Proclomation

Cat in the Hat refuses to leave the house since I've gotten back.  She will look out the window, but she runs away as fast as she can if I open the door.  Tonight, I came home and found her in the exact same place that she was when I left in the morning.  I swear she had not moved.  When I sit down, she will not leave me alone.  What can I do?  This is an appeal, not a rhetorical question.  If I don't pet her, she sits and stares at me for fifteen minutes at a time without moving.  It is unnerving.

I know I am becoming unhinged here at the cafe.  And I think I know why.  In part, it is that I have done the work and now there is about to be a modicum of success.  The number of people coming to this site grows steadily, and I am uncertain why.  I mean, I don't hear from most of the visitors and am not sure why they come.  I know that I get a lot of visitors just now who Google "Vintage Christmas Cards."  Hundreds.  This site ranks high on a lot of crazy Google searches.  So I know why those people come (I would like to know how many of them come back).  But as the number of returning visitors grows, I have wondered what particularly attracts them.  They are not people I know, not friends nor acquaintances.  Half of them come from overseas.  Do they read the blog or only look at the images?  I want to keep them, of course, as all of us want to be validated for what we do.  But this has happened before, and when the numbers drop off, it can be demoralizing.  So I've been thinking more about what I need to do to keep them than about what I want to do and why.  And of course. . . that way lies madness.

Last night, I finally got to watch the American Masters three hour, two part special on Woody Allen.  For me, it was fantastic.  I'd forgotten how many movies he has made, though I have seen them all.  I'd forgotten how many Oscars his films have won.  What I hadn't forgotten is how few people watch them.  Here is a fellow who makes a movie a year without regard for mass popularity.  He makes them, he says, for the few people who enjoy them.  And until "Paris," that had been a very few.

In the interviews, he reaffirms over and over that he make films about the meaninglessness of life so that he doesn't have to think about it.  He stays busy creating so that he doesn't have to think.  He doesn't care, he says, what people say about his films or about his life.  He was surprised that he was famous enough that anyone cared about his personal life he said in reference to his break up with Mia Farrow and marriage to Sun-Yi.  Of course, this seems obtuse enough.  I mean, perhaps he wasn't, but Mia Farrow was.

But, he says, he got to do everything he ever wanted.  He's performed onstage, acted in films, published books, and made movies.  And in the end, he says, he thinks that nothing he has done is much good.

I remembered why I have always been affected by Woody Allen.

And I remembered why I began to write this blog and to make pictures.  It was so that I didn't have to sit and think about the horror that we call life.  I wanted to work at what I had to say about it rather than sitting and brooding about it all the time.  It was simple.  I was here.  This is what I saw.  Here is what I felt.  In the end, it doesn't matter.  Here it is.

So I am going to get back to that.  I don't care if people like what I do, if what I do is right or wrong, good or bad.  I'm going to make things that feel good to me, that I like.  And not worry when I change my mind later on.

Some of you will stick with me.  A few.  As for growing this from a few dozen to a few thousand--who cares.  Have you ever gone to the mall?

O.K.  I've decided to go watch the American Masters piece again.  It is simple, droll. . . and magical.

Whatever

Whatever.  I like this photograph.  It makes me happy.  This woman, the single mother of a growing son, a working mother with an imagination, was fascinating.  She lived upstairs in an apartment building.  She had to walk the stairs.  She worked all week in an office and on weekends as a promotional model for a liquor company.  She had a much younger boyfriend.  She laughed about that with both pride and self-deprication.  She did not shoot nudes, she said.  Never had.  Me neither, I said.  I hate them.  But sometimes people are naked in my photographs.  I would not ask you to do something you didn't want to do.  O.K. she said.  I've had a child.  My God, I said.  Do you know the paintings of Edward Hopper?  I've seen her modeling pictures.  She does not look like this in any of them.  She looks like a model.

I worry.  I think people will tire of my photographs.  I think they will flip through them rather than look at them.  But I can't quit looking at them.  I can't believe I was allowed to make this picture, that we were able to make this picture.  We talk forever before we ever shoot, the model and I.  I ask them everything about their lives.  I want to get that in a photograph.  I look at this photograph and think of her alone in her room, staring, thinking with nobody looking at her, the inward gaze.  Nobody sees her like this.  Ever.  Holy shit.  Holy shit.

There is plenty to do, plenty to write about.  Fuck it.

After They've Stolen Your Ability to Imagine. . .

I don't want to write about me, and I don't when I have something else to write about.  I think to write about the police state and what constitutes a police state and to argue that the United States is allowing its cities to become police states, doing and saying nothing in direct contrast to the stance it takes on the regimes of the Middle East and The Arab Spring.  Right to assemble, free speech, and all that.  As the conservative right is allowed to take arts out of school curriculums in this country and to replace it with workforce development skills, they have been allowed to create an undereducated class of unemployed workers with college degrees and a lack of creative and critical thinking skills.  The reason democracy worked better here than some other places in the world was the educational philosophy that we were creating rulers, giving everyone the same broad education that was only given to aristocrats elsewhere, a full, round education in both the arts and the sciences, an education required to make the good and necessary decisions that considered the good of all (personal foibles were left to the individual).

Etc.

But this is a dull, unconvincing vagary not fit for the five-hundred words that I average here a day.

When I am truly living, I have experiences enough on an average day to fill ten blogs if I had the time to write them.  But hours at the factory seem to get longer and more brutal with more strife and less fulfillment each and every day so that I straggle home too tired for anything but making my meal and consuming it with something to narcotize me against the horror of this passing life.  It is not fodder for writing.  There is a cat, a meal, something to drink, the bills piling up on the floor beneath the mail slot, the shower drain that seems to be clogging, and the solitary nature of my life.

I've never felt like this before.  I've never travelled in such a rut.  I've never lived without imagination.  I've never been so dully terrified.  This is how my parents lived and how I swore I never would.

And everything I've found exciting in life has been criminalized while the criminal behavior of the monied has been touted.

O.K.  There is more evidence of the dullness that has overtaken me.  Totalizing statements.  Not "everything."  But surely some important things.

That is all I can think of this morning as I anxiously watch the clock, knowing I will have to hurry once again to get to the factory in time.  And I know that if I don't do better here. . . .

Tomorrow.  There will be tomorrow.

Confabulation

I've spent all morning writing and deleting.  What remains are some confused ideas about sexual misconduct, the theory of transference and the Three Card Monte, politicians' fear of big financial institutions, the Country Club faction of The Tea Party, media pandering to the marketplace. . . oh, well. . . you can see what a mess I presumed to explain over my morning coffee.  It is what I'm thinking about, but as I see now, not very concisely.  But what I think I wanted to say is that the personal easily wins out over something complexly global.  That doesn't even come out right.  I give up.  And I hear the factory warning whistle.  I don't want to be late, times being what they are and all.  

I'll just leave you with this.  You can figure out the other stuff for yourself.  

Wild at Heart

Last night, I posted quickly as if there was some rush to get the video up before someone else did.  I guess I was panicked when I realized that I had missed something so great for so long and didn't think that I was just pointing out my lack of hipster credentials in the doing.  Whatever.  But I am still mesmerized by the video this morning.  Every day, more of my romantic vision of the world is stripped away to be replaced by the oddness that I've thought only marginal.  Nope.  The world is weird at heart and wild on top. I think that is a bastardization of something Barry Gifford wrote in "Wild at Heart."

The homestead, though, continues on its melancholic normal ways.  Puss in Boots did not like being left alone outside.  She felt, I believe, that the good life had come to an end.  She felt abandoned.  Now she is manically happy again, determined to show her appreciation and love of all things that are me.  Last night, in normal fashion, I grilled for my mother with whom I had just spent the last three days.  The cat, usually demure around my mother, took to her like a long lost friend.  She jumped up beside her and made a show of displaying her affection.  She would not leave her side.  Craziness.  She stalks me around the house trebly now.  She is annoyingly cloying.  Makes me think of some relationships I've had.  A balance between reticence and affection must be struck or else be stricken.

I have worked only three days in the last two weeks, and so this Monday is particularly onerous.  The factory is fraught with political perils from which I was glad to be away.  Today I will have to deal with what has been left undone and all the things that have blossomed in my absence, too.  So much better to wander about with little purpose other than to look and listen, to make some pictures and tell some stories, and to think sweet and melancholic about. . . you know.  Sitting here at the window this morning, I think how wonderful it would be to have time to do all that, but then the horror strikes when I think about depending on my own talents to make my living deprived of the weekly stipend.  I am not quite mad enough for that.  And what could come of it?  I might leave a body of work as rich as Mohammed Rafi?

Since my friend Q has reported on his blog in the most defamatory way that he depends upon me as a news source, I should report that Robert Downey, Jr. is now the voice of Mr. Peanut (see it here).  It is a terrible waste of talent, akin to having Johnny Depp do a voiceover, for certainly they are two of the most entertaining people on the planet to watch.  There have been complaints that Planters has dressed Mr. Peanut and given him a "partner" (here and here).

A forty-six year old drug addict who went to jail, had sex with hookers--all the things your parents warned you about.  Nope.  Seems sometimes they were wrong about most things.  Sometimes.  But then again, what would you tell the little girl pictured at the top of the page?  Would you tell her to stay away from the likes of Mr. Peanut?

David Lynch Had Nothing on This

Cleaner version.

"Jaan Pehechan Ho is a popular song, composed by Shankar Jaikishan, lyrics by Anand Bakshi, sung by Mohammed Rafi, from the 1965 movie Gumnaam, directed by Raja Nawathe, produced by N N Sippy and starring Manoj Kumar & Nanda (actress)."


"Lets get to know each other, it will make life easier, oh you heart stealer, dont shy away, tell me your name!" is the chorus.


"Soundtrack is from a 1965 Indian movie 'Gumnaam'. The story is based on Agatha Christie's book 'And Then There Were none"


"The group "Ted Lyons and his Cubs" playing the song can also be seen in 1964 film Jaanwar playing "Dekho Ab To" (a cover version of I Want to Hold Your Hand by Beatles) and Tasveer (starring Feroz Khan), Love Marriage (starring Dev Anand), Bedaag (starring Manoj Kumar), Shehnai and Mere Sanam (both starring Vishwajeet). The dancer/choreographer Oscar Unger can also be seen in most of them."


"Let’s get to know each other

Life would become easier
You who have stolen my heart
Do no be so elusive
At least tell me your name

May this wonderful evening
Not pass unavailed
For it will not return
On anyone’s call
Whether you speak or not
Your message is clear

The hard blow fell
Right on my heart
Stolen glances,
Impassioned looks
Let this small matter
Not become a huge tale"

Hindi Hipster Fellini

A special bonus post tonight.  If you missed "Ghost World" ten years ago like I did, watch it.  But more importantly, get acquainted with this.  Holy Moly.  I feel so lost. . . etc.  This is how the world REALLY IS.  If you are anything at all like me. . . .

The Inevitable

I don't know what I was thinking buying this Tony Bahama shirt.  Holy shit.  I'll get to that.  But here is more Hillbilly Holiday.  This is my cousin's daughter.  She is petite, a pocket model as they say.  I was sitting with her cousin, her father's sister's boy, Thanksgiving night.  He picked up her phone and started looking through her pictures hoping (as we all do) to find something wonderfully hideous, something illicit and incriminating and fun.  He didn't, so he went to the text messages.  There he found all of that and more.  In true horror, he began to read them to me.

"Why are you reading that?  She's eighteen.  What do you think she's doing?"

Player is a dichotomy, a big, sweet kid who likes to run with criminals and felons.  It is in the blood, really.  Not his fault.  But his being shocked by his cousin's texting was unnerving.  He is too much like me in some ways.

Later, sitting in the kitchen, we saw his mother come in from the grocery store.  The first thing she pulled out of the bag was a pack of egg noodles.

"Uh-oh," he said.  "That doesn't look good.  I guess we're having turkey soup tomorrow night," he said with total resignation.  Player is old enough to be on his own, but his mother and father let him stay in the house, stay up all night, come home at dawn and sleep all day, and they feed him to boot.  He does a few lawns each week and gambles at the Indian casino about an hour away.  I'm pretty sure he sells drugs from time to time.  He is one of my favorites.  He is funny.  It goes a long way.  And he is street wise.  He knows everything that goes on below the radar.  He has friends that collectively can get you anything.  It is his AK in the pictures.  His glock, too.

Later, after smoking up plenty, he stood before the open refrigerator peering in for a long, long time.

"This place sucks," he said.  "There's nothing to eat."

I chuckled to myself.  "What do you want?" I asked him.

"I don't know."

"Hell, man, that's what's wrong with YOU.  YOU don't know what you want.  Close the fucking door and look at me.  LOOK-AT-ME.  What do you want?"

"I don't know.  Something sweet."

"What?"

"I don't know.  Peanut butter, maybe."

"??????"

"Maybe I want Reese's Peanut Butter Cups."

"There you go.  Now. . . go get them."

Shit.  He's twenty-four.  But I get it.

Now this fucking shirt. . . .

I drove my mother back this afternoon.  Traffic was bad, so it took about an hour longer than normal.  It was O.K., though, in my new ride.  We were fine.  And M.O.M. likes talking to me.  So we talked over all the things that we saw and heard and decided we were well situated as things go.  And I decided that for Christmas, I was going to buy her all the Premium channels the cable company offers.  For the year.  She was happy.

On the way home, I got a text.  It was from a girl who--I think--dissed me when I was in St. Pete a few weeks ago.  It is O.K.  I mean, she doesn't owe me anything.  She is young and beautiful, and I am very sensitive to how things appear.  And I don't want her to think that I am dogging her.  I don't know if I ever told you this (yes I do), but I have never asked a girl out in my life.  The reason for this is that I can't stand rejection and don't wish to be seen as someone desperate, sad, lonesome, pitiful, or blue.  O.K.  Blue I can take.  Not the other.

But Gorgeous texted and said she could meet up, so I rearranged a few things in order that I could, too, thinking all the while that at the last moment, the situation would change.  She was a champ, though, and we met late in the afternoon.  And so after showering all the hillbilly stink that I could off my body, I put on my new Tony Bahama shirt.  Hmm, I thought.  It doesn't look as good as it did in the store.  Fuck it, I thought.  I am going to wear it.

Gorgeous showed up and was just so.  And I. . . I was in a Tony Bahama contraption.  Truly, it is not hideous, but I looked like. . . like. . . like. . . an old guy trying to be comfortable.  I wanted to burn the fucking thing off my body.  I mean. . . I don't need any help being old.

We sat outside at a hip cafe in a funky part of town two blocks from my studio--and it was empty.  Dead.  I thought we were the only two around, but just before the food arrived, a fellow I have known vaguely for a long time walked up.

"How's it going."

He's not as old as I, but still, he was making me look. . . .

"Fine.  Fine."  I saw him looking at Gorgeous.

"You still selling?"

"Sure."

"You still living on the lake?"

"No. . . .  I just got divorced."

He had been married for a long time to a woman much too pretty for him, and he knew it.  They had two kids, but he was always trying to make her happy.  It was obvious.  And, of course, I told him.

"Well, I'm sorry.  That's terrible.  But that's been coming since you got married, hasn't it?"

He just grinned.

I freeze up in situations, and I swear to god I couldn't remember his name on a bet.  So I never introduced him to Gorgeous.  I just kept talking.

"Gorgeous, before I was married, my soon-to-be wife and I met up one Christmas Eve in front of this restaurant.  We had been in a bit of a tight spot, but when we met, we hugged and kissed like fire.  And when we looked up, the people inside were all standing and cheering.  We went in and ordered champagne, and soon, others did, too.  More people showed up, and though the bar was closing, it stayed open.  We knew the owner and everyone was happy.  The next year, we told people to meet us there, and after we were married, it became a tradition. And the celebration grew.  And for years, people would meet here at day's end on Christmas Eve t and order champagne and make the owner a lot of Christmas money.  And then we would all go back to our house where there was food and a fire in the fireplace and plenty to drink.  And later, drunk as skunks, we would pile into cars and drive through the streets of our fabulous neighborhood with its miles and miles and miles of street-lining luminaries at five or ten miles per hour.  It was hallucinatory and magical.

"But like my friend here," I said, jerking my thumb to my now divorced pal, "things went bad.  And the next year, full of Xanax, I started a new tradition of Christmas Eve orphans drinking late into the night.  And that celebration grew, too, over there on the Boulevard where only one bar remained open for such as us.  And the crowd there grew, too.  And that is where I'll be this Christmas Eve, with my buddy here," again jerking my thumb towards the fellow whose name I could not quite remember.  "And it will be a swell time."

My buddy said he had to go.  Where?  Why?  He couldn't really have had anywhere to go.  Ask me.  I know.

So it was just Gorgeous and me alone again, and just then the baked brie and fruit arrived.  It was a lovely night, one made for romance, but we were not romance and I was wearing a Tony Bahama shirt and somehow fell into the cadence of someone wizened by time giving life advice.  I heard myself, and I knew that when you hear yourself, you are in irrevocable trouble.  I was.

But she was lovely and polite, and she told me about her new boyfriend and how she had fallen for him, and I was happy for her.

"And you?"  she asked me.  "Are you happy?"

"Oh--well, I'm not unhappy.  I mean. . . I'm not happy. . . but I'm not unhappy."

And it was true.  Happy is for the young and the very young, I think.  Then it is something else.

"You are 'melancholy,'" she said to me.

"Yes, melancholy, that's true.  I've always been.  I'm melancholy and contemplative and introspective. . . "

She interrupted me.

"And observant."

That was good.  She was observant herself, I guessed.

"Yes. . . observant."

And then it was getting dark and she had much need to go.  She had to drive an hour and a half before she was home.  And so we walked back to the cars talking about this and about that.  And then we hugged, said the inevitable, and she was gone.

It was getting dark, the stars just beginning to twinkle in the sky.  And gazing up at them, all the resolutions of the holidays began to fade away.  What were they, I tried to remember?  What was it that seemed so important to do?  But as always, those certainties faded into obscurity never to be recalled again, or at least not until the next time.  And the heaviness of it all fell upon me with the sinking temperatures and the growing dampness and despair.  What was changing?  Oh, things were changing alright, I thought, feeling the stupid luxury of the expensive Tony Bahama shirt against my skin.  "How does that feel," I asked myself?  "How does that feel now?"

Black Friday

The good thing about partridges is that they don't crow.  Those of you who have been reading for awhile might remember that last year my cousins were raising chickens and the roosters would not let me sleep.  This year they have settled on partridges.  I don't know what they do with them, but there is a hurricane fence cage in the back yard where they keep them.  Rabbits, I tell them.  That's the thing.  Good meat.  And like the partridge, they don't make noise.  The dachshunds do, though, every time I move.  Three of them.

I made my escape to the beach late this morning.  I walked miles along the Gulf of Mexico over sugar sand and shell, the water cold, the crowds large, the weather perfect, and while walking I made resolutions I'll never keep, the same ones I've made for years and years and years.  If I'd kept them, I'd be a different--and maybe better--person.  But that is what we do and the rest is what we are.  There are many options, but we have only energy for a few.

And after walking on the sandy beaches until my heels were raw, I went to the gym.  That, I guess, is one resolution I made and kept long ago. And then I went back and showered and readied myself for lunch.  The day had already slipped away from me and I was shaking with hunger and other things.  I went to the Columbia.

The Columbia is a Cuban restaurant that has been in Tampa since 1906.  There are several in Florida now, and I've never had a bad meal in one.  I like this one on St. Armand's Circle because the bar overlooks the street and I enjoy eating at bars.  Sangria and ropa viejos and a big slice of Cuban bread. The world was looking better.  It was time to do the Black Friday stroll.

If this place is any indication, the economy is coming back.  Of course, this was no mall but a square just off the beach serving the wealthy and the wannabes.  The stores were full of merchandise, and unlike last year, shoppers.  I got caught up in it, I think.  I wanted to buy something.  A madness, really, or maybe it was the Sangria.  But suddenly I found myself standing in a Tony Bahama store (I know the actual name)--no, not standing--shopping.

"These aren't as bad as I remember," I was telling myself, and then I was in the dressing room with an armful of shirts and shorts.  And then I came to my senses about almost all things--but one.  A shirt.  I swear, it doesn't look like a Tony Bahama shirt.  I swear.  I swear.

I strolled to the counter to pay hoping I wouldn't see anyone I know even this far away from home.  A Tony Bahama shirt for God's sake.  How many jokes have I made about the people who shop in these stores?  Scores.  But I wanted the shirt.  It was the embodiment of tropical comfort.  It didn't have a picture or script on the back.  It wasn't flowered.  None of that, I tell you.  It was normal.  

The woman ringing me up did not care for me or the job or her job or something.  She was just snotty and deliberately reluctant.  But I had to get the shirt.  She putz around in a drawer or two without looking at me who was so obviously on the other side of the counter staring at her with desire.  Maybe she mistook my desire to get the hell out of Tony Bahamas for the other kind.  I don't know.  So just before my herky-jerkiness got out of hand, an equally snotty gay fellow decided to ring me up.  Maybe I had done something wrong, I thought.  Maybe they just didn't like my kind.

When he rang me up, I knew that it was true.  It was a shirt, for Christ's sake.  There had to be a mistake.  But as usual, I had not brought my glasses and the lights were too dim (I assume to flatter the aging patrons) for me to get even a semi-blurry vision of the price tag (I had guessed at the size when I picked it up and had guessed wrong on some others).  Without visual verification, I did not feel I could challenge what I was being most assuredly wrongly charged.  Besides--I wanted that shirt.

And so, too many dollars the poorer, I had joined the Black Friday crowd--of sorts.  They were looking for bargains.  I was looking for the highest price I could find.

As I write this from my cousin's home, I notice two Tony Bahama prints on the wall.  Jesus.

I don't know, I don't know.  I can't explain it.  But my cousins. . . well, they like the Tony Bahama line.

Turkey and Such

I will write before I go to bed.  The hillbillies aren't really so hillbilly any more.  I guess you can't be unless you live in some isolated holler.  T.V. and malls have changed them forever.  A little.

I mean, they still left the turkey and fixin's out all day.  I ate a turkey sandwich tonight.  The turkey had yet to see the refrigerator.  But I drank a bottle of champagne and bunches of scotch to counter that.  We'll see how I feel in the morning when I post this.

My second cousin Player has a beautiful girlfriend with whom I can not get along.  She's beautiful but literal.  She has a daughter, though, who like all kids gets along with me fine.  Player just likes to hang and smoke skunk.  I don't get it.  My aunt is going senile and doesn't remember what just happened.  Nobody seems as lively or happy as they did some years ago.  Except my boy cousin who has just gotten a new girlfriend.  She didn't come over because she had a "terrible cold."

"Bullshit," I yelled.  "She's not sick.  That's what you say when you don't want to go to your boyfriend's relative's house.

He smiled.  He's lost about thirty pounds since I last saw him.

"Jesus Christ, skinny, you been staying up late at night?"

He liked that.

His daughter is a little looker who is in her first year of college.  Player read the texts on her phone when she was in the other room.  Some boy and she had been texting terrible sexual things to one another.  Player was upset.

"Don't read the phone.  She's eighteen.  What do you think she's going to do?"

She wore a tight little strip of denim with pockets and a push up bra.  I kept looking.  Hillbillies and their cousins, you know.

Food eaten, wine drunk, the television went on and everybody sat around it and talked.  Me, too.  That is what we did.  And then. . . the day was done.  I poured myself another scotch and headed to my temporary bedroom.

Another T-day in the bag.

Thanksgiving

Jean Perréal (b. after 1450 - d. after 1530)

I'm lying in bed at my cousin's house drinking some bitter coffee and perusing the net.  The house begins to come alive with kitchen sounds.  I feel guilty that I am not helping this morning.  I just want to stay out of the way.  Soon I will go on a beach trip, then come back to shower and mix with the relatives and try to make some pictures of them.  Probably won't though.  It is difficult to photograph things you have to see again and again.

My friend said he would feed my cat.  I bought him a bottle of champagne and left it with the cat food.  Then I picked up my mother and drove south.  When I got here, I had a voice message from him.  He'd gone by the house and couldn't find the key.  Shit!  I'd forgotten to leave it out.  Fortunately, I guess, the cat had gone outside when I was packing the car, so he will leave food for her there.  But she is not used to staying outside all the time any more, and I worry.  Not enough to drive the three hours back, but enough.  If she survives the three days, she will be very angry with me.  Who knows what she will do?

This is a strange holiday, I think, when we celebrate the first (and only) feast with the people from whom we would steal real estate.  Go Team.  That is why football is the tradition.  A violent contest over turf is just the thing today.  O.K. O.K.  I'm not that way.  I just feel like it today.  I am envious, I guess, of all those happier than I am today, those wrapped in the bosom of the kinds of families and familial situations that we see in the movies with Steve Martin as the father, intelligent rich things.  And, of course, it is a day of self-blame.  I mean, if I wanted that. . . what the fuck happened?  I thought somebody else would give it to me, I guess, while I was running around the world being my own hero.

And such.

But to you, my friends, a Happy Thanksgiving.  Let the games begin.

If I Put "Johnny Depp" in the Title, People Will Come

Confession.  Two nights ago, I bought Johnny Depp's latest "Pirates" movie, and I fell asleep.  But the rental lasted until tonight at 8:30, so I made dinner and sat down to eat and watch what I missed.  The dinner was terrific, especially after a long day of doing absolutely positively nothing.  I was in what passes for my pajamas until three.  At one-thirty, a friend who is going to feed my cat while I'm gone stopped by.

"??????," he said.

"Hey man, I work every day.  I'm taking the day off."

Whatever.  I was doing things.  I worked on Fuji film pics trying to make them something I can like.  But feeling guilty after he left, I prepared for the gym. Sort of.  I didn't get there until 3:30.  Workout, Whole Foods, organic beer and cheese, shower, and then a bit more shopping.  Home again to put on the tenderloin and Brussels Sprouts as big as your fist.  The steak on the grill, certainly, and a bottle of red.  Then. . . the movie.

I had slept through a lot.  Most of it.  and as the 8:30 deadline closed in, I saw that there was more movie than clock.  But I couldn't fast forward through Depp.  Just to watch his Peppi LePeu imitation is worth the ticket.  And Swearenger from "Deadwood" knocks it dead.

So just before the movie's climax, the fucker went off.  Stopped cold.  I'm not kidding.  I'm pissed off.  If any of you know the end to the movie, write and tell me.  This was after finding there were no screenings of "The Rum Diaries" in town.  Boring, lonely night.

But I am glad.

I had a chance to go to dinner with the woman who wrote the memoir from which this movie came.  Sort of.  She has been a guest writer at the local Country Club College, and my friend went to a book reading with her the night I was flying back from Asheville.  She is friends with his friend who is a painter.  He said I'd love her.  She is mad, he said, a danger.  Perfect.  But my timing has been off.  "Where are the clowns?"

The day was not a total waste, however.  I worked on Fuji film images trying to get them to look like what I want them to--consistently. Some of them. . . I"m not sure yet.  But soon it will be all I have.  So. . . .

I leave for the Hillbilly Holidays in the morning.  Wish me luck.  It is just a matter of lots of liquor and plenty of patience.

Odious

You're either on the bus or off the bus on this one.

Some images are just automatically iconic.

You get it or you don't.  There are a lot more of these images or contribute your own images here.

My friend C.C. sent these to me and the next things, too.  Here is the statement from the official U.C. Davis English Department Website.  I have to say that the workers at the factory don't have this kind of fortitude.

The faculty of the UC Davis English Department supports the Board of the Davis Faculty Association in calling for Chancellor Katehi’s immediate resignation and for “a policy that will end the practice of forcibly removing non-violent student, faculty, staff, and community protesters by police on the UC Davis campus.” Further, given the demonstrable threat posed by the University of California Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to the safety of students, faculty, staff, and community members on our campus and others in the UC system, we propose that such a policy include the disbanding of the UCPD and the institution of an ordinance against the presence of police forces on the UC Davis campus, unless their presence is specifically requested by a member of the campus community. This will initiate a genuinely collective effort to determine how best to ensure the health and safety of the campus community at UC Davis.  (source)

But something is in the air.   Here is what the last decade's people look like now.  They just don't get it.

Above the Odious

I am home one day and now prepare to go with ma mere for the Hillbilly Holidays.  We will have turkey dinner with her relatives.  That is close as I want to admit to the genetic heresy that is my bloodline.  The cat, who is already traumatized by my five day departure, will surely go loose in what appears to be her little tick of a brain.  Burdens and responsibilities.

(Hippolyte Flandrin, 1846)

But I am free of the factory for another six days so there is that.  Oh, I have many things to do, but I am free not to do them even if it is at my own expense.  I am content to do nothing, at least for now, at least until everything has truly come undone.  But these are the holidays, and I will give myself such presents.  And likewise, I must begin thinking of presents for others.  Whiskey and champagne and books, of course, and maybe even a print or two, but there are other, more difficult presents to think about and buy.  Just thinking of what to give other people, though, always brings me back to my own selfish desires.  What is it I want?  Maybe I will give myself a Vespa this Christmas.  It is a "practical" gift as I rarely go outside my little village other than to go to work.  Maybe an iPad, or maybe a new Apple computer with a 26" screen.  That is all, really, along with the camera that Minnicks is preparing for me (though I have all but paid for that already).

But I was talking about presents for other people, wasn't I?  And there are cards to be mailed.  That should get done this week.  And there are the people I supervise at the factory to think of as well.  My head begins to spin.

I think I will take a walk, then, until my mind has settled.  A little exercise, some reading, and lunch.  Then I may begin to think about the serious business at hand.  There is always so much to do and so little will to do it.  Times being what they are and all.  Yes, yes, we must surely try to lift the spirits.

Sorry. My Bad.

I worked a long time writing this morning, a clever piece, I thought, about our conflicted feelings about the rich and the position they hold.  Then I did something and the font went crazy so I tried to "undo" and lost a big chunk of the text.  I don't have the time now to go back and redo it, so you are stuck with this.  Sorry.  I'm more aggravated than you.  What can I say?  C'est la vie.



Narratives and counter-narratives surrounding the Occupy Movement abound.  Q just sent me a link to an article in Slate that talks about the banking industry's funding "'opposition research” on the Occupy movement in order to help construct 'negative narratives' about protesters and the politicians who support them."


Well. . . they have the money.  


Most of us, however, are not ideologues, so we are skeptical of both claims and counterclaims, thrust and parry.  What we do know and feel is that the very, very wealthy need to be checked.  They make their money off the backs of other people's labor or through corrupt financial laws that allow them to monopolize resources to cut down competition.  Still, we don't want to spend more money for products and continue to buy things made out of country where corporations can get things made at a fraction of the cost of manufacturing here.  We don't want to pay more for food or clothing or even luxury goods.  But we do want the price of our houses to rise again.  Even we like to feel smart when we've made "a good investment."  I've done it several times when the housing market was going up.  Genius that I am.  

I spent yesterday touring the tourist spots of Asheville.  First, the home in which Thomas Wolfe grew up.  It was a proletariat deal--one single dollar ($1)!  Thomas did not grow up in luxury.  The son of an alcoholic tombstone cutter and a severely miserly mother who had separate residences a few blocks apart for most of his life, he lived with his mother in her boarding house where up to thirty people stayed at a time.  Thomas was shuttled to whatever bed was empty at the time, and if all the beds were full, he was sent back to his father's house to sleep.  The cost of staying at the Old Kentucky Home (the name of the boarding house) was a dollar a night.  


Up the hill where I stayed at the Grove Park Inn, they charged five dollars.  The Grove Park Inn was built by Edwin Grove, a chemist who discovered a way to suspend quinine powder in a "tasty syrup."  Known as "Grove's Chill Tonic," it helped quell the symptoms of malaria.  It was purchased by every major army in the world.  Grove was rich.  In 1912, he began construction of the hotel and put his son-in-law, Fred Seely, in charge.  The two had a falling out, though, during the construction because Seely wanted to pay his top masons more than Grove intended.  At a dollar a day, they were considered "highly paid."  All the rock was carved out of the surrounding mountains, all the timber cut from nearby forests, and in less than a year, the hotel was complete.  During the early years, you could stay at the hotel by invitation only.  Grove entertained the world's most famous and powerful people.  


And there I was, living half the week in the belly of the beast, a bourgeoisie enjoying himself at the expense of others, drinking at the bar in the big lobby with hillbillies and shit-kickers who somehow had stolen enough money for themselves to bring their wives and lovers for a romantic weekend of relaxation and luxury.  

After the tour of the Wolfe house, I drove to see Vanderbilt's Biltmore Estate, the largest private residence ever built in the United States.  With 250 rooms and 135,000 square feet with miles and miles of landscaped ponds and forests and fields, it stands the penultimate monumnet to unregulated wealth and gilded greed. And with one million visitors a year, it is North Carolina's main tourist attraction.  


Count me one.  


I had only a couple hours before I needed to get to the airport, so the $59.00 entrance fee seemed like more of the rich stealing from the poor, but hell, money must be paid, so I put up my card (easier than watching the cash leave my trembling palm) and took the ride.  


It was a house.  Room after decorated room.  There were medieval tapestries and oil paintings and chess sets that had belonged to Napoleon.  There was a basement with a heated swimming pool and changing rooms and a gymnasium with a rowing machine and Indian dumbbells, medicine balls and weighted pulley machines.  My favorite part was the servants working rooms and quarters.  All was nicely appointed with airy rooms for one.  There were laundries with washing and drying machines and huge indoor hanging racks.  There were refrigerated rooms (some of the first) and pantries and butcher shops and flower shops and cheese rooms and fruit rooms.  I imagined myself working there, stealing from the larder until I got caught, sneaking into some pretty servant's room besides.  Really, for me it was the best part.  


So what can I say.  I was no different than the hundreds of other people who walked along the cordoned path with me imagining what all of this would be like, not wishing to be that asshole Vanderbilt but not minding at all to be one of his children living like this.  

Asheville Holiday

Yesterday, I went downtown to roam Asheville.  When I got there fairly early on a Saturday, I couldn't find a place to park.  A bit later, I found why.  Asheville was putting on its annual Christmas Parade.

Eventually, I found a place in a lot for permitted cars only.  I asked a fellow who was getting out of his car if that referenced weekends as well.

"Well. . . they only ticket about half the time and when they do it's only seven bucks."

I was hoping he was right.

I believe I saw Asheville at the Christmas parade.  I stood and listened and watched and photographed, trying to be a recorder.  There are no jobs in the area, I am told.  Everything has gone away, shut up, closed.  Downtown was a hodgepodge of independent shops and galleries and buildings for rent.  Hippie jewelry and fabrics and organic stores were plentiful.  Hungry, I stopped into a breakfast place that served food with creative ingredients and twists on old recipes.  It was the sort of place I used to eat breakfast when I was in college.  And really not much had changed.  The waitresses had on stockings and leggings with holes in them, mismatched clothing, hair in braids or pigtails with bits of ribbon in them.  They were obviously weary and hipper than the customers because they were working there.  It was a seat yourself place with tables that were barely bussed, a bit sticky and crumby so that you took it upon yourself to clean it.  The food was great with big chunks of rough, grainy toast and preserves served in little tin cups.  The omelette was Southwestern--with a twist--full of fresh vegetables and a surprising sauce both sweet and spicy.  When I picked up the salt shaker, it was textured with years worth of sticky fingers.

Back on the street, the parade continued.  It seemed to go on forever.  There were marching bands and dancers and drill teams and floats advertising restaurants.  Nothing, really, except kids and their parents.

I tired of the parade before it was finished, but finally it was over.  The Christmas season had been officially ushered in.  Of course, there still was Thanksgiving to contend with.

I wandered about town looking at the old brick buildings that were still standing.  Some of the old painted signs could still be seen like palimpsest in brick and mortar.

I wandered over to the other side of town, to the River Arts District, where a bunch of old factories and warehouses had been converted into studios.  Visually, the area was interesting, rather barren and forlorn. The art, however. . . but I found solace in the empty hollowness of the railway yard, watching as they connected car to car in the cold afternoon sunlight.

When I got there, John Minnicks called.  He was about two blocks from where I was walking, so we met up and looked at some of the art but mostly talked about art, he once having owned a commercial business in Manhattan at One Park Place with a giant studio, giant clients like Dewars and G.E., and a giant overhead that broke his back.  He did not want to judge the works, he said. He was over that.  Everybody was just doing what they do trying to have fun.

Sure, I said, but that maybe isn't enough for me.  I want to walk into a studio and feel inspired.  I want to feel something--envy, awe--something that I didn't get from all of this.  John, I think, was unmoved.

The day winding down, we went back to John's American Court with its old flickering neon sign.  He wanted to show me a couple things about the camera that he had forgotten the day before.  We took his out into the dusk and opened up that big old lens, he talking me through some of the peculiar things I will encounter when I shoot with it.  Exposures change, he told me, depending on the focal length.  Hmm.  I could see trouble coming.  We talked through the possibility of shooting at night with a weak strobe at 1/4 of a second, dragging the shutter so that the background streaked.  He showed me a trick to allow me to focus in the dark.  Then we went inside and sat and talked until all the talking was done. Two weeks, he said.  You'll have your camera in two weeks.

It was early, only seven or seven-thirty, but I was tired from being out all day, so I drove back to the hotel, getting lost for awhile, stopping in gas stations to talk to locals, then finding my way back to the behemoth of luxury.  Sort of.  The place was packed to the rafters with hoi-polloi who had come for weddings and conventions and even to see the annual gingerbread display (oh, it is hideously awful with people coming from all over the state throughout the holiday season to see gingerbread houses and gingerbread fences and gingerbread people), sitting in rows of rocking chairs in front of the big fireplace and crowding around the bar.  But I was too tired to think about going back out on this big Saturday night, and so I resigned myself to ordering a burger and a beer and making an early evening of it.

As you know, I like to say, "Power to the People" even as I ridicule them.  All are created equal, I believe, equally wonderful and hideous.  None of us has a lock on any of that.   So now read this.

A Different View

I tell people I've gotten old enough to require a "room with a view."  And all that it represents.  It is a luxury we should afford the aged, I think, and something for youth to look forward to.  There must be some compensation for not being able to run a ten flat one hundred yards.  Or even to climb stairs comfortably.  Alright, alright, without whining like a baby.  The bed here is lovely, too, with cloud-like pillows piled high.  Here is the morning view at 26 degrees.  Terrible.

After the conference ended yesterday afternoon, I went to see John Minnicks, the man making what I've been referring to as "Frankencamera."  It is actually called the "Aero-Liberator."  After seeing how it is made, I must show deference.

I called John in the afternoon to see if he would be around his shop.  Sure, he said, drop by.  Turn right at the Fudruckers and I'll be on your left.  It is an old motor court.  I have the office.

It was something out of a David Lynch movie, like the place Sailor and Lula get stuck when they meet Bobby Peru.  The hotel had been closed for some time and converted into apartments, but the Americana Court sign still dimly flashed a red "No" as I saw later on that night.  John came out to greet me as I stepped out of my car.  We made small talk for a bit, then he took me inside to look at "the works."

I'd been thinking for all this time that once he had the process of adapting the camera to the lens, it would just be a matter of assembling them over and over again.  But it was not so.  John showed me boxes of parts he had machined, each looking the same, each slightly different.  He had parts for everything, cloth for bellows, cloth for shutters, brass rails and knobs and screws, pieces he had chromed at a metal shop he would show me later.  Graflexes sat all about.

"You want to pick out a body?" he asked me.

"Sure.  How?  I'll take your advice.  You know them."

He'd pick them up and mumble something about this one or that one, something good and bad about each.  It could have gone on for a long time, so I said, "I want the one with the flash synch."

"Well. . . that one's in good shape.  Look at the shutter cloth."  He set and released it.  "This one is already pretty accurate."

Good, I thought.  I made a good choice.  Maybe.

"Which cloth do you want for the bellows?"

I looked at his camera, the one he used.  "Make it like yours," I said.

He looked at me.  "You want that viewfinder?"

I looked at him as if he had just spoken Polish and he began showing me different finders.  He showed me some glass.

"Look at that," he said with a smile handing a frosty piece over to me.  I held it up.  What quality was I to comment on?

"Sure is something," I said.

I could tell by the look in his eyes he thought I was probably a moron.

We went through fittings--brass, chrome, black.  He had me pick out a wood front from a box.  I chose a bright cherry wood of which he approved.  I had chosen it because that was what his own camera had.  The choices went on and on.

"What are the chances you would come today?" he grinned.  "You get to see your camera, to make it like you want it.  Look.  Here's a box.  Put your name on it.  It is your box.  We're going to put all the pieces you've chosen into it.  Let's see.  You chose this body, right?  Oh, I wouldn't have given you that one," he said with a wry grin.  I squirmed.  "And here's your bellows, and you wanted these fittings, and here's your wooden faceplate.  Which viewfinder did you decide on?"

"I don't know."

"Well, it doesn't matter."

Then her reached behind him and pulled down a brass plate.  He had written some things on it with a Sharpie.  He showed me the one from the camera he was shipping out that day.  It was beautifully inscribed with "Aero-Liberator #12."  It had the owner's name on it and under that "made by John Minnicks" and the date.

"David Burnett was here and I told him I was making you this camera, #13, and he said we should put a cat and a hat on it instead of a number.  You can pick out any design you want and send it to me and I will take this plate to the tattoo parlor and they will inscribe it on here."

When we finished up, he began showing me other cameras he was working on, beautiful cameras that he stripped down to the original wood boxes and epoxied and lacquered so that they looked like art objects.

He showed me some other cameras he made for himself, crazy things like one that was two 35mm halves put together to make a panavision camera and a Hasselblad that shot 180 degrees.

The afternoon was waning and I wanted to see the town before the light was gone, so John jumped in the car to show me around.  We stopped here and there, a gallery, a machine shop, a coffee shop, a restaurant, and John chatted with the people there.  John was a good guide pointing out structures and materials that I would not have noticed.  The light was falling yellow and gold.

"It's good to see the town in this light.  Good light," he said.

And then it had fallen and I was hungry.  "You like sushi?"

We went to a place called "Wasabe" and had spectacular food.  We ordered plate after plate until we were full.

"Well," John said, "that's it for me.  I'm done.  I want to go to bed early tonight."

"Sure," I said and drove him back to the motor court with its red "No" light flickering dimly in the darkness.

I dropped him off with the idea of seeing him before I left and headed downtown.  I wanted to walk about on my own to get the flavor of the streets.  But man had it grown cold.  It wasn't just the cold, but  the wind which funneled through the buildings and cut right through my sweater and shirt.  Everywhere people were dressed in hats and scarves and heavy, wind-proofed jackets.  Before long, I began to shiver.  It was impossible.  I had warmer clothing at the hotel and it had a giant fireplace and drinks.  It wasn't late, but that is what I would do.  Tomorrow will be warmer I told myself with resignation.  I can do it all then.

Random Behavior

I did not rid myself of "random behavior" last night.  I went to dinner with a group of professionals including a colleague from the factory.  First I drank too much.  Then I talked too much.  Then I drank some more.  It was cold.  Surely that brought it on.  I ordered duck and was talking so much I didn't notice that I had been brought a pork chop instead.  Halfway through dinner, I said, "Is this duck?"  Someone called the waitress over.

"Is that duck?"

"No," she said, "that's a pork chop.  He has the duck."

We looked to the fellow sitting across the table from me.  He was on expense account and was paying for the evening.

"I thought that was an awfully tender pork chop," he said.

"Bullshit," I told him, wanting what was left on his plate which wasn't much.  He had devoured the thing.

"Oops," said the waitress.  "Would you like something else to drink?"

"Probably."

When you think you are being most witty, you probably are not.  I am sure there will be repercussions for what was said at the table last night.  Maybe no one will remember, but I don't think they were drinking enough to forget.  Perhaps they, too, though, will think me clever.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy has rocked the Egyptian boat by posting a nude photograph of herself on her blog.  Both "liberal" and "conservative" Egyptians were shocked by it.  A few see her as a brave human rights activist.  Most see her as something else, some she-devil who has gone too far.  Liberty has its limits after all.  "Freedom," said one detractor, "is not the same as degradation and prostitution."

Yes, we can agree about that.

But there goes the country.  If women begin taking off their clothing, what next?  It used to be so good there, too, everyone behaving so well and all.  Some things had to be done that were not "tasteful," sure, but they had to be done nonetheless to insure social stability.  Someone has to enforce the rules.

If things like this keep happening, I'm certain the world's economy will never recover.