Talk Talk Talk

Yesterday, I presented myself as a hideous(ly) talented man, a listener, a Svengali, a freaking Dolly Llama, a girl whisperer and a trader of dreams for tales.

And then. . . I don't know what happened.  The antibiotics are finally beginning to have a visible effect.  My face is less hideous, the pain finally subsiding.  Still, I take terrible amounts of anti-everything drugs so that I do not feel myself.  And I've gone back to the factory during the day and to the studio at night.  I am exhausted when I finally get home.

Last night, I picked up a woman I would shoot with.  I don't normally, but she doesn't have a car and was going to take the bus.  She lives only five miles from the studio, so I offered.  She lives in the funky part, or what passes for it here, of the big city downtown.  It is young and hip and partially snotty (as opposed to my little hamlet six miles away which is older, upscale, and snotty).  I walked into her place, an old '20s stucco house with two great palms in front so that it could double as an L.A. address in some local hipster's independent film.  It was spartan.  Bare.  Beautiful, really.  And there she was, a tall, slender, pale young woman with long dark hair, a skirt that fell to the floor, a simple strapped top--a throwback, a neo-hippie.  She had no internet, no car, a free phone from her cell company, and a melancholy demeanor.  She was from Seattle, had been here less than a year. Followed her boyfriend here.  They'd met working on a cruise ship in Mexico.  He was older.  At first it was good, but soon alcohol and drugs turned things wrong.  Now he was gone.  She kicked him out a month ago, she said.  I could tell she had doubts.  Trying to work through it, she worked, slept, did yoga, had few friends.  She was thinking.

We went to the studio and shot.  She was translucent, her skin unmarred, a perfect pale membrane.  She did not move like a model but somewhat awkwardly so used to yoga poses, but then--boom--it worked out.  She was delighted with the Polaroids as they developed.  I was feeling better and so was drinking wine with her though I shouldn't have been.  I was becoming giddy with returning health.  My face was less a lump.  We finished shooting.  I invited her for sushi.

Maybe you can finish this tale.  Perhaps you can predict the ending.  Wrapped in the glow of alcohol and dinner and believing myself no longer disfigured and deformed, I held forth.  No shit--after all I told you yesterday, I began to talk.  Talking is a mistake.  It truly is.  I thought myself fascinating, perhaps, ready to hold forth with "The Wisdom."  I don't know how it happened, but once it did, once I began to realize what I had done, there was nothing to do.  Except to try to talk my way out of it.  I felt the weight pushing down on my head as I became smaller and smaller, the Incredible Shrinking Man.  But I could not get small enough to disappear.  Just small.

I can blame it on many things, on being ill, being exhausted, on chemicals. . . it doesn't matter.  Mr. Marvelous, alright.  Then, dinner over, there was the long ride back to her place, six or seven time longer than before.

I hope she is not a writer.  I wouldn't want those things told by someone who could bring the image alive.  Still, she liked the pictures and agreed after all to shoot again this weekend.

But I must not allow myself to forget that drifting, bored look in her eye and hearing my voice coming at me from all sides like talking in an empty room or seashell.

I was better when I was more hideous, I think.

(Re)Born

I shot lat night with a younger model.  I had made the date before I got sick, and I don't like to cancel, so even though I was shaky and foggy and knew I would be weak and tired, we shot.  I thought to shoot quickly and briefly, but it went on and on.  After we shot, she sat on my couch and talked for hours.  I am a good listener, a good interviewer, because I am truly fascinated by people and their lives.  They tell me things that are thrilling.  They reveal themselves in intimate ways.  I am a sweet man, sincere, honest. . . .  It is a talent.

Her tale went from here to there in no order.  I will tell it here sometime in the future.  Perhaps.  I am finding it tricky to tell people's secrets here, not because they are secrets (they are stories we all hold somewhere deep inside us), but because I can't make the stories not reflect poorly on me somehow.  I mean, how can a poor old bastard tell the tale of a naif without looking. . . well. . . probably like what he looks?  Sometimes I think to go underground with a new blog with nothing but stories and no narrator, no personality connected to the tales.  I am so first person here that it is difficult now to step out of that.  I hear the voices in my head.

"Oh, yea, there goes that shit C.S. again."

If I start another blog, I won't let you know.  Unless you ask me.

So today everything will remain abstract rather than concrete (always the kiss of death in writing).

I am very lucky to hear what I hear, to process it and to figure out without watching it on television that things have changed.  Everyone knows that people are different than they used to be in some way, but ask a baby boomer how and they begin to stumble.

We have not experienced some cataclysmic change in the gene pool since a generation or two ago.  It is the same.  People have the same aggregate I.Q. as they did.  And the desires are all the same, too.  What changes is how they choose to satisfy those chthonic needs.  And that is what I hear as I solicit those stories.  People want to tell if you give them the chance.  They seem to fall back as in a trance, speaking things they don't get to say, speaking in "tongues."

I must have an honest face!

But it has been misshapen badly by the disease.  Parts are swollen and twisted now.  I have lumps and a nose that goes every which way.  Perhaps, I imagine, I have become hideous.  When I was younger, I would have found it tragic.  Now, I swear, it seems merely fascinating.  Hideously fascinating.

So I tried it out last night, this new face.  She didn't know the old one, took this to be "me" and not something altered from what he was before.  I imagined she was looking at a beast.  I saw myself as such.  A little deformity might be a good thing.  I'll not worry about the way I look again.  I'll stare into the eyes that see the carnage boldly.  It is an awful(ly) good face.

I've ambled and rambled this morning.  I am so full of chemicals I don't feel myself.  Yesterday, I tried to use my debit card, but I could not remember the PIN.  It still has not come back to me.  And even that is not troubling me so much.  An altered face, an altered mind.  There is a sense of rebirth in it.

A Sort of Stoicism

I am heavy with chemicals, dull and slow.  It appears, however, that I may finally be on the road to recovery, at least partially.  I must return to work one day, perhaps today.  I know it is not good for me.  As sick as I was, lying in the hospital bed with nothing to do did more for me than anything, except, of course, the heavy chemicals).  Maybe it was the Vicodin that put me at ease.  But the work world, the factory, I know is ruining me.  I used to love the job, but like the American culture, things have changed.  And I have not so much.  Not voluntarily.  And it is the involuntary part that is the killer.

My friend wrote me one word about the illness: "Stoicism."

Of course.  That and whining.  A whiny sort of stoicism may be just the thing.  With a little self-aware humor of the dark kind.  Hemingway's mistake was leaving out the humor.  By all accounts, he was not a funny man.

I should have marked the passage when I was reading the novel, but I didn't.  In grand chaos of Hemingway's posthumous "The Garden of Eden," Katherine is crazy and depressed.  She confesses her fear of dying to her husband David.

"But what if I am dead," she asks him.

"Don't let it happen till it happens."

The world is full of zombies.  It is difficult not to join them.

For a while I used the pseudonym "Woody Hemingway."  A funny, whining sort of stoic.  

About Suffering They Were Never Wrong

I shot this for a model I've worked with many times.  The image is a mistake.  I accidentally overexposed it but tried to get an image from it as an experiment.  When the model and her mother saw it, they wanted me to print an 8x10 so they could put it in her portfolio.  I say that I shot this "for" them because it is not the sort of thing I do, but I will shoot whatever they want me to as they've been generous in working with me.  I didn't think any agency would look at this as they usually want to see plain pictures of the model and are not interested in "artistry" of any kind.  To my surprise, they told me the agent liked it much.  The agency signed her and are now shopping her around.  What do I know about such things.  

I put it here not because I think it is a good picture, but because I was looking in some of the places I surf on slow mornings and saw a nice collection of Lillian Bassman's photographs here.  It reminded me of her work in a superficial way (not making any comparison, I swear).  

I am not up to a big post here.  Spent the weekend in the hospital with the malady I'd mentioned.  I won't report on that, but on this--the first step outside the hospital is a shock.  As bad as hospitals are, I got used to people taking care of me very quickly.  I was not prepared for my stay and did not have anything with me other than my phone.  I was put into an observation ward with six other beds.  It was loud and busy.  I had nothing to do but lie in the bed, think and listen.  Usually I can't stand noise, but somehow there it was comforting.  I slept and woke listening to one patient being brought in and asked the same questions I had been--have you been falling. . . diabetes. . . history of heart disease or cancer. . . .  Later, another.  I'd fall asleep and the nurse would wake me up to give me medicine or to take my "vitals."  On and on like this it went, but I had driven myself and was alone, so in some sense, I think, it was a substitute for a family or community.  I don't know.  But I didn't mind.  I even ate the hospital food without complaint.  The nurse the first night was wonderfully pleasant and beautiful.  Of course.  In the morning, she was gone without goodbye.  Ho!  And the next was equally attentive and pleasant.  They were all wonderful, checkin on you, asking if you need anything, giving you medicine and helping you sit up and responding to your calls for Vicodin promptly.  And so I lounged sleeping and waking and thinking without television or book or computer.  

"You must be bored," one said to me.  

"Not really," I said.  "I never get to do this."  

But there was a devil in the mix.  Don't need a doctor on the weekend.  We all know that.  From Thursday to Sunday, I saw talked to seven different doctors who asked me the same questions each time, each of them responding in different ways.  There seemed to be a thread of reason that bound six of the doctors' responses, that being I needed to be hospitalized and put on i.v. antibiotics.  But the seventh was different.  He didn't like me at all, I could tell.  I wondered what I had done to him on the outside.  Surely something, for there was a familiar look in his eye.  And on the verge of admission, he came in and said I was fine, that the drugs I had been taking were good ones, and that I could shove off for home.  I won't bore you (more) with the details of things, but something changed yet again.  As I was waiting to be discharged, I was hooked up to an i.v. and told I was being admitted.  

My last day in the hospital, the last doctor I saw, the one who discharged me, the only one I saw twice, was The Dick.  I was in good shape, he said, and sent me on my way with an armful of prescriptions.  

So. . . the first step outside the hospital was a shock.  Don't expect to leave the hospital cured, I guess.  I felt as bad as when I entered, worse, really, now that I was full of so many toxic substances.  My symptoms were still the same.  From the cold, dry ward, I entered the hot and humid outer world, chemical sweat beading instantly on my greasy face.  Finding the car, driving to the pharmacy, then to the grocery store for things I needed. . . it all seemed impossible.  I wanted to ring the button for a nurse.  And people outside the hospital seemed mean.  They would not care for me.  Dripping with sweat, all things seemed impossible.  

At home, the cat waited for me with tremendous neediness.  

"I'm not in the mood to take care of you now," I said. 

"Pourquoi pas?"  

"Nor to speak French."  

There was only my house and things to do.  And I, I felt, was not the man to do them.  I am much alone and often happy to be so, but in such times. . . one envies the other.  "Here's the price," I thought to myself.  The cat bumped against my leg.  

I have gone on about this far too long, much longer than I intended.  Other people's suffering is boring, and I have reneged on my promise to make mine more interesting than yours.  That, too, seems impossible.  

*     *     *     *     *

Sorry.  Wrong photo.  This is the one they liked.  But it doesn't remind me of Bassman.  

Malady

I have had a bad malady for the past few days.  No need to go into it, but my face is deformed and I am in much pain.  The drugs the doctor has given me do not seem to be working.  He said to call if they don't, but that was Thursday.  Who do I call on Saturday?  Sunday?  I have been alone for two days with only pain and dark thoughts.

But that is just the set-up, not the point.  We all suffer, I mean, and I don't want to highlight mine over yours.  But if I am around later and can think about it right, I will try to make mine more interesting than yours.  There is that.

I keep thinking about dying.  If I were to die, what would be the last thoughts, the last images I would call up to see me on my way?  What would I miss most sharply?

It all gets confused.

Then I wonder about regrets.  Would I have them?  Would they be for what I did or what I didn't do?

And I wonder if I would feel guilt.

I have a feeling, though, that I would like to explain things.  A lilfe is never what it seems to be.  The underlying motives for an action is the story, not the action itself.  At bottom, we are all fools and simps stumbling about, bumping our noses in the dark, driven by partial understanding and ignorance.

The girl in this photo has stories.  I am desirous to get them.  We had plans.  She said she would tell them all to me and that I could steal them and use them.  Then her boyfriend roughed her up on last time and she went away.  She is the inspiration for "Drug Skinny," a collection of unwritten tales.  But she will come back, she says, and she will tell them to me.  Why am I so desirous of them?  Because they are full of the things we consider bad and wrong, full of conflict and bumping noses in the dark.  And I want to know why.

She has unsuspected talent, too.  She wanted to use this photo for her FB page, so she added the top.  I complimented her and told her to stop fucking with my pictures.

Sage

"Eventually suffering is permanent, I think.  Put on some makeup and pretend.  Where's the harm in that?  Too many people believe they know what others go through.  They don't.  You only know what you go through.  Fuck 'em.  I'm going to do what I want."

~Lilac

Hipster in Training

Putting off going to a doctor was yesterday's mistake. . . today's dangerous misery.  But this video and this song are what came of last night.  I'll explain it better later.  Many things, of course.  The short version is that I began watching Season 7 of "Entourage" last night.  This song played under the credits of episode four.  I got up and googled the lyrics.  I came up with the song, linked here, and the video above.  The original song is by  Wanda Jackson, the video by Duck and Cover.  It was the Jackson version on "Entourage," but who can resist the woman singing in this backstage video.  If life were only as good.

Sweet Nothing

(for some reason, blogger won't let me add a picture today)

I wrote something last night that I thought would save me time this morning.  Nope.  It seemed clever enough when I was drinking.  I want to tell the same story again this morning only better, but you know how that goes.  And I'm neither clever nor clear here, getting up and going back to bed only to rise late.  There is little sense to things this morning as I sit looking over the wicked mess someone must have made in the house while I was sleeping.

It sounds as if the cat is learning Russian.  I can't understand a word of it.  Something is wrong with her as well.

I went to a retirement party for a man I've worked with many years.  Such things are sad, not because the person is leaving but because such celebrations are always so forced and paltry and hollow and awkward.  A co-worker asked me if I'd seen "Midnight in Paris," expecting a review.  Several people listened in.

"You know which Woody Allen film is MY favorite?" the coworker asked me.

I didn't think any of them, so I said, "What's Up Tiger Lily"?

"No.  'Radio Days.'"

"Oh.  You know my favorite?"

He thought a minute.  "Zelig."

"No, no.  C'mon. . . . 'Manhattan!' I watch it at least once a week."

Crowd response.

Feeling clever, I put my arm around one of the younger, prettier women in the room and asked, "Have I told you how nice I am to my mother?"

To me, she seemed less unimpressed than usual.

Home late, having cooked again for one, I sat down in front of the television and looked at what I had recorded on the DVR.  Several things, including "An Education."  I thought to watch the first part of it again while I ate.  The opening three or four minutes is a wonderful montage.  But of course, I got sucked in.

I stopped the film just before the end when everything has gone to shit and Jenny tells her parents, "Young girls are always getting seduced by sophisticated older men."  I didn't want to watch the rest of it because I knew this was a shortcut, a cheat.  It was there only to get us to the point of this morality play.

So, feeling as clever as I had that afternoon, I searched for songs from the movie's soundtrack and hijacked them for my friends.

I'm not feeling so clever this morning, though.  At night I tend to feel more clever than I should.  Tonight, I think, I'll drink tea and read Buddhist texts.  That should start me on a path of clarity.

I wrote something last night that I thought would save me time this morning.  Nope.  It seemed clever enough when I was drinking.  I want to tell the same story again this morning only better, but you know how that goes.  And I'm neither clever nor clear here, getting up and going back to bed only to rise late.  There is little sense to things this morning as I sit looking over the wicked mess someone must have made in the house while I was sleeping.

It sounds as if the cat is learning Russian.  I can't understand a word of it.  Something is wrong with her as well.

I went to a retirement party for a man I've worked with many years.  Such things are sad, not because the person is leaving but because such celebrations are always so forced and paltry and hollow and awkward.  A co-worker asked me if I'd seen "Midnight in Paris," expecting a review.  Several people listened in.

"You know which Woody Allen film is MY favorite?" the coworker asked me.

I didn't think any of them, so I said, "What's Up Tiger Lily"?

"No.  'Radio Days.'"

"Oh.  You know my favorite?"

He thought a minute.  "Zelig."

"No, no.  C'mon. . . . 'Manhattan!' I watch it at least once a week."

Crowd response.

Feeling clever, I put my arm around one of the younger, prettier women in the room and asked, "Have I told you how nice I am to my mother?"

To me, she seemed less unimpressed than usual.

Home late, having cooked again for one, I sat down in front of the television and looked at what I had recorded on the DVR.  Several things, including "An Education."  I thought to watch the first part of it again while I ate.  The opening three or four minutes is a wonderful montage.  But of course, I got sucked in.

I stopped the film just before the end when everything has gone to shit and Jenny tells her parents, "Young girls are always getting seduced by sophisticated older men."  I didn't want to watch the rest of it because I knew this was a shortcut, a cheat.  It was there only to get us to the point of this morality play.

So, feeling as clever as I had that afternoon, I searched for songs from the movie's soundtrack and hijacked them for my friends.

I'm not feeling so clever this morning, though.  At night I tend to feel more clever than I should.  Tonight, I think, I'll drink tea and read Buddhist texts.  That should start me on a path of clarity.

Summer 2011

I felt good last night but couldn't sleep.  I woke and thought dreams, stretched and rolled and felt the million thread count sheets against me.  It was the solstice, the shortest night of the year.  I finally got up at 4:30 feeling fine.  Odd, though, that the cat did not come running as she usually does.

"Ou etes-vous," I whispered, but nothing.  Did I leave her out when I went to bed I wondered?

I saw an ambulance drive slowly by my house in the darkness.  Somewhere in the muddled folds of my brain I thought of something.  Perhaps it is for me, I thought.  They are looking for me, going slowly, in no hurry.  That is why the cat isn't here.  I'm dead.

But it pulled up to a neighbors house where a more probable candidate lives.

"This time," I said to myself, feeling for the fellow, hoping it turned out O.K. for him.  The cat lazily brushed against my leg.

It is awful to want to live, I thought, or rather, to be saddened by the other.

I tend to remember equinoxes more than solstices.  The solstice brings summer and fun. . . at first.  But summers get brutal here and so what follows at first are beaches and summer love, but then it is disaster warnings and shattered nerves, afternoon storms and worn passions.  Being merely cordial in August is almost impossible.  Read your Faulkner.

I wake this morning a new man--someone with an iPhone.  I have given in, allowed myself to be seduced.  It was nothing, like losing your virginity, I think.  It is difficult at first but you keep thinking you will learn to enjoy it.

Q and the prodigal girl both sent things to my phone yesterday.  Otherwise, it would be like my other phone, silent until I got a call from my mother.  But getting photos and texts were--dare I say it--fun.  It is Q's old phone, and he says I will want a new one soon.  And he is right for one reason.  I want the video camera on the new iPhones.  They art truly awesome.  And the 8mm app--well, I have phone envy.  But I've gone from 0 to 1,000 texts/month in 3.5 seconds.

So it is summer.  I have a 21st century phone.  Both the cat and I are still alive.  The sun is coming up and I feel like getting outside.  With apologies to the neighbor, out with the old and in with the new.  I'll book flights to NYC and San Fran today.  It is time for a little summer fun.

Just Go with It

(source)

High Times.  I cooked for my mother last night after napping all day.  I thought I might have a little "quality control" this way.  Big pork country ribs and red beans with onion and red wine and plenty of red pepper in the pressure cooker.  Jasmine rice and a large garlicky salad.

I have a model/photographer friend in NYC who I wrote to on the night of the full moon.  Part of the untold story, etc.  I had to ask her if a friend of hers, a photographer of some repute, was making fun of me when the day after I wrote the "salmon patty" story he mentioned the same two beers on his blog, Stella and PBR.  She told me no, he always drinks PBR.  It is the "beer of hipsters" now, she said.  Coincidentally, after breakfast at the diner, I saw four hipsters in little pork pie hats, goatees, cut off knee-length jeans and fuck you glasses (the girls didn't have goatees) holding four six packs of PBR.  My friend in NYC is a young and famous hipster herself, so based on her recommendation, I decided to get some for dinner tonight.

After a steady diet of Euro beers, I was certain my mother would prove to be a hipster herself.  Much to my surprise, however, she has been spoiled.

"Tonight we're having hipster beer mom.  Pabst Blue Ribbon.  It's all the thing."

But when she took her first draught, she shook her head.  She didn't like it at all and immediately switched to wine.  This from the salmon patty queen herself.  I've ruined her.  She used to be such a cheap date.  I, on the other hand, surprised myself.  The Pabst wasn't bad.  Nope, I could hang.  Baby, I think, it is time for PBR.  I've begun the goatee thing.  I'm looking for the slip on tennis shoes with the stretchy bands and some vintage head-ware tomorrow.  I'm going to wear my 3D glasses everywhere.

["Hipsters are a subculture of men and women typically in their 20's and 30's that value independent thinking, counter-culture, progressive politics, an appreciation of art and indie-rock, creativity, intelligence, and witty banter. The greatest concentrations of hipsters can be found living in the Williamsburg, Wicker Park, and Mission District neighborhoods of major cosmopolitan centers such as New York, Chicago, and San Francisco respectively. Although "hipsterism" is really a state of mind,it is also often intertwined with distinct fashion sensibilities. Hipsters reject the culturally-ignorant attitudes of mainstream consumers, and are often be seen wearing vintage and thrift store inspired fashions, tight-fitting jeans, old-school sneakers, and sometimes thick rimmed glasses. Both hipster men and women sport similar androgynous hair styles that include combinations of messy shag cuts and asymmetric side-swept bangs. Such styles are often associated with the work of creative stylists at urban salons, and are usually too "edgy" for the culturally-sheltered mainstream consumer. The "effortless cool" urban bohemian look of a hipster is exemplified in Urban Outfitters and American Apparel ads which cater towards the hipster demographic. Despite misconceptions based on their aesthetic tastes, hipsters tend to be well educated and often have liberal arts degrees, or degrees in maths and sciences, which also require certain creative analytical thinking abilities. "]  (source)

In not-so-hipster-fashion, however, I bought a pay-per-view movie to watch with my mother.  We settled on "Just Go with It" with Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler.  When else am I going to get to watch movies like this?  It was perfect.  Two thumbs up here.  If you are watching with a relative.  I'm certain the Pabst helped.  And that was date night, me, mom, Pabst, and a commercial movie.  Dinner, by the way, was perfect.

There is a little hipster bar down the road from me.  I will hang this week.  I am tired of these faux-bourgeiose blues.  The economy sucks.  Things are not so pretty any more.  There is no fighting it.  Definitely, it is hipster time.

Money and Memory

I've already climbed pretty high on the Google search for "Cave of Forgotten Dreams."  I'm going to have to quit it.  I got tons of hits from that search yesterday.

But what else is there to do?

I am curious about the memory of waitresses.  Either I am spending way too much money eating out, or I'm missing a lot of opportunities.  I go to a diner about every couple weeks to get breakfast.  Nothing special.  I went two weeks ago and the waitress who took my order said, "What's your name?  Everyone in here seems to know you, so I need to remember what you get."  I didn't think everyone in there knew me.  I come in, sit at the counter, order, eat, pay, and leave.  I leave a twenty percent tip.  I don't talk to anyone.  When I went in yesterday, I had that same waitress, the one who waited on me once.  She knew what I wanted.

"Same thing?  You want a small or large orange juice?"

I watched her as she worked.  She didn't look like a genius or someone with a photographic mind.  In fact, and I know how wrong it is to say this, she looked a bit simple.

In the evening, I went to a little fish shack that I go to again about once every two weeks.

"Hey, C.S.."

This from a new waitress who, like the one at breakfast, has waited on me once.  You have to order at the counter.  They give you a little metal holder with a card they write your name on.  You take it to your table with you so they can find you when the food is ready.

"Do I need one of the little name holders?"

"No, they know you."

I forget the names of people I work with.  I have relatives I don't see whose names escape me.

"Mom, what's Ethel's son's name, the one with the short leg?" I'll ask when family stories come up at dinner.

So tell me, am I spending too much money or does money make you remember things?

"No, pal, you're special."

That is what I want to hear, of course.  We all do.  

Which segues, sort of, into what I haven't been able to write the past few days.  It is sort of contrapuntal to that.  It, too, is about being remembered.

O.K.  I've tried for the longest time here, but I still can't get it right.  Maybe someday.

So I'll end with this.  Q gave me his old iPhone ever so long ago when he got his new one.  It wouldn't cost me anything more to use it than to continue using my old Razor.  But I haven't because I don't want to be playing with my phone all the time.  Meeting up with the prodigal girl, though, I realized that I was being what I don't want to be, don't like to see in others.  It is an ideological stance, no?  Maybe Q is right.  Facebook.  Twitter.  They are all tools at our fingertips.  I don't know.  Perhaps I am going to switch over today.  The devil can have me.  I may enter into century twenty-one.

Cave of Broken Dreams

I've been trying to tell you a thing here for the past half hour.  All that I have written sits underneath this line not yet deleted.  It is horrible data.  Not even stuff.  Perhaps it is agenda-driven.  Or I am too aware of myself as I write it, perhaps, a sure knell for writers unless you are David Foster Wallace.  I am not.  But it is horrible not to be able to articulate an observation, an emotion. . . a story.  Perhaps this is a preview of my after-life, the punishment to which I'll be subjected for eternity.

I don't think that way, but last night I went to see Werner Herzog's "Cave of Forgotten Dreams."  It has had rave reviews and my friends have urged me to see it.  In 3D.  So I did.  A quick stop at the sushi bar beforehand.  There was not much time before the movie, but I wanted a simple tuna roll and some sake.  As I walked to the bar, the hostess came up and said, "You no sit outside?  We turn off music for you.  No music."

"I know," I said.  "That is wonderful.  Everyone will appreciate it.  But I am just getting something quick before the movie."

"Oh," she said rather disappointed.  "What see?"

"Cave of Forgotten Dreams."

"What that like?"

"I haven't seen it yet, but it is about ancient cave painters."  I could see the confusion on her face.  She said something I couldn't make out, then asked me,

"You still want go to Vietnam?"

That is where she is from, and I had plans at one time to go but in the end could not.  The person I was to go with just got back and was not taken with Vietnam but loved Cambodia.  And that is what I told the hostess.

"Too much communism, she said, and they didn't really seem to like Americans."

The sushi chef cried out, "Hate them," and the others laughed.  I began to get curious about my food.  Did they hate me, too?

The hostess went back to work and two servers came up.

"Why you no sit outside?  We turn off music for you."

Ibid.

I like eating there because it is like dreaming across a cultural void.  We communicate something, but surely not what we intend.  Even looking into one another's eyes is a mystery.  Maybe not so much, though.  They always keep the prettiest waitresses away from me.  It is true and verifiable.  They send the males and the older, married women.  I can only watch the others who studiously avoid my eyes.  Surely it is only I who dreams across this cultural void.  Maybe they are too busy living.

I carried my 3D glasses and glass of wine into the movie theater.  It was terribly small, and the seats were not centered with the screen so that what looked like the middle was very left of center.  There were not many people seated, but they were all seated in the same area, the only one, really, that didn't have you too close or looking to the screen at a right angle.  Being only one, though, I found a decent seat next to a couple.  Of course, the woman I sat next to was irritated.  They had planted themselves with an empty seat next to each of them.  I was disappointed, too.  Jesus Christ, she smelled bad.  Really bad.  I was tempted to move but in the end just leaned to the other side.  What the hell was the smell?  It was like she hadn't bathed in a month and then put on cheap, horrible perfume.  I kept sipping the wine trying to stay my gag reflex.

During the previews, I thought about two things that had bothered me earlier.  I had seen an elderly black man walking his bike on the sidewalk.  Nothing looked broken.  The tires weren't flat.  The chain was on. Why would he walk his bicycle?  It is an awkward thing to do.  Did he get tired?  Or had he just wanted to slow down?  As I watched him, a truck approached in the oncoming lane.  The driver honked the horn briefly, and I looked to see if he knew the man walking the bike.  Something made it difficult, though, to see inside the cab.  As I passed him his arm came out the window and gave me a thumbs up.  It was a big fellow with a muscular arm, but I couldn't really see him.  Who was it, I wondered looking in my rear view mirror trying to make him out.  The bed of the truck carried something, a couch, it seemed.  But it wasn't a couch, it was a casket!  I had only a glimpse of the driver's smile.  If I were a different type. . . well, it was still spooky.

I am still chewing on the thing I started to tell this morning, the thing I can't get out.  It was the night of the full moon.

Herzog, on the other hand, made an hour and a half postcard from a handful of 30,000 year old paintings.  They are incredible, alright, more beautiful than you might imagine.  Picasso tried but did not capture what this ancient artist did.  In his time, Neanderthals still roamed the earth.  Extinct cave lions and cave bears lived where the artist worked.  Outside were wooly mammoths and mastodons and rhinos and wolves, all at the same time.  Impalas and ibex and reindeer.  Unimaginable.  His work is staggering.

More so than the film.  He hadn't enough material to make it so long.  The interviews are terrible.  His narration is melodramatic and often borders on silliness.  The soundtrack is distracting.  The film is best when it simply presents images, the ancient cave paintings and the contemporary 3D images of silent living people staring at the camera as if they were photographs of ghosts.  In those things, he succeeds in making something something that is haunting.

I am not myself today.  Strange forces conspire.  The story is left untold.  I will let it stew, I guess.  If I had the talent, I would draw it on a wall.

Friday afternoon.  It is steamy.  The plan is to go to lunch, have a glass of wine, and sack out on the couch.

Un Chat Tres Chanceux

People love a comic twist that they can recognize.  Everyone likes "Shit My Dad Says."  If you haven't seen it, do a Google search.  Many people have told me that the sketch I made of going to my mother's house for salmon was one of their favorites.  If I could write more pieces like that, I would, but you can't make that up and must live it to write it.  I think.

Having that on my mind, I made salmon last night on my grill.  Salmon for two--me and Madame Chat.  She began dancing as soon as I took the salmon out of the butcher's paper.  She has a nose for fish and can probably read my body language as well.

"Voulez-vous quelques poissons?"

Excited, she answered in English, but we have rules now, so I said once more:

"Madame, voulez-vous quelques poissons?"

"Oui, oui," she said turning circles on the floor.

"Well, you will have to wait until I steam the broccoli and make the rice.  The fish will grill very quickly."

She seemed annoyed at the English, and she is not so good at waiting, but she finally resigned herself to lying in the most annoying place on the kitchen floor so I would have to step over and around her at every move.  She would not be forgotten.

"Mon dieu, vous etes un chat embetant."

I opened a crisp table bottle of Pinot Grigio and set upon my avocado salad.  You must try this.  Slice the avocado and squeeze on some lime.  Salt, then sprinkle with balsamic vinegar.  Now, here's the thing.  Drizzle some honey on top.  You don't want it to be sweet, but to have a bit of sweetness.  Top with chopped garlic.  Your head will spin.

Eating, I began to want cut flowers.  Why did I quit buying cut flowers, I wondered?  I used to buy them every Saturday at the Farmer's Market.  I looked around the house.  I needed more than flowers.  I had ignored the house for too long now.  I need to repair the decor which I have taken little interest in for years.  Where to start?  Perhaps getting rid of the piles of things that I no longer see, things that become part of the usual landscape.  Yes, I thought, this weekend I will try.

"Ou habitez-vous?"

I read an article once that took this phrase as a starting point, considering it as a profound question rather than a geographical one.

"Je vi dans la merde," I thought.

I will make it all beautiful again.  I'll have to start over.  It will take some doing, some rethinking.

So. . . I've written around the story of the prodigal girl, you say.  Maybe not.  Read closely and you will see.  It is better not to confront some things directly, eh?

"Je suis un artiste, pas un journaliste."

It is easier to say that in French.

Oh. . . I must finish the dinner story.  Madame Chat and I ate together after the salad.  She was very wide-eyed over the salmon.  It was pleasant watching her enjoy my preparation.  She is, I thought for the trillionth time, a very lucky cat.

Isn't It Pretty to Think So

I'm a cocktail shaker of emotions tonight.  I've tried to write this earlier but was capable only of adolescent mumbles.  I will try again.  Well lubed already.  God. . . who knows what madnesses the night has in store.  The worst kind, I'm certain, the madness of crazy, energized solitude.  It is a full moon, too, one I'll probably not be able to see in this horribly humid sky.  It will haunt me like Queen Mab tonight.

I gave up on going to the gym after work and opted for sushi instead.  It was the better choice given everything else.  And lo. . . when I sat outside on the veranda, the speakers were dead.  Lord above, I thought, it is a sign.

"You want the usual," the young waiter said.

"Yes, that is what I want tonight."

"Sake or beer?"

"Oh, hell, I'll take the sake.  I don't care that it is hot."

But I was wrong.  The heat and the humidity were stifling.  The sake went right through my pores, and I began to sweat like a drunkard drinking sake on a hot and humid evening.  I tried to write, but it was of little use.  I spilled a bowl of soy sauce and tried to wipe it up only making a sticky, dark glue across the table top.  Flies hurried over to lend their aid.  The friendly waiter came over and asked if he should cut me off.

"If you would, maybe you could just drive me to rehab?"

I hurried through my dinner thinking only to get home.

I keep the house too cold.  I learned that from a bad and wicked friend who never scrimped when it came to certain comforts.  Too cold was just right.

"Bonjour, Madame," I cooed to le chat.  "Et allait-il comment votre jour?"

She walked slowly by in that slinky way she has to make you think it is not her idea for you to pet her.

"Avez-vous faim?"

I gave her a handful of food and poured a little medicine to help the nervous and digestive systems.  Standing there watching Madame Chat poke at her food with a bit of disdain, I thought about the day.  It is one of the disadvantages to living alone, this thinking.

The factory job had gone along.  I had meetings all afternoon, the last one worse than the usual drivel.  And as the program droned on, I asked the fellow on my right a question, to which he responded.

"I'm sorry," I heard the Talking Boss say, "there are too many conversations going on in the room at once.  Maybe we can stop and listen to what you two are talking about."

"Oh, O.K." I said in a loud, inauthentic voice.  I hate authoritarians the way a Baptist hates a sinner.  My response was instantly good.  Impressive, really.  In some areas, I have skills.  It is funny to think how much my skills will cost me in the long run when it seems to me they should be recognized and rewarded.  But there is injustice in the world as we all know.

After the meeting, though, I took kudos from my fellow proles, and as we walked out, I began retelling the tale to my pals as we do, reliving the blows in slow motion and technicolor just in case they had not been paying perfect attention.

And just before I got back to my building, I looked up to the landing where a beautiful blonde was staring down at me.  She leaned over the railing, lifted her sunglasses, smiled and said, "Hey P.O.B."  That was her nickname for me once--Poor Old Bastard.

"See you later fellows," I said not taking my eyes from her.  She looked the same as she had twelve years ago.  I knew I didn't.

The rest will have to wait.  I wrote it all under the influence of the full moon and medicine, and it was not clever.  It was nothing at all.  I've tried to rewrite it this morning, but it remains impressively the same.  And besides, I had a message waiting in my email inbox this morning telling me what a lovely pain in the ass I am.  My flaw, I think, is that I can only see the first part of that.  I am blinded to the other.

But the full moon had its way and the night was full of stories.  There was in the end a greater madness to it all.  But it will keep.  Now. . . I must return to the factory.

Giving Verbal

I must have been drunk when I wrote what follows.  I realize that it is not the equinox tonight, but the full moon.  The Full Strawberry Moon.  The equinox is not for another few days.  Another symptom.  Another sign.

*     *     *     *    *

I sit in the dark now, the sun setting so slowly, tomorrow night the Eternal Carnal Vernal Equinox.  Thunder rumbles all around with occasional flashes of lightning.  But no rain.  It is bone dry and humid now, brush fires surrounding the area.  There is smoke if the wind blows right.  But I've grilled chicken and steamed broccoli and made a salad and eaten it all with beer and wine.  And now, scanning Polaroids like a loser idiot, I am drinking scotch.

An email comes in from someone I once did(n't) give everything for.  I must be careful.  She comes here occasionally.  She is in town.  She writes to see if I want to have a drink.  I am drinking, I write back.  Why can't she use the goddamned phone.  Nobody uses a telephone to make a call any more.  It is too much of a commitment.  It is too probable that you will be drawn into a conversation, asked questions, prevented from creating the abbreviated propaganda that you wish.

I guess it is a bit of an abbreviated blog, too, which is an abbreviation of something else.  Living life in shorthand.

Shit.  She knows where I live, of course.  I was once more sophisticated.  I live like an animal now, or so it seems.  I sit in my boxers and a t-shirt with another scotch at my wrist.  She works in the center of the fashion world in Manhattan.  Can't worry about that now.  The hogs are greased and out of the pen.  It's every man for himself.

A car drives by.  I jump.

It matters little, I guess.  I was caught in a towel this morning when the vet came to give the cat her shots.  Yes, the vet comes to the house.  She charges for it, too.  So I came running in a towel, all shoulders, pecs, arms and whiskey gut.  I think I scared her good.  Once, so long ago, she wanted to take me to Africa.  I didn't go.  The woman in town just now was the reason.  I think she was twelve then.

But that is another story.  What was it I meant to say?

Nothing.

I must give credit.  The title was suggested by the former twelve year old.  It is something she no longer performs.

Bat Country

Ambition sucks.  That's what the Buddha says (or something akin).  And he is right.  The best men and women lack ambition.  They possess another element, something more serene.  So it is proclaimed.

I've not made a proclamation before.  That was rather fun.  My friend Q proclaims a lot.  Yes, he has more fun than I, I am certain.

Most people do.  Rich, poor, stately or homely.  But what do you learn from fun?

I'm tempted by syllogism, but I'll refrain.  I'll leave it at "ambition sucks."

"I don't understand you," a friend said to me.  "You whine about not having your work seen while you sneak around on an anonymous blog and won't show your prints to anyone."

"I don't care," I told him.

It's not true, of course.  I care too much.  It is simple, though.  I can't stand rejection.  I am cut deeply by the smallest slights.  The larger things devastate me.  A throw away invitation or a slight promise of something will possess me.  Things grow large in imagination, too large.  Then, when the invitation is forgotten, the promise unkept. . . .  trauma.

I know, I know, it is a bit like Williams' "The Glass Menagerie." Amanda and her wicked memories, Laura's forced exit from the make believe, the disappointment of The Gentleman Caller, Tom's abandonment. . . cloying and brutal at once.  But wrap all those characters up into one. . . .

"Enough of that talk," he said, "or I'll have to use the ether.  Get hold of yourself man!  This is Bat Country."

True Grit: A Movie Review

I am listening to a My Morning Jacket concert on NPR.  It is damned good and is sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer.  ?!?!?!?!?  I had no idea.  I may start drinking that again.  It was the beer I drank early on when I first started drinking beer.  My father drank it.  I haven't had one in. . . thirty years.  I didn't know they still made it.  I will buy a six pack tomorrow and see.  I remember it as one of the sweet beers, practically Canadian.  But I will try it just because.  The concert is good (bad quality, though).  I'll try to find the link and post it here for you.

Since I posted my "review" of Woody Allen's "Paris After Midnight," I have climbed to #3 on the Google search list for "Paris After Midnight Review," and #9 for "Paris After Midnight."  Many hits.  I don't think they will return, though.

I had dinner with mother tonight.  Terrible disappointment.  I told her that I would grill salmon or pork tenderloin, whichever she wanted, but she said she already had the salmon and to come to her house.  Great, I thought, her turn.  So I stopped and got a good bottle of Pinot Grigio and some Stella and was ready to feast.  I wrote her early in the day to make sure she had Wild Alaskan salmon as the rest was farm raised and not worth a shit.  She wrote back and said that was what she had.  Good living, I assumed.

So when I got to her house, she was making salmon patties.  The empty can of Wild Alaskan Salmon sat in the sink.

"What the fuck, mom," I said, biting my tongue immediately but not terminally.  "Jesus Christ, what the fuck!"

No amount of cursing was going to change dinner, though.  Salmon croquets and overcooked vegetables.  Sometimes there is nothing for it.  It is just hillbilly all the way.

"Is that for me?" she asked when I pulled a Stella out of the carton.

"Oh, you bet, mom.  You bet.  Later you can have some of this really nice bottle of wine to go with your (fucking) salmon patties."

To make the evening palatable, I bought "True Grit" for us to watch.  Well . . . I pushed the button to buy it which will show up on her bill.

"I've seen this already," my mother told me.  "It's O.K. though, go ahead."

You know the rest.  She saw "True Grit" on TCM a while back.  She watched as the movie began.  No John Wayne.

"Maybe I haven't seen this."

So the Coen brothers did a wonderful job on this one.  O.K.  O.K.  I'm about six months too late.  It doesn't matter to me, though.  All I have to do is title this piece "True Grit: A Movie Review," and I will get a thousand hits.  Maybe they will get a kick out of it.

*     *     *     *     *

Oh, my. . . after writing this post, I checked my traffic and found that I've moved even higher on Google searches for "Paris After Midnight."  This might come back to haunt me in some way.  Hmmm.  

"Ou est le Chat?"

Where did Saturday go?  It moved so slowly, it moved too fast.  All the things I'd thought to do. . . .

There are more danger signs to scare me.  I almost forgot to write today.  I finished reading the news and looking at the morning's websites and was ready to move on.  Absent mindedness is a warning of something.  What?

I decided that if I was going to go mad talking to the cat, I'd not speak English.  So this early Sunday morning, I tried speaking to her in tongues.  She responded alright.  No. . . no, don't ever try that at home.  She gave me "the look," something straight out of Hawthorne.  Chilled me to the bones.

So I switched to French.  I took French in college many times and once could read a French magazine at a slow but steady pace.  Not much has stayed with me these following years.  Still, "Je parle Francais au chat."  Perhaps today I will be motivated to buy a French magazine.  I went back to look at my French primers, but they are waaayyyy too boring.  Can't they teach French through interesting conversations.

"Hello.  My name is Bob.  What is your name?

"Hello, Bob.  My name is Charlotte.  Would you like to have some fun?"

Kids would be more motivated to learn.  We all would.

My friend told me she learned Spanish by falling for a Mexican hombre.  A hotel room and a two week intensive.  She is clever that way.

My cat has an Italian name, but I've never had any Italian.  I think it would mess up my very weak Spanish.  A cat with an Italian name.  Fancy that.  I liked saying that.  I sound so cosmopolitan.

"Le chat es sur la table.  Mon chat est appelle Bella.  Elle est beau."  Sorry.  I can't get the computer to type the accent signs.

I've just changed the photo at the head of the page.  Le Chat.  It is much more apropos for this post and late spring Sunday afternoon.  

Paris After Midnight

I realize that many of you visit this site for the film reviews.  O.K.  Quit clamoring.  Even with considerable talent, it is difficult to be all things to all people.  Even with such a "refined" audience as this one.

Last night I went for sushi and a movie.  Big night out.  When I walked into the sushi restaurant, the hostess tried to seat me outside on the veranda where I normally sit, but a big truck was making a delivery and I didn't want to sit beside the noise.  I hate noise more than most.  So I sat at the bar while the troops flocked around wanting to know where I had been.

"We not see you long time.  Where you been."

"I quit coming so much after you put the speakers on the veranda.  Why would you play a radio station? Who does that attract?  Ask anyone if they come to hear that.  I can't imagine anyone saying yes.  But you have lost hundreds of dollars of my business.  It is awful."

Saying that made me feel good and bad.  I never really calculate how much money people are taking from me.

They huddled together away from me talking excitedly.  It was all muddled except the word "radio."  From the time I had come in until my Kirin arrived, several servers asked me if I was having "the usual."  Yes, I thought, they do take a lot of my money.

When the Kirin arrived, I remembered once again to quit ordering it.  It is surely made with radioactive water by now.  I tell the waiter, "Perhaps I'll gain superpowers."  He laughs and says he will drink some after work to see.

"You'll turn into Godzilla instead," I tell him, thinking after I say it how wrong that sounds.  For a few moments, I wonder if perhaps it is a genetic problem.

Oh. . . movie review.

After sushi, I bought my ticket for Woody Allen's "Paris After Midnight."  It has gotten wonderful reviews from almost every sort of reviewer as if they all agreed to give Allen a pass on this one, even the one's who refer to him as "an old perv."  It was one of the darlings at Cannes, and for the first time in years, regular theaters are giving an Allen film a run of more than a week--with advertising!  


 What did I expect?  The crowd was older, but I only paid attention to the two young couples who were there.  Why? I wondered.  Must be film majors, I thought.  Of course, I was at the film equivalent of the "blue plate special," having gone to the seven o'clock show.  I hadn't wanted to go alone to the theater with "normal" people.  "Shit," I thought, I should have brought a flask."

The movie didn't suck.  It had elements.  Allen does for Paris what he does for New York.  I love and believe in his image of each.  And the performances by the actors who portray Hemingway and Scott and Zelda and Dali are spectacular.  But this is the sort of Allen movie I like least but which plays best with popular audiences.  There is a goofiness to it that. . . well.  It is not like "Manhattan."

O.K.  That is not a movie review.  The movie is pretty, whimsical, and charming.  But it is not interesting.  I am media y media on it.

Who cares.

I made some toast somewhere in the middle of writing this.  The cat got under my feet when I began pulling things out of the refrigerator, and we got into an argument.  And I realized just then that I have begun talking to the cat.  Now this, in my judgement, is a very bad sign.  I am talking to her waaayy too much.  Definitely a danger signal.  Dinner and a movie alone, talking to the cat. . . what next?

Scamway

I work like crazy.  Nothing seems to get done.  You too?  I wish I had some snake oil to sell for this.  I would put it in an ad from the '60s.  Or a Popeil ad.  "But wait, don't order yet."  Everyone is suffering.  There is money to be made.

I'm thinking Amway, too.  Did you know it makes more millionaires than any other company in the world?  Es verdad.  I'm thinking of contacting the more powerful gangs in my city.  They already have divided their part of "the world."  They have a syndication, of sorts.  Of course, they sell drugs there.  But I'm thinking that they can make just as much money legally.  Homeboy knocks on your door:  "It's time to buy your fucking Amway."  And people pony up their money for soaps and vitamins.  The product isn't bad, and it is surely better than drugs.  Maybe somebody comes to your house once in awhile to make sure you haven't bought some toothpaste in another brand or to make sure you're not squirelling away some shampoo or beauty product, but other than that, everyone gets something.  I've just got to get them to agree to sign up under me in the wonderful pyramid scheme.

If I don't do it, though, I'm going to write a screenplay about it called "Scamway."  James Woods could play the lead, a down on his luck scammer/salesman who flounders into this scheme.  He is a schlemeil, but after the few hiccups, everything begins to fall into place.  The neighborhoods clean up, everyone has more money, and soon they build a new community center.  The kids are safe and happy and getting pro sports contracts left and right. Singers.  Dancers.  Scholars.  It feels like a Disney film.

People need something of this sort just now, I think.  I do.

The girl in today's picture wrote that she wished her skin was really that color.  Shit.  Maybe the only things we really want are the things we can't have.

*     *     *     *     *

Holy smokes!  I just looked at my counter.  I had about five hundred hits from some twitter thing.  Twitter is powerful, I guess.  If somebody comes from their, can you let me know what is going on?  I'm curious.  

Mad Friends

Man. . . the world gets weirder by the moment.  I don't know what anyone is talking about any more.  My friend Q has lost his mind in a diatribe on. . . ?  I love this boy, but he blames me for every trouble in his life.  No, that is not fair.  Only the ones that have to do with the direction in which I should have steered him.  What burns me is that he is right, of course.  But the trouble is that we are not like "other people."  Neither are you if you come here often.  We are different, no?  We feel things more deeply.  Ideas enter our DNA.  We get transformed by art and literature and romance.  For "others," it is ideology that enters their systems.  My friend C.C. has been speaking to me about an article he read on "Prudery."  He says I will like it.  I have not read it yet, but will after I write this.  It is better to post things before you vet them, I believe.

He also sent me a YouTube clip supposing to warn me about the terrible self-destructive path I am following just now.  It is true.  I know.  But as the song goes,

Sometimes falling feels like flying, 
For a little while.


Oh. . . it comes from him with a paraphrasing (I think) of a message in "Willy Wonka."

"Do you know what happened to the boy who got everything he wanted?


No, what?


He lived happily ever after."  

Here is the alternate ending.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEgGE81joB8

Sure, I know.  So what?

I've been very lucky in my life in many ways.  But never in games of chance.  And I'm not certain about love.  I seem to have a stamped on expiration date.  It is about seven years after inception.  Lucky?  I've been in love with incredible people.  It is only out of love that is problematic.  Which brings us back to Q's polemic discharge.

Q is a genuis.  O.K.  I make fun.  But he is truly smarter than I (though not so well trained) which I am smart enough to know.  But I am much more practiced.  I have a half-brother I never see who is in Einstein's I.Q. range.  No kidding.  They put him on television in the '5o's with other little genius kids to talk about how to get men to the moon.  He was the star.  And as it turns out, he was right.  But we played chess once for my father.  The genius hipster and the hippy.  And I beat him fairly quickly.  He hyperventilated and almost passed out.  But I had been in bed for months after a severe surgery and had spent my time reading chess books and knew many, many openings up to the 15th and 16th moves.  I'd also studied end games.  Trust me, I am not that man.  I never played another game of chess in my life.  But beating the genius in front of our father was worth that.  It was something

Practice.  And study.  It will beat raw talent sometimes.  That is what education does.  Like old money.  It eliminates random behavior.  Of which I am full. And so is Q.  And so is C.C.

Really, everyone I like is a maniac in some way.  They are not like "other people."  They have bigger appetites, stranger tastes.  They have a greater intelligence.  There are many people I cannot name here for various reasons.  But as Kerouac said, "they are mad to live."  Kerouac, right?

Oh.  And we know how that turns out.  Here it is again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FEgGE81joB8

Second Hand Report

Different film, different technique.  It, too, is an extinct Polaroid film, however, so there is no "future" in this.  I made three images last night in three hours of post-processing.  Each one was thrilling.  Ever so, as someone used to say in times long gone.

Ever the second hand reporter, I am ready to relay to you my one to two sentence accounts of what I read.  I hope it saves you "ever-so-much" time.  And as always, I will suggest what it means.  I am like a preacher in that, giving you the chosen line and then wailing away the way god intended.

And it is just this.  Studies show (I love the phrase) that the economic downturn is having negative effects on the health of Americans just like you and me.  They feel depressed, of course, but it is manifesting itself as somatic issues like higher blood pressure and cholesterol.  Of course, now many can't afford health care, so the problem become exponential.

And I wonder. . . what might be the health issues in really poor populations?  O.K.  I know.  But the girl in this picture is island poor.  She doesn't have a lot of the things you might take for granted.  It doesn't seem so bad on her.  In her father's native land, she can buy an acre or so of nice hillside property close to the ocean for about seven thousand dollars.  Everyone builds houses in stages as they can.  The Dream. Meanwhile, the family all pitches in.  They fish and grow gardens.  And drink rum which is the cheapest of all the liquors.  I know.

She inspires me.  I'm cutting back.  Friends are doing so involuntarily.  I was at a party the other night and a buddy was saying that he mixes Cafe Bustello with his Starbucks in the percolator and can't tell the difference.  Bustello is what--$3 a pound?  I used to drink Bustello all the time, too.  I have become addicted to too many expensive things and it is time to quit it.  I am no Paris Hilton.  I want to be, even if you cannot understand, but I should be London Ramada or something.  Don't Google the name.  It is emblematic.

I checked airfares to Europe yesterday.  Thought to take a trip.  Jesus Marimba.  I don't know.  It is time to get Cowboy Tough, but I've gotten to an age where I want a Room with a View.  I don't enjoy the dives the way I used to.  I'd really like someone to porter my bags, too.  I can feel it coming on, the depression, the ill-health.  I want it all.  I think it is making me sick.

Turning Turtle

Way back in the Bible, 
Temptation always comes along
There's always somebody tempting, 
Somebody ending up
Doing what he knows is wrong.


Well they tempt you man with silver, 
And they tempt you sir with gold, 
And they tempt you with the pleasures
That the flesh does surely hold.


They say that Eve tempted Adam with an apple, 
But I ain't going with that.
I know it was her Pink Cadillac. . . .

(Bruce Springstein, "Pink Cadillac") 

I'm going to have to rethink this whole "Feminology" thing in light of the recent furor over Representative Weiner's confession of "misbehavior" on the social network.  I've been making fun of my friend Q and his adolescent addiction to Facebook, but I see that he knows something I surely don't.  I think of Facebook, though, as something invented by the police.  If you are doing anything at all, you will be ratted out on Facebook whether intentionally or not.  Probably not.  Probably innocently.

What has Anthony Weiner done?  He's caused himself a whole bunch of trouble, that's all.  Tell the truth.  It is fun.  Of course, of course, I'm worried about those young girls with whose spiritual well-being he has dallied.  We all are.  God love them, it will be a long road to recovery.  It will be hard, but I am pretty sure they will get some government money to help them with this, and a lot of Weiner's.

But that is not my point.  What makes someone do such a thing.  It is ludicrous.  And Arnold?  More "love children" as the Puritan press likes to call them.  What freakin' rabbit hole do men fall down?

I just read an article that says pornography is playing a bigger and bigger role in the break up of marriages.  And another on the resurgence of the French Feminist Movement in light of the Strauss-Kahn allegations.  Even Reese Witherspoon has had enough and has lashed out at the likes of Paris Hilton and other sex video stars.  It is making me turn turtle.

The days of thinking that right and wrong are social constructs are coming to a quick end.  All we can do now is hope to be taken back to those pre-lapsarian days before "the knowledge."

Crushed velvet seats, 
Riding in the back, 
oozing down the street, 
Waving to the girls, 
Feeling out of sight, 
Spending all my money on a Saturday night.


Honey, I just wonder,
What it feels like in the back, 
Of your Pink Cadillac.

(Jerry Lee "The Killer" Lewis version)

(rare version)

Some Possible Topics

I bought some Impossible instant film.  To wit.  I think it is gorgeous.  I had to borrow one of the 600 film cameras to make this image.  It is one of the cheap Polaroids.  I love it.  Now, I must learn how to make some Selavy magic with it.  But the film. . . the girl. . . wonderful.

I shot with Saturday night's model Sunday morning.  We made wonderful things.  Then we went to brunch.  I needed the giant mimosas, but she did not like them.  Guinness or rum are her drinks.  Or Sprite, I am beginning to learn.

She has journals of her private life.  She began writing them early on.  By the time she was fifteen and had her first encounter with a boy, her mother found them and had a devilish fit.  But she is tough, this girl, and did not stop writing.  Her little brother found them one day.  Came in with an arm full of composition notebooks.

"Are these yours?" he asked her.

"Tell me you didn't read those."

He had.

Sexual encounters and fantasies.

"Can I keep them?" he asked her.

I am hoping to get them for us.  Maybe, I think.  I will quote extensively, comment more.

I am thinking of a project I will call "Feminologies."  You know, the myths of feminism that we hold as self-evident, even in the face of things.  Don't get angry.  I think of everything as myth, white, black or mulatto.  And, of course, I love to be contrary.

So. . . I grilled a big Porterhouse steak for my mother tonight, and steamed the Brussels Sprouts on the burner of the grill, too.  No cooking inside.  It was all fantastic.  So we both proclaimed.  Then, for $4.95, I bought "The Fighter" for us.  We both liked it.  My mother recognized the characters right away as relative equivalents.  It was a wonderful night.

I haven't regained my stride here on the blog yet, but I'm trying.  Let us see where it is going.  

Walk

Sunday morning.  Ouch.  There is no philosophy to it, just the hangover of the life lived the night before, then the nightmares and the aching body and the headache, waking in the light wondering what time it is, not wanting to know, rolling the legs out of bed gingerly trying to minimize the lower back pain that is replaced by screaming knees and hips, hobbling to the bathroom trying to avoid the mirror, walking through the play of shadow and light falling through the shutters and finding that you forgot to buy coffee, boiling water for the instant Starbucks you keep for such emergencies not wanting instant coffee at all, feeding the cat--ouch again--the bending down to the bowl then standing and waiting for the whistling of the kettle thinking that it should not be like this, that it didn't used to be, once looking forward to the day, now not wanting to think about it, pouring the boiling water into the cup and adding whole milk, watching the black residue cling to the top of the white mug just below the rim, sitting down to read emails and the news or what might pass for that, looking at the happy messages of others touting nieces and nephews and their own children here or coming, everyone writing as if for the yearbook with happiness and hope.  Nobody loves a loser.

Shot last night with what once would have been a black girl but the world is not like that any longer, she some amalgam of colors and youth and unlikely desires, saying she doesn't go outside but stays in and watches old black and white movies on TCM wanting to be in those movies, wanting to be--of all things!--Ginger Rodgers just as her mother did with whom she watches old westerns that they buy out of the sale bin at Walmart for next to nothing, buying big boxed sets and watching all weekend, just the two of them.  She likes to cook, she says, though she didn't know how to until a bit ago when she lived with a Jamaican man who wanted dinner waiting on him after work.  He taught her, she said, though she didn't like to handle chicken, it looking too much like a baby and she not wanting to cut it up like that, but loving to cook now especially fish and shrimp and coconut flavored jasmine rice and beans.  She never goes out, she says, and never dresses up.  She is a t-shirts and jeans girl and is very beautiful and the boys must go crazy for her and she laughs and says no, they think she is goofy and they don't stay around and I say she is perfect but she says I don't know her well enough with which I agree while watching her put on her makeup getting ready thinking I don't really want to shoot just drink and sit on the couch and watch some old movies with her and listen to her crazy talk.

She went to a private school but her parents got divorced while she was in high school so she told them she wanted to go to public school and they didn't care at the time so she did for the last two years, her father moving away one street, she having a room at both houses staying wherever she liked, then away to college and then not, working at a call center nine-to-five six days a week, her mother's brother telling her she should come to California to model with an agency owned by a woman he knows, he being an author of an interior design book or something and very successful, and I say you should listen to him and she says yes, but she has just gotten another call center job and starts Monday.

I'm thinking about that with my second cup of instant coffee and about the upscale fish shack I took her to for dinner and sitting there eating and drinking and listening to her stories about Jamaica where her father is from, she preferring it to the southern black culture of her mother and her mother's family, especially the food like the pork chops and collard greens her mother's sister fixes with cornbread.  She likes fish, she says and spicy foods.

Jesus, why do I feel so bad?  It can't just be the alcohol.  I feel beaten up all over.  It is something else, maybe, the movies I watch and the books I read and the music I listen to and all these happy fucking voices that are making me sick.  I find myself thinking stupid phrases like "life coach."  I need one, I think, a manager of some sort, 24/7, something constant and sure.  Too much random behavior.  I'm too unrehearsed.  Clean up the clutter, I think, put things away, throw the rest out, weed the lawn and fix the sprinkler heads and start on the new landscaping.  You have to get the trees trimmed and to call someone to give you an estimate on making two of the driveways gravel.  You need to pressure wash the house and begin painting.  You can't let things go so long.  It begins to pile up.  Pile up.  Pile up.

I think I'll take a walk instead.  Walking is good.  A saunter, if you will.  A Walking Man Walks.  If only for awhile, things get left behind.