WEBVTT

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Let me see how
noisy this thing is.

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You hear me OK as I speak now?

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OK.

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I'll start off with
a poem against people

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who think that art is immortal.

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"Against the Text 'Art Is
Immortal.'" "All authors

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temporal, all art gets lost.

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Go to Egypt, go look at the
Sphinx, it's falling apart.

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He sits on water in the desert
and the water table shifts.

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He has lost his
toes in the sand,

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blast of the Saharan winds
of a mere 2,000 years.

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The Mamelukes shot up his face
because they were iconoclasts,

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because they were musketeers.

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The British stole his
beard because they

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were imperialist thieves.

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It's in the cellar
of the British Museum

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where the Athenians
lost their marbles.

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And that city of ideas that
Socrates once had in mind

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has faded too like the
Parthenon from car exhaust

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and from the filthiness of the
Turks who used it as a dump.

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If that city ever was for real
in public works and not just

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words he said, no things
but in ideas, no ideas

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but in things, I say as
William Carlos Williams said,

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things as the
Sphinx is our thing.

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A beast of a man made
God stoned into art

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to guard the dead from nothing,
nothing and vanishing toes

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first in the desert.

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Sand blasted off into nothing.

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For a few thousand years of
air, sand, take your pick.

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So go to Egypt.

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Go look at the Sphinx
while it lasts.

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Art is not immortal,
art is not mortal.

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Art is ideas in things.

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All art is temporal.

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All art is lost.

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The imperial desert is moving
in with water, sand, and wind

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to where the godly native
beasts the man apart back

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to the nothing
that sculpted him.

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I remember the Mamalukes,
remember the Brits,

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they were the iconoclasts
of their own times.

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Primitive musketeers,
primitive chisels.

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This time we can really blast
the beast of man to bits."

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