New posts start below. This pinned information is response to persistent inquiry. Apparently my stuff is a little mysterious for the Internet.


What are you creating?


I offer a mix of original writing, art, and music across 3 platforms:
 
• DamonArvid.com = the collected cloud novels and art. 
• endurancewriter.com = ongoing blog articles + creative projects
• Youtube = music playlist @ fabric - Summon These Days*


What is your purpose here?


I am sharing what I create, approximately when created. The aim is that everything I put up be transitory and yet lasting. Portable, able to travel well to Mars.


What are you selling? 


Glad you asked. merch includes: original artwork and signed prints. Any artwork can be turned into a one-off poster, signed, dated, and delivered for $150. Original art can be priced on request. Fancy way of saying it all depends on supply, demand, and how the kombucha is reacting in my gut on a given day.


I also have several ongoing cloud novels. These are being completed at a snail’s pace, as I have a content gig that pays the bills and takes incredible amounts of time that would otherwise be spent authoring.


You want a section or chapter of a specific cloud novel expedited? The sound of clicks motivates the artist not at all. The cost is $1k, with a month to deliver. You get, in addition to that content you are burning to read, a one-off printed version of the chapter, complete with hand edits, cowbell, and random doodles in the margin.


I am also working toward a new fabric album Avocado Sun. Once completed, the plan is to run off a limited edition lp and do a tour across Canada or Europe, dressed up as Bono as a subway busker. The lps can also be ordered n this site, for $60 each. Expected release mid-2020, a run of no more than a few hundred copies. 


How can I pay?


Email damon74 (at) mac.com. Minions will respond and share PayPal details.


Why aren’t you putting stuff up on Amazon, Spotify, or Medium? 


There is a reason why I haven’t purchased anything from Amazon in over a decade. Medium has been paying me one cent per quarter for about a hundred posted pieces for years. I guess the endurancewriter content itself will always be free, why not concentrate it on my own site… it is up to the public at large to decide if my output is valuable enough to make the ephemera worthy of paying the artist for. 


Ok, why an old fashioned website, Boomer?


Listen hipster, those who never leave their app ecosystem are prisoners of their own device. I don’t really aim at a viral audience of device users, though they are welcome to peruse my stuff. Those who use laptops have the usual bookmarks and organizational options for creating a coherent reading system, Maybe they really like my stuff and sit down and enjoy it as the artist intended, instead of as the feed forces. Groovy baby.


Why don’t I see any live concerts or promotional appearances listed, if you are truly an artist?


Part of my conceit is that I don’t have to deal with troops, run through hoops. I haven’t worked in an office or had a conversation with someone I didn’t want to in more than a decade. Similarly, the music I have created has been developed in less than formal settings. Even in the studio its loose and we have fun. It’s no accident that our best popular musicians lived a half century ago and that many died trying to escape the madding mass-consumer crowd.


Let me live. Please. Insta-hate those who play the game and have the machine to support them or spit them out.

*MediaHuman's Youtube to MP3 is a nice app if you want to add a specific fabric song/album to the old playlist. Go ahead, the quality won't be great, but perfectly fine for device.

For the Birds

Flute thrashes time, 
miseries expounded,
frustrations extended
Earth a fabric distended

A muddle of marks exposed, 
Unspoken vision of calamity asserted 
By the mere fact that no one can hear––

I make my way along the beach 
where nothing grows, 
I see cormorants carve air currents in
shriek of triage, I leave my splintered mark

Would you ever want what you heard
plastered across the wind
If there were not some declarative power
that turned realities upside down,
dangled roots in blue
And reclaimed space as
beyond borrowed-time continuum?

Bring in the donkeys, the brayers, the (re)mixers,
cut and paste soothsayers, who know not what they Google––
what we used to call fixtures. 

[This was March, 2015. Out of nowhere my old college roommate, who I may have turned to a path of music and infinite frustration, reappears in the digital realm]
​
Steve Perry: If your flute thrashes time, I recommend a metronome 

Me: I am completely against the metronome, when did anything except that timed to destruct the earth need a regulated beat not coordinated with planting, celebration, ceremony? 

Flute playing, cormorants flying, looking at a sky & branches upside down––gaining a new perspective on life each day, or just being heard. Hearing yourself over the din of competing voices and logic. Wilding blend.

Therefore, introduction of metronome is a great idea (Kashup has nothing on this logic, I believe.)
​
Steve: going hiking you were like "the forest is 3-D and the trail winds one way..." and then I tried to rush ahead and got more lost than ever have in my life....

Me (channeling Dante): 
​
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle part of my life
I found myself in a dark forest
where the direct way was lost.

Steve: Oh yes, now it all comes back to me. I remember the very class. Sitting in Purgatorio!?? Shit.
​
Damon: Professor Brose and the sweet new style. That line of Dante's always stuck with me though... I'm just starting to understand it.

Steve: That was a good text. I'm reading the Anthology of English Literature right now, got through Beowoulf. On to Chaucer, which is like trying to read in Spanish. 

Damon: Chaucer is awesome... Boccaccio's Decameron was preferred tho...

Steve: Who was the fem fatal in Dante?

Damon: The fem fatale was that dame Sam Spade almost fell for... Eve. man, I think I just finished writing a classic my friend (Arisugawa Park, now A Beautiful Case of the Blues. Eve, now Evena.)

Steve: yeah?

And now for something completely different.

[11/19 - Five years later I return and find that this is no alternate beginning, but a prologue. There is no reason why this can’t fit the same narrative as the Playa episode at Darknur's. The question now is do I need or want to write this… probably fifth on my “list of books to do,” considering that I don’t exactly have many bullets left. Oh yeah, and coincidentally we are back to two bullets. This is no subtle "half is glass empty" shift, it just sounds more dramatic. And less work, considering that each bullet probably deserves a section.]

3/15 - Prose created without a net––here is what I forged in today's workshop. A second potential beginning to Two Bullets Left. Again, far from the version that will make the book––and probably more original for that.

Las Vegas Strip 3:45 am

The Strip never quite sleeps––even at that moment when movement wanes and those tipsy sorts not enclosed in all-night wombs have departed in cabs, the neon lights and video towers flicker out ultra-luxe lifestyles at a bargain. The bridges that crisscross an otherwise pedestrian-hostile desert are empty except for the odd vagrant too out of his mind to make it to the shelter of darker rock and scrub––the vacant expanses that hint at hard times only minutes from the glitter. The plexiglass on the overpasses, designed to halt the fall of brawlers and losers on the felt flicker a hundred fuck-me colors––stimulating aural intimations that one has come to a place where money spent is just a colorform, unfocused, without limit. 
​
6:15 am

The sky lightened incrementally, the form that sprawled against the plexiglass in a half-upright posture exactly mimicking the sort of gone person who would continue to sit in that position, staring epically at the sun, until the midmorning pavement baked. His skin was burnt leather, in a month or two he would be broke, if not dead. Leaving Las Vegas a vacant myth for his type in this car drowned city.

It was not until the sun ran across the steel-ribbed rooftop of the Aria, radiating onto the bridge’s metal railing and creating a vaporous orange taffy reflection, that the municipal services employee noticed him. An older Asian woman with soapy bucket, she had been avoiding the man’s slumped, sure-to-be-smelly form for some time, assiduously wiping down the rails opposite, scrubbing plexiglass into some semblance of transparency. 

There was no avoiding it, she was going to have to rouse him at some point. A sudden reflection of sunlight off the Paris hot air balloon, as thin, pointed, and powerful as that which guided hobbits into Smaug’s dread mountain lair, etched a frozen turbulence, a moment of impact––when the blood trickled from the cranium faster than the body sank and smeared a crimson wash down the smooth surface behind his shoulders. She took a single step forward, enough to get a glimpse the unending night in his eyes, and screamed. 

7:10am

“Thank god for barriers,” the junior officer thought, angling a toothpick between teeth. The height and pattern of the blood spatter on the plexiglass indicated that the body would have otherwise fallen off the overpass onto the Las Vegas Strip, pancaked on a 2 am asphalt crawling with taxis. Instead, the body had been framed for four or five hours. It was in good enough condition––forensics would blast through it in half a day, the junior officer thought. He almost recognized what remained of the face––had maybe sat with him at a late-night table once or twice, at the Orleans or the Nugget. 

And now for something completely different. This fabric video seems to have Las Vegas all over it.