what i love about wandering a bookstore

it's the patterns. the internet gives too much information. a library and the classroom out of date. only with books (300,000 new ones a year in the u.s. alone), laid out the tables, spread around the cafe, can i see what's the real trend. for example, national brain month. i've already written a bit about that. so much of what the new technology discovering, probing, picturing has us fascinated with ourselves in a new way.

ah, my search today related. it's all about ferreting out probability. i'd never heard of the 'quants' on wall street, traders analysing numbers derived from all kinds of info from the web. they know nothing about stocks, yet can pick the winners with more than a realistic chance. or take the recent tome 'a billion wicked thoughts' by aqas and gaddam. these guys tracked billions of hits and other memorabilia on the web. they came up with some surprising conclusions in the sexual arena, ie. most men prefer women with weight on their bones. i thought i was different, however the skinny in bed not as comforting as the pillow of a big behind and fleshy arms cradling your head.

the debate, of course, is how predictable are we? 'bursts' by lazlo babarsi maintains all, most all of us, providing you have enough information, can be tracked by big brother. then 'the genius in all of us' by david shenk maintains the opposite. true, i drive to the bookstore once or twice a day, yet i left my truck lights on last night. dead in the water, i took a walk in the park and bathed in the watery, spring greenery. that improved my mood, despite the viruses running around in my lungs. could this change in plans have been computed?

a wise politician said events determine the society's next move. could 9/ll have statistically been predicted? princess diana's death by paparazzi? the japan tsunami with the results it had? all these in the realm of possibility, and how do you narrow the odds? at the beginning of 'bursts' the author relates the trials and tribulations of the artist asan elahi. dragged into interrogations by the color of his skin and erratic travel, he decided to post everything about himself on line. as far as i know, his movements still can't be foreseen.

yes, books reveal a lot merely by being. let's hope the e-readers don't kill the hard copies. after all, during vietnam, even with extreme television coverage, i never would have known what was really going on. fitzgerald's 'fire in the lake', for example. what patterns do you see? zombies, teens obsessed with the mystical, all kinds of people browsing the overflowing business section. hang out in a bookstore, before it's too late, if you really want to know what's going on.

well, i've also been discovering the androids that live in my cell phone. you're welcome to look. after all, there's no hiding place.

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

finding my inner animal

yes, i'm no longer so sure about free will. reading the male brain and the female brain, i collapse into a deep doubtfulness. with all those hormones controlling our moods, not to mention circumstances like poverty and the weather, how could i be so sure i'd chosen to do what i'd done. after all, as i've said before, personalities don't change much unless there's brain damage.

this left me in a pickle. ambiguity might be fine for poetry and philosophy, yet it won't cut up a steak or fry a fish. and as for the vanity of human wishes, these become more and more apparent the older i get. does anything of the individual survive? true, a bit of wit and common sense (hopefully) may pass into other people. alas, i haven't created a gene for either.

kids and animals, ah, i remember when i had don juan (a dog) at bunker hill (my first lookout), the visiting children certainly cottoned to him more than the magnificent mountain view. curious by instinct, the little ones get into everything. even in high school in germany i snuck with a friend onto a general's train (we got caught), a steel mill - walking those high iron catwalks across hills of coal - and into an international trade fair, going under the fence. in fact i'm sure my desert uncle shocked when i searched through all the debris he'd collected.

damn, i've never lost that. when i walk into a bookstore, i immediately grab whatever comes next: crockery, learning spreadsheets, teenage horror. is this really human? after all, if an old guy pranced up and down the aisles dancing like that little princess in the pink dress, they'd haul him away to the nuthouse. i'm ever in terror my inner goat will take over and begin butting the human butts sitting in the cafe chairs. 'get up! there's more to life than that!!'

all this came to a head as i took pictures at the county fair this weekend: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/animal click in the upper right hand corner for a slideshow.

a treatise on the false law of self-interest

it's so interesting that people act self-destructively more often than not. me, for example. i should have been saving money all this long life of mine to enjoy a stable, comfortable old-age. alas, in college english class we read an essay on 'the deadly coils of comfort.' and i fell for it, hook, line, and sinker.

as a result, i've wasted everything on creative projects. getting into photography, i spent a fortune on cameras and accessories, not to mention books, and books, and books. what am i to do now, discovering i could do it all on a cell-phone! thank god the value of lenses goes up.

or theater. i cannot tell you how much time and loot i've squandered on this particular madness. staging shows, writing them, watching them (71 in one new york spring). putting my heart into this celebration of the transitory, i certain haven't gathered many stellar reviews - it always seems like there's a fly in the ointment: an actor who can't learn his lines, an actress who throws fits, cries, threatens to bail.

in fact, i did combine photos with actors in one vainglorious exhibition where i installed hundreds of shots. alas, the only reason anybody found it was because the room used for talks and meetings. okay, i learned public art the best. put yourself where people can't get around you and have to step on you, as squishy as you are.

cutting to the chase, workers in the midwest of the u.s.a. stormed the gates for ronald reagan. how did he do it, making them destroy their factories and jobs? HE APPEALED TO THEIR VANITY! he'd be seen drinking evenings in bars with the hardhats, having stabbed them in the back with a presidential initiative that afternoon. they fell for the public image of themselves as tough, all-american and able to hold their liquor.

'never attack a man's self-image'. and you know why? that personal perception of oneself worth more than all the tea in china. vanity, vanity, all is vanity. where did i read that? only too true, it is. you can fool almost anyone by manipulating their desire to be something they're probably not. if they were who they are, maybe then they'd act in their own self-interest. until then....

the graduation videos, or how i think i learned something....

my last performance in paris

good gravy, i didn't know anyone was watching! yet i'm immortalized by ben willis in 'THE TAO OF ART':

Many years ago when I was an art student in Paris there were numerous colourful characters living beneath the bridges along the Seine on the Left Bank. Some of these were protesting students or long-haired Existentialists, the precursors of modern hippies, some of them simply vagabonds or derelicts. Since I was often drawing along the river I had the opportunity to study and even sketch some of these people.

I remember one in particular who by anyone's standards would be called the most disreputable of vagabonds, a tramp. He was always dressed in the same unbelievably tattered overcoat that reached his ankles, patched, baggy trousers (a rope for a belt), a crumpled fedora jammed about his ears and his feet wrapped in bundles of rags.

What distinguished my favorite tramp was that he danced - suddenly, joyfully, spontaneously, with or without music. When he danced - his arms floating lightly on the air to either side, his hands and fingers undulating expressively, his feet gliding surely and nimbly across the cobblestones, his body turning in parabolic, swirling, stately pirouettes to a measured inner rhythm only he could hear - he was pure poetry, and the bliss reflected in his crumpled, bearish face was a joy to see.

For he became something entirely free that soared above life but was at once life itself in all of its diversity, all its turmoil and all its spiritual heart. He wasn't intoxicated or mad - he was creating, with all he had, with the inner material of life, which is what creativity is.

yes, this was the me you didn't see. i sold out and became a star, as you know from my publicity photos:

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

this week i snapped portraits of 50 people revealing themselves: www.pbase.com/wwp/matt

when i got a harley davidson motorcycle, i got religion

my sister just sent me a fun email:

Well just when you think you know someone True I like to believe that life is stranger than fiction....but when Marge called and swore her life has changed because of some cd s recorded from the grave I gotta wonder well shes left me a copy in my mailbox and says I have to be in a very positive mood when i listen...

this got me thinking, especially since our father a minister and i've been amazed at how captivating the biblical stories are. what's it all about, religion, i mean?

1. most people pretty lonesome. freud said our primary urge to join a small group. a bridge club, a salsa society, you name it. and that's part of it. you can know the identity of every person. it's not like passing an endless stream of people on the street and feeling like a stranger.

2. this membership allows the lonely to limit their horizon. they no longer feel insignificant when looking at the stars from a fishing boat.

3. questions, we're overwhelmed with them. human beings born curious. watch those kids get into everything. too many questions. our subscription to the tea potty supplies the answers and gives us the opportunity to get up and shout. drugs at a dance do the same thing.

as for motorcycles, what else? the feeling of power surging between your knees. wow, that doesn't take a freud to tell what that's all about. and once you choose your machine, you trick it out like an alter, you make it all your own. yet, those rides, those meetings, sales at the dealer crowded with the like-minded. you're not alone.

a retired professor friend who bought a cruiser sent me this ad. i think it sums up what i'm saying. the myth: you are an individual. the truth: and joining others, you become the storm-troopers of the second millennium:

penis envy, or 'the little one that could'

like most hypothetically heterosexual guys, i've been reluctant to tackle this subject. it seems like any study of the male tallywacker would lead to a fascination with naked guys and eventually to midnight meetings in the park and aids. remember: the fear of being thought gay once the number one terror of a healthy american boy. wear green on thursday? never!

unfortunately, this left most of us in the dark (so to speak) on the facts of sex. i don't suppose any body's as ignorant as we were in the old days, when you suddenly discovered by yourself the incredibly pleasant orgasm. and that secret knowledge had to be hid. i doubt if my generation ever recovered from it.

what set me off on the quest of knowledge, a volume of world poetry, an accidental discovery of a poem 'the penis' by a 14th century welsh poet daffyd ap gwilym. by god, he hit it right on the head (so to speak):

By God penis, you must be guarded

with eye and hand

because of this lawsuit, straight-headed pole,

most carefully for evermore;

net-quill of the cunt, because of

complaint a bridle must be put on your snout

to keep you in check so that you are not indicted

again, take heed you despair of minstrels.

a rousing beginning, to say the least. what a perdition puberty leads us to. here's what louann brizendine says in 'the male brain': If testosterone were beer, a nine-year-old boy would get the equivalent of one cup a day. But by age fifteen it would be equal to twogallons a day. get that, guys. no wonder you felt drunk every time your eyes staggered around english class, landing on one burgeoning breast after another.

You are a trouserful of wantonness,

your neck is leather, image of a goose's neckbone;

nature of complete falsity, pod of lewdness,

door-nail which causes a lawsuit and trouble.

yes, it's hard to love a slave-master that flogs you all the time, a second nose by which you are always being led. yes, the most fun and adventure i've had in my life the result of this, and i luckily escaped the consequences. but, whew, looking back on it, the chances i took! were they really worth it? our poet obviously not as fortunate.

Consider that there is a writ and an indictment,

lower your head, stick for planting children.

It is difficult to keep you under control,

cold thrust, woe to you indeed!

Often is your lord rebuked,

obvious is the rottenness through your head.

so much for wales in 1350. some things never change. and i turned to wikepedia, of course, and found thickness gives more pleasure to the ladies than length. good gravy, that makes all kinds of sense. they've been telling us for years to stimulate the clitoris, and that fountain of joy very close to the entrance. looks like this has more to do with men competing with men.

next, after the erotica project being delightfully presented at the blue room theatre for the ladies, i say, let's turn to the penis project, stand up for the little guy!

http://www.blueroomtheatre.com/ come see my rose photos in the lobby. and i've posted more online: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/ordeal

the little boy who got to cry fire

to be a movie-star is not enough, you have to head up a rock band and tour the country. Kevin Bacon passed through town with his brother last weekend and played the el rey theater. the forty dollar admission too much. still, i thought about waylaying him in the alley and saying, "hey, kevin, i'm the fire lookout you visited 23 years ago."

yes, that my most intense experience of hollywood. the crew repainted my lookout, covered the buildings next door so they'd looked older. everybody ate a hot lunch a la fellini, gazing down upon crystal lake, while they bitched about the cheap producer only spending 80,000 dollars a day! i remember how kevin during a conversation got the call for his one minute of work. suddenly, his focus shifted, narrowed, totally on the scene to come.

of course, i had to write him a play. unfortunately, it about a gay social worker with his own band. this obviously not the flavor he wanted to project at that stage in his career (before fame and going to the moon). i can understand his boredom with movie-making. the director the sole person on the set working all the time. otherwise it's like war, wait, wait, wait, BANG!

and as a rock star you don't have to share the limelight with anyone. this for performers who didn't get listened to as kids. and i too wrote songs for awhile, took voice lessons, sang once in a coffee-house. in the end it's nerve-wracking. yesterday, passing roadies unloading tons of equipment at the senator theater, i thought, 'all this road time. what a bore.'

instead, i meditate on a mountain, and every once in awhile i leap to my feet and call on the radio with false calmness, 'SMOKE REPORT.' 500 people go into motion, trucks, airplanes, helicopters. all hell breaks loose. the adrenalin flows. ah, my fix for the day is over. i go back to daydreaming.

rose, roses, and more roses: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/ordeal