hid inside some part of us which, if tracked and plotted
would spit out the vast, unraveled code,
untie the universe;
that was until we stumbled on distinction between
God's domain and that of our own.
After that, I started sleeping late, stopped shaving and
would sit outside reliving those good old days
of dark anxiety filled with heroic angst,
my speeches as the tall, thin voice of analytic leadership,
the false joys of thinking virtue
lie in being young and brave.

Copyright (c) 2008 Gary Brown

STATEMENT/QUESTION:
What we are so very sure we think we know...

The Death Clown Chronicle

Hard to say how much pre-earth and mid-Kingdom was
Lucifer's election,
his self-appointment as the Death Clown;
novice that he was.
Unaware his hidden play
(this jump to trump his master's hand)
was not the ambush he had planned
when he and his celestial lackeys
flung themselves headlong into
the heaven of their choosing.
This rookie thug used his free will
as license to slice up his angelic throat;
with recruited sidekicks schemed to pirate Paradise,
violate the body Grace,
pummel-throttle life from every uninscripted person
and all future souls shaped by the hand of God.
The ending of this story reads,
"His plans went south."
and that is all; but I suspect
the sealed details reveal a should-know truth:
After the trainwrecks and debris
have shoved us in the bin,
it's one thing to discover evil eating on our ear
and it's a very something else
to pretend it's love.

Copyright (c) 2008 Gary Brown
STATEMENT/QUESTION:
Sin is a pretty, shiny man who takes me to the park on Sundays.

Deposit Box

Each day he quietly aims his slingshot at the sky
and rockets something up and out
and right into an almost sacred envelope of time;
thinking every artifact he launches
fills some private cosmic warehouse;
considers this a unique form of spiritual investment,
anecdotal evidence to help God know him better.
Last week as he shot a piece of carrot at the universe
he imagined over time,
along with his assorted coins,
bottle caps and chicken bones,
broken glass and dog food kibble,
pencils, badges, paper clips,
ticket stubs and spoons
everything was piling up inside eternity.
Today he has been contemplating
whether to impale the air
with his toothbrush or a yo-yo;
such decisions are not made in haste.
While he makes no clear connection
between his flying objects, still
he does recall the old eyeglasses
flung the day before
and wonders if they may be linked
to what he flings today.
Such is the accumulated weight of thought and labor
he endures in this odd, ecstatic ritual.
On another note:
Emma Johnson has discovered
her own other-worldly thing,
perhaps God's intervention in her very drab existence
when quite some distant years ago
while seated on her backporch swing,
she noticed items dropped from heaven
into her backyard.
Religiously she collected them,
kept them stored and labeled;
secretly she documented
and cross-referenced everything
in zealous hope to understand the cloudy mystery
of this type of spooky manna, providence and truth.

Copyright (c) 2008 Gary Brown
STATEMENT/QUESTION:
When thirst and ritual and circumstance collide... where are we?

Donut Church Cafe

The Donut Church Cafe absorbs its patrons,
infuses them with a shopping center faithiness
in God and coffee and convenience.
The corner booth corrals its transient flocks
who squeeze in past each other's thoughts
and the disheveled newsprint,
this morning's headlined scriptures;
they hope to talk enough to change the world,
note their blogs, call it a day.
The walkers
pace across the storefront's windows,
watch the weather for no reason,
panhandle schemes for spare change truth
from passing strangers,
at least enough to buy a burger,
as if they would really eat it.
And from the street scan parking lot
for clues of who may be inside,
cast our imagined dice at those
we presume make their home
among this riff-raff clergy who
sell each other designer brands
of their recycled dogmas
salvaged from the discard bins
of actual, thinking souls.
My head wags at wasted lives
as these clueless activists,
blind archeologists without credentials
who dig inside their gourmet brews
for insight;
I watch them with chagrin
and hate myself.

Copyright (c) 2008 Gary Brown
STATEMENT/QUESTION:
When internally evaluating the world, what roles do sarcasm or cynicism play?

Who is the Society of Blackened Sheeps and Unregulated Saints?

The Society of Blackened Sheeps and Unregulated Saints is an unorthodox, unregulated and frequently unruly conglomeration of anyone who wants to be a member. Typically, its main core of constituents may comprise a loosely affiliated assembly of rather creative and committed renegades of Christianity who possess a just-a-bit-too-joyful lack of binding affiliations with institutionalized religious denominations, including those classified as "nondenominational".

Though there are no rules, only guidelines for membership, the three major elements which probably link members to each other are their compelling desire to learn how to:

1. Live a Visible Love: They possess, desire and/or actively seek to develop a tremendous thirst to cultivate:

• A passionate love for God and
• An intense, nonjudgemental, demonstrated love for all persons... ALL persons (which also includes, all persons).

Members are also willing to acknowledge the difficulty that these (especially the loving other people thing) may entail as lived out in one's daily life, yet they remain undeterred in their commitment, often relying on and deriving support and feedback from fellow members in this pursuit.

2. Live as Humble Investigators: The scriptures of the Bible are integral in the investigation and development of their faith yet they do seek to remain fully cognizant of the utter incapacity of any person or persons to ever "get it all right" or grasp all the Truths it contains. Accordingly, they openly admit the absolute probability that no Christian will ever get a lot of it right, despite the sincerity of their motivations. This prompts:

• A humble respect for the right (and duty) of other like-minded, committed Believers to pursue their own understanding of the faith,
• A willingness to at the least, listen to and hopefully, interact with and learn from the insights and experiences of others and
• A confidence in God's Holy Spirit's capacity to help and guide every humble, seeking and sincere Believer to navigate that endless Pilgrimage of Faith.

3. Live Creatively: Members understand, whole heartedly embrace and actively seek to feed a joyful compulsivity to live with daring creativity. This drives them to explore, develop and practice an extraordinary dimension of life made possible by God's unquenchable love. Having been created "in His Image", they also acknowledge and celebrate the resulting, inborn "capacity to create" everyone subsequently possess. Warning: Understanding and implementing this Element may result in a growing, even alarming lack of fear to express one's self!

NOTE: Members developing a problem within any of these critical Elements will be unceremoniously expelled from the Society with a joyful invitation to return as soon as they have recovered their senses.

Well. That about does it.