Art "Home" Brew, compare art brut,
lived in a travel trailer up on cinder blocks,
behind a bait-beer-ice store in Slap Out, Alabama.
Whenever you asked for anything, at the store, they said,
"We're slap out." He was connected, through a wire,
to the worldwide web, by way of a small, desktop computer.
He was a newspaper columnist and free-lance writer. He wrote
stories about L. A., or the Redneck Riviera. L. A. stood for
Lower Alabama. Then, later, Brew moved to Point and Shoot,
Florida, and began calling himself Irascible "Razz" Heap.
Heap was his own paparazzo. He carried a digital, point-and-shoot
camera in a fanny pack, or musette bag. A cup of rice and a song in his heart.
Live off the land like General Sherman's irregulars. He was a senior fellow at
the prestigious left-wing think-tank, the Point and Shoot Institute (PSI).
So much pressure. He wrote stories, poems, and white papers. Then he
collected them into books and asked New York publishers to publish them.
He compared himself to Herman Melville and Marcel Proust. New York thought
he must be crazy. Then he changed his name to Large Pyle. Confusion to
the enemy. He had a lot of pseudonyms and wrote rapidly and didn't make
any money. The old pulp-ghetto ideal. Always try to work in a despised medium,
Fredric Brown told Blaster Al. The late, great sci-fi writer.
Kurt Vonnegut asked Charles Willeford why he wrote in
the crime fiction ghetto. To me, Willeford wrote magical
surrealism. He was a magical surrealist. When reality is
surreal, surrealism is realism. My old home place
in Delray Beach is now a yuppie restaurant called Da Da.
With a pastel hobby horse in front. Shades of Zurich, 1916.