no, should i? it's not over yet, i hope. maybe soon? okay, i'll think about it. jesus, what am i in for now? every autobiography a pack of lies, making sense of the insensible. and what's interesting, after all, about a guy who spent forty years writing and traveling, and now doing art work? i have talked up a few love affairs, tried to make myself poetically larger than life: "i am the caboose blindly following history."
"Quit making excuses. You know quite well what to say?"
oh, i do, do I? you should be in my position under the heat-lamp, suffering all these staring eyes! damn it, damn it. okay, here's chapter one: DECISIONS I MADE EARLY. i know it's not very catchy. we can change it later. okay, decision #1: writer or artist? age thirteen. a writer needs only a pencil and a piece of paper, and an artist needs to be able to draw. besides, look at all the books i've read, starting with three a day the summer after third grade.
And decision #2?
never to have kids, buy a house, or get in debt. my family did all these things, my mother writing me she couldn't buy a candy bar and lamenting at the end of her life she'd never had a new car. quite a statement for an 84 year-old. yes, that drive across country, waiting for my father dodging bombs in korea, the ford woody used a quart of oil every hundred miles. you can read the whole story here. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/indiana
I've read it, everything you've ever written, and seen every picture you've ever made.
ah, then i can quit. i do want to mention that at 17 i decided i either watch television or have a life. i chose the latter, and with a few exceptions, have stuck with it for 56 years. true, i seem to have a knack for catching the good stuff. in my mother's living room i watched the kids get shot at kent state. i did have a tiny tv temporarily at the lookout and i happened to turn it on when o.j. simpson cruising down the highway with a hundred police cars behind.
9/11, the assassination of JFK, the Vietnam War?
granted, i did miss a lot. and it saved me a lot of fretting. the news mostly the attempt to read a crystal ball. the relief lookout, jack leahy, called said to turn on the tube. i watched the two planes hit and the towers fall. once, and that was it. the radio gave me much more a feeling for it, people screaming in the streets. remember, i was raised on radio and words create better pictures than pictures do.
JFK?
ah, another radio event. in the upper room of the presidio little theater, i typed slowly a copy of the matchmaker, the publisher wouldn't send it. later i found out it was being made into hello, dolly. the theater director called me from downstairs: KENNEDY'S BEEN SHOT. i ran down the steps and we listened to the first report - after ten minutes they said he was dead and some waltz music came on. very odd, don't you think? we cancelled the show.
And Vietnam?
look, it was the first and last war completely televised. i'd look in a store window and there would be g.i. carried off the field, his shattered arm hanging over the side of a stretcher. no one now can realize how open the reporting was, how disturbing the images. i talked with a helicopter pilot who hadn't been scared until he got shot through the foot. and with a corpsman who'd just returned and had to keep going to the men's room and throwing up as he told me what it was like to hear gunfire all the time.
Hmm, just as we thought. You tried to avoid living in your own time, yet couldn't do it, though you didn't father children, purchase a home, or get a credit card.
so i'm innocent?
i stumbled on a large group of people dancing thriller in the square with thousands around the world at the same time. i still don't know what it was
supposed to mean.
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/thrill
Epitaph: still looking.
He didn't want a career, he wanted a life.
How can you find yourself if you aren't lost?
The opposite of every truth is another truth.
She was a pop tart.
I hope I've written enough in favor of what I don't believe.
Can you remember what remembering was like?
I don't mind repeating what I've never heard.
One wave makes an ocean.
After it fell, the stone didn't love the ground so much.
He liked the fact he'd created God in his own image.
Too much remembering leaves out a lot.
If your language is new, you'll have to teach it.
Basically, I'm not into drawing attention to myself, except when I'm absent.
Don't be distracted by 'reasons.'
She's more fun than money.
He wanted something new, but could only think in terms of the old.
Only a plagiarist knows a good thing when he sees it.
If only space weren't so crowded.
He was a solution looking for a problem.
By mixing categories he came up with a grey area.
Being patient and being passive aren't the same thing.
He'd better lose, or he'll be a different man tomorrow!
summer singles 2013: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/singles
i swear to heaven i didn't plan it, and i'm embarassed by it, even as i pack up to move again. yes, we did move thirty times by the time i was out of high school. and ending my 50th lookout season means i've moved a hundred times, just on that account. i'm sure i've moved at least two hundred times, if not more. so what's the beef?
my last real trip: amsterdam and paris, spring, 2001. then 911. and soon after my travel partner berta gardner died. http://www.pbase.com/wwp/berta also i stopped writing and took up the outrageously expensive task of photography. ah, all that precious and useless equipment rotting in my storage space! as they say, after the show's over all you've got is the pictures.
and now i picture myself fat and old, sipping a cold beer and watching old movies on television. no, it's not that bad, yet. i have been watching films of people who accomplished something in the world. for example, just finished one on edward curtis, the famed photographer of american indians. of course, he's criticized for staging scenes, yet outside his twenty volumes of portraits he took a lot of street-type, informal, and delightfully natural photos i'd never seen before tonight.
and i watched THE DESERT OF FORBIDDEN ART, about the russian collector who set up a museum of state-repressed art during the soviet period. wheeling and dealing with personal contacts to collect 44,000 pieces of art, which he put in a building out the sands of Uzbekistan. hopefully this film will allow them to be preserved somewhere, when locusts come. a very heartening story.
okay, let's see, i've kept travelling on my couch. THE STORY OF WALLY, a painting by egon schiele stolen by a nazi and how the family finally received it's due, fifty years later. lots of scenes in old vienna. alas, it tarnished my view of the town where i'd had good experiences in the past. and i shuddered through HAND HELD, the story of a photographer who discovers children in thousands of steel cribs, after the fall of the Romanian dictator, deprived of every bit of loving care. the photographer's drawn into setting up a foundation to help and twenty years later we see healthy kids in a local olympic games.
now, have i justified myself? these stories took me all over the world. and all summer i kept debating: should i go on the road again? have i really become a creepy stay-at-home? i have to answer yes. when it came right down to it, i realized one night i wanted to sit at a desk, write, read, fool around with photos on the computer, and generally preserve my concentration. immediately, i began searching for a new place and thankfully found a cottage right in the middle of a student ghetto. i've changed my life without leaving town. yes, very embarrassing, but let me quote franz kafka:
You do not need to leave your room.Remain sitting at your table
and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quite still and solitary.
The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no
choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
posted single shots from the summer: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/singles
Hand Held: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008H345VC/ref=wtls_list_pr_15/ref=avod_wl_watch_now
Portrait of Wally: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0032DGB5K/ref=wtls_list_pr_4/ref=avod_wl_watch_now
The Desert of Forbidden Art: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0032DGB5K/ref=wtls_list_pr_4/ref=avod_wl_watch_now
Coming to Light: the Edward S. Curtis Story: http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Light-Edward-Curtis-Story/dp/B00A6KTO8S/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1382163002&sr=1-1&keywords=edward+curtis
well, here i am again, wondering how i can save the world before i shuffle off it. my friend jim feels it's a hopeless cause. digging our own graves, imitating the dinosaurs, ultimately unable to deal with the very climate changes we've caused.
in the immense what am i to do? i think, if i can make someone's life better, that's enough. i send money to my sister, expose people to museums, ancient artifacts, faces in the clouds. ultimately, i feel it all depends on imagination. is that what i'm best at?
of course, i'd like to be woody allen. last night i watched his latest 'jasmine' and i came home disappointed. i wanted the heroine to be saved, changed, uplifted. alas, she ends up on a park bench in san francisco, talking to herself, mulling over everything that's gone wrong: her husband's affairs and suicide.
the best scene in the movie probably where she's telling her two young boys what cracked her up. they sit wild-eyed with amazement. here the older generation certainly passing along a lesson, even as she says, 'remember, wealth brings responsibility', insisting they devoted a lot of the money they stole to charity.
and this morning i have to admit, there's a moral to the story. she insists all the way through she didn't know about her husband's double-dealings. actually, she looked the other way, for in the end in fit of jealousy, she turns him into the FBI. when she finds her estranged son, he says 'i know all about that phone call.' ultimately, that call caused his father's death by hanging.
earlier she tells her sister and friends, 'hanging doesn't choke you, it snaps your neck.' kate blanchett reiterates this statement two or three times, making it grim to contemplate. here, without question, is a haunted women who basically deserves what she gets.
what has this to do with me? i keep thinking, 'i should help orphans.' yes, my sister was an orphan so i'm helping one, but is that enough? i keep thinking of the wonderful photographer Tina Modotti who gave up her art to abscond to russia from mexico in order to promote a cause. it led to her sad ending, and her photographs have done more than all the speeches and washing dishes.
here i am in the middle of change, about to come down off the mountain like zarathustra. what am i to do now? he eventually ran back up that slope as quick as he could. nietzsche or woody allen or changing diapers. it's a tough choice.
Sex is only interesting when it gets you in trouble.
Religion is something humans added to leaven suffering.
Whenever I feel evil, I smile without doing anything.
The days passed through my hands like lemmings headed for the sea.
The most dangerous thing you can do is get out of bed.
We live by measuring. If we can't measure it, it doesn't exist.
I waited for her to seduce me.
Nothing's more uncomfortable than being tested for sleep.
He made her think of all the things she knew she'd never have.
If I started counting my losses, I'd feel like a rich man.
What am I to do with myself, now that you've changed me?
Traveling in memory has the advantage of no flies.
I can't leave until I find myself.
He stumbled across himself in a conversation and didn't know what to say.
He wanted to give away everything, but he had nothing.
The higher he rose, the harder he found it to fly.
The distance he put between them seemed to draw them closer.
He forgot why he was suffering, but the suffering itself remained.
The nightmare of knowing it all.
He felt his silence full of notes he couldn't hear.
I'm not sure we should try to go beyond survival.
Truth won't get you into heaven.
She tried to make a mistake. At least that would be a start.
Nature seems continuous to us, yet she leaps.
The only way to slow down time is to travel or commit a crime.
"Only enthusiasm can defeat death." (Cioran)
Don't be afraid to bend your knees.
How many more things have become criminal since I was a child?
ah, art is my way out: http://www.pbase.com/wwp/crocker
Storks have a habit of delivering to the wrong address.
Storks are great gamblers, often staking their packages.
Beware of bored storks.
Never trust a stork.
The stork refused to take the package back.
A stork can make or break your day.
Storks have a lousy sense of direction (but a great sense of humor). Every stork born a practical joker.
After the duel, the surviving stork didn't know what to do with the extra package.
Never cross swords with a stork.
Stork Delivery System: "We always make mistakes."
Don't take a stork in training.
The new stork recruits had barrels of fun with the robot babies.
There is a stork in your future.
A stork flying backwards is a bad sign.
If storks didn't pretend to be preachers. I'd trust them more.
Fear the stab of a card-playing stork.
The absorbing story of the stork caught reading porn.
When a stork gets stuck, what can a chimney-sweeper do?
Has there ever been a singing stork?
When in the mood, storks are great entertainers.
Why did they call it The Stork Club?
Storks can certainly look like stuffed shirts.
Stork: the only bird you can imagine wearing a tuxedo.
Storks have the ability to take a terrible revenge.
If the Ancient Mariner had shot a stork and not an albatross, he'd have come undone much quicker.
To quiet our fears we pretend storks bring good-luck.
Storks like to keep their feet warm.
Do wise people build fake chimneys for storks?
in opposition to the air, i've gone under the sea:
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/sea2
http://www.pbase.com/wwp/sea3
