david mamet as the dick cheney of literature

i can hear everyone saying 'who? who?' i'm only familiar with mamet 'cause of fifty years actively involved in theater. he's worshipped in drama classes for his 'true sounding, natural dialogue' and a play about two petty thieves, 'glengarry glenn ross.' frankly, i wouldn't consent to giving him the notoriety of the man voted the most evil in america i don't know how many times, if it didn't involve something larger, the trashing of a vague outline called the liberal. mamet's recent book, 'the secret knowledge', in this glowing present day tradition.

i must confess, i simply don't know what this word liberal means. according to webster:

1.
broad-minded: tolerant of different views and standards of behavior in others
2.
progressive politically or socially: favoring gradual reform, especially political reforms that extend democracy, distribute wealth more evenly, and protect the personal freedom of the individual
3.
generous: freely giving money, time, or some other asset
"My great-aunt was liberal in her bequests."
4.
generous in quantity: large in size or amount
"a liberal helping"
5.
not literal: not limited to the literal meaning in translation or interpretation
"a liberal interpretation of the rules"
6.
culturally oriented: concerned with general cultural matters and broadening of the mind rather than professional or technical study
"a liberal education"
7.
of political liberalism: relating to a political ideology of liberalism

so, the people practising these things being lambasted on the covers of book after book? i mean, the new tome table loaded with them. hmm, this seems like a list of christian virtues. how have they become the undermining practices of the government in america?

i have to shake my head at the duplicity. conservative to most of its members means 'no taxes and no quarter.' like david mamet, if i can't make it, it's my fault, i deserve no sympathy or public assistance. in a society without the above, it becomes the will of the strongest, cynicism without insights. ah, i'm letting my inner goat baaah!.

yes, my goat's been gotten. nothing new. the myth of ronald reagan will forever turn my stomach, though his recently published notes reveal a sense of humor. alas, was it baudelaire who said, 'comedy depends upon a belief in one's own superiority?' maybe it was bergson. anyway, most of these guys standup comics. it's easier to make fun of people than to have compassion.

good gravy, how do i get off my soapbox? i'm bored by diatribes and suspicious of them. let's cut to the chase, i'm conservative as anybody, with a liberal twist. i believe in a general education 'cause it changed my behaviour. exposed to the arts, history, anthropology, i discovered my desire to be a person of the world.

oddly, i believe in commerce. corporations don't bother me in that they don't want to disturb international trade with wars that are too big. i believe cities bring freedom. only in them can you be safely outrageous. small towns mean mean spirits. and the family. i love the extolling of family values. for example, most murders happen in the home, child abuse, alcoholism, wife-beating.

it's a troubling world, to say the least.

continuing to delve into the android underground:

www.pbase.com/wwp/android

how i spent my life reading self-help books

impossible but true: once upon a time the self-help section of your local bookstore did not exist. any books like 'how to please people' filed under either business or religion. (now all the business books encourage self-renovation as a first step!) of course, americans always bootstrappers, and reading walt whitman like absorbing 'how i got out of a lethal hetero and into a same-sex marriage'. yet, forty years ago a new spirit emerged.

the first real book in the genre, 'your erroneous zones' by wayne dyer. a girlfriend and i read it to patch our relationship. it really pissed her off and she ran away with a friend. so much for #1. dyer's next book full of real-world advice, 'pulling your own strings' (recommended). for example he said always call authority figures by their first name. 'hello, barrack, will you have soup or salad?' i actually put this into practice. i woke up one morning at the lookout with a pain in my throat, the result of another misplaced love-affair. nine doctors later, one solved the problem: an acid-eaten ulcer in my throat. (gerd born at the same time as personal improvement books. i wonder if there's a correlation?)

the only doctor to act normally when i called him by his first name the last one. he told me a teacher taught him to really listen to the patient. also, he'd read about the breaking-news acidic stomach in a recent journal. believe me, most doctors just jump to a very quick conclusion, no time taken at all. that a big lesson in itself. and the one who zeroed in on me, he who found the cure. ah, taking antacids after all theses years!

if a person of power reacts badly to you calling him by his first name, look elsewhere for help. and, of course, a pharmacist in sun city, arizona told me shortly after, 'oh, my wife had that problem. we took her off acidic producing substances.' now you can't escape books on the subject. and sex. and marriage. and dealing with your teenager. my mother said i was a book baby. she followed dr. spock religiously, letting me cry myself to sleep at night. enough said, i blame all my peccadilloes on that sad fact.

it did surprise me when a whole bunch of books showed up for sale at the local museum. i bought one for a writer friend, a guidebook to paris in 1927. evidently the fellow who'd passed onto an easier heaven to inhabit, inherited money and spent his life reading manuals on how to make his life better. i know that after paris, he retired to correct all his inner and outer faults with an extensive collection of the personal reconstruction literature available before the subsequent boom. a man, certainly, ahead of his time.

whenever i get tired of zen, i'll pick up 'it's never too late,' or 'don't sweat the small stuff'. i'll even read the rich man's guru, bagwan rajneesh, now known as osho. comforting, indeed, to know someone has the answers.

guess i've been a wise-guy myself: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/married otherwise known as 'how to be a lover in a married world.'

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: