The Disappearing Unknown

I have to wonder what the disappearing unknown does to the human psyche.  When I was growing up, people harbored not-so-secret dreams of escaping to some far away place, some exotic land.  There was a man down the street who worked on the sailboat he was building in his back yard.  He would sail away.  Tahiti, perhaps, or further.  On weekends he would go out and tinker.  Writers and painters told us it was there.  And it was.  You didn't have to go, only to know that you could.  Take to the mountains and jungles and high seas.  

Lowell Thomas and Marlin Perkins and Jacques Cousteau.  National Geographic.  

Somewhere on a velvet couch in a place far away, dimly lit in a mysterious chamber, a soothsayer, perhaps, or an incubus, a land filled with djinns and genies, there lay adventure.  

Trivial

Now the cocoon must be broken.  It is time for the work-a-day world again.  All too soon.  I have a haircut, a few extra pounds, but no new clothing to armor me.  I have observed but have no observations.  I look for quotations.  I read last lines in books, articles, looking for something to say.  It all seems trivial.  Soon enough, some shrill siren of complaint will welcome me back from this velvet cell.  Something will shake me.  "Just hold on," I tell myself.  "Just hold on."

Gout's Borderline

A fat pasha left alone--all I've done is give myself gout.  I have, however, devoured the beer and wine and whiskey, the thai chicken and fresh tamales, the humus and olives and fresh French bread, the chocolates and cheeses and date cakes and ice creams, and I have refused to answer the phone.  I have slept late and slept often, and I suppose all of that was good.  I have not, however, bought myself expensive new clothes.  I tried, but I felt too lazy and fat to climb in and out of pants and shoes and shirts under the unforgiving lights.  Besides, I am in the wrong town for buying clothing.  There is not much and what there is is very conservative.  I cannot find the beautiful silks and fine linen here.  Perhaps I could find a tailor.

It is Sunday and I think that after eating fat, I must eat lean.  Whole grains and vegetables today.  I know I promised an entire weekend of decadence, but I think that it might kill me to continue.

There are State Fairs just now, the last of them.  I saw the article in the N.Y. Times today.  Minnesota is left, and then Texas.  I think about going with my camera to chronicle this.  St. Paul and Dallas.  I wonder if I could get a press pass from some small paper in the area?  Probably not.  It would make things much easier, I imagine.

Sleeping late sure shortens the day.  I feel it almost gone now, sitting at this table in full sunlight.  I must do something, I tell myself, but then the horror comes back--there is just too much to be done.  Maybe I'll allow myself a final day after all.  There is nothing I want to do.  Nothing.

Except this.

Balm. Potion. Tincture. Unguent.

I am going to baby myself this weekend.  My nerves are frayed, my system worn out.  Last night after getting my hair cut, I went to the market and loaded up with luscious things--bottles of wine, big blocks of a variety of cheeses, a baguette, bowls of olives, humus, pita chips, triangles of thick date cakes, dark chocolates, sorghum beer, exotic soups, fruits of all sort, ice creams, etc.  I lay on the couch and watched two movies eating what I wished like an old pasha left alone.  I drank whiskey and went to bed early, woke early and drank dark African coffee and ate peanut butter smeared on torn pieces of baguette topped with thick slices of banana.  Then I went back to bed.  I will walk and eat and take a nap later, and maybe I will go shopping for clothing at some outrageously expensive stores.  I am in a dangerous mood.  Tonight, I'll watch movies on a couch smothered in pillows.  If the phone rings, I will not answer.  Sunday--I will do it all again.  Balm.  Potion.  Tincture.  Unguent.

Here is a photo I've borrowed from somewhere.  I don't know who took it.  But I guess you know I like it.

Late Night with Whiskey and Extreme Fatigue

I'm listening to Melody Gardot and thinking about Peter Beard--the earlier version.  I don't know why.  LIfe, I guess, that is gone and can't be lived no matter how much whiskey we drink or weight we lose.  There was a time when we were glorious.  We hope.  But it was true.  The time is fleeting, but if you had it--oh, my.  It might have been a moment when you were in love, lying on a couch watching a movie.  As simple as that.  When the wine was perfect and the room agreed.  You were far away in a foreign country where everything was new or you were climbing a mountain with no one around.  There was sunshine, or there was whiskey and beer.  You can't explain it.  It is simply that you were there and it was perfect.  

Never try to compare the present to those heroic times.  No.  We were heroes then.  All of us. 

But not like Peter Beard.  We can wish. . . but no, we were never like that.  

Vice, Virtue, Charm, and Weakness

The comments on yesterday's post included quotes from Oscar Wilde and Victor Hugo.  I'll measure this site by the quality of those.

Come inside.  "Ce specatcle, c'est visible."

Au Dessus de 16 Ans

Works of Art

Men looking at women wearing masks.  To what end those masks?  They certainly don't hide identity.  A mother would not wonder if that were here daughter.  It would not confuse a father nor a brother nor a sister nor a friend.  Believing in the symbolic world, the hidden identity, donning the mask to run amok.

Then there are those of us who run amok freely, only later wishing to don the mask in shame.

"Pour personnes au dessus de 16 ans."

Every Thing's Wild

"It's like looking forward to memories.  You just have to wade through the present so you can get there.  All this movement, all this travel, just so you can remember."


"I don't want to remember.  I don't want to do anything.  I just want to be.  I'll float somewhere unintelligible with my eyes closed.  There will be no in or out.  Everything will just be."  


"No, no.  Not like that.  You can't escape just like that."  He snapped his fingers with a supernaturally loud pop.  "You're trying to play cards with everything wild."  


"Yea, yea.  That's good.  Every thing's wild."  

Nothing

"I don't know what I promised you, but I'm sure it wasn't this."

He stood trying to hold himself straight.  He was dumbfounded.

"What do you want me to do?" she asked.

"I guess nothing."

Nothing, he thought, is better than this.

Don't Worry

You know what they say:

"It's not your fault.  It isn't you.  It's me."

Trudging

One day you take a look at yourself and wonder how it happened.  And you realize it just did.  Sloth, perhaps, and a certain admixture of fear and desire.  But mostly sloth and the slow, imperceptible movement toward safety. You are not who you thought to become though you are not unrecognizable to yourself.  But you are a distorted version of your youth, the smile slightly twisted, the lines around your eyes speaking of compromise.  

That is unless you were a sellout from the start. Those who aspired to top the mainstream, who had the talent for that, those who did not read too much or believe in the efficacy of certain arts tend to be straighter and clearer.  Protest if you will.  But it is true.  

And if you have fought against that while slouching toward the middle all along, you might be dissatisfied toward the end.  

But there are still dreams on summer nights of ending up romantic, one last hope of moving to Cuba and starting something, of falling in love under tropical stars, the fragrance of frangipani filling the air as you make your way home.  

It is a dream, and they will try to steal that from you, battering you until you are too afraid even to try.  So you work on, retirement your distant dream, hoping that there will be enough, fearing there will not be, thinking you should work harder now having fiddled away your youth, perhaps putting more into your 401K each month, thinking about insurances and hospital plans.  

Sit, Think, Wonder

All the things I love lack satisfactory definition.  Everything else. . . .

Nothing to Express

A rat died under the house or in the wall or somewhere inaccessible.  It is August.  It is brutal.  This rat is a symbol of the times.  The cat is going crazy with it.

I put in a new motion detector light outside my bedroom.  I kept waking up to it last night.  Something creeping around the house.  The night creatures will learn its ways and torment me for fun.

Still, what do I have to complain about?

"I have it in me so much nearer home, 
To scare myself with my own desert places."


(Robert Frost, "Desert Places")

The Perp

The world needs rednecks.  Nothing gets done without them.  They do.  This is a broad category as I'm using it, very inclusive of all sorts of rough necks, crackers, and whatever regional version you have in your area.  You may or may not like them, but you'll need them sooner or later.

I have a fellow working on the house.  He gets a lot of money for it.  He cuts me a deal because he's worked here before and because I hang around and help some and talk shit.  He can do anything, it seems, a general, all around handyman.  He'll say, "Let's take down that wall and. . . ."  What!?  I'll get all scared and jumpy.  "It's nothing," he'll say.  And he'll begin just knocking the hell out of things.  Of course taking down the wall isn't the hard part.  But when he's finished, everything looks good and new.

My Jeep has been sitting for awhile.  It won't start. Actually, it's been so long, I don't remember why it won't start.  He looks at me and says, "Why don't you fix it?"  He can't understand why I'd let it sit.  He'd fix it and take it out four wheeling and crush it all up and fix it again and take it four wheeling. . . . . He's just not afraid of work.  I grew up with rednecks.  If one of them said, "Let's move my house over six feet," they'd just all go over and do it.  No questions. And they'd laugh and tell jokes, get drunk and fight, knock out some teeth, and go to work on Monday.

It's a big surprise when you find out things about people, though.  Tough guys are afraid of things, too.  Sometimes you have to laugh.

So my fellow was looking at some of the pictures I've been working on.  He saw a naked girl and wanted to see more.  After he looked at them for a minute, he said, "Why do they all look so weird?  Why don't any of them smile?"  Well, I said, I'm trying to go for something here.  Then we came to a picture of a naked fellow lying on the couch uncovered.  He jumped a bit.  "Shit!"  I thought he might hit me, but after the initial shock, he was O.K.  I figured he'd just double the price he had in mind to charge me for fixing things.

But again, people will surprise you.  He told me some stories that I won't repeat here that made him a more complex character than I, in my stupidity, had given him credit for.  I didn't think he really liked the pictures as they are a bit odd, but he turned to me and said, "Why don't you sell these?  You could make a lot of money."  Who in the hell's going to buy these, I said.  "Man, lots of people.  These are really good."  What I should be doing instead of playing around with cameras, I said, is learning to fix houses.  "Bullshit," he says.  "You've got a real talent."

What we did for the rest of the day was work and sweat, work and sweat.

When I say the world needs rednecks, of course, I'm acting as if a redneck is a thing.  I've "totalized," to use the language of my trade.  I know that.  I come here so I can do that, so that I can say things I can't say "there."  But there is truth in it, too, I believe.  Where I think, rednecks do.  And in the end, all such categorical, totalizing, reductive thinking tells a story, not about "the other," but about the perpetrator.

Yes, yes, I'm the perp.  The story is not about him, of course.  I will never know enough to tell that one.

The Internet and The Mask

Strange bugs in yesterday's posting.  Must have been the Friday 13 thing.  My friend Sean called to tell me that the links I put up did not direct the reader to his site but to someone else with the same name.  What!?  How could that happen?  Poor fellow.  Both of them.  They could not be less alike.  One seems a perfectly normal sort, a wedding photographer or something.  Gave the other the heebeejeebees.  I'm sure you were asking yourself, "What sort of fellow is this anonymous Cafe Selavy?  I thought his friend's were dangerous?"

Of course my friend retaliated.  That is what friend's do.

Sean's "professional" name is Sean Q6.  He is present all over the web.  Here is a link to his blog.  But there are others with the name Q6 on the web.  I was going to link you to this, and this, but enough is enough.  Still, it points up the oddness of internet identity.  It is why the internet was invented--so that people could be someone else.  Or what they consider themselves to be.  It brings into question the entire idea of "self."  That is the only reason to have an internet.  Everything else is just dross.

It is silly and dangerous to try to be yourself.  Ask the lady behind the mask.

Memories of Memories

Last night looking up into the western sky just after sunset, I saw a tiny sliver of a lonely moon bone white in a purple sky.  It caught me completely by surprise.  Amazing, I thought, how strong an emotion such a thing can elicit.  Vague memories leaped forth, memories without specifics, memories of feelings rather than events.  The memory of seeing that same moon in that same sky as a ten year old boy, perhaps, waiting for his parents alone by the car in anticipation of going to see a movie at the drive-in theater.  The big, hollow, longing, hopefulness, a cowboy sky, hoping to catch a spooky glimpse of those "Ghost Riders" he'd heard about in song.  Memories of memories.  Memories of seasons.

What grammar school year did I feel?  What age?  The warm memories of a young boy thinking on a Friday night about the week at school, the stories they'd been read, the paper cutouts they had decorated the walls with for the holidays.  His grade.  His class.  It assumed a personality, a persona that subsumed them all.  The steady sureness of it warmed him as he remembered it, remembered remembering it there on a Friday night waiting, looking at the sliver of a moon in the endless purple sky.

It is Friday the 13th.  So many of those, too, though not so many as moons.  My mother, born on a 13th, whose birthday sometimes fall on Friday.

My friend Sean put something wonderful on his blog yesterday:

"The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be." - Paul Valery

"Quit It"

Some burn out in victory, some in defeat.  It is burnout, nonetheless.  Sometimes it is difficult to tell between the two.  Pyrrhic winning, Pyrrhic losing.  But the battles accumulate, leave residue.  That is the stuff of art, of literature.

It is also the material of other things, too.  People want to tell you how they've walked through the fire.  Noble idea, but there needs to be an art to it, something more than the heart-felt emotional offering of what they suffered, what they learned.  Pabulum.  Terrible drooling.

Guilty.  Too much telling.  Too little literature.  Suffering must be made into something else.  So hard to do.

When I made the photo posted above, I thought immediately of the painter John Currin.  I saw an article about him ten or fifteen years ago.  Loved the crazy figures, the lack of accurate perspective, etc.  I remember he said that he learned more about painting from bad art than from the masters.  Maybe he said "as much."  But I know I wanted to photograph the way he paints.  It is hard not to look at his images no matter how much they disturb you.  The eye keeps drifting back.  "Quit it," you'll tell yourself, but you know you can't.

I am silly to put his image up with mine which suffers so by comparison.  But you get the idea. 

The Pathology of Being Alone

I think my trip to the Neu Gallerie this summer had an effect on my images.  Some of them seem right out of the Weimar Republic.  Of course, I flatter myself.  I have one more "shoot" and then the project is over.  Done.  I will work with the images awhile and think about what to do next.  I don't want to work with people right now.  It drains me.  I am anxious for twenty-four hours before "the shoot."  Afterwards, I am exhausted.  It is difficult to meet people, I think.  I tend to stay to myself mostly, so it takes a monumental effort for me to say, "May I take your photograph."  It is always a scary (ad)venture.  I'd like to photograph tools or something else inanimate.  I'm not really interested in such imagery that much.  I'm just worn out.  Like Greta Garbo, I want to be alone.

Which may be a bad sign in itself.  Is there some pathology at work when what you look forward to most is coming home to dinner alone with a movie or a book or some small creation?  Last night, for instance, I came home to eat and watch the first episode of the new season of "Mad Men" that I missed the night it aired.  I downloaded it onto my MacBook and watched it on the laptop with earbuds in place.  And I thought it tremendous fun.  I am afraid that I will become a misanthrope.  I will have to be very careful.  I don't want to become too much like that Sebastian character in "Blade Runner."

Ode

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting."

(Wordsworth, "Ode: Imitations of Immortality")

Last night, after an exhausting day, I came home with a meal prepared by Whole Foods and a bottle of sorghum beer.  I sat down alone in front of the television thinking to watch the news, but that was spoiling my appetite, so I switched over to TCM and caught the very beginning of "Splendor in the Grass."  Oh my.  I can't believe I've never watched this movie before.  I know, I know.  I'll take the beating for that one.  Such a tremendous film.  What can I tell you?  What can I say?

Elia Kazan, of course.  I didn't know he directed it.  You can barely ever go wrong watching one of his films.  And everyone in the cast was dead on perfect.  Pat Hingle as Ace Stamper--well, I grew up loathing such characters, people without enough redeeming qualities to inspire sympathy of any sort.  Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood.  

But the treats for me were Barbara Loden, Zohra Lampert, and Jan Norris.  Jesus.  Why didn't they all become stars?  Zohra Lampert turned me upside down with that crazy dialect and quirky way of moving her head.  I could watch home movies of her just walking around the house.  Barbara Loden was married to Kazan, but she didn't have much of an acting career which seems criminal.  And Jan Norris just disappeared, I think, after playing "the other kind of girl" so spectacularly.

I loved the classroom scenes, the old blackboards and the school marm teaching literature to high school seniors.  Martine Bartlett.  Perfect.

Warren Beatty collapsing from repressed desire.  The old doc giving him injections of iron and sessions with a sun lamp.  Natalie Wood going to an insane asylum because her love takes his father's advice and makes love to "the other kind of girl."  Just "the other kind of girl" is enough.  Masks.  Denials.  Victorian values.  Melodrama.  I just haven't seen all that for so long.

Maybe you must be from a world where such archetypal characters existed, when choices were not as varied or extreme.  Maybe you had to grow up in a small town where everyone knew and feared the county sheriff.  I'd like to watch this film with a bunch of high school seniors to watch their reaction.

Or maybe not.

The End of Something

This project is over soon.  Whatever project it was.  It has morphed and become something of its own.  I have thousands of these images now, but in a week or so there will be no more.  Inconceivable.  I am just beginning to learn what to do.  I have ideas, but the material means for creating this will be gone.

C'est la vie.

My week is busy.  Then, I think, I may rent a car and drive.  I must think.  I am thoughtless now.  Saying it is redundant.

I love the oddity of them, these images.  It takes hours to make one.  Watching them develop thrills me almost every time.

Someone Else Can Do For You

Facebook.  OMG.  : )  : (  LOL

I have a faux Facebook account I had to set up to look at some art a friend had put up.  I don't use it, but about once a month for some reason, I'll check it.  Joe and Marylen are now friends.  Amanda likes a photograph by Donny.  WTF?!!

I am worried.  I think I will have to set up a real account one day.  I am sure of it.  You will be the first to know.  Maybe.  I'm not certain how to make the transition from Cafe Selavy to a real identity.

Problematic.

I think about master artists of the past.  Would Hemingway have a Facebook page?  Faulkner?  Picasso?  Matisse?  I've checked some current artists and writers, and there are pages, but I am certain they are set up by someone else.  Perhaps that is the answer.  I'll be big, bigger than all that.  I'll have someone maintain my Facebook page for me.  Never get my hands dirty.  Why didn't I think of that before?

There is nothing someone else can't do for you.

Seeking Foreclosure

"In a time of crisis," she said, looking angry and intense, "perhaps we should just bring this to foreclosure."

Lotus Blossoms on a Summer's Day

Is it only August?  My calendar has been thrown off by industry. It is a million degrees and professional football teams are in practice.  I guess high school teams will not be far behind.  Anything can happen for money.  I quoted T.C. Boyle a few days back.  I like his works.  That is one of his themes--Nature vs. Human Nature.  Corruption.  Greed.  Badness.

I look to summer's end, but it is only beginning here.  August, September, October.  Nobody thinks of October as summer, but it truly is here.  I am feeble with considering ninety more days of heat.  Bad things could happen.

"The human mid can only take so much."  Dylan.  And in the heat, everything you've accumulated becomes clutter.  Focus.  One thing.  No more.

James Salter's book of letters to Robert Phelps has been published.  A friend of mine let me know yesterday.  I used to know such things preternaturally.  I will get it today.  His writing is like lotus blossoms on hot days.  I think.  I'm not even sure what lotus blossoms are, but it sounds just right, some lovely flower floating in a bowl of water on a rough wooden table in the shade.  I'm not much for Phelps, though.  Maybe after reading the letters I will change my mind.  I hope so.  I need something to get me through.

Amy Crehore

When I stumbled upon the work of Amy Crehore, I had that great fun shock you get when you watch somebody doing what they are not supposed to.  Or what you suppose others think one might not do, which is often a prescription for deep water.  I wrote to Ms. Crehore straight away and asked her if I could post a few of her images on this site and inquired about the price of some of her paintings. That was awhile back.  Since, I've been thinking about what I might say.  Her bio page offers little help, saying only:

"Her mysterious, dream-like narratives reveal a preference for vintage musical instruments and a love of art history."

Perhaps.

 
Her blog is a tremendous image repository that seems to mirror many of my own interests.

I like her work.  It is crazy and hued with the colors of childhood memories.  What memories!  But there they are creeping around, archetypal, submerged things full of crazy monkeys and diabolical clowns and lurking cats and peepers, all  part of the secret Fairy Tales books we were never allowed to view but suspected nonetheless.

Oh, I'm not qualified to speak for others.  I'll have to leave it to you.  I still haven't derived the words and phrases I need to handle an essay on her paintings.  I'm just glad she's painting them.

An Age

It's so easy to be inconsistent these days, easy to be conflicted.  I've been thinking about what this "Age" might be termed by future scholars.  In what "Age" am I living?

"The Age of Failure"

Of course, that could be my own age.  I think of T.C. Boyle's opening lines in "Greasy Lake."

"There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine. When we wheeled our parent's whining station wagons out onto the street we left a patch of rubber half a block long. We drank gin and grape juice. Tango, Thunderbird, and Bali Hai. We were nineteen. We were bad. We read Andre Gide and stuck elaborate poses to show that we didn't give a shit about anything. At night, we went up to Greasy Lake."

It is a great opening.  I ask, "When was that?  What time is he speaking of?"  And I usually get some bracketed date.

Youth.  It is "The Age of Hope."

Or used to be.  I'm working on a documentary about teenage suicide just now as part of someone else's grant.  I'm beginning to lose faith in the "Age of Hope."

"The Age of Expectations"

Thinking about such things alone in the early morning light is like playing solitaire.  Or maybe solitary scrabble.

Labels. They are totalizing.  They oversimplify.  But they stick.

I'm sure you have a few ideas.

When You Begin Seeing Yourself

When you begin seeing yourself from the outside, you are lost.  The view isn't as good from there.

Just wrote you a longish story, then deleted it.  I'm not sure if it wasn't any good or if I am just becoming self-conscious.  Probably both.

Here is another of the "Prom Dress" series.

What will I do?  What will I do?

"If you go to the barber. . . ."

Nice break.  I'm all ready for the future!  I was watching television with my mother last night after dinner and saw an advertisement for knee replacements.  When I watch television with my mother, I see all the ads, and it seems that the majority by a mile are for prescription drugs.  They are disheartening, but you might not know to ask your doctor if you hadn't seen the ad, right?  And they are up front.  If you are willing to suffer deafness and blindness and the loss of a some of your other body functions for sexual arousal. . . ?  Erections lasting longer than two days may cause kidney failure, etc.  I understand these sorts of ads.  But knee replacement?!

"Oh, shit honey, come look at this.  I hadn't thought of this.  What do you think?"

Is it something you have to think about?  Maybe it is reassuring to people who must have them, I don't know.  But as I heard a doctor telling a fellow at the gym, "If you go to the barber, you get a haircut, right?"  He kept saying this over and over to a fellow who was going to have knee surge.  I couldn't figure that one out and checked it off to him being decidedly Asian, thinking that it was some proverb he grew up with.  Maybe it was.  Maybe I'm just slow.  Awhile later, though, I realized if you go to the butcher, you get meat.  If you go to a car dealer, you get a car.  Don't worry, it will come to you.

All I know is that they don't seem to be advertising the things I really need when I'm watching television with my mother.

August

Feels like I've been running on vitamin C and cocaine, as they used to say.  Pushed too hard and now feel broke.  Not sure that the effort will pay off in any way.  Pretty certain it won't.  Then comes the blues, time when everything seems to be stacked against you, when you feel yourself so far outside you can't imagine what you were thinking.  Living in time and space instead of place.  One thing, and then another, first slowly, then quickly.

That is how it gets for everybody sometimes.  It is August now, and people toute le monde are closing shop to go on vacation.  I'm worn out and must follow suit.  Fewer postings this month.  August.  It can be a killer.  I think I need to float.