wayne pease smokysun's heaven

can you create the perfect lover?

2012-02-14T09:55:00.000-08:00

valentine's day 2012

o my, how i've tried! in the first grade we made a zillion valentine cards and sent them to whomever we could. in the fourth grade i began getting crushes, sneaking into the coat-room and putting anonymous presents in the pockets of the girl i loved. where the devil did this romantic impulse come from? religion, politics, and self-deception dominate american culture. the movies, is that the source of the virus?

the irony, whenever a girl demonstrated a passion for me, i desired someone else, usually a plain jane. maybe that made it easier to project my fantasies. i've always liked tennyson's the lady of shallot, the story of a woman who loves the images in her mirror. alas, the shining knight, sir lancelot, rides by the house and catches her eye through the window. inflamed, her heart wishes for the 'real' man. and when she runs out the front door and pursues him, she falls into a river and drowns. the poor lady couldn't cope with visions turned to flesh, any more than most of us can, now living in virtual reality.

yes, a man ahead of my time, i wrote valentine's to ladies i never dared approach, much less touch. this had enormous benefits for self-preservation. i couldn't be disappointed or disillusioned, worshiping perfection from afar, falling for actresses and dancers, artists and illusionists. european women, especially, seem to know how to project a constantly changing face, very much in the tradition of cleopatra. two german girls led me a merry chase, both proving to be mentally unstable. i constantly tried to rescue young maidens in distress!

st. george, superman, the shadow, they fattened my fantasies. and here i am, on the far side of valentine's day, facing myself on the screen. taking wellbutrin, the extra dopamine stimulates my searching. in the end i'll be satisfied with zombies, love beyond the grave.

take a look as the androids search for enlightenment: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/enli those boxes of letters in old ladies' attics will certainly come back to haunt me.

adventures in disillusionment

2012-02-10T11:58:00.001-08:00

perhaps i should have titled this you are never too old to be disillusioned. years ago, my friend jeff said, 'you always overrate people.' at the time i rather took it as a compliment. after all, i'd been giving people the benefit of the doubt. alas, when it came to love affairs, this a disaster. once i loved an actress and idealized her for a century before i slept with her and encountered the real body. having not learned my lesson, i idolized a blond dancer for a millennium, not aware until her last visit how manipulative she was.

or to use examples not my own, before the election of our last president, a friend said, 'he will bring us peace.' in reality he reveled in creating two wars and plunging the world economy into the toilet. her husband said, 'he won't raise taxes.' this is called a one-issue voter, or 'me, me, me.' in reality the national debt sky-rocketed during the eight years and the rich got richer and the poor poorer. and maybe this the answer to the blight of tunnel vision.

yes, i tend to pick one aspect of a talented person i like, a politician, a teacher, and i ignore everything else, perhaps to learn more from them. when we worship a guru, we listen a lot more closely, we copy their movements, we put them on a pedestal as we did our parents, then reaching a certain intellectual puberty which can happen at any age, we smash the statue. this can be a painful process, losing our guiding light, our mentor, our beatrice pulling us up from hell.

so, last night i found out the larger truth about someone i honored, his really terrible faults (from my perspective) and it plunged me into intense self-doubt, about my judgements, my maturity, my ability to distinguish between true and false. again, the end of a love-affair. luckily, for a little while this morning i could laugh at myself. it didn't last. at the moment i feel chagrined. life will humble us, especially through love.

a few more holograms, or 'believing is seeing,' the title of a recent book on photography: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/hol

adventures in disillusionment

2012-02-10T11:48:00.000-08:00

perhaps i should have titled this you are never too old to be disillusioned. years ago, my friend jeff said, 'you always overrate people.' at the time i rather took it as a compliment. after all, i'd been giving people the benefit of the doubt. alas, when it came to love affairs, this a disaster. once i loved an actress and idealized her for a century before i slept with her and encountered the real body. having not learned my lesson, i idolized a blond dancer for a millennium, not aware until her last visit how manipulative she was.

or to use examples not my own, before the election of our last president, a friend said, 'he will bring us peace.' in reality he reveled in creating two wars and plunging the world economy into the toilet. her husband said, 'he won't raise taxes.' this is called a one-issue voter, or 'me, me, me.' in reality the national debt sky-rocked during the eight years and the rich got richer and the poor poorer. and maybe this the answer to the blight of tunnel vision.

yes, i tend to pick one aspect of a talented person i like, a politician, a teacher, and i ignore everything else, perhaps to learn more from them. when we worship a guru, we listen a lot more closely, we copy their movements, we put them on a pedestal as we did our parents, then reaching a certain intellectual puberty which can happen at any age, we smash the statue. this can be a painful process, losing our guiding light, our mentor, our beatrice pulling us up from hell.

so, last night i found out the larger truth about someone i honored, his really terrible faults (from my perspective) and it plunged me into intense self-doubt, about my judgements, my maturity, my ability to distinguish between true and false. again, the end of a love-affair. luckily, for a little while this morning i could laugh at myself. it didn't last. at the moment i feel chagrined. life will humble us, especially through love.

a few more holograms, or 'believing is seeing,' the title of a recent book on photography: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/hol

mother loves a vampire

2012-02-08T17:07:00.000-08:00

i'm boggled by all the blood-drinking novels. what's this fascination with vampires? i mean, it does go back to dracula and nosferatu. those films, emphasized terror. in the latter film, the monster drinks the pale lady's blood until she's dead. then he evaporates in the light of the morning sun, having overstayed his welcome. would their modern cousins have fit into the bookshelves of 1880?

i have come up with a theory, though its slightly different for the teen reads than the older consumers. for the elders, the emphasis seems on violent, masculine possession, vampires a minor sideline. lady chatterley's lover the model for them, the gamekeeper/cowboy/lower class lout doesn't give a damn for her ideas and creativity. all he wants is her body and orgiastic rites. this reminds me, the women in sweden tired of their men when they became too considerate and nice. any guy will tell you, in high school all the jerks got all the girls. i'm here to confirm this lasts quite a long time.

the younger readers do prefer the bloodsuckers, to put it graphically. and i've come up with a possible theory. could it be the adolescent generation wishes for boyfriends who love blood, not only tolerate it, during menstruation? i know this is a bridge all human-beings have to cross, opinions divided. many men must be ambivalent, not to say repulsed. vampires would be an exception, thus making all the cramps and bad-moods worth it. they'd love a woman at what she might consider her worst. don't shoot me for my idea, it's only a wild lunge in the dark.

i did spend time in the bookstore, photographing covers. the romance section pretty graphic, the teen section watered down, and the magazine section a whole other reality: weddings, food, babies, kids.

covers at see covers at http://www.pbase.com/wwp/vamp

nature doesn't love a straight line

2012-02-03T18:20:00.000-08:00

no, i'm by no means the first to have this insight. living it is another matter. three days ago, walking downtown, i noticed all the cracks in the sidewalk, the straight telephone poles and corners of buildings. transfixed by the matrix, i felt my heart stop. the prison of our existence closed in on me. luckily, common sense prevailed, and i continued on my way.

why the alarm? the straight line invented our modern civilization and keeps it going, nothing natural about it. and in fact mountains and seas can't hold it back, you can see the defeat in the clear-cuts and suburban sprawl. the round eyes of planets and stars, they've been blinded by our arrow. alas, this does have side-effects. we feel our lives should go in a straight line to the goal, and all our wandering this way and that can't help but feel like a defeat, for we are animals, not a straight line in our bodies.

that's not so say, the clear demarcations not needed. i remember reading about a refugee camp in nigeria. their saviours immediately laid a grid across the rough and tumble circumstances. this made sanitation and food-delivery possible, bacteria and rats put on notice. and it's easy to feel agony in the organic, as the hero does at the end of sartre's novel nausea, staring at the roots of a tree as though they were serpents crawling across his corpse, or spirochete eating his brain. a cube of one's own can hold the cacophony of the world at bay.

still, pre-modern times lived by the circle. in mexico field-hands sit in a circle for lunch. american workers scatter this way and that, solitary or in split groupings. an english class sitting in the round creates a democracy, in rows addressed by the professor the students slaves to grades and her goodwill. i don't know what it would feel like to live in a handmade world. i do relax on the beach walking among the sea-lions, the waves curling and crashing.

these night flight drawings a perfect example. we can't escape the earth without many straight lines creating our spaceships: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/nf

everybody needs to be part of a story

2012-01-31T08:56:00.000-08:00

now why didn't i think of that before? i've always been a rat chasing it's tale. in a way it makes no sense, knowing i'm made up of a bunch of cells walking around together, until they part company. consciousness? basically something formless. am i the universe, the universe me? whatever it is, i make it up cause i need to. whenever i lose touch with my story, i'm despairing, suicidal. to get back on track i'll look at pictures of 1950's paris, my first visit. ah, the world traveler, the intellectual, and so on.

even family has to be part of my story. after all, my grandparents met and were married in this town about a hundred years ago. i keep saying to myself, 'you can't claim anything anyone in the ancestral line has done as your own.' yet, the oregon trail, the american revolution, those guys travelled paths part of my myth of myself. almost anything i've done contributes. fifty years being a fire lookout, a archetypal occupation. giving my versions of stand up comedy, or playing the cockroach in kafka's metamorphosis, all part of a semi-conscious construction, determined to make me more than a protoplasm living in a swamp.

of course, that could be a my place too. identifying with the tribe, other floaters and bottom-feeders. those long winters, huddled up in a tent, humanity told stories for centuries, merely to get them safely and vividly to the spring. and when i meet an american in another country, i greet him/her like an old friend, even if at home i'd shout at them, possibly even call the police. ultimately, we feel the best with the familiar.

take the news, it's all drama, characters, threads of a plot, even being a conspiracy theorist makes sense, given this thesis. wow, those big guys out to get me personally, i must be terribly important. and this occupies the mind, pushing out thoughts of aging, death, poverty, and an ultimate fate of sleeping under park benches. none of it is my fault. we join the superheroes, vaulting over buildings in the face of common sense. who wants to be ordinary, who can stand it?

more ipad portraits at http://www.pbase.com/wwp/ipad yes, we never stop creating our epic, and if we do, we jump off a cliff, and that's part of it too.

how to avoid being a professional

2012-01-25T09:04:00.000-08:00

this has turned out to be a lot more difficult than i expected. the temptations have been many. both my parents had masters degrees, one an army chaplain, the other a psychiatric social worker. not going to college didn't enter my mind - at first. then, i made one feeble attempt at twenty, grabbing a bus to mexico city, loaded down with a 200 lbs suitcase full of books. i felt i could simply go off and become a writer. a great adventure with electric memories, ultimately abandoned out of common sense.

no, that's right, i tried a second, more virulent effort. after five years at three universities -valpariaso, berkeley, and san francisco state, i fled to the mountains for a lookout job, the only one i'd ever coveted. i needed one unit to graduate and felt enormously proud of myself for not doing so. instead, i spent winters in new york, europe, doing theater, writing reams of stuff, some of which i still like. however, having met a german maiden, i thought i might marry and need to work. thus, to make a short story long, i drove through a biology course by mail. unfortunately, they'd changed the requirements at san francisco. in a mad rush i ran around for a day, taking tests and scooping up signatures, and completed my degree.

generally, i like to finish what i start. that goes for all kinds of projects. when i don't have a project, i go crazy. mostly i've lived like a montessori student, following my impulses. luckily, this method kept me from falling into a career. as i said, the opportunities did arise. i started out as a school reporter, specializing in sports. the first year in college, the drudgery and other people re-writing my stories maddened me. i drifted into literature. alas, even though i desired to become a classic, i never aspired to being 'a man of letters.'

i could have become a fire-dispatcher, a counselor, or, heaven-forbid, a teacher. not that i don't admire the latter tremendously, most of my friends of the profession. yet i realized, it's a full-time job and you have to read a lot of bad writing. ironically, i still audit classes and love being a student. always a bridesmaid and never a bride, thank god. not wanting the money-sink of a house and knowing the debt-ridden course of raising children, i decided to remain a child. and like a child, i've few defenses against ecstasy and misery, bouncing from one to the other. that is the price you do have to pay for freedom.

as far as being a creative person, i like works left in a semi-rough state, not too slick and impersonal. this effectively cut me out of the market. for whatever reason, it hasn't diminished my desire to make things. in the long run i've avoided wearing a uniform and the curse of celebrity, even if i'd like to set an example of independence for others.

there's a nature center two blocks away and on a walk, i took a few pics and mucked them up: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/cent

and you can browse through a large part of my holdings, if you wish: http://www.pbase.com/wwp it's an example of what a dedicated amateur can do.

according to goethe, live near a university library

2012-01-23T09:05:00.000-08:00

ah, i moved to this town for this reason thirty-some years ago. wise or not, the advice took hold. true, i've haunted aisles of books since the summer after the third grade when i read two books a day. not moby dick, rather the adventures of kit carson, or sitting bull. i outgrew the age of comic books, going through science fiction, then historically based stories. ultimately, a degree in english literature ruined me. i became too educated to appeal to a wider audience with best sellers.

yes, i've imitated being a classic. and i doted on the old ones, soaking up dostoyevsky and pascal. what a shame. now i'm way over-educated in an under-educated atmosphere. college town though this may be, it's no athens. yesterday, everybody retreated into the bars to watch a football game. that's the nature of the beast. the best thing about it, the first thing: wonderful tomes sat on the shelves for years, available because students never read them! with the internet it's even better. they may study in their cubbyholes and learn how to manipulate each other in the modern world. in ancient rome, post ww2 paris, they'd be lost and helpless.

see, i gloat in my rainy window room. today the next semester begins. i'll go over to soak up the youthful energy. unfortunately, with the stormy weather, the girls won't look their best, all covered up. that will have to wait for valentine's day and spring. tomorrow, i'll go to an art history lecture on photography, probably another on old peruvian art. though i'm hibernating like a bear, my pulse dropping to zero, my breath coming once a day, my brain will be stimulated, thanks to j. wolfgang g. what's the point of living in the present, anyway? individuals die, libraries live forever.

i did wake up long enough to take pics out the window of my room. they probably show my dazed state of mind: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/rainy

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. goethe

it all happens by design

2012-01-19T18:50:00.000-08:00

egad, i'm going to go off the deep end, recommending a book i haven't even read. well, it wouldn't be the first time. i've at least two thousand books in my storage locker, piled right up to the front door. have i read half of them? hell, no, yet that doesn't stop me from buying them. my whole life spent in libraries, looking for the answer. have i found it? more than once. then lost it again. i just order the universal principles of design online.

you see, i know i'm being affected and manipulated all the time, good ways and evil ways. last night i watched a documentary on vidal sassoon. great guy. and i spent years responding to his haircuts on women and the dresses of mary quant. they created a seductive and strong image. i swear women would not be taking over the world if it weren't for them. it's like michael jackson, the source of barack obama's success. we react to thriller images, in dance, in the movies, in books. and with a formula, they yank us onto the road to perdition.

speaking of roads, i just drove home from the cafe, in the rain, and after reading words black on yellow the most memorable, i noticed street signs, the digital sign on the local bus, yellow turn-signals. watch out! opportunity! danger! i've certainly no objection to the signal lights. they've saved my life more than once. what alarms me: my own lack of observation. and i think the key to understanding our world and leading a life independent of it, depends upon reading all the signs.

it occurred to me the other day: without the dress, there'd be a lot fewer weddings. those wedding magazines all about the white uniform. no wonder all eyes on the bride walking down the aisle. bingo! i'm center stage for once in my life. however, marriage dying out around the world as women take the limelight every day. power and design, there's certainly an essay in that. and i have read 100 things every designer needs to know about people, backwards and forwards. we're not talking about gods wielding divine power. no, about the smart human beings who've learned how to control all the rest.

this said, artists, writers, dentists, all kind of creative people could benefit from this knowledge. there, i've attempted to sell a book without having read it. it always works on me.

here are a few designs of my own, found around the house, inside and out: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/tex

added more ipad drawings:
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/ipad
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/nf

don't answer a dead man's cellphone

2012-01-14T10:49:00.001-08:00

i mean, every time i've come across a dead body on the beach, the avenues, in a back alley, i've been tempted to pull that ringing alarm-clock out of the clutching hand. so far i've refused. what would i say? what kind of madman might be on the other end, looking for a victim? true, i could abandon this boring life and get involved in another, throw myself off track into a meaningful and terrifying adventure. should this ever happen, i'll share the details.

in the meantime, the other night i shot photos at a dress rehearsal of a play by this name 'dead man's cellphone' by sara ruhl, directed by brad moniz. unfortunately, i couldn't enjoy the flow of the play as much as i would have liked, clicking the button. still, i got my laughs from this ingenious story. a guy dies at a cafe table, his cell keeps ringing, and the girl nearby, reading a book, gets very annoyed. finally, she confronts him and he tips sideways. after a moment of horror, she can't resist answering the phone.

yes, she does get pulled into a bizarre family, and she keeps making up stories to help them feel better, that the corpse loved them, appreciated all they'd done, found them sexy, and so on. definitely a fantasy satisfied. she even finds love. no, i don't want to put in spoilers. you'll have to see for yourself:

http://blueroomtheatre.com/

the director, brad moniz, carefully thought things thru, from the edward hopper mural 'nighhawks' to the leonard cohen music during the intermission. the play circular and so is cohen's music, which i've always loved, mostly cause he undercuts his own image in a sly way. it's details like this which pull the whole creative venture together. i can't wait to see it again.

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/cell

to quote oscar wilde: don't try to lead my life, it's already taken.

brad moniz

don't answer a dead man's cellphone

2012-01-14T10:42:00.000-08:00

i mean, every time i've come across a dead body on the beach, the avenues, in a back alley, i've been tempted to pull that ringing phone out of the clutching hand. so far i've refused. what would i say? what kind of madman might be on the other end, looking for a victim? true, i could abandon this boring life and get involved in another, throw myself off track into a meaningful and terrifying adventure. should this ever happen, i'll share the details.

in the meantime, the other night i shot photos at a dress rehearsal of a play by this name 'dead man's cellphone' by sara ruhl, directed by brad moniz. unfortunately, i couldn't enjoy the flow of the play as much as i would have liked, clicking the button. still, i got my laughs from this ingenious story. a guy dies at a cafe table, his cell keeps ringing, and the girl nearby, reading a book, gets very annoyed. finally, she confronts him and he tips sideways. after a moment of horror, she can't resist answering the phone.

yes, she does get pulled into a bizarre family, and she keeps making up stories to help them feel better, that the corpse loved them, appreciated all they'd done, found them sexy, and so on. definitely a fantasy satisfied. she even finds love. no, i don't want to put in spoilers. you'll have to see for yourself:

http://blueroomtheatre.com/

the director, brad moniz, carefully thought things thru, from the edward hopper mural 'nighhawks' to the leonard cohen music during the intermission. the play circular and so is cohen's music, which i've always loved, mostly cause he undercuts his own image in a sly way. it's details like this which pull the whole creative venture together. i can't wait to see it again.

http://www.pbase.com/wwp/cell

to quote oscar wilde: don't try to lead my life, it's already taken.

brad moniz

what's the place of willpower?

2012-01-11T09:43:00.000-08:00

i've always been suspicious of over-riding my feelings, for fear i'd lose all sensitivity, vulnerability, the ability to sense currents in the air and the news. i pretend to be an automaton, simply to throw people off the trail. i'm terribly uneasy at parties, for example, especially having sworn off alcohol. like everyone else i wear a blank look and a smile. anyone looking closely into my face would discover the contradiction. luckily, everyone else too focused on themselves to notice.

the other day i grew annoyed with myself for being upset. an acquaintance with a bit of power over me suggested i'd lied. i proved to him i hadn't, yet in the process i felt the old oedipal urge against the father. this pricked at me as i prickled. suddenly, i thought, 'do i want to be controlled by childhood all of my life?' no, i didn't, so i simply waved the torment away, or rammed it into my unconscious, i'm not sure which. i said to myself, 'i can be a man!'

still, the rest of the day i asked myself, 'am i numb? have i voided my intuition? do i wish to be caesar or alexander the great? is that worth losing my poetic sensibility? hugh mccloed, one of my gurus, writes, power is always taken, it is never given. that i have pondered. say, j.p. morgan (picture above), what was the source of his wealth, banking? absolutely not, rather, the knife in his hand. or look at krupp (picture below), financier of hitler, the greenish glow around him the aura of self-importance, even if he looks (and acted) like an icon of greed.

along with that, there's leni reifenstal's movie triumph of the will, hitler riding in glory before saluting crowds. yes, we know what happened to him and the misery he caused, this bad artist rejected by the vienna art academy. if only they had accepted him ww II might have been avoided, his faint artistic ability overcoming his ire, which he made all of austria suffer for. maybe he would have been softened up just enough. alas, history had something different in mind, using nietzsche's the will to power for it's own purposes.

i had to go smell the roses, simply to escape my damning ambition. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/rose2

everything we do changes our future

2012-01-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

i devised this disturbing insight to keep myself from being annoyed. now, when my coat catches on a railing or a hat falls out of the door of my truck and i have to bend over, i tell myself, 'ah, that saved me from being hit by a bus in six months.' in worldly terms it's called the butterfly effect or why we can't predict the weather. say an insect falls from a tree along the amazon. eventually, a tidal wave sweeps japan as a result.

this theorem can prove very useful and the results immediate. i've found when my thoughts swing into the negative realm, all i have to do is tap the top of my head three times. this immediately shakes up my automatic patterns. they take another track and i'm saved from personal mortification. the method deceptively simple, yet we pay a psychiatrist thousand of dollars to shift us out of circular thought where A always leads to B. that's all i do when i surreptitiously give myself a minor concussion.

theoretically, if i'm unhappy with my present view of what's to come, i could stand up, run around my chair three times, and sit down, having altered my world. in public this might look a bit insane. so be it. my survival more important than the impressions of others. and if this gives me a certain control over my destiny, why not? could i plot my actions on a graph and find out how they're ruled by fractals, i might actually turn this sop of a guy into a real man. here's hoping. i vow not to step on any more cracks in the sidewalk. we'll see what happens.

desperate for subject matter, i drove to a neighboring town, marysville. once a thriving crossroads, it's become a city of holes, empty stores and lots. they tried urban renewal. i don't know why it failed. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/mary

it's all chance, so you can relax

2012-01-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

last time i fell asleep at the wheel, i travelled a two lane road on the way the san francisco. my doze took me across the center-line into the other lane. i snapped awake to see a huge truck coming right at me. swerving back, i missed a sure death by ten seconds. how often has that happened? i don't really know. he said, 'did you see that huge shark near you?' i'd just swum back to shore in a belize blue lagoon. and she said, 'did you see that ufo over your lookout last night?' probably the close calls in the thousands.

these days i wish for one thing, good luck. that's recognizing the reality of black swans, teleb's unexpected events, what determines the course of history. we invent certain systems to counter-act this great truth. karma, sin, self-confidence, heaven, living in the myth we get what we deserve. hah, whenever has that been true? my sisters received my father's love cause he liked little girls more than boys. of course, my tirades as a result didn't help, yet they came after the fact. nobody really deserves anything. in terms of abstract justice it would be nice.

take the jugoslavian conflicts. i met a muslim student from belgrade. she'd come to work at a city office one morning and a sign said, 'as of now all of the Mohammedan conviction don't have a job.' her friends had been of all races and religions, no problem. the dictator tito kept a firm hand. or the example of sadam hussein in iraq comes to mind. despite his tyrannical ways, women had more freedom under him than they ever will again. we invaded in the name of democracy, abandoning them to their own devices after ten years. anyone with half a brain could see the coming civil war before we launched a plane.

well, i contradicted myself! i'd maintained everything chance, get used to it and relax into uncertainty. and actually, you can forecast the weather and tides a bit, not enough to rely on for a lifetime, still, it's possible to avoid a tornado, sometimes, a heart-attack, an auto-accident. no sense being stupid. to feel you have a right to live while others die, it's only natural, but don't bet on it.

two words WOUND and VOID showed up prominently at an indian art exhibit this weekend in san francisco. see if you think they tie things together: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/indart

what to do if you can't afford therapy

2012-01-04T17:54:00.000-08:00

eat chocolate. okay, you didn't need me to tell you that. the stuff can be amazingly effective. i don't know how many times i've shifted a mood simply by crunching an oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookie. no, it doesn't always work. that's a given. it can be an addiction on its own. and what we know about addictions so far, even strong drugs can't end them. only five-step programs have a prayer of doing so.

i do get mixed up. am i a social being or a chemical animal? how does the first affect the second and vice-versa. considering my blood travels 50,000 miles a day, my kidneys processing 300 gallons, a lot of stuff must be sailing thru my system. how the body keeps all that in balance, or doesn't, a great mystery. no wonder what we eat determines who we are. well, not totally, exercise, for instance, can rouse endorphins and a feeling of well-being, unless you get so exhausted you fall in a ditch and expire of hypothermia.

we're meant to move, and a lot of problems arise when we don't. i wonder if a personal trainer couldn't do more than a therapist? and the right drug does work wonders. i met a guy in costa rica taking a vacation from running a biology lab. he invited me to visit him in oregon, which i did. he said the day before i arrived he suddenly felt normal for the first time in his life, his escape to central america giving a respite for the drug to take affect. and just this past week a friend suffering from long-term depression said people finding her more relaxed, the right drug discovered after an extended and painful search.

personally, i've spent thousands of dollars on therapy when it was a lot cheaper than now. having always having had pretensions to being an elitist, I barked up that wrong tree and fought off suicidal impulses simply with luck. my medical doctor encouraged me to try prozac for a year before i would. and once that worked, i added welbutrin to beef up the dopamine. yes, we're chemical beings and somehow we've got to accept it and get the balance right. otherwise it's crack cocaine and heroin, deployed in a war only they can win.

my friend dennis palumbo has a new article on the subject of therapists as villains. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hollywood-the-couch/201201/the-girl-the-evil-psychiatrist i wonder if they're seen as anti-democratic (expensive) and conservative. my therapist years ago said, 'most people happier mainstream'. and in japan therapy states, 'your problem not loving your mother enough.'

in berkeley over new year's i took a few pics. a lot of people out there could use some help: www.pbase.com/wwp/ny12

the amaerican as a wild animal

2011-12-29T20:48:00.000-08:00

i'm constantly fearful of invasion, losing my way, forgetting my place. when i tried a biofeedback exercise, hooked up to a machine recording my brain-waves, i'd revert to the tenser state the minute i heard a sound, felt a breath, a shadow passing across my eyes. i thought this might have been early childhood training, ie. my mother popping into my room at the most expected times and telling me not to play with myself. hmm, guess that could be true, but i think there's more to it.

a nigerian visitor said, 'america's a tough atmosphere, you have to make a place for yourself, stake out your territory. in africa we're given a place and protected by others who've been put in a particular spot as well.' so, it's true, the united states is literally a jungle without the social cohesion given by tribes and familiarity with the territory. by the latter i mean, those old guys used to have one landscape with which they became intimate. by taking care of it and understanding it, they could live comfortably.

and these small groups didn't tolerate strangers. i walk down fifth avenue in new york and i'm jostled by all kinds of wierdos. i once saw mafia dudes pounce on an enemy and beat him to the ground, right in the middle of this crowd. trying to establish what happened, how could the cop listen to everyone, including the gangsters, and come up with a who-done-it. if you have a fear of crowds, there's a damn good reason and you'd better be on your guard.

you may not be aware it, how everyone in america afraid of losing their job and everything they possess, this particularly true the past couple years with the economic collapse, homes being tossed back to the banks. most of us don't know how to take care of ourselves, building a fire from scratch, digging up edible roots, in fact we don't even know how to beg, though i think we could learn pretty fast.

an anthropology teacher in college (1962) said, 'we live better than any kings before 1900.' have you gotten used to water coming out of the tap, the air being breathable, food appearing like magic in plastic wrap? theoretically, this makes you a civilized being. the minute the gas stops flowing as it did in the gas crisis of 1973, we fight like tigers at the pump, things get really nasty, all our goodwill depending on our comfort.

given these facts, we can't relax, pleasure has gotten a bad name, sensuality a sin, and all because of the jungle. have you ever thought what would happen if other drivers ignored the white lines and traffic lights? your life wouldn't be worth a plugged nickel. i know this means i'm under threat of extermination every minute, despite the long-term stability and investment appeal of the country. freedom's just a game of jumping over bear-traps and kissing your friends goodbye. no wonder, as many around the world have observed, americans always overreact. i personally have made my body robotic to avoid organic decay.

a few more tell-tale drawings in ipad night flight: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/nf

the useful uselessness of new year's resolutions

2011-12-28T08:20:00.000-08:00

that time of year to disappoint myself again! of course, the first thing i always say: i will exercise more. and you know what? i never do. what this teaches me, however, is: i feel fat and unsexy. then i think of the hottest woman i've ever seen, in a los angeles irish pub dancing. believe me, she must have been at least forty-five and had those extra love-pounds. and wow, every guy in the place couldn't stop watching her, not just that iridescent dress, those hips, those moves.

and in the survey of web porn, two billion wicked thoughts, the authors discovered most men do not like thin women. and when a woman looks at a man, she must be desiring more than muscles. i mean, look at all these guys they're with! pretty amazing, those beards, scuffed shoes, watery eyes. and i'm not just talking about the old ones. i see combinations i simply cannot believe, i feel like i'm watching a horror movie, hallucinating.

which i bring up to prove my point. what we wish hides the substance of that desire, the true impulse, so time to back up, examine what you will never do cause it's not what you really want. now, if i said, i'm going to get more sex this year, i'd have to confront my fears, figure out what a woman really wants (good luck!), and go for it. and i suspect all our hopes for a higher salary, a fancier car, a trip to tahiti disguise the same thing, pure unadulterated lust. if i say, i'm going to have a kid this year, it means, i'll risk a lot, the fear of aids, the scary business of a possible involvement, and of course pregnancy, to have a lot of fun.

i encourage all of us to get real. that pub-dancing lady knew what she wanted and made no bones about it. we have to get past manipulation and self-consciousness and the attempt to play it safe, broadcasting want me, i can give you what you'll never get alone, and all because i'll be satisfying a passion even bigger than yours, my own.

new pics, out xmas eve and the day itself, this depth of darkness needing a release: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/kiss and http://www.pbase.com/wwp/xmas11

the clones of andy warhol

2011-12-24T08:22:00.000-08:00

portrait by alice neel

actually, i like to forget this kind of disturbing identity dream as fast as i can. oh, i've read tons of freud, jung, and their followers, an interesting thing to do, yet i've decided most of our dreams merely practical. they integrate the trials and tribulations of the day into whatever makes up our 'self'. usually, they start pretty nasty, calming down as the night goes on.

unfortunately, i ate very sugary cookies last night and this means disaster. yes, scrooge was right, a bit of undone potato can undo you. anyway, i spent the last couple hours in andy warhol's apartment, the dump filled with drug-besotted hangers-on. andy himself drove me crazy, friendly one minute, honoring my opinions, and scathing, ironic, damaging my self-image the next. finally, i decided, after failing to be able to take a shower or find my shoes, 'i'm getting the hell out of here.'

one item disturbed me most, a young theater director who recently lost his job part of the retinue. i attempted to convince him this a bad scene. alas, all he could do was imitate warhol, even deciding he was gay and celebrating the fact. when i started to take off my clothes, all these guys stood around me salivating, eager to see my tally-whacker.. needless to say, i became very self-conscious. what was i, one of these or somebody else? down in the street, i at first simply wanted to return to that hell. then i realized my pack back and my loafers on my feet and i walked with a firm gait. ah, a dream, i knew it.

maybe it's the holidays too. yesterday at the cafe, i felt disconnected, other people unreal. not until i picked up a manga story and read a bit did i feel myself returning to this world, certainly a contradiction. oh, hell, as whitman said, 'i contradict myself, therefore i contradict myself. i contain worlds.' if only he would come to me when i need him!

these ipad drawings related: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/nf

ps. once sat behind andy warhol at the theater. white hair. faded denim. a ghost-like aura. pretty freaky.

yes, envy's my middle name

2011-12-21T09:43:00.000-08:00

my friend dennis palumbo just published an article on the subject in psychology today. and what an embarrassing topic it is. believe me, i can envy just about anybody, depending on my mood, say the young, just because they've got so much to look forward to. us crusty old guys figure whatever they seek to do, we've done it better. once staying with a friend's daughter in seattle, i denigrated her work and that of her friends. she jumped all over me. and i realized what i was doing: ENVY.

since then, i've tried to catch myself, even enjoy the successes of others. one trick, i say to myself, now i don't have to do that, it's done. usually it stops me from trying to save the world or re-invent the wheel. i could, of course, build a better mouse-trap, and that's an option, depending on how interested i am. i used to covet the warmth and security of home and family. at night i'd walk the streets, look into kitchen windows, and see everybody having a great time. PROJECTION. my jealousy based on an assumption of the unreal, viewing whatever they have as lacking flies in the ointment.

today, i consider how much time and money all that is costing them. and i know the tensions in families all too well, my own had enough for four broods (nice word, that). take christmas, coming up this weekend. when we were little, we've be full of excitement, my mother's xmas eve ceremonies comforting, we'd listen to a recording of dicken's christmas carol and stuff ourselves with the candy my father had made. later, as we grew older, we became disenchanted, uneasy with the whole affair. ah, if only i still believed in santa claus!

and then there's sex. when i see a gorgeous woman with another man, i turn green, completely forgetting i'm looking at her as a goddess and not a real person. i forget how she had to color and tease that hair, how long it took for her nails to dry as the guy stewed, late for the theater. i totally ignore her bad moods, her demands for attention, and so on. some nights i do go to bed wishing i'd a lovely beside me. and in the morning i wipe my brow and thank god i'm alone. so much for coveting my neighbor's wife.

here is the article mentioned above. tough going in an insanely competitive environment. again, i say, wish for the victory of your buddies. they may carry you to the top: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/hollywood-the-couch/201112/envy

have you ever been haunted by a photograph?

2011-12-20T09:46:00.000-08:00

this is the one i mean. we all know the expression 'tip of the iceberg', yet do we really take it's significance into account? the captain of the titanic certainly didn't, nor did george armstrong custer at the battle of the little bighorn. my vanity creates more assumptions than stars in the galaxy, not to mention the universe. for example, i believed invading iraq a bad thing, the only possible result civil war. now that this war is 'officially' over, i'll have to reassess my position. after all, the price of gas dropping!

and afghanistan, where civilizations go to die? hmm, exceptions to the rule? maybe all those drone bombs killing people necessary steps in human evolution? am i being ironic? damn, i never know. some things i am pretty aware of. for example, when touring the teddy roosevelt house in new york, i heard the guide say americans don't know their own history. once i took a course in our revolution, and i didn't remember the colonies had three million people. no wonder the british had a fight on their hands. and did a million citizens move to canada after it was over? somewhere i read that.

does my ignorance matter? that's the big question. so far i've gotten thru life without knowing what the hell E equals MC squared means. and if i'm sailing the ocean of thought, what dangers lie in the deep? true, i do believe as things begin, so do they go. a revolt in violence creates a violent new society, whereas a peaceful one, say new zealand, doesn't lead to a lot of blood-letting. can i see like the author of the rational optimist the whole of human society progressing, even as individuals suffer? and when does bowing to complexity, not allow us t0 cut the gordian knot?

nothing ventured, noting gained. after all, any of our lives fatal! new drawings: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/nf and new photos: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/meso2 where students reconstruct what might have been.

only the madman is completely sure (robert anton wilson)

2011-12-19T09:11:00.000-08:00

my friend marilyn once said, people who think they're always right have more energy. when i go down the list of people i've known, i believe it to be true. not that they're necessarily more successful, however i suspect conservatives happier than liberals, fathers more than sons. and they can be as obnoxious as hell, without feeling guilty.

transposing this to the big names in art, i must confess i'm puzzled. lately i've streamed documentaries on bob dylan, alice neel, keith haring, robert anton wilson, and countless other artists. guess i'm still looking for the key to fame and fortune. certainly amazing what these people have done, yet doubts seem to creep up on them all the time. hemingway said, courage is grace under pressure. what amazes me: how cheeky a bob dylan or john lennon can be.

is it simply the drive to 'do something', write songs. paint. direct? suicide does often raise its sad head, much more prominent among creative people. we can all think of examples, hemingway himself and marilyn monroe. and i haven't found people who consider themselves infallible to be geniuses, in fact they very often live by cliches. that gives them a rectitude money can't buy.

one example i love: the man with the highest IQ in the world. i forget his name. he lives somewhere in the american midwest. what a dolt. never having the chance to train his brain, he thinks killing dumb people okay. here the mind creates a demon, or as goya would say, the sleep of reason creates monsters. informed intelligence the way to go. unfortunately, the more you know the more you know you don't know. awareness takes away certainty.

started a new batch of drawings, night flight: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/nf i'm sure it will prove again photographs have more universal appeal than artistic creations. artworks seem to narrow the audience, the quirkiness of individuality limiting you to an audience with the same quirks!

"the young always underestimate the competition,"

2011-12-14T17:32:00.000-08:00

hugh mccloed wrote in ignore everybody: and 39 ways to creativity. this, of course, has it's pluses and minuses. another wag wrote, don't ask if it's impossible until after you do it. just having come from helping review a theater class auditions, i feel melancholy. and other local theater people who helped expressed the same. high hopes dashed by the market. a single mother with no time. and so on.

henry james wrote plays and failed on the stage, despite a very insightful book of reviews. it hurt. and i know the feeling. at some point i realized my number one need: community. and every time i tried to satisfy my desire with drama, i cried once the production ended and the stage immediately dismantled. every body who'd become one goes their separate ways, the profound intimacy scattered to the winds. one auditor who'd tried the lost angels route said, i envy you and am glad i'm not where you're at.

america as the land of opportunity has a built-in cruelty, promising the presidency to half the population, children, you can do anything and everything if only you try, don't be satisfied with being a senator, a judge, a governor, always a bigger prize in front of you. alas, you may get what you want first-most, but not what you want second-most. i've found this to be all-too-true. we've so much energy, talent, time, focus. and the truth is, almost everyone ends up opting for a home and family.

as i said, for me it's community. i like having a doctor and dentist, neighbors, clerks who recognize me, it satisfies my herd instinct, the animal i am, especially having avoided the common doom above. and this fulfilled, i don't have the drive to make theater work for me, much as i may love it, much as i may have learned, to write and direct plays. and i could see in the kids auditioning most didn't have the necessary focus, something else more important, and the path to finding it due to be a rough one.

even my androids are having second thoughts http://www.pbase.com/wwp/android4 they too not really sure what they want.

gosh, last night i identified with the bad guys

2011-12-10T10:10:00.000-08:00

at an environmental conference in ashland, oregon, a native-american woman maintained other people couldn't use her tribe's symbols and ceremonies, these private property. despite my urge, i didn't stand up and declare, 'lady, if this knowledge would benefit all of humankind, cough it up. what's at stake now is survival of the species.'

last night i watched the art of the steal, moving of a famous art collection, the barnes, to a new building in downtown philadelphia. one of the good guys opposing it said, 'the collection belonging to walter, he could do whatever he wanted with it.' alas, his family died out and everybody else in the world jumped to secure the paintings, the most famous in post-impressionism. and i believe these a treasure to be shared with everyone. in an art book, when i see, in a private collection, i grit my teeth, knowing i will never see the original.

no, i don't believe in the government owning everything. military dictatorships simply don't know how to do business. and a individual life given by a room of our own very precious. when radicals exclaimed, 'the personal is political', i realized they were asking for the police to step into the bedroom, sex having become a public football.

yet national forests and parks for open use make life for me livable. and i really enjoy little perks like the return sunday fare free on the new york subway. this lost, i felt diminished. there's something about freedom of access which stimulates me, widens the world.

added a few free pics of my own:
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/meso2
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/net

even if it's meaningless, keep doing it

2011-12-09T09:06:00.000-08:00

i read, if you use the wrong fly long enough, it becomes the right one, an analogy from fishing. i guess i must believe it, cause the emptiness of our fate in the universe hasn't stopped me. for example, i got out of bed this morning. of course i had to fight my basic human laziness. first thing, i turned on the computer. now i know 99% of my time on it an absolute waste. i delete ads for half an hour. my in-box never empty, yet i feel a foolish sense of accomplishment.

various wise guys have come up with answers. bliss, feeling alive, carrots and rewards. these work for children. ah, christmas morning, i couldn't wait, up at the crack of dawn to stare at the presents. we didn't have a lot of them so each individual one meant a lot. as an adult, i've attended feeding frenzies, the packages so many the kids go glassy-eyed, the whole mission to unrap everything while what's inside merely decoration. talk about a nietzschean reversal of values!

the cartoonist hugh mccloed states, 'we need social objects.' okay, i hate the term, yet he's onto something. the local bookstore survives only because of it's cafe. for hugh we crave company like seals on the beach. and i'm no better than anyone. i go for coffee every day just to watch the faces, the combinations of people. for example, last night i sat near a table of three girls studying. they looked so young, being so small and beautiful, and i couldn't place their origin, though opening their mouths they sounded like every other american girl with a twang. puzzles like this confront me every time i go out.

i admit a fascination with portraits. yesterday, these popped into the camera: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/meso2 and a couple weeks ago i indulged my fascination with japanese netsuke: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/net did these give me a purpose? no, they gave me a thrill, opened up mysteries i can never fathom. personally, i don't know why people keep having children. social objects? probably. they pull you into a different world and team you up with parents and teachers. plus, you think you have them figured out? hah! you'll never know why the tw0-year old walked over to a plant and perforated its leaves with a hole-punch.

you don't need a reason to be happy. astounded by this mantra, i try to keep it in mind. maybe all we need digging ditches is movement, smoking a cigarette: the motion of our hands. even if alcohol kills us, it's a pleasant form of suicide. ultimately, we know too much, and understand we know nothing at all and can't let that stop us.

the world as a gaint brain, finding your function

2011-12-06T09:03:00.001-08:00

electricity remains our greatest wonder. without it everything human would come to a stop, including our bodies, our brains 80% water and electrical impulses. is it an accident the dynamo discovered? for the survival of the species, certainly not. electric-shock therapy, we're born from it and experience it every moment of our lives!

gawd, i hate myself when i'm dogmatic. just yesterday i had to repeat my old mantra: everyone is enlightened except me. once more, like during my first asthma attacks, i carried the world, trying to figure everything out. i can't tell you how heavy and congealed my body became, slowly turning into stone. i had to go back to zero, start over, give up. and i immediately felt relief. it's like unfocusing my eyes. as soon as i do it, i relax. evidently, we use enormous energy to spy out danger and pleasure, tightening our beam of attention to a pinpoint.

and once i surrender, i discover my place in the universe, my function in this immense brain we call the earth. you see, when we say we're all connected and part of the whole, it's literally true. we've fifty-thousand thoughts a day, all electric charges, lightning created biologic life and continues to hit the ground 200 times a second, all day, every day. and with the internet we've finally discovered the truth. we can't do without each other.

true, just as millions of cells born and dead every second in our body, humans come into being as others snuffed. the world mind acts exactly as our own, constantly renewing itself. and every part necessary for the whole, too large a war like a huge stroke. recovery comes slowly and may shift operations to a new area. civilizations come and go, sparking new lines of inquiry and old defeats. so far our blood has been oil. hopefully, this will shift to sunlight.

has anyone analyzed the globe in this way? i think it might be an interesting endeavor. and meanwhile, the androids toil behind the scenes: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/android3 the wizard of oz pulls the switches back-stage.

thank you for leading my other lives

2011-12-04T09:21:00.000-08:00

a former friend, rich, once said, 'happiness is realizing your potential.' unfortunately, we've way too many alternatives in the modern age, and that can lead to despair. i console myself with gratitude to others for doing what i don't have the time for. alas, rich despised me and cut me dead for not fulfilling one of his fantasies. so be it. can't please everybody.

that said, i want to thank sam shepherd. once, wandering around fort mason in san francisco, i dropped into a rehearsal of inacoma which sam in the middle of directing. famous as an avant-garde playwright, he adoped one of my alternative selves, the way i thought i'd retire with millions. friendly - we'd had pieces on the same program at the first bay area playwrights' festival - he invited me to see the show. i wasn't sure a play about an unconscious woman had much potential. pedro almovadar finally did it with talk to me.

at six i'd wanted to be an actor, immediately dropping the idea when my mother proposed i memorize the poems of winnie-the-pooh. my ambition didn't quite end there and later i wrote and acted in a movie, the same with a stage adaptation of kafka's metamorphosis. i imitated professors and did a bit of stand-up comedy at the university. in the meantime sam starred in movies, wedded a famous actress, and roams a ranch in new mexico. that's not all he did for me. before he became a star, my sister send me a postcard: made it with sam shephard last nite. he took care of my long-standing urge toward incest, kept me out of trouble. thanks again, sam.

on a much more decorous side, i'd like to thank my friend dennis palumbo for taking care of several potentials. first, he made a name for himself as a screenwriter. i met him when kevin bacon and others shot whitewater summer, available to view on amazon, at and in the neighborhood of my lookout. i watched another actor play me. then the scenes were cut. damn. still, i got to hang out with that crowd for several days.

dennis had been called in to doctor the script, though he'd only get a bit of cash and no credit. unhappy with the whole scene, he decided to run off to nepal. after three months he returned to become a therapist. you can see where this is heading. too many people have told me that's what i should have done. trouble is, did i really want to sit in a room baffled by other people's anguish when i couldn't cure my own? dennis did more than that. he wrote a column for screenwriters and turned in into a book http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Inside-Out-Transforming-Psychological/dp/0471382663/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1323018515&sr=1-1 he's helped wannabees realize they're not really that good, or better than they think.

a couple days ago i read his latest novel, fever dream, and i couldn't put it down, squeezing in minutes between other opportunities (read my review on amazon) and haunted by the story still, i'm experiencing a gritty pittsburgh, his hometown, and plenty of rapscallions, and the difference between the haves and the have-nots depicted with a scarifying flair. thanks, dennis, for being a screenwriter, therapist, and novelist. you've freed me from way to much work. and i didn't mention your family. yes, you've done it for me.

sam shephard needs no introduction. look at dennis palumbo's website:http://www.dennispalumbo.com/
or simply google him. lots of columns on huffington post, etc.

now i can go back to drinking my morning tea and allowing the doctors, lawyers, and pimps out there to pursue the many fates i'm too lazy for.

all our troubles come from possessiveness

2011-12-03T09:25:00.001-08:00

especially in matters of the heart. if the woman i'm with smiles at another man, i'm suddenly in baudelaire's hell. look at all the soap operas. doesn't take much to set off disaster, even the hint of infidelity. being that insecure in my own powers, i certainly wouldn't make a safe mate for life. the oedipal complex struck me deep and hard, sleeping plagued by dreams of the lover i desire going off with another man.

actually, i find it a matter of identity and power. with the arrival of private property, inheritance, etc. our survival depended on protecting our domain. and our individuality expressed in what we own, especially 'our' children. true, this creates us. if you've your own room, you become a dreamer, a person who exists independently of other people. no wonder we're tormented by our imagination!

in terms of trying to find an individual destiny without being banished from the crowd, this is my favorite example:

it cracks me up. by the end they look like a pack of nazi stormtroopers. not that i don't feel nostalgic for adolescence. i'd like to buy a motorcycle and immediately spend even more money than the asking price to deck it out and reveal it as 'mine.' the rallies all about show and tell, me, my and mine.

tattoos the same way. i've thought about getting one so my body can be identified. see, i even want to own this dissolving animal! everybody in town has a tattoo, i suspect. the parlors invaded years ago and there must be at least ten of them: lucky's, jade eye, the sacred cross. join the club, but be obviously yourself.

alas, if we lose our favorite spoon, what sorrow. yet letting it go, we become truly free, though it stolen off a japan airlines flight and brought back exciting memories of the past, 'our' past. maybe that's why i like museums, the feeling all of us can enjoy a painting, it not hidden away in a private vault. here are some examples from my last trip to san francisco:

pictures from an exhibition: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/ex

all our troubles come from possessiveness

2011-12-03T09:10:00.000-08:00

especially in matters of the heart. if the woman i'm with smiles at another man, i'm suddenly in baudelaire's hell. look at all the soap operas. doesn't take much to set off disaster, even the hint of infidelity. being that insecure in my own powers, i certainly wouldn't make a safe mate for life. the oedipal complex struck me deep and hard, sleeping plagued by dreams of the lover i desire going off with another man.

actually, i find it a matter of identity and power. with the arrival of private property, inheritance, etc. our survival depended on protecting our domain. and our individuality expressed in what we own, especially 'our' children. true, this creates individuality. if you've your own room, you become a dreamer, a person who exists independently of other people. no wonder we're tormented by our imagination!

in terms of trying to find an individual destiny without being banished from the crowd, this is my favorite example:

pictures from an exhibition: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/ex

when it comes to sex, fantasy's better

2011-12-01T10:52:00.000-08:00

ah, i can hear all the angels in heaven protesting. actually, i don't completely believe it, not the sex bit, but the encounters, the adventures the quest brought, these definitely worth their weight in gold. the act, however, i think we can all agree, messy and fraught with peril: pregnancy, herpes, aids, jealous husbands, angry wives, the law.

let's take messy. when young, i could ignore the taste of a smoker and i lived with one. i could ignore blackheads, as long as i continued to float on a cloud. alas, older and disillusioned with love as we know it, i can no longer blind myself to smells. for example, finally, a woman i chased for years decided she might as well give it a chance. unfortunately, she'd come straight from a marshal arts session and hadn't taken a shower. in the middle of an attempt at passion, i detected the odor of poo, and that's all i remember these many years later.

smells go to directly into our brain, much quicker than any other sense. and even the slower ones move pretty fast. in terms of touch, skin texture means more to me now than it did in my salad days. having had a brief exposure to a type last year, i realized how those with different colored hair feel. i won't name my preference, yet i do have one. and my trekkiing across the racial divides has provided exquisite alternatives.

oops, now i'm praising the reality rather than deflating it. trouble is, we don't often have a choice. we take what we can get. so she's blond and i love brunettes, she's available. he's too old and hairy and he loves me. i'm in norway and i dote on italians. hey, get real, which is what most of us do. and this is where the imagination comes to the rescue. it saves us when we are a twosome under the covers, and it saves us when we're alone.

once i did put together an 'homage to eros'. one must looks at all the possibilities, any choice better than none: www.pbase.com/wwp/eros

being in the now means you get left behind

2011-11-30T11:04:00.000-08:00

yes, you miss the bus, he gets the girl, she wins the prize. i've often been tempted by this philosophy, and it's gotten me nowhere. i stop to smell the roses, as i did yesterday, and fog rolls over the sun. i meditate and am too tired after to stand up. i think this path a ploy by the ambitious to get rid of the rest of us.

the hypnotherapist milton erickson said, 'always have something to look forward to.' the psychologist cg. jung maintained, 'westerners operate on a system of action, not contemplating the navel.' today, i passed the tents of those occupying our town and a ragged group sat in a circle, eyes closed, hands palm up on their knees, chanting om. i waited for the town square to levitate into heaven. it didn't happen.

usually i discover when i'm depressed i have too much unused energy inside me. instead of sleeping, the route i most often take, i need to bounce on my trampoline, jog in the park, anything to get the circulation going and to burn off the excess fat of the mind. being here now, i run down at the heels, the floor goes unmopped. i thank buddha for killing all my desires. alas, that includes the desire to live.

so what am i to make of this? californians the most ambitious people in the world. they want to talk with everybody, that's how silicon valley happened. and they love to run with wolves, until the wolves get hungry. at the same time we've spas, meditation centers, the exhausted go to the beach, trying to recover. yet we hop back on the freeway and gun the engine. we fly by the flowers planted in the median strip without a shred of attention. we're chanting with the beach-boys and conquering the opposite sex with our witty moves.

whew, i've worn myself out with this. i think i'll take a nap. look at more of my contradictions: www.pbase.wwp/unified this is my contribution to einstein's last theory.

does the picture have mystery?

2011-11-29T09:08:00.000-08:00

boy, in the last ten years it's become almost impossible for me to read a whole book. partly cause most books relate one idea from many angles, whether it's fiction or not. if i can browse a five hundred page book in two hours, i'll do it gladly and walk away satisfied. that said, i did finish watteau by the art critic jed perl just yesterday, and found it delightful.

can anybody look at a watteau painting and not wonder, what the hell is really going on? they're charming, beautiful, yet we don't know what stage of romance (or not) they have in mind. perl weaves together dozens of short stories of actors, movies, everyday scenes, in a magical way. his take: you will never know what's going on, the characters in the scenes themselves ignorant of what will take place next. in other words, these pictures leave you hanging (ah, the pun surprised me.)

have you ever been disappointed by a film where the first half hour keeps you interested without revealing the basis of the story and then when you know the trick, it's all over, you might as well go home? wings of desire by wim wenders struck me this way the first time i saw it. keep me in the dark, please, as long as you can. as for the surrealists, i find them witty, but don't they try too hard? di cirico, for example, simply jumps at our love of the mysterious without a disguise.

i realized that's what i'm often trying to do: not give things away. and the best way i've found is the right kind of improvisation where i can't control all the factors. taking pictures in cafes, for example. i don't really like to sneak pictures, i'd rather take them in museums and at parades. however, to catch people in private moments, nothing works better than the coffee house. and what happens, if it works, is the individual in a context where he/she emits unknowability. and that's the truth of us as human beings. whether a person bores me, angers me, excites me, or leaves me cold, other than my reaction to this particular person, i cannot really know him/her.

i hope in this series sometimes two or three photos in the same scene create the mystery i'm trying to describe:http://www.pbase.com/wwp/sam and sometimes one by itself.

does it matter who wrote shakespeare's plays?

2011-11-26T15:46:00.000-08:00

at twenty i found berkeley a bore, the teachers and institution very conservative. students continue to rebel. i did it my own way, stopping class attendance, saving up money from working the libraries, and preparing for a move to mexico city where i could be a real writer. i made the journey, but that's another story. while waiting, i read all of shakespeare, a play a day.

what i discovered, a continuous voice, similar images appearing and re-appearing, used this way and that in different contexts. so, i've never really doubted who penned the scripts - until this week. have you seen the movie anonymous? i enjoyed it immensely. edward de vere, earl of oxford, writes the plays, tries to get ben jonson to be his front man, signing his name to them. alas, a greedy buffoon, booming billy, snatches them up and takes the credit.

fitting all the facts together, i'm sure the movie-makers had a great time. de vere certainly more sympathetic than wee willy, and as an unknown playwright, i sympathize with a man who can never lay claim to his creations. yes, it shook my faith, despite visits to stratford, seeing the plays done under all kinds of circumstances and in many interpretations. if you look at jan kott's shakespeare, our contemporary you find him a post-war french existentialist. he can be stretched and bent, part of his claim to fame.

okay, how do i feel four days later? alas, the bookstore carries a book called contested will by james s. shapiro. this author seeks to debunk the debunkers by showing how historical climates since 1800 have led people to not believe in governments, identities, professed ideals. 'lying is what makes us human,' advanced one university lecturer in my own time. and then at the end, the author says it does matter who. bold bill could have interviewed plenty of foreigners about italy and any needed information. and to doubt the authorship to undermine belief in the imagination with the necessity for realist experience.

now i really am blowing in the wind. in college i took a course in shakespeare's contemporaries. no doubt he rode the wave of his contemporaries: marlow, jonson, etc. and a lot of his stage craft could easily have been picked up from them. however, couldn't a theater-going royal have done it all, including the grand tour of the continent and avid tutors? somehow i wish someone else would be proven, as this would knock the bard off his pedestal. imagine being a writer in english and everybody declaring, 'no one can match will, the greatest scribe ever!' wouldn't you be a bit resentful?

i haven't come to any conclusion, browsing thru the plays. many insights assert themselves. one, this guy creates scenes with incredible drive, energy, bold, blustery, characters ready and attempting to grab whatever they want. that's drama! also, he could be infinitely bawdy, down in the dirt funny. this really made me wonder if the earl could spatter himself so? yet, to say that demotes the power of his imagination. how much did high and low experience together in that time? the answer might provide an answer.

to prove my own credentials, i directed a one-person piece by susan aylworth, gertrude, hamlet's story from his mother's point of view performed by jodi rives. pictures here: www.pbase.com/gert and here's my theater doctrine: www.pbase.com/wwp/laugh

art as a respite from the tyranny of time

2011-11-25T07:54:00.000-08:00

my friend susan said, 'it's an odd thing we do, putting pictures on the walls in museums.' hmm, i'd thought about this, having spent half my life in such places. my first thrill came in the louvre at sixteen, not from a painting on the wall, rather from an american girl sitting on the floor, drawing. watching her do so made chills run up and down my spine. the same had happened in the darkroom as i watched the photo form in the developer.

these first orgasmic experiences appeared in the process, not the finished product. rarely has a work on the wall stopped me, though it finally happened last week. a late painting by manet of a woman and the scene 'susanna and the elders' by tintoretto. they made me understand what i love about art. you see, the transitory nature of our existence plagues me. it's as if i'm always sitting in front of an hour-glass, burned to ashes by the falling salt. did this come from being a preacher's kid, the baptisms, marriages, and funerals? this too shall pass, a lesson i learned all too early.

different forms of art may seem to act otherwise. take the movies, for example. they've transfixed me from the beginning. and i know it's cause i escape the circle of my own thoughts, the world i've constructed out of the 10 billion stimulae striking my eye every second. according to my mood, the color of the sky, the sound of airplanes or butterflies, i form a buzzing conglomeration of images called 'reality'. my reality and your's? well, they're bound to be different. how do we agree on anything, except out of necessity?

in essence, a symphony replaces my flow with another. a painting may, certainly a poem. my time disappears (and i insist 'my time' my own construction), the passing moments which terrify me, the falling of a sparrow from the sky. we plague ourselves, no other does it, not even the universe. we've discovered art as a cure for life.

posted more drawings. too bad they don't show up clearly on the web. printed, all the green tints disappear and what i'm hinting at stands out: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/android3

thankfullness won't flow from a clogged faucet

2011-11-24T09:27:00.001-08:00

jeez, not only did i wake feeling no gratitude, i felt absolutely resentful. why do i have to pull on my socks, straighten the bed, pour cereal in a bowl? can't somebody do all this for me? I mean, the president has a butler, clothes all laid out and he's helped into them. the cook brings the tangy coffee. his wife wipes his glasses and says, 'honey, is there anything more i can do for you?'

my anthropology teacher in college said, 'we live better than any kings in history before 1900.' and as i watch toddlers wheeled to the market in fancy strollers which could be first class on an airplane, i think, 'enjoy it now. you'll never be royalty again.' so, i suppose i have to admit being spoiled. yet, it doesn't seem that way. the more i can buy, the more comfortable i get, the worse my selfishness and ingratitude.

i'm trying to cook up a little thankfulness. really, it depends upon vulnerability. when i'm injured and the doctor solves the problem, i feel relieved. that is his job, of course, thus i can't completely experience the indebtedness i should feel. or when my mother bathed me after i crapped in my pants during a spelling test in the second grade, stumped by the word 'of,' i experienced more pain than pleasure. however, now, i do appreciate the touch of her hands.

okay, that's where i have to start. unless i can not only forgive my parents for bringing me into this world, i must muster some thanks. you see, life's a mixed bag. how can i thank them for the pain, the pleasure, the roller-coast of emotions and fortune, especially the tension i normally feel within me? and if i can't appreciate being born, how can i possibly be genuine in my embracing fate?

hmm, so far it hasn't worked. let me try another route. what events, people, etc have moved me. i stumble across these pictures of 'hollywood babylon', a production by winston colgan. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/bab the show truly moved me and i still have the sensations. perhaps cause i loved judy garland in 'the wizard of oz'. maybe due to the father-son playing leads and the conflict true. and then again, most of us feel like dwarfs in a world of big people, particularly when we're children.

as i look thru my pictures, past and present, little bells of joy go off. http://www.pbase.com/wwp i love the dancers, i remember the 11 year old hiking into the ruins of canyon de chelly and how good the oranges tasted in the heat. and my mother feigning great delight as i climb onto my christmas tricycle. aye, there's the rub. i got that vehicle stuck in the grass and wailed til she came and pulled me free. yes, it's mostly about mothers, all this, the ambiguities of thanksgiving. lucky the ones who've had a near-death experience and making the choice to come back, take responsibility for their lives.

thankfullness won't flow from a clogged faucet

2011-11-24T09:26:00.000-08:00

jeez, not only did i wake feeling no gratitude, i felt absolutely resentful. why do i have to pull on my socks, straighten the bed, pour cereal in a bowl? can't somebody do all this for me? I mean, the president has a butler, clothes all laid out and he's helped into them. the cook brings the tangy coffee. his wife wipes his glasses and says, 'honey, is there anything more i can do for you?'

my anthropology teacher in college said, 'we live better than any kings in history before 1900.' and as i watch toddlers wheeled to the market in fancy strollers which could be first class on an airplane, i think, 'enjoy it now. you'll never be royalty again.' so, i suppose i have to admit being spoiled. yet, it doesn't seem that way. the more i can buy, the more comfortable i get, the worse my selfishness and ingratitude.

i'm trying to cook up a little thankfulness. really, it depends upon vulnerability. when i'm injured and the doctor solves the problem, i feel relieved. that is his job, of course, thus i can't completely experience the indebtedness i should feel. or when my mother bathed me after i crapped in my pants during a spelling test in the second grade, stumped by the word 'of,' i experienced more pain than pleasure. however, now, i do appreciate the touch of her hands.

okay, that's where i have to start. unless i can not only forgive my parents for bringing me into this world, i must muster some thanks. you see, life's a mixed bag. how can i thank them for the pain, the pleasure, the roller-coast of emotions and fortune, especially the tension i normally feel within me? and if i can't appreciate being born, how can i possibly be genuine in my embracing fate?

hmm, so far it hasn't worked. let me try another route. what events, people, etc have moved me. i stumble across these pictures of 'hollywood babylon', a production by winston colgan. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/bab the show truly moved me and i still have the sensations. perhaps cause i loved judy garland in 'the wizard of oz'. maybe due to the father-son playing leads and the conflict true. and then again, most of us feel like dwarves in a world of big people, particularly when we're children.

as i look thru my pictures, past and present, little bells of joy go off. http://www.pbase.com/wwp i love the dancers, i remember the 11 year old hiking into the ruins of canyon de chelly and how good the oranges tasted in the heat. and my mother feigning great delight as i climb onto my christmas tricycle. aye, there's the rub. i got that vehicle stuck in the grass and wailed til she came and pulled me free. yes, it's mostly about mothers, all this, the ambiguities of thanksgiving. lucky the ones who've had a near-death experience and making the choice to come back, take responsibility for their lives.

our investment in cultural icons

2011-11-23T08:40:00.000-08:00

their first murder (weegee)

using celebrities to stabilize our view of the world certainly a risky business. hence, our attention to scandal, especially sexual. i'm not surprised when a financier robs the bank. that's what he's born to do. however, if a president makes it with his secretary, big news! this, despite the affairs of jfk, the mistresses of eisenhower and roosevelt, and i find my interest (and more) aroused.

everybody likes to gawk at the mess of a car crash, the scene of crime, me included. i guess none of us can avoid three important questions: is it a danger, can i eat it, will it have sex with me? the survival of the species depends upon this awareness and taking immediate action. unfortunately, all kinds of sex illegal and threatening. no wonder fewer and fewer people marrying, both in the united states and in europe. why be prosecuted for having three husbands when you can simply live with three men? definitely, this is progress. if you can do without the wedding dress, maybe you can live modestly.

oscar wilde wrote: our servants will do our living for us. that's exactly the role of the public on pedestals we idolize. i sit in a bookstore cafe and watch men and women, young and old, studying US, people magazine, fan games day after day. the thrill only goes when one of them fails to behave - if it's a politician, he/she a dead duck. movie stars, on the other hand, cash in as long as they can. mea culpa gives them more covers.

and once a generation passes, new idols are born. each has its own. frank sinatra lives, as does elvis. we didn't depend on them at the bank. they get free passes. elect a poker-faced president on whom we can project all our hopes and desires and we're doomed to disillusionment, a huge disparity between promises made and promises kept. i, for sure, like to deny the complexities of the economy. print more money, that's my solution. why didn't anybody think of it?

you see how limited my resources and knowledge are. and i don't feel i'm alone. aren't you a one-issue voter? what matters most? mortgages, abortion, taxation? whatever we focus on becomes our god and we can do no wrong.

things can always be made to look different. here's a watercolor version of the revolving door: www.pbase.com/wwp/door2

who are those living in the tents?

2011-11-22T09:22:00.000-08:00

confessedly, as i walked the streets of berkeley, the tent cities seemed created by the folks who sleep in the parks usually. that's a callous attitude, but i've always been reluctant to be rowdy. despite me being a slacker, it looks like this consciousness-raising technique working on everybody, in some way.

rep. deutch from florida introduced an amendment to the constitution banning corporation political funding and removing them from 'personhood' which gives them the same rights and assurances as individuals. the ruling by the supreme court to allow unlimited spending by the conglomerates could be considered the death-nell of democracy. more power to rep. deutch.

something else that had to be done: outing the people most responsible. a new poll on http://www.bravenewfoundation.org/ allows you to vote for the villains. this at least allows names, faces, and companies to be put together. these elders won't like it. everybody in america wants to be seen as democratic and middle-class, especially the most wealthy. to stand out too much makes you a target. i voted for my supreme evil-doer. see if you can guess who it is.

as more leaders come forward, the issues ramping up. you have to have charismatic figures speaking for you, centers of vocal and social energy, otherwise these grassroots movements peter out. going to be very interesting to see what develops.

the revolving door has more than one meaning: www.pbase.com/wwp/door

how did i find the other me in me?

2011-11-21T09:04:00.000-08:00

discomfort. (unpleasant to say it, but somebody had to.) by changing places and circumstances, cat-sitting for a week in berkeley and roaming the streets and museums of san francisco. we're not talking extreme deprivation, just a change in routine, the house cold, the bathroom upstairs, walking to the subway past the homeless posing as demonstrators and kids flooding out of the high school for lunch.

what happened? people started talking to me out of the blue. a couple before a flamenco concert, a pretty grad student from san francisco studying in paris and complaining about the bus service. another time a woman from philadelphia asked me where to get off for golden gate park. she praised the transportation system! and said, 'how wonderful to live in a clean city.' yes, i remember years ago a pop bottle exploding on the top of our family car passing through her town.

i found myself joking with strangers, complimenting them on their work, in other words i came out of my shell in some way that encouraged people to speak with me. what a pleasure. that hasn't happened in a long time. and it's all because of discomfort. back home in my little room, i don't have to go anywhere. i'm not pulled out into the world of Titian and Pissaro, not stunned by a beautiful painting by Manet and a couple by Watteau.

in fact, i had a small epiphany. after gazing at photos in the realistic manner, not to mention aisles of art in the same style, i stumbled on a little cezanne. i'd never understood his appeal to picasso and the moderns. this time he felt absolutely refreshing, me seeing his piece as an abstraction. what a relief from all these wonderful, ordinary, expected versions of reality. abstraction lies behind every work of art, yet it took cezanne to bring it forward.

yes, here in my little nine by twelve foot monk's cell, lovely trees out the window, the bathroom and hot water a step away, the Internet service like lightning, heat in winter, coolness in summer, a soft bed, food a quick fix, i tend to rot away in my thoughts, my very pleasant daydreams. this time, coming back, i asked myself, 'where have the last thirty years gone?'

a few photos and watercolors from this expedition, the revolving door, and that is definitely meant metaphorically:

www.pbase.com/wwp/door

www.pbase.com/wwp/door2

once you owe money, you don't own your soul

2011-11-08T08:00:00.000-08:00

'now wait a darn minute,' i can hear you saying. 'that may be true for some people but not for me.' debt is like death, or the ten commandmants, everyone insists on an exception. 'we need money for college, to buy a house, to invest in stocks. money makes money.' hmm, that's not what i'm hearing from the newspapers and my friends.

take an education, for example. students leaving school after five years twenty to forty thousand dollars in the hole. how long will it take to crawl out of it? what options have you surrendered, like back-packing around the the world or meditating in an ashram? ultimately, you become a conservative by virtue of your pact with the bank. you may demonstrate against the government out of frustration: 'i was too young. i didn't know. you evil folks wrote checks for me.' tell it to the judge.

or buying a house. yes, property changed humankind forever, and i think for the better, ie. it created individuality. no longer were you merely a tribal entitiy. and now i'll reveal the truth, my family in bondage the whole time i was growing up. yes, i remember my mother writing she couldn't even buy a candy bar, adding insult to injury since her family lost their wealth in the great depression. we closed off rooms in winter, slept with hot bricks, bundled up in warm clothes. when my father exited the bus from the east where he'd applied for the army, he almost fainted, not having eaten in three days.

and when food in short supply, the kids fight over it, identifying it with love. we survived borrowing money from my uncle walter, the batchelor. in the end i paid a terribly price for it, my personality undergoing a complete change when i lived with him and alcoholic uncle luzerne. driven inward by the feeling i must conform to their wishes, all of us indebted to him, i couldn't fight back and psychologically knuckled under and succumbed. read the letters exchanged with my family at the time: www.pbase.com/wwp/son

yes, a faustian bargain feels good at the time, saying to yourself, 'i will never have to pay it back.' alas, the truth quite otherwise. the sword of damocles may very well hang over your head for the rest of your life.

can there be jobs without a steve jobs?

2011-11-07T13:33:00.000-08:00

many moons ago, peter smith, head of university arts & lectures, said, 'what's needed is a center of energy.' in terms of the real world, this person provides the drive making things happen, whether it's a product, service, or religion. and, alas, i'm not one of these people. i'm the idea guy. when it comes to mustering community forces, i'm an utter dud.

i've been browsing through the coming jobs war by the ceo of the gallup polling group, jim clifton. usually i shy away from war books, however i figured i'd give this a shot. as usual, the book contains one premise: entrepreneurs needed. the innovative may announce, even begin, a revolution. the audience-builder has to create desire in the hearts of consumers. the author sites many examples of inventions turning into also-rans. i think of the lcd, invented by americans and ridden across the finish line by the japanese.

anybody advising steve j. about phones, music services, and pads, said, 'hey, stevee, these dead territories, why re-invent the wheel.' the rest history. building a better mouse-trap not time wasted. the rats continue to climb aboard a sinking ship, for that is what the gallup guy gallops toward. 'we need thirty percent of the world's smartest to survive. health care killing us. school dropouts, how they going to help pick us up?'

you know, the trouble with starting a business is you have to work all the time. it's so much nicer to collect a paycheck and have another life. mercifully, i've been able to do it. psychics tell me i've had so much responsibility and seen so much destruction, i get a vacation. i'm not sure inventing the device blowing up atlantis qualifies me for an easy time. well, life is not fair. i'll take what i can get.

usually, i've lost my jobs through boredom: bagging groceries, pulling chain for a surveyor, sweeping a dime-store. as long as i can dream while working i'm free. god-forbid i should be supervised! how i got through this lifetime i'm not sure. true, i'm a workaholic when it comes to writing, theater, art, photography. let me drive myself insane, even if i lack the skills and desire to make fame pay.

if you find the entrepreneurs at fault, you'll have to build your own factory for cannonballs. those will always be needed, even if it's been done before. take choreographers for example: www.pbase.com/wwp/dancepics

the struggle to resist belief

2011-11-05T10:42:00.000-07:00

like most mortals, at seven and eight i started creating categories, putting cats into this one, socks into another, girls into several. i couldn't help myself. the world overwhelmed me with too much information. for example, ten billion stimuli hit our eyes every second. of those we can actively recognize forty and deal with four at most. we create a life day by day, editing out what we fear or doesn't seem useful.

lately i've spent time with two friends devoured by conspiracy theories. these occupy their minds to organize the world. as usual, nefarious political and financial people conspire to get everything, to steal from us, to make us suffer. unfortunately, it's true, though the upper one percent would never agree. 'we're creating job opportunities.'

yet, what's really happening in the minds of my friends? the making sense of the world by adopting a system which keeps their busy minds occupied. and when i watch people pouring over the bible in cafes, i think the same, 'they've reduced life to this particular, very comprehensive and confusing book from which you can justify anything.' luckily, it evades science, economics, anything which might prove even more difficult to assimilate. again, frantic intelligences being absorbed in a complete universe.

any paradigm can be proven true. that's the beauty of it. all you have to do is accept a few basic premises without proof and the rest follows! this, you have to admit, completely ingenious. what it eliminates is doubt, ambiguity, and the hell of independent thought. and, of course, i would like to suggest an alternate route.

CANDLE

Surely you weren't meant
to be born here in this
kitchen, waiting for
the ants. Old Greek poets
sang of dresses falling
from lovely limbs, the moon
bouncing off the water.
Sanskrit sages denied
anyone could resist the
flute of Krishna, tunes
fluttering through the perfumed
leaves. Married women
dropped wedding rings,
shyness, customs, the
husband's heavy sighs,
to slide out the door
into the forest. And if
you find yourself doing
the same, open the poems
of Bhartrihari and drink
the deep silence of the stars,
burn like the candle
you left far behind
watching in the window.

taking in all the evidence: www.pbase.com/wwp/poems

make everyday count 'cause it's all you've got

2011-11-03T21:01:00.000-07:00

it's painful giving people advice on how to live. they never do what i say. yet i can't stop it. for example, two fellows yesterday, both basically out of jobs, early thirties, upset about what to do next. one burdened by student loans, he can't even imagine what he might want. the other, just fired as the head of a theater in a state of shock. and i couldn't hold myself back, poor guys.

'go to saudi arabia for a year and pay off your debt.' 'figure out how to get to england and establish a career.' my god, these are big chunks to swallow. everything seems incredibly beyond reach when you're depressed. and you may be down in the dumps unexpectedly, me for example. this week a 200 dollar brake job on my truck turned into a 1000 dollar one. i offered to give the cashier at the car dealer my blood instead of cash. she didn't go for it.

okay, let's break this down into bites. at five years old you liked to dress up, 'who shall i be today?' you're on the edge, slaving as a cook, but you can do it. salvation army's just a block away. acquire an outlandish wardrobe and be a drag queen at breakfast, join the local people doing mad fashion shows. and as for you, having had england as your playpen at five, you can start stealing english silver from antique stores and eat off it every evening. be a thief of time.

He did not dare touch the coffin
a passion in glass
a lesson in perfection
He
did not dare hope
for anything so living
as love
in the flesh
He satisfied himself with eyes
Imagine
the shock of the dropping
the cracking of the coffin
Snow White
jarred awake from the land
of her dreams
into his

We think of ourselves as victims
yes
that's a good beginning
victims
Everything done to us
birth was done to us
nobody asked
death was done to us
we resisted
personally
Eyes were done to us
and noses
socks and shoes
we didn't ask to live
in houses and pants
streets were done to us
circuses and cotton candy
beer and brothels came to us without our asking
We took them
we took it all
what else were we supposed to do

the androids have been asking for you: www.pbase.com/wwp/android2

van gogh did not shoot himself?

2011-10-31T12:10:00.000-07:00

this comes as an incredible shock to someone who wrote his first good play at 23 about van gogh and gauguin in the south of france. mainly, cause like most of his generation, he accepted van gogh as the image of christ, sacrificing himself for the beauty of art.

here's a quote from the news: In Van Gogh: The Life, a 976page doorstop published this week, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith say it's more likely that the celebrated Dutch post-Impressionist painter was the victim of an accidental shooting. The suspected perpetrators: a couple of teenage bullies obsessed with American cowboys and playing with a gun, and protected on his deathbed by van Gogh claiming an act of suicide.

oddly, in a way this makes him more of a saint, refusing to disclose the identity of his killers in order to protect them. yet, any disturbance to our view of an icon unsettling, to say the least. t0 those who wish to believe in the artist as hero, especially the artists themselves, this comes as a blow. we've always prided ourselves on suffering until dead when we're discovered.

with the myth exploded, how can we continue to live in 9 by 10 rooms, storing our drawings and manuscripts in a rented storage space (me)? true, had van gogh lived another year he'd have found himself celebrated and paid as a painter, the saintly image discarded. and who was it said, 'many have quit just as they were about to succeed?'

let's face it, the art-world overwhelmed by the productive slaving in their studios. once they could have made chairs, pewter dishes, walking canes. alas, these occupations have gone the way of horse-drawn buggies. everyday i look through design and art books at the bookstore over my cafe americano. and for all the liberation of post-modernism, the power of a van gogh and gauguin missing.

duchamp created the copy of the copy as artifact, and his command incredible prices. television cannibalized the movies and history. starting in 1950 every attempt at art a facsimile of the past. what has artistic freedom done to us? confused the whole picture!

van gogh and gauguin in the south of france: www.pbase.com/wwp/flame

it's wonderful to have memories you can edit

2011-10-30T13:16:00.000-07:00

and that was part of my original intent. we moved thirty times by the time i graduated high school, age 16. and it included two years in the utah desert and two years in germany. this formed a habit it never occured to me to kill. i unconsciously followed a family tradition, all the while telling myself, 'a poet has to be a citizen of the world.'

we re-create memories. turns out they don't really exist. this makes having a pile of shards quite exciting. for example, the day i received the telegram telling me my father died unexpectedly. after calling my mother, i said to myself, 'i'm going to enjoy this day.' yes, we think once our parents gone, we'll be free of them. i've been wrong both times.

i wandered over to the berlin zoo. looking at captured animals in the grey light couldn't have cheered me up. and i recall a cheap eating house where clients feasted at communal tables. what i remember: the wire-rimmed glasses of the fellow sitting opposite me. actually, my stunned state didn't allow much reflection.

or the day bali finally turned sour for me. a german guy told me it would, after awhile. the ceremonies which had been bright and exotic, lost all their color. the garbage in the gutters overshadowed the kids painting florid pictures. i'd overstayed my welcome, my senses surfeited, the pimples of the populace now showing through.

i figured in old-age i'd like a lot of memories, and how true it's become, as long as i can leave out nostalgia or the desire to change anything, like the time the girl in amsterdam finally agreed to make love with me and i'd gotten so angry i took my revenge by walking out. how stupid can you be! or the bleak goodbye to renate before she committed suicide.

in a good mood you can choose the high times, leave out the turbulent stomach or the aching back carrying a pack. often i simply remember a street corner in bangkok, a weary museum guard in istanbul, the look of bottecelli under glass. each gives me a thrill. i was there. i saw it all. and with a little editing the past charmed and bright.

the planning for a trip, the memories a few days after, this is all you really want. the actual journey full of potholes. and once you get home, the photos gradually replace the adventure. yes, you traveled the world. doing it on the cheap, you got down with the people more than once too often. these aspects of the facts can be deleted. the young save up a wealth of magical details, hitching through ireland and crossing the border into guatemala, photos of wanted guerillas all over the guards' walls, as they fingered high-powered rifles, staring at you.

www.pbase.com/wwp/travel

www.pbase.com/wwp/zen

the myth of always taking yourself with you

2011-10-27T16:06:00.000-07:00

finding your true self? d.h. lawrence would never agree. 'which self, i am many selves?' perfectly true, within limits. as i've stated many times before, only brain damage does our present personality in. otherwise, we tend to lope along at the same speed, especially without the intervention of fate.

everyday i get a new inspiration. i'll go back to kyoto, berlin, mexico city, and after a few peeks at travel books over coffee, i'm almost instantly disinclined. guess it's like the love mafia: once you've been disillusioned you can't overlook the pimples, bad-breath, scuffed shoes. passion now impossible in this situation.

the same with cities and countries. india spoiled me for india and russia for russia. in sri lanka i stumbled on an incredible ceremony worshiping a tree: candles, incense, singing. the next day i returned to find ashes and silence. so, when i romanticize berlin, i forget the gaffitti. in vancouver it was the claustrophobia and madness caused by the closed bay. even new york city has suffered a sea-change, the fountain of my youth.

and where i've lived for the past thirty years? that's a laugh. absolutely no romance. plenty of friends, but otherwise... i guess it's a matter of who wants to be trapped with a lover in the same town? cynical, but realistic, though reality certainly over-rated.

the palm ultimately goes to paris, the tattered cliche. i can't explain why it's worked. one morning in the 60's i did arrive on the train early, april stores opening, sidewalks being washed, the sun warm, the windows sparkling. perhaps that cast a glow. i met miriam on the plane. hand-patsy, one thing led to another, finally a hotel room with a window on notre dame. and toshiko, met in london, pursued to paris, kissed under the eiffel tower, a marriage proposal sent to japan politely refused, 'i didn't know you felt that way.'

people flirt in the subway. young ladies, gracious grand dames. you can actually talk with them. now that i'm wrinkled and stooped, i wonder what kind of a reception i'd get? i'm cat-sitting next month for my friend Q as she flies to france. maybe she'll be able to tell me. at the very least, i won't look at guide books to paris tomorrow. i've been disappointed enough for one week. my paris self, where are you?

let's look again: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/1970

you will have to live with the pointless but powerful desire to create

2011-10-27T00:53:00.000-07:00

as i was packing up to leave the lookout, a rather frail and thin fellow with a short, black beard spoke up from the bottom of the stairs. 'hi'. i told him the floor wet with mopping. he said, 'okay,' only he didn't go. he acted like we knew each other. who the hell?

i had planned to leave within the hour, felt impatient, yet invited him up. we stood waiting for the floor to dry. finally, i realized this the lookout who'd retired last year. we'd worked thirty years together and met but once. ah, the voice. no wonder i knew without knowing.

we got to talking. would he take his trailer south? he seemed in no hurry to leave, and i thought, 'this is very auspicious and remarkable. likely, we'd never meet again, he turning 75, me not far behind.' he pulled off the cap to his camera. i asked, 'have you gotten back to painting?' 'been thinking about it.' 'you could put your stuff on the web.' he paused and pondered. 'i can't think of why i'd want to do that.'

my god, i had a shock. doesn't everyone want their work known, to be known, to give pleasure? evidently, he created out of the urge to do so, no other reason necessary. i'd never met such a being, not in our world of celebrity and hype, not to mention my own maniacal urge to be invisible but recognized. maybe this was the message he had for me.

you don't need a reason, you're just stuck with this restlessness, get used to it. where have i said this before? i've always said everything, it led me to a dead-end and now all i can do is look at picture-books like a child. hmm, let's ask the rabbi. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/rabbi

if you saved the world, what would the neighbors say?

2011-10-25T22:34:00.000-07:00

probably nothing very kind. gratitude doesn't come easily to human beings. imagine everyone in town shouting, 'hey, we were going to heaven, or asleep, why didn't you let the sky fall, the rains come? even god would have destroyed us with a flourish and been happy. you had to keep the same old thing going.'

this is to console myself for not having rescued humankind, much as my mother expected it of me. yes, every poet a mama's boy, not necessarily in a bad way. it's just the bar set so high. you can't just write a few jingles for soda-pop ads, no, you have to write paradise lost or king lear. ordinary rhymes won't do, you have to invent a new language, honored by the nobel prize.

trouble is, actually, everybody wants to cure the ills that beset us. even the guy who sold me my new glasses, he's studying bio-tech in order to feed the masses and cure the aids epidemic in africa. how nice to be so young! he loves math and science. i basically flunked out of engineering at university. the first semester i played games, kissed girls on the bridge over the tracks with the train howling by below. second semester i dropped off to sleep after supper, rose at midnight, studied til six in the morning, and catnapped once again, all to no avail.

if i hadn't switched to literature, i'd be pounding nails somewhere or serving up drinks. come to think of it, i've never used that college degree, not for anything practical. and i've become pretty much convinced all the diplomas in the world can't match noah with his boat. yes, that man did it, why i almost stepped on a rattlesnake yesterday and did crush a few ants.

what in tarnation makes all of us feel the tsunami has to be stopped by our bare hands? was it that story of the boy who rescued holland from the sea by sticking his finger in a dike? if only it were that easy. i suspect you'd have to invent an anti-gravity machine to propel every last dog, child, and squirrel off the planet before it implodes. fat chance.

true, i continue to draw androids, hoping one will come alive and present us (me) with eternal life. www.pbase.com/wwp/android2 bringing the fountain of youth back from the future. yet, my true feelings revealed in this poem: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/angel it's the call of despair from the boy who cried wolf one too many times.

what if you don't have time for it?

2011-10-17T15:11:00.000-07:00

my friend leslie, when diagnosed with breast cancer, exclaimed, "i don't have time for this!" a potter with a new studio, she didn't want any interruptions. luckily, the operation a success and she finished her work. my friend susie had different thoughts, diagnosed with uterine cancer, "suddenly, the passion of my life, the novel i've nursed, didn't seem important at all!" she too recovered, busy at finishing the book.

i keep ransacking my own history to find out what i haven't yet done. when i was a kid, i read a comic where the protagonist sold his time for a nice house, nice kids, nice car. suddenly, he discovered he'd little time left to trade. a very dramatic picture of all those minutes and hours flying away and the desperation on his face, it's stuck with me for sixty years.

time is of the essence. time waits for no one. a stitch in time saves nine. i can't help feeling all of us bear this burden. what cures procrastination? i suppose a close call might: accident, heart, anything threatening our physical existence.

and i'm still suffering from finding all those facts about the body: ten thousand red cells die every second, our blood travels fifty-thousand miles a day, we've ten billion plus neurons in our brain. it assaults any theory of spirituality, any belief in what we do matters. this stuff makes it hard for me to take anything seriously. let's face it, we're all tourists, and we'll visit the catacombs last.

i've just looked through a book on nevada brothels, desert rose by marc mcandrews. for some reason i've always had a fascination with prostitution. when flying to new york, a black guy sat next to me and reveled in his tales of working in a san francisco brothel. and now i can't say, 'why not?' even if i've never dared enter that world. true, working at lake tahoe above the casinos i did write a series of poems about it: www.pbase.com/wwp/gambler

what does this have to do with the passage of time? we're physical beings, animals if you like, and freud right, sex programmed into us in a big way. when walking about we're always on the watch: is it dangerous, can i eat it, will it have sex with me? and how we deal with the opportunities, how we fulfill the few days that are ours, to deny it seems to throw away whatever lease on life we have.

some days everything seems revolting

2011-10-15T08:59:00.000-07:00

alas, i've never been one to march in any cause. call it cowardice. call it rationality. not a good team player, i hate to pass the ball (or the buck). not that i don't admire the faithful. they usually react to economic injustice or some version of inequality. and it's always the rabble who have the courage to cast stones, despite bibical advice to the opposite.

unfortunately, the result depends upon several things. if it's a violent revolt that succeeds, usually a much more tyrannical system prevails. this because people tire of hardship and chaos, and because leaders who can win a war want to run a country in the same way. in violence the scum usually rise to the top. those with a desire to control and profit, the fascist crowds put into order by a charismatic leader.

germany in the thirties the saddest story. an army brat, i lived in germany 1954-56, playing in old bunkers, walking on abandoned airfields, passing holes in the middle of cities. as a teenager, all that interested me sex and girls, my ignorance of recent history abysmal. still, something sank into my bones merely by proximity. norway invaded by germany the week i was born, may 5, 1940, and my first years spent waiting for safeway to open, people in the line holding their ration cards. i collected old tires, getting, i think, a quarter a piece.

my experience of the 60's mainly one of cynicism and fear. i joined the coast guard reserve, never called up, the boot camp experience one of the worst in my life. i remember standing watch at night on government island, watching the car-lights of freedom on the oakland freeway and listening to my fellow sufferers shouting and crying in their sleep. my father a chaplain in the army, i'd had a completely different experience of post life.

kids revolted against being drafted. that's what drove the protests. and i often felt they were self-serving. still, to live under the gun a terrible existence. yet now i do sympathize a lot more with a democratic military that responds to civilian control. and i understand every society will have those who belong naturally to the soldier caste. i'm not a fool. i know tyranny must be nipped in the bud. however, when alcibiades sent the ships from athens to italy and they disappeared in the conflict, it ended the greatness of the athens we celebrate today.

so, the leaders of a change determine the result, and the more peaceful the developments, the happier everyone will be. the dissolution of the soviet union a miracle in this regard. think what a mess it could have been, probably engulfing europe in the process. and i have to smile at those who rail against welfare and the easy life of indigents in america. imagine what eliminating social services would do. instantly, we'd live in a chaos of beggary and theivery.

without leadership, no focus, no organization, no credibility. this last important. even in the indian wars, when tribes didn't have kings and captains, washington designated leaders and dealt with them. and of the indian fighters we remember the heroes like chief joseph and geronimo, we admire the charismatic, and hopefully those we discover today will have hearts of gold, and not of ice.

here's an interesting article on the current protests. remember: democracy only lasts as long as enough people feel they're getting a fair share and have a voice. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/15/business/in-private-conversation-wall-street-is-more-critical-of-protesters.html?nl=nyregion&emc=ura1

if you want the answer: deregulation

2011-10-13T15:07:00.000-07:00

o no, i hate thinking about anything political. as a poet, i'm a tyrant. 'if i were running things, i'd do this, and i'd do that', all the while knowing any society manufactured by a theory ends up as a terrible dictatorship. you see, the theorists end up with all the money, the fine houses, and so on.

anything i could possibly say would end up creating a mess. yet...yet...i do think i've a few insights. see, i basically read headlines, snippits of stories. today, for example, about the president raising campaign money, hoping to hold off the billions available to his opponents. or, the story behind steve jobs' adoption and his biological father and novelist half-sister.

how could i possibly formulate any theories from such meager investigation. however, as hamlet said, 'i know a hawk from a handsaw.' and i have taken two classes in the russian revolution and one in the american. if you look at beginnings, you learn a lot. for example, the colonial 'rabble' with the help of the french, defeated the british. and the more educated 40 percent of the winners headed for canada.

doesn't that tell you something about the united states and it's constant wars? we've had one on the average every 14 years until recently. now they never seem end. can any addict stay high all the time without crashing? teachers go jobless, while soldiers get killed. the best educated nation will dominate the future, that goes without saying.

jeez, when i get polemical, i hate myself, even if it makes my evening walks go like wildfire. i'm having so many conversations with the myself, the scenery doesn't distract me, despite it's magnificence. shame, shame. and i haven't even addressed my headline.

all you have to do to unravel the present economic debacle is watch the newsreel of ronald reagan signing the bill deregulating the savings and loan companies. he gives a big smile, almost with a little dance, and says, 'we've done it! we've done it!' during his reign, the income of people went from the most equal across the nation in history - to the most unequal in history.

what's a little savings & loan crash? i think it only cost two hundred billion. more and more deregulation and the costs spiral upward. and those cashing in cry bloody murder when you try to hold them back: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opinion/panic-of-the-plutocrats.html?_r=1&ref=paulkrugman

unfortunately, the lesson luther learned when the princes squashed the peasant revolt: he'd need those high-powered guys to oppose the pope. you have to have big bucks coming from somewhere to promote any cause you may have.

in 1976 i celebrated the bicentennial with a work called murphy's rebellion.you can peruse it here and see how awful i'd be were i in charge: www.pbase.com/wwp/murphy

my life as a poltergeist

2011-10-10T15:14:00.000-07:00

in my early twenties i tried to be invisible. riding buses in san francisco, i wanted to watch the commoners and listen to their lingo. this material i'd turn into poems for the king. (w.h. auden said, 'every poet wishes to be an advisor to the emperor.') even today i think, 'maybe the president will call me and ask for my opinion on the state of the nation.' for better or worse, it hasn't happened yet.

when i stayed in amsterdam with geert's brother, he freaked out. he said, 'it's like having a ghost in the house.' i slept in a closet. he must have heard strange sounds, like those little noises i make without realizing it, or the shuffling of the flyers i collected at the museums - amsterdam has 42 - especially from the van gogh museum, since my first good play about vincent and gauguin in the south of france, flames will not feed us www.pbase.com/wwp/flame

i've always loved joyce's line from ulysses, 'hamlet was the ghost of his father.' i suspect many writers and artists come from families where they weren't listened to, in effect, poltergeists in their own home, entities which might startle people once in awhile with an unexpected cry or breaking of a lamp. remember how your parents were always asking, 'how did that happen?' for years i had the urge at public performances to stand up and shout, 'look at me! look at me!' had i done so, i might be sitting in psycho ward instead of on top of a mountain in the rain, waiting for winter.

snow, yes, it snowed several days ago, and i felt that old alienation. suddenly, the world we knew so well becomes the surface of the moon when it's full. movies like 'winter sleepers' by tom tykwer and 'the sweet hereafter' by atom egoyan capture this alien space, as if the road accidents that happen can only be investigated in slow motion, as if we must stumble through dense drifts. and remember the gunfight at the end of 'macabe and mrs. miller', the robert altman film, the heroes striving mightily to be real before dying?

one thing about a long life: everything vanishes into the mist and far off we hear the sounds of birds and laughter, nature hardly able to restrain itself, every bit of news we took so seriously meaningless today. poltergeists of the world, unite!

here are my visions of what others must be going thru: www.pbase.com/wwp/geist

and storm videos: http://youtu.be/OrR-nUIIQAM

it's hard not to fall for the hype

2011-10-06T10:28:00.000-07:00

i'm finding it difficult to trust myself, when it comes to the news. for example, amanda knox. at first i fell for the sex-crazy version, satanic ceremony, and so on. gradually, the media projection my eyes adopted wore off. i read several books by people meeting her in prison, examined the evidence - the rolling stone article revelatory - and realized i'd been bamboozled. i felt as sad as relieved when she acquitted and released two days ago. it's something that never should have happened, yet look at my original response.

and now steve jobs has died. most of us couldn't help admiring him, though i haven't found apple products at all useful. his dropping out of college, seeing the symbol potential for computers, his firing from apple and the return, his wonderful commencement address at stanford available on youtube, what's there not to like? i just finished the presentation secrets of steve jobs by carmine gallo, a lot of great tips.

unfortunately, just before his death yesterday i ran across two caveats, which we should all remember when worshipping the rich and successful. the first on jobs as a philanthropist (or not): http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F01E2DD123BF933A0575BC0A9679D8B63&scp=2&sq=steve+jobs+theater&st=nyt here, i think we can give him the benefit of the doubt. he died much too young (56) to begin thinking of his public legacy, though with the years of illness he had the chance.

the other bit, though, much more damning, with hard evidence. mike daisey, a contemporary storyteller/actor presently doing a one-person show in new york: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/theater/mike-daisey-discusses-the-agony-and-ecstasy-of-steve-jobs.html?scp=1&sq=steve+jobs+theater&st=nyt it's about how apple products produced in china, the polluted villages and kids as young as 12 working. alas, i believe jobs could have funneled some of his billions back into creating better working conditions and helping the people who created his wealth.

of course, who am i to talk? i'm certainly a self-indulgent as anybody. luckily, nobody worships me or envies my success. i did run across a box of old slides the other day and posted them. www.pbase.com/wwp/1970 i do see a guy on some sort of mission. unfortunately, his heroes poets like baudelaire. you can see it in his eyes...

the day the gods were bored

2011-10-01T09:57:00.000-07:00

naturally, i've never understood the conflict between evolution and creationism. why couldn't consciousness been implanted in the neanderthals, changing them into homo-sapiens? that way the process includes a divine intervention, of some kind.

that's my theory. lolling about on olympus one fine eternal summer afternoon, those beautiful, lackadaisical bodies couldn't stand any more good weather. i mean, that happened to me. after eight months on the island of rhodes, i thought, 'this place breeds nothing but drunk swedes.' so i moved to a dark grimy basement in berlin. why should the gods be any different?

hermes, the most adolescent of them, though all could qualify, stifled a yawn and flipped a cigarette butt at hephaestus, just to get his dander up. this led to a brawl that died from pointlessness. what real harm could they do to each other? watching them, athena got one of her brilliant ideas. she should never have been born from the head of her father.

'hey, guys, why not have a little fun? see all those stupid animals running around below? they're so predictable! all they do is sleep, grunt, and eat each other. what if we gave a group a smidgen of our intelligence? say, those apes standing upright and banging each other with bones. they'd think they were gods, having a bit of us in them, and fantastic! they can find really creative and devious ways to kill each other. wouldn't that be fun to watch?'

and so it happened long ago, just before bibical times. athena threw her javelin at the ugliest of the savage animals, and the light bounced from brain to brain, they being group-animals and primates. from this moment arose babylon, new york, delphi. the gods had invented something special, their own video game and they called it darwin.

what has this particular mammal recently posted. oh, i know, www.pbase.com/wwp/rothko ah, the painter, the poet, the lover, the god, don't they all go together? we're flies for their sport, as shakespeare related.

do it while you're young (later you will be too timid)

2011-09-28T14:25:00.000-07:00

of course, i don't mean to spread despair amongst us older folks. that said, i'm now asking myself why i did all those things, like live in a berlin basement, wander the streets of new delhi, make love in the sand (really stupid) or swimming in salty water (i don't think astronauts have much fun from weightlessness).

ah, the answer snuck in there: sex, libido, pleasure in the physical world, buildups of random energy needing to be expended. had i been more sensible, would i have risked pregnancy (not mine, but yet my own), nights in new york on hooker's alley (going to a loaned apartment alone)?

true, i haven't given up entirely. alas, my last attempt at an affair a disaster. i couldn't swim blindly in a stormy sea, having faith i'd stay upright til i returned to land. no, no, no, as king lear shouted, no, no. these days all i want to do is daydream and be creativc. that's how my energy frittering itself away, not at full steam, lover on water-skiis.

you see, the less you know, the more fun you have, especially true in the physical world. you've all these ridiculous impulses you take seriously. my god, how i've moaned over an imaginary woman, dreamed of flying, gone a hundred miles an hour in a convertible with a drunk driver on a very dark night in indiana, throwing up all over the car-door without even knowing it. that was high-school.

see, as you advance in age, you naturally become careful. so and so, a good friend, ended up behind glass in a black coffin. jesus, she got killed by a baseball bat at a party, and i haven't even mentioned the great C word. lately, i've looked at the obits in the ny times. almost everybody toppling over younger than me.

and now i think, o boy, i don't have to stand in that rickety bus bounding along the worst dirt road in costa rica, for hours and hours. if i traveled now, i'd be a victim of tours, reclining in beds at the ritz, not even daring to pay for a call-girl, much less roaming the streets in search of miss Bad. even in my youth i didn't do that.

let me tell it like it is. learn a skill - and i mean damn well. play the ukulele, read tarot cards, learn to cut hair. go on the road and pay your own way. college becoming a sink-hole for the debts that bind. i love hanging out around all that intellectual stuff, but it didn't stop me from taking very stupid chances. i wish the same for you.

let's see, at 52 i wrote these notes: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/zen

i'm bewildered by my brain

2011-09-26T21:35:00.000-07:00

today i found out my forty-year writer friend steve suffered a massive stroke last may, right in the language part of his brain. with the help of his wife janice he's fighting to make it back (they expected him to die). he's walking and swallowing and learning to form simple words.

so i lay down on my bed and felt something intangible. then i realized, this is terror. lately, i've picked up a lot of stray facts: the brain 80% water, white and gray matter, about two and a half pounds. and it's doing all these things over which i have no control!

of course, if i were a supreme yogi, i could go into a trance and feel better. we're in trances all the time. take driving to san francisco. i can cover the whole distance without remembering anything but the conversation with myself, flashes of lightning in that underground lake. and there's always the caterpillar who couldn't walk when thinking about which leg to move first.

it's good we forget (the chinese believe we're blessed if we do). otherwise every moment would be added to another and recalling them all we'd soon be so burdened with the past, we'd crumble like a turtle swimming in jello. having met people with brain-damage i know it's the one way we can completely change our personality. why so frightening if we don't even know the person we used to be?

always, we've got things undone, i suppose that's it. when death is there, we're not, but we don't like treading the trail to meet him: pain, loss, the absence of independence. maybe it really is all about control. that being said, i offer this very interesting video from the TED site:

i've also been reading about steve jobs and trying out another apple product. here are drawings of my own brain done on his lozenge, not very flattering: www.pbase.com/wwp/pod

and related to the squishy situation in my noggin, three thousand lighting strikes bounced around the tower last week. did a short-circuit occur? am i no longer myself? all our thoughts electricity and water, what a concept!

if you could regret one thing, what would it be?

2011-09-22T22:38:00.000-07:00

true, i've felt regrets to be useless. and actually, i've been hard-put to dig one up. i could, of course, ask to be a nicer person, or a more ambitious one, maybe even famous as a writer, and so on. in other words, a complete sheep or a ravenous wolf. somehow, it seems pointless. i mean, i wouldn't have changed anything i've done, really, except one thing.

damn, i wish i'd savored each moment more! less nervous, less restless. of course, i enjoy remembering driving thru the desert in my vw bus, camping among shrouded louisianna trees, stopping for a rain-shower in new orlean's storyville, water dripping from the old wrought iron railings. yes, continuing along the mississippi coast right after hurricane camille, houses turned over, sand thrown over the road. i enjoyed touring williamsburg, hearing the museum docent proudly declaim on southern art.

alas, the end not so happy. i stored my vehicle in a brooklyn garage and endured the worst month in europe ever, not to travel again for fifteen years. yes, it was that bad, that lonely, the last time i visited my berlin friend renate before she drank poison and lept into oblivion. luckily, i landed two sisters for the drive back, susan horn and her sister. i did have to meet their russian mother, who said she'd kill me if anything happened to them.

what i mean is, i've learned we only live one day at a time and our imperative to take pleasure in at least one piece of it, even if we're meditating in a salt-mine, doing yoga in prison, reading poetry in the war zone. all this planning, all this ambition, all this remembering, what a waste. not that it isn't fun and often a balm, but the eternal truth? we put one foot in front of the other.

had i savored those moments, making love, drinking sherry, laughing at charlie chaplin, i could feel fulfilled. not only that, i would have understood early on the best we can do is help someone else enjoy a bit of their day, cause that's all they have too. dear, dear, it's not to be. i'm still dancing like a flea on the back of a flying pig. the moment i settle down, i feel i'm missing something.

and i've regressed, taking up the finger-painting i loved to do in the second grade.... www.pbase.com/wwp/finger

what if you woke up one morning and were a cockroach?

2011-09-16T20:53:00.000-07:00

today i went bananas with my samsung tab. i got the urge to look at the glass bead game by hermann hesse. why this book, i don't know. lately i've been nostalgic for the fifty-some years i read books like a monk. was it the search for the meaning of life? or merely a retreat into wonderful worlds i couldn't find around me? thinking i'd absorb some lessons from the classics, i read a lot of them.

and i began my quest for the illusive hesse, calling up a bunch of e-readers: nook, kindle, laputa, adilko, and so on. never did find the bead game, though i began downloading free classics by the dozens. the brothers karamazov, crime and punishment, pride and prejudice. each time reading a bit of the opening. none sparked my interest, not siddhartha, nor the complete wizard of 0z (though i read them all as a kid). amazing what's out there now, merely for the asking.

okay, i thought, maybe a bit of kafka. and that worked. i read the opening of the trial in english and then german. i'm one of those people who finds the work of franz very funny. he uses the conditional-conditional tense, as if to say, 'this may be true or it may not', his heroes confused as can be. last summer i listened to a new translation of the castle as i drove back and forth to the lookout. the images and situations still stick in my mind.

once i did a stage adaptation of the metamorphosis and played the bug myself. you can find the script here: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/kafka and when i visited prague, i bought a booklet showing the places kafka had lived and worked. the prague pics here: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/prag the town just coming out of the communist soggy grey, the place certainly lived up to my expectations. once a fanatic follower of K., i've never quite lost my taste.

what's his main insight? if you give up your own authority, you lose yourself in a search for approval and validation. his insight into the corporation/bureaucratic mentality exactly this. in the major works the hero called to stand up to the forces that be, and he always fails (except for, perhaps, the unfinished amerika, his fantasy of escaping to the far west). and once the protagonist kowtows, he's done for, lost in a melancholy and ultimately fatal dream.

'assume your own authority', what else is there to be said?

in total darkness you can see a candle thirty miles away

2011-09-14T23:17:00.000-07:00

i wonder what else we're capable of? lately, going through all the wonderful, useless random facts on my droid x, i keep discovering things about our bodies that astound me.

for example, in a lifetime our hearts pump a hundred million gallons of blood. my god, this one pound mass of tissue, how does it do it? (seeing my heart beating on a screen took my breath away.) and we've 100,000 miles of capillaries and veins. strung end to end that part of us would encircle the earth four times! and the human heart beats roughly 35 million times a year, 3.5 billion in a lifetime.

add further complexity: half your body's red blood cells are replaced every seven days. each day 400 gallons of recycled blood are pumped through the kidneys. two million red blood cells die every second. the numbers become more and more boggling. 100 billion neurons in the brain? and the brain 80% water?

as i see it in advancing age, i keep wondering how the hell i survived so long, all this going on without me even knowing it! all of our "thinking" is done by electricity and chemicals . every three days a human stomach gets a new lining. no wonder the processes can be upset by alcohol, heavy metals, amphetamines. i never understood where cancer came from. we're in a constant state of renewal.

when all's said and done, your body the most complicated thing in the universe. what more can it do that we haven't even imagined?

well, i've been thinking about the wonders of inebriation. new pictures: www.pbase.com/wwp/drunk

There are 10 million bacteria at the place where you rest your hands at a desk. wow, we must be a lot tougher than we think.

have you ever been drunk beyond memory?

2011-09-12T07:42:00.000-07:00

one of my most embarrassing: friends set up a date for me with a junior at the university of wisconsin, me a freshman in indiana. they lied about my age. i think i held up the image pretty damn well, until i drank one too many beers and dropped over the edge into limbo. next day, i learned what a fool i'd been.

and what do you do the day after? blush and leave town if you can, which i did, relieved to take the option. and what do you do if you can't leave for a new country? in other situations i've blustered, hidden my tracks, pretended it never happened, got drunk again. and that's the way i feel after the tenth anniversary of 9/11.

how do you make the obvious visible? it's the toughest thing in the world. what we see everyday certainly looks like a chair, but is it? isn't it, as plato maintained, merely an idea? and once we've come to picture an historical event as we've been trained to see it, can we really unravel it into it's component pieces and perhaps recover a bit of memory? http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/nationalism_in_the_aftermath_of_9_11_20110910/
no, one person's memory of an event can't clear away the dust thrown in our eyes.

collectively, we do not learn from history and repeat it every day. pardon me for my brashness, yet it was henry ford who said, 'history is bunk.' and i'm afraid he's right, much as i've always loved the study of history, it's full of good fairy tales. no, we copy the way our parents walk and talk. i catch myself making a statement like my dad or using a lovely sarcasm of my mother: if you don't like this hotel, you can go to another! yes, shame is a great way to keep your children under control, and a country.

what am i getting at? with the collapse of the communist threat, the people who had used it to maintain political control in the united states were at a loss. they'd a president who'd stolen the position, the laughing-stock of the population who avoided responsibility by going fishing. UNTIL...the momentous visual event of planes crashing into two tall buildings, the towers crashing and burning, provided a new enemy THE ARAB WORLD to replace the old.

i in my tower on that day didn't watch the news, rather listened on the radio. i knew if i watched the tv footage over and over it would plant a searing image into my brain. the voices in the street much more real and individual. i called my friend randy, who lived in greenwich village. he'd walked toward the smoke with thousands of others until the first tower collapsed. everyone turned tail, and looked back to see the second go down.

in such circumstances it's hard to know what you saw. evidently we don't contain memories, we reconstruct them every time and they degrade. in terms of political events they get re-written. like have a huge hang-over, we can't think straight the day after, not to mention ten years later after having taken our personal tragedy and making it a world one.

i did run across one short talk that clarifies the present situation:

http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_stewart_time_to_end_the_war_in_afghanistan.html

however after so much patriotism, jingoism, and loss, a man of common sense can't make much headway until the fires die down. and they can't, being constantly stoked to scare the population into submission.

what happens when you abandon your watchtowers? destruction

2011-09-10T23:33:00.000-07:00

it's quite amazing to me: nobody said a peep when the california division of forestry closed 80 firelookout towers about ten years ago. i still can't believe it. and the united states forest service closing more all the time (three on this forest this summer). where are these officials' heads? (i decline to express the obvious.)

in the past week a thousand homes burned near austin texas, a state that quit watching over itself years ago. you know what i hear? satellites, areal observation, both lies, foisted on the public. the first very expensive and as far as i know, a pie in the sky can't tell the difference between a campfire and a car engine. this is not a lighthouse situation. here the light flashes at me, and all too quickly.

another example. i worked on angora lookout at lake tahoe, closed in 2002. five years ago a fire one mile from the lookout burned 90 million dollar homes. had the tower been staffed, they'd have known right away that it wasn't a control burn, that it took off like a bat out of hell. friends who live on the ridge above watched the ashes settle on their roof as they packed up their cars, just in case. a fire changes everything.

of course, it's a numbers game. you gamble a large fire won't happen, in order to save pennies, and i mean minuscule amounts of money. almost fifty years up here and i have: no benefits, no retirement, no step raises, and earn 14 dollars an hour. you can't get much cheaper than that. one bulldozer equals 5 observation booths. which is more likely to save your home?

yes, yes, we love our machines. for a few years after california closed its lookouts they paid 6 million dollars a day (so i heard) for a gigantic dc10 airtanker that couldn't hit a bird in a barn. and everybody assumes we've been closed down for years, the last watchers those who announced the fall of troy and the irish towers shouting the arrival of viking ships.

check out the forest fire lookout association: http://www.firelookout.org/ fine folks dedicated to preserving and re-constructing towers.

and i've many pictures of lookoutlife: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/lookoutlife

the angora fire images http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=angora+fire&qpvt=angora+fire&FORM=IGRE

news from texas http://www.cbsnews.com/i/tim/2011/04/21/es_0421_TEXAS_FIRE_copy_480x360.jpg

finding your mate - what's the big secret?

2011-09-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

my lovely friend Q. beautiful, smart, hard-working, creative. she's been in two very long relationships. unfortunately, now on her own for several years, she hasn't come up with a new one. match dot com unearthed a lot of wannabes. alas, none struck a match for her. she works at home sixteen hours a day. could that be the problem? of course it is!

one very important circumstance leads to mating: PROPINQUITY. let's face it, most people marry the guy/girl next door. they've learned enough about each other to feel safe, to trust, to fight. (marriage a wrestling match. read pairing by richard bach. he maintains an honest, if angry first encounter essential, illusions about the other quickly shattered before they become a veil of tears.) others discover partners thru dancehalls, classrooms, work spaces.

you have to be around a lot of the kind of people you like. for example, i've never mated, yet romantic contacts have taken place, most through travel and theater. for example an artist and i made out under the stars next to the youth hostel once the home of mussolini's mistress. that led to a series of encounters with her in hamburg, berlin, and on a greek island www.pbase.com/wwp/greece . one that didn't go so far, a meeting in a london hostel, a brief love-making around midnight in a half-constructed building, and waiting all night in a burger hut for the hostel to open in the morning.

theater a tricky business, everybody in a heightened state. no wonder movie stars so caught up. they have to sit around half the day in empty trailers. the stage busier, so people even blinder. i recommend theater classes, less intense, more informal over time. never ever, however, fall in love with the character about which you salivate while they're onstage! what you see, the god or goddess, the highly simplified and eroticized version of the human being they really are.

again, let me repeat: PROPINQUITY, PROPINQUITY, PROPINQUITY, it's so easy. go to a lot of weddings and funerals: www.pbase.com/wwp/family my mother got her last mate of twenty years waiting for his wife to die of cancer and pouncing. who said love was ethical? as kurt vonnegut remarked, 'could we have a little less love - and more common decency?'

read more: http://www.bobsommers.com/tag/propinquity-effect

work is more fun than fun

2011-09-02T19:30:00.000-07:00

okay, so i'm crazy. please give me a little credit for knowing it. as i watch certain friends retire, fall apart and die or get bitter, projecting their own decay onto the world, i'm glad i'm still able to labor, though i need to define what i mean, or you'll onto have me thrown in the nuthouse.

look at it this way, a hundred years ago retirement didn't exist, nor health insurance, people survived i don't know how. (no penicillin, yet they did put cocaine in coke!) we've risen to the top like scum on a fermenting wine-barrel. true, benefits being slashed and if you truly want security, work for the government, they print the money.

this brings up the main reason people hate work: supervision and bureaucracy. what do teachers bitch about? not their time in the class room. or friends in the forest service? have you ever had to sit in useless meetings all day? if you're a professor, you can clap your hands and say 'i have, almost every day of my working life.'

and actually, i just finished reading a book every one should: 100 Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People you will learn an amazing amount of stuff about human nature. and low and behold, group decision-making most often faulty! i'll let you find the chapter. and did you know research proves our minds wander 30% of the time. what fun. i'm not the only bozo day-dreamer.

i have to admit something damning: i'm a workaholic. oh, my friends don't think so. lazy bum, works seasonally, looks out the window and makes money. unfortunately perhaps for me, i've never been able to stop doing. traveling, for example, you know it's reward only comes after you forget the beggars and sand-fleas. everything looks beautiful in colored photographs. writing, damn, hundreds of manuscripts. photography, a million pictures a year for eight years. now the drawings pile up. i think this section almost to five hundred: www.pbase.com/wwp/android

yesterday i did do eight hours of honest labor - and at the end i couldn't see straight. fifty years ago i stole a bag of family photographs from my grandparents. why, i don't know. i'm not a family history bug. i don't think we can take credit for what other people have done. these photos buried themselves in my belongings, and honest to god, i never looked at them, not til yesterday.

my niece dawn fascinated by our family through time. i decided, okay, i'll help her out and i scanned over two hundred pictures. not that it wasn't fascinating, especially since my sister's house burned down years ago, charring every evidence of familial memory. this is it, none of it can replaced. i drove myself, and later in the night the electricity died and i stiffened in my bed from the cold. so much for history keeping us warm.

you can scan the pics yourself: www.pbase.com/wwp/family

resume': reply to an inquiry from bill johnson

2011-08-29T19:27:00.000-07:00

A good, rich life, Wayne...and I am the richer a person for having shared a part of it. Question: Do you regret not having finished at Stanford?

Bill

hi bill,

so funny you should ask! for three months late spring, early summer, I had a theater dream almost every night. they took place in opera houses, on the beach, all kinds of stuff, mostly I was an in and out observer, but you were directing a lot of the shows, great stuff. what a dream career.

of course, I sometimes yearn for status. then I wake up the next morning feeling

I've escaped with my life (like now). it's the having to work at a false authority persona I could never quite do. psychics have told me I've had so much responsibility in past lives, I get to have fun in this one (I wish it felt more often like fun). and one told me I was too impressed by death when young. well, that certainly took away the illusion I'd never end. other factors like ww2 helped, my first five years of life, newsreels of battles and the dead buried at sea.

at thirteen I try to decide: writer or artist? the first only needed a pencil and paper, me a bookworm who couldn't draw realistically.

to answer your question, I sabotaged stanford from the beginning. as a teenager I decided 1. no television 2. no teaching 3. no kids 4. no house. time was what I wanted, the little I had. so I've stuck to these thru thick and thin, tho stanfords have been thrown in my path.

by the way, the most important people in the world teachers and politicians, they influence the most people in the deepest way. I'm just out here tap-dancing on my coffin.

you've been an inspiration. best, wayne

www.pbase.com/wwp/theaterpics

3 days later we hiked to my first lookout 1951

cone peak pinnacles national monument

i spent the first six months of my life looking up
at it from a crib in soledad, california. only
realized many years later when driving back
from southern california.

how the hell do you write a resume'?

2011-08-28T13:27:00.000-07:00

i've never been able to do it, always misrepresenting myself. say on match.com, you know how the unloved reveal personal likes and dislikes, throw in a million activities, and all the other person wants to know is 1. do you have a job? 2. money? 3. can i get over how you look? unfortunately, for me, the first is yes, the second no, and the third debatable, considering my advanced age.

okay, say i want a theater job, how do i sum up fifty years experience and what would get my foot in the door? at twenty i began writing hysterical psychological plays. my mother an actress in community theater on the presidio of san francisco, so i began running lights and sound. those gave me a great deal of power as i turned up the volume on the nazi footsteps in the diary of anne frank.

three years later i directed my first play, a broadway comedy oh men! oh women! oh boy, i didn't know what i was doing. at the suggestion of the manager i changed casting at the last minute and never quite had faith in myself. it's better to make a mistake that's your own than accept a promise from someone else. eventually, the actors got the hang of it and i discovered with comedy run-throughs the key to get the timing down.

let's see, during the next two years in greece, berlin, and oxford i attended every kind of play. an old fashioned troupe of five actors counted their money over ouzo after performing a heroic epic in a tiny, grubby space. in berlin i either went to a play or a movie every night for six months. where else would i have seen goethe's faust? and from oxford i traveled at least once a week to watch the shennigans of the royal shakespeare theater and visit shakespeare's plot in stratford on avon.

after returning to california, i'd make a yearly pilgrimage to new york city, this being the latter half of the 60's. believe me, i didn't miss a significant show, whether in a basement, loft, or on broadway. i studied play-writing and performance with members of the open theater, savaged my way thru improvisations, fell in love and out of love.

finally, all that burned out, and i worked for arts and lectures at the university of california santa cruz, house-managing, making a photo record of an old barn being turned into a theater, attending acting classes, directing a production of racine's phaedra in aforesaid space. that all lasted for seven years. i swear to god i still didn't know what i was doing. yes, i read every book i could, however either i didn't have the maturity or the confidence to do a really great job.

twenty years now passed, the new york trips sporadic: one spring i attended seventy-one shows in the city. i ended up in chico california, more or less at loose ends, a town of my first three year old memories (i cut off my sister's yellow curls cause everybody thought they were so pretty!) i did keep writing plays. i figured out how to do it, though few performed. 1995 i think it was, bill johnson pulled me into a production of the musical city of angels. i watched every rehearsal and took constant notes. in the end i lay writhing onstage in a giant iron lung.

this led to a whole round of theater experiences, history and directing with randy wonzong, acting and auditioning with bill johnson, styles with cynthia lammel, choreography with sue pate. eventually, after about ten years of this, i became involved with the downtown blue room theatre, directing with a several of my own scripts staged. launching into photography, i aimed my cameras at the actors with a ferocious zeal, hanging a show of three hundred photographs. here's the link: www.pbase.com/wwp/theaterpics

okay, fifty years of attempting to direct and the one crucial book became the keystone of the arch and made all things possible: a sense of direction by bill ball, founder of the actor's conservatory theater in san francisco. yes, the right book can be the drop coagulating the super saturated solution.

ah, so much left out, all those years hanging out with the actor's workshop in san francisco, meeting lee breuer on a street in athens as a bunch of us went for a glass of wine, tapping arthur miller on the shoulder and asking him if he'd changed the ending of the price for a current revival, studying for a year with luis valdez of teatro compesino, landing a two year scholarship to stanford and dropping it cause i didn't want to be an academic.

isn't resume' actually, resume?

how i overcame my millenarian instincts and became young again

2011-08-26T20:46:00.000-07:00

yes, i was one of those. in my first poems i didn't want anything from the mechanical modern world, no cars, telephones, typewriters, yet i gradually gave up. however, i did use a manual typewriter til 1995 when i decided to write my opus cloud watcher, a firelookout's book of days. (you can read a few excerpts here: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/cloud (i can't reveal the rest until i'm either dead or don't need a job, whichever comes first.)

then the dam broke in 2002 when i lurched into photography. twenty or more thousand dollars later the gear piled up in my closet, the cameras depreciating and the lenses going up. i rather like googling my name, as it's the first of the hundred wayne peases in america to come up: http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&hl=en&source=hp&q=wayne+pease&pbx=1&oq=wayne+pease&aq=f&aqi=g1g-v4&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=2836l5466l0l6425l11l8l0l0l0l0l865l2707l2-2.1.1.1.1l6l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=c0bea07e605a791b&biw=1920&bih=909 my snail's trace across the canvases of francis bacon.

okay, so i burned out. i admit these days i feel photography is a dead art (forgive me all you passionate clickers). the greatest pictures made in the early days and digital turned everyone into a decent if not great photog. yes, i do like looking at my pics, as i do my poems, always surprised they came thru me.

i'm sick with drawing, that's where my passion yowls this eve. my droid x phone transforms me into the artist i always want to be. scroll down the page and see the depths into which i've descended: http://www.pbase.com/wwp and of course this has whet my appetite for a better instrument.

xoom, aspire, pandigital, vizio, nook, i've bought them all and returned them. nothing matched my phone, until today. true, the ipad arrived this week and i felt i'd gone on the gold standard (much as i admire steve jobs i don't care for apple), given completely in. i dragged myself to the local verizon store to set up a hot spot for it. and damned if i didn't come away with what i needed and loved: a galaxy tab. the ipad goes back tomorrow!

and i must say, all the really young bumpkins bumping into me with their smartphones these days don't seem so foreign.

let every day be different

2011-08-20T23:01:00.000-07:00

smarmy helicopter

as a moody human being, i find this almost impossible to practice, especially sitting here on a mountain-top, alone ten days at a time. self-awareness comes at a price, ie. you can't really control how you're feeling, try as you might.

example, this week up and down like a yoyo. i think it was wednesday i inexplicably felt grateful for everything, needing to have, be, discover nothing more. the peacefulness of it all, that state of acceptance and perfection. i could just sit! what a relief, as i'm usually as restless as a bee on a blossom.

the next day we'd a dramatic event. a lumber truck turned over and burst into flame, blocking both lanes of highway 70 in the feather river canyon, igniting the brush on a steep slope. at least, this is the way it sounded when my friend lucas, lookout on another forest, called and told me a helicopter reporting it. i immediately passed it along to our dispatch. later ron, on pike county lookout, called me with updates, and these too i relayed.

all ended well, just a half acre of tiny flames crawling between the rocks. alas, the next day i got chewed out for interfering with the dispatch, and i'd thought i'd been the hero of the day. my heart hardened like a rock, i couldn't feel anything but a kind of sociopathic hatred of the world. this two days after feeling completely at peace.

okay, a couple days later i forgave everybody and got back to normal. that said, i've careened from peacefulness to anxiety to inspiration to despair over the weekend. i lurch for the good and grab the bad. i curse the bad and am suddenly uplifted with insight. a doctor once wrote, 'if you wake up in the morning age sixty plus and feel no pain, you're dead.' and to that he added, 'no day will be the same.'

my eternal search for security could only end six feet under, rolling my eyes in the quiet of the tomb. if i could just let everyday be different, i wouldn't have to collapse every night in a frenzy, worn out by the struggle to make no effort.

my androids reflect all this:

www.pbase.com/wwp/android

tolstoy wrote 'creative works the record of our twitching nerves.' no wonder he always felt like a saint in heat.

if you're not growing, you're dying

2011-08-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

alas, true in the literal sense. each new cell created in your body to replace the last weaker than its predecessor. if something isn't done about it!

unfortunately, i'm not sure what can be done. diet. yoga. chris marker filmed nine hours of india way back when, and i remember a 70 old yogi who looked as healthy as any human being on earth. as a consequence, i studied with a fine teacher and did my stretches for years. ironically, with my first back failure, i abandoned it, never to get back in the practice.

once i sat next to an actor in new york, one i'd seen onstage. he too had the bloom of youth at 45. i asked him how he'd done it. "eating no meat," he said, though he was not at all pompous about it. eons later i watched him perform again and he seemed as youthful as ever.

that kicked off 32 years of vegetables and tofu for me. i only lapsed with an attack of asthma and a visit to an 82 year old chiropractor. she believe in eat right for your blood type and convinced me as a blood type O i needed meat, especially to keep the acid in my stomach busy. true, i seldom eat the red stuff and almost never pork. maybe that's why i have to swallow an ant-acid pill every night or wake up to a beating heart and trembles.

as for exercise, i've always walked an hour a day. and recently i bought a wonderful mini-trampoline. i just bounced on it, waiting for my coffee to drip. i felt like a little kid jumping on a bed. NASA recommends it as the best exercise, perhaps as training for that first tourist trip to mars.

you know, i can finally hear the notes from my tiny ukulele, improvising like a mad scientist. they say being increasingly sensitive to sound can help stave off alzheimers. and recent studies show you can dig new grooves in your brain and expand the snaps. the mind doesn't need to decay.

why do we lose our sensual perceptions as we grow older? we can keep our libido alive with tricks (a little fantasy goes a long way), yet following einstein, we've a physical sense of the universe when young. later it changes into an abstract formula, habit, and mathematics couldn't save einstein in old age, except i believe his uniform field theory to be true, even if he didn't have the tools to prove it. see my thoughts on the subject here: www.pbase.com/wwp/unified

and i've added a series of drawings called the mayan underworld:

www.pbase.com/wwp/maya

maybe playing with my smartphone will at least keep more than my hair and nails growing in the grave.

life isn't short we just waste a lot of it

2011-08-13T08:47:00.000-07:00

okay, seneca, you stabbed me to the heart with that one. where have i gone wrong? i mean, really, what have i done (or not ) done that has stolen chunks of my tardy existence?

i do remember having a girlfriend whose friends bored me to tears. every time we had a gathering, i found myself looking desperately for the exit. they didn't seem to have a way with words or a single original thought. my god, no wit! how can such people stand themselves?

not that i'm a genius, but at least i'm weird. (i know, cause plenty of people have told me.) and that seems to me at least somewhat intriguing. ah, and i recall two people in town i've avoided like the plague for years. what was it about them? they felt they were geniuses and continually talked about themselves. that's it, the vital life is a conversation.

this leaves plenty of time for daydreaming. aren't the most interesting talks the ones we have with ourselves? and other times don't we communicate with the bicycle we're stripping down, the seed we're planting, the sun splitting the clouds apart? maybe i object to others interrupting my thoughts with trivia. and by that i mean, they don't stimulate me, the weather doing a better job, creating meditations on fate, creation, are there gods, can we really be alone in the big universe?

what about worrying about what other people think of me? i've done precious little of that since overcoming puberty. still happens, especially on the job, maybe they think i'm lazy. jesus, i chose a job staring out the window all day. retarded, or communing with nature?

and then there's trying to motivate people, has that been a waste of time? yes, i have to admit it has, sticking my nose in other's problems, attempting to solve them even though i haven't been asked. i have learned you can fire-up a group with members already active. the key: skip the individual in this case. failure may be their agenda. don't mess with it.

and something very overwhelming is happening in my lifetime: women taking over. how could i have predicted that, though i've always thought mothers did rule? now it's out in the open. it would certainly be wasting my time to oppose the flow of the economy and history.

learning how to HOWL

2011-08-07T22:15:00.000-07:00

it all seems so bizarre now, being seventeen and wandering around north beach san francisco, mike's place, the co-existence bagel shop, not really part of the beat scene, a literature student at berkeley.

last night i spent the whole evening on netflix creating an even longer instant queue for myself, bouncing from anime, to french thrillers, documentaries about butterflies and beautiful insects, collecting a long list along the way, longer than i will ever be able to watch.

this evening i wandered down the stair of movies, trying to find a landing, and nothing stuck til i stumbled across a movie about alan ginsberg and the obscenity trial for his poem HOWL, and began watching it without high hopes, but having listened to most of ON THE ROAD last summer and remembering the sad death of neal cassidy by the railroad tracks outside san miguel, mexico, the police coming to the author of EPISODES pierre delattre to ask if he knew this body of the man who'd been given divinity by jack kerouac and he said yes, i let the movie pull the memories out of me.

at that time (1957) i studied modes of fiction in a thomas parkinson class, a friend of ginsberg, the prof had him come speak to us, and alan pensively read part of KADDISH, a requiem for his mother, which he'd been working on out in the courtyard while waiting for class to begin, not shaggy haired and bearded but a young fifties guy in normal clothes, just like in the movie.

one kid in the class demonstrated outside the courthouse during the trial, very nervous about being arrested himself and what what would happen, and i don't know what did, but it's all like yesterday, years later alan coming up to me at a table in the new school for social research where i was helping with registration and asking where he should go, limping for some reason.

and then when he read at the city center in santa cruz, jingling his bells - he'd been to india in the meantime and wore the white of a guru - when the loudspeaker called out someone had planted a bomb and we all filed out while alan cheerfully kept chanting and told us to be calm.

alas, too many of my ideals come from these guys, the movie PULL MY DAISY, local readings by gary snyder, who lives in the area and who lost his sense of humor after his first book of poems RIP RAP as did alan after HOWL, both becoming sages who couldn't make fun of themselves.

since i'm just a clown stumbling through the universe, i can't say i've done the same, a ridiculous hold-out from the rebellious boys of the fifties and still trying to find my own voice up here on the mountain where the coyotes howl.

feel free to wander through my galleries and see if you can find a faint echo of that radiant epoch: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/the_written_word_galleries

how do you know the real thing?

2011-08-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

now i don't relish having beer cans thrown at me, especially with a camera in my hand, which i'm constantly covering with my straw bonnet. a friend of the lead singer, johnny rotten, in the seat next to me, and of course, he ultimately has the booze running down his face, as rotten peppers him with cans and dowses him in alcohol.

the artistic director had asked the audience to keep it calm for the cameras. that seemed to unleash even more shouts and missiles, the theme of the show basically fuck you! in this punk epic, 'sid & nancy'. actually, i'm not sure what it is all about. the foam earplugs cancel most of the dialogue and i never can understand the lyrics of songs. plus, i'm clicking and flashing away.

obviously, sid has a fatal attraction to nancy, and nancy keeps bouncing back from any rebuffs. looking at the pics www.pbase.com/wwp/sn you can sense the visceral impact. if a show well-directed, the visuals tell the whole story. i figured the director, martin chavira, must be a lapsed catholic. characters in his shows love to destroy themselves, as well as buildings. sid revives from his own death at the end to sing and fire a forty-five into the audience.

all this could have been completely false and lackluster, yet this production sucked me in (and spit me out). afterwards i just wanted to escape with my life and my pictures. the next morning the evening's memory depressed me. yet as i worked on the photos over the next three days, i gradually felt a thrill. this no ordinary endeavor.

after all, sitting in the front row, i got raped by sid's electric base. another time he nearly fell on me as he lurched around the stage in a drug-induced state, grabbing my foot to save himself. how and where they managed to draw the line, i don't know. they did, and that the ultimate art. another night they might cause a riot. we'll see as they go on the road.

again: www.pbase.com/wwp/sn

and the theater: www.blueroomtheatre.com

to quote james joyce: history is a nightmare from which i am trying to awake.

have you tried revising the ten commandments?

2011-08-02T20:57:00.000-07:00

as a preacher's kid, i always attempted to do so, mainly to make it easier on myself, yet i've found my new rules as tough as the old, if not tougher. they say when a follower attacks his/her own religion, the desire is for more restrictions, not fewer. i'll do my best to entertain the fallacy.

1. LOVE THYSELF. otherwise your neighbor will have hell to pay. remember the golden rule?

2. BE PREPARED TO IMPROVISE. if you can't light a fire with a couple of sticks, you won't survive the next millennium.

3. AVOID FAME. the reason for this obvious. yes, extremely difficult if you're mildly talented in a world of mediocrity. didn't i say these new strictures would be painful?

3. GIVE FORM. this is something i discovered for myself. it's better to create castles in the air or in sand, than not to create at all. it will make your day.

4. KEEP MOVING. death finds it more difficult to hit a good circulation.

5. DO WHAT YOU WANT. ultimately, nobody cares. and in a hundred years, nobody's bloody likely to know.

6. BE AN EXPERT. they get paid.

7. DON'T JUDGE YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE. actions tend to reveal their true meaning and value days or years later.

8. ALWAYS LOOK BACKWARDS. see how your shadow follows you? if you don't know history, you're unprepared for today.

9. PRACTICE WHAT YOU DID AT FIVE YEARS OLD. you followed your instincts before school and the devil got hold of you. (look at the first commandment again.) why else do we lose our sensual perception as we grow older?

10. DON'T LET GO OF YOUR OWN MYTH. when you get away from it, the world turns black, a sign of your depression and straying from the true way. only you can renew your world every day.

********haven't i done this before: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/picasso ah, pablo, where are you when we need you!

i've lived in such luxury few people can imagine

2011-07-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

yet that has to do more with luck than money. true, i knew to have a family meant being broke all the time. in the montana parsonage it meant closing off all the rooms in winter and sleeping with a warm brick. in germany we didn't have money for a candy bar. my poor working bachelor uncle in indiana, walter pease, footed a lot of the bills.

as for houses, my god, it's not the payments, it's the broken sewer lines and leaking roofs. you never know what's going to happen. so i decided for a shiftless life. fifty years ago i entered the invisible profession of fire lookout. i'd hiked to one in pinnacles national monument at age ten. the view of the salinas valley took my breath away and the lookout had a ham radio. my god, up in the clouds and able to talk to the world. that was for me. eventually one fell into my lap, bunker hill.

taking a two year break on a greek island, a berlin basement, and an oxford rented room, i returned to california at the behest of the coast guard reserve. i fell into a fun half-time job with arts and lectures at uc santa cruz. those were certainly my most sensual days. summers i returned to the towers.

luck, i mean it. europe a bargain in the 60's, yes, on five dollars a day. santa cruz almost a slum when i arrived, later one of the most expensive communities in the country. since i live off the interstates in a college town, i've had lovely rooms with trees outside. and during this time travelled the world before gas prices soared.

i just watched a video on a lookout for rent in montana:

strange to see it near one of my many childhood homes, once a bevy of small towns now a booming ski-resort country. how amazing to have kept ahead of the trampling herd. and i really am grateful. for a couple days i've created designs for fire prevention posters. my hope, the forest service will pick up the ball. they've a PR goldmine in fire towers which they've never exploited.

see them here: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/poster

crime with a higher purpose

2011-07-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

i've gotten into a strange habit in the last six months. probably i can blame it on my friend dennis palumbo, whose thriller mirror image arrived on the shelves a while back. he's such a fan of the crime novel i figured they must have something special. (he's got another coming out this fall.)

this, i must confess, against my own instincts. as a teenager i read a lot of the nero wolfe stories - and ultimately found the whole genre depressing. the mystery may be quite an adventure, yet at the end the hero rarely gets the girl and it's a matter of stopping something that shouldn't have happened at all (rather like standing up against a government out of whack). lying, cheating, stealing, i've tried them all, my father caught me filching candybars at the local grocery and pouncing on the collection plate sunday evenings after a service. i guess those lessons must have sunk in. if i'm not honest, i feel lousy about myself.

so, if it's dostoyevsky, crime and punishment, or the brothers karamazov, i can see the point of the whole endeavor, larger metaphysical issues at stake. that was until i listened to a few contemporary thrillers on cd while driving back and forth from the mountain. michael criton's next, frankly hilarious, especially read aloud. a send-up of genetic engineering, the real topic. and the forgery of venus by michael gruber, fascinating in its details of how to fake a famous painting, and the hero actually flashes back to being valazquez.

then the dragon tattoo girl came along. the first movie craven compared to the actual novel, the violent deaths emphasized over larrson's real motive - he wanted to call the series crimes against women. yes, i actually read the first volume. afterwards, to get the whole pie, i speed-read the next two volumes, going for the story, skipping a lot of the subplots, sitting in my bookstore cafe and watching the plot pass as though i were watching a movie.

thus came about this bizarre habit of reading thrillers this way, and discovering i like the ones that do more than solve the specific villainy. of course, nazis and wwii a fairly easy mark, though stephen kerr in the berlin trilogy and follow-ups makes the most of it, revealing gas-chambers for jews in argentina, for example. and in his futuristic novel a philosophical investigation he questions genotyping of individuals. gradually the themes of these writers have gotten more interesting.

one of my favorites is the devil's trill by gerald elias where a blind, irascible violin teacher exposes the forcing of young children to practice until they can win contests, yet fail in life. yesterday, one of my two hour jaunts with james patterson and liza markland in the postcard killers where they examine the carrying of art to the extremes of murder, the victims posed like paintings. (damian hirst, you can run, but you can't hide.)

these don't depress me like the mundane examples of the genre cause they serve a higher purpose, interesting larger violations of humanity.

more androids: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/android and more fake matisse's: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/matisse

what if my life is a dvd?

2011-07-13T17:00:00.000-07:00

that thought occurred to me long before the technology existed. when i was 14 i realized a god wouldn't be necessary if there were no beginning and no end. in other words everything goes in circles. like a laser beam my consciousness travels along a groove.

this does play into the old saw of predestination. well, let's say i'm a stack of dvd's, one playing now, another later. theoretically i'd have many cross tracks, new music constantly created from the old matter. and, of course, 5,999,999,999 other tunes would be in progress, and that's what makes the planet pretty messy.

however, let's simplify: one disk at a time. here i am a story recorded on hard matter. my thoughts travel in familiar territory (deja vu). if the boom box big bang working correctly, i could be re-started anywhere, beginning wherever my mind happened to land. thus, time as we know it, doesn't exist. it's not time-travel, it's my-travel. as you ask, is there any wiggle room? does the disk get worn out, played over and over? can it crack?

hmm, maybe that's a way into the problem. no, that assumes time exists. time only exists if there is a beginning and an end. our humanity based on an error, in that case. we suffer not knowing we'll never be born and never die. alas, this flies in the face of science, it throws us back into a cyclical view of the universe. am i discovering already known moments! can we really say the film can't be played backwards? i keep asking myself the most obvious questions. ah, i'm already leading a virtual life.

more androids: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/android

courage is the first virtue, without it you can't practice the others (samuel johnson)

2011-07-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

from: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/laugh

i've carried this aphorism around for years. tough to practice, as by nature i'm a wimp, non-confrontational, get along, don't make waves kind of guy. i can only think of three times in my adult life where i may have practiced it.

the first shouldn't count. i joined the coast guard reserve to avoid being a foot soldier in vietnam. arriving at bootcamp on government island , alameda, california i had no idea what i was getting in for, not until i reported to the duty desk, lowering my arms to rest them, when the second mate yelled, "get up against that wall, face it! stand at attention and don't move until told to do so." during the next three months i learned what it was like to be a convict and a slave. a very valuable lesson, and maybe a bit of courage did help me get thru it.

the second rather tame by comparison. the first time i landed some unemployment compensation, my girlfriend said, "get some therapy." i didn't have to ask why, i already knew. okay, i picked a name out of the phonebook, and as i stepped across the threshold, i said to myself, "my god, i'm actually asking for help." that first session disappeared into limbo, but not the feeling in my chest when i exited. i realized i was experiencing fear and that it more than likely had been with me my whole life.

the third example also a false one, perhaps. in 1995 i felt isolated and at loose ends. what could i do to get out of myself and rejoin humanity? theater, of course, came to mind, my second great love, yet i hadn't practiced it in a very long time. CITY OF ANGELS, PREVIEW TO AUDITIONS. that notice at the university kindled a bit of a spark. so i went, listened to the director and his assistants outline the musical and the process to be. INTERMISSION. i walked out on campus, under the moon and trees, and thought, "i can't do this." but for whatever reason i re-entered. actors practiced the songs around the piano, and a miracle happened. bill johnson, the director, strode up to ask who i was and struck up a conversation. little did i know, of course, he wanted some old guy to lie in an iron lung on a big stage in a 1200 seat theater, which i ended up doing. this led to another bout of theater for twelve years.

i just watched this video:

i like description more than conclusion

2011-07-08T12:47:00.000-07:00

maybe this has been my greatest weakness? hah, with so many flaws how can you give one pride of place? okay, okay, just for this morning let me enjoy this particular error.

and as i was saying, i love process more than finale, i'd rather see a dress rehearsal than the full-blown show, then i'm part of the creation. often i prefer a reading of a play to an actual production, left to my own imagination.

here's the beginning and end of a poem by juan ramon jimenez:

Among the clouds the moon is
A shepherdess of silver
Who, through a pathway of stars
Drives her white gleaming flocks.
...........
The moon goes by slowly,
Naked, lovely, in ecstasy
Singing to an unknown earth
Along her highways of dawn.

in between she finds 'smooth-worn cattlepaths' and 'backwaters of eternity'. i'm given nothing but a progress, and i begin dreaming aloud.

that's it, of course, my whole life one long day-dream. i'm the kid who sat in class looking out the window and who found a way to do this for a living for fifty years. if a smoke comes up, it sets off an inner alarm. i leap to the firefinder without knowing it, the microphone in my hand, no fire the last, just a step to the next.

very entertaining, yes, i've been entertained by the whole show, a permanent tourist, a born buddhist, sighing a times for the transitory, yet indulging it as much as i can. this means imperfect creations, faulty poems, off-kilter songs, unproduced dramas. even if i've directed a few, performed a few, the main audience has been myself, hoping a bystander might get a laugh or shed a tear.

a friend, director/choreographer sue pate once pointed this out. she goes for the finished product, usually with beautiful results. 'you like the process too much,' she said. alas, i have to agree. even today i feel what i do in this moment is all that exists, the rest is fantasy and theory. to quote steve hagan, We've formed many a theory and belief, but as we look about the human world, it is clear that nobody actually knows what's going on. i suspect this is the only "conclusion" i will ever come to.

a new set of doodles, crime scenes: www.pbase.com/wwp/crimes

more of matisse look-alikes: www.pbase.com/wwp/matisse

and an endless parade of shadowy androids: www.pbase.com/wwp/android