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
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
