for example, does the young woman married today really want to be known as the 14 year old kidnapped at gunpoint and sexually abused? or the 13 year-old object of roman polanski's lust appreciate a case that never ends? notoriety not quite the same as justified adulation! yet confusion reigns in my mind. people famous for being famous, only in our virtual reality could such a mismatch occur. only postumous honor can be endured graciously.
at least i know my limits, that's what i tell myself. last night i attended (briefly) my boss's retirement party. i sought out fellow workers among the humongous crowd, my nerves humming like electric lines in a tornado. whew, got through that and in the men's room relieving myself, i realized i didn't have the stamina to stay, plus i had to drive home eighty treacherous miles in the tortuous feather river canyon, something i avoid doing at night. too many people have ended up in the river. some attendees did recognize me by my voice. and just before i left, the retiree introduced me to a friend as a 'legend.'
flattered and alarmed, i jumped in my truck and listened to dylan thomas reading a child's christmas in wales. what a fantastic voice! alas, he died of darkness and drink. out, out, brief candle. what would it take to be a leonard cohen, singing into his late seventies? a good reason can be seen in the early documentary about him, Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen where he makes fun of himself, and of course, he did try a long rehabilitation at a zen monastery in california, in the end deciding he'd have to go on being nasty. it was more fun.
this last week a famous singer bit the dust from drugs, a familiar cautionary tale for parents to tell their kids. get a job, you'll live longer. and as i go down the list of '11 things you need to do to live to a hundred,' i wonder if it's worth it. never retire, eat the same hearty food every day, keep to a routine, and so on. most of us would rather hitch our wagon to a shooting star.
and though most don't know the name hank williams, everybody's heard the songs. he expired in the back seat of his cadillac at age 26. see the pictures here of the local show LOST HIGHWAY:
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/lost and http://www.pbase.com/wwp/hank
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.
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
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
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.
