Dangling In The Tournefortia

Rotterdam

2008-02-05T00:19:00.000-08:00

DAVE MARKEY AT ROTTERDAM

The screening in ROTTERDAM for the "Reinactors" the documentary I cut went great.
It was in the top 10 with audiences. Every screening was sold out and we got invited to 8 other European festivals. Now we wait to hear about Los Angeles Film Fest.
Goal is to get this film in the fest plus my short film
"A Nice Day For An Earthquake."
We shall see.

The Melvins were also at the fest.

LYNCH

2008-01-21T12:45:00.000-08:00

The New Year has started out great. Kris and me are going through escrow for our first house.

Dave Markey and Kevin Church will be leaving this week for the Rotterdam Film Festival. The documentary I cut for Dave got into the festival. I’m staying back to finish my new short film and get it done in time for Los Angeles Film Fest.

And on top of that I’m writing a new project.
So things have been a bit on the busy side.

Last night Kris and me went to LACMA (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
And saw the documentary LYNCH. A film about filmmaker David Lynch.
I thought it was for the most part a fairly good documentary.
The film says its directed by BlackANDwhite with is a pseudonym for David Lynch.
He wanted to shroud the fact that he made a film about himself.
Not really sure how I feel about a filmmaker doing a film about himself. It feels very protective. Very controlled where what I was searching for was something not controlled.
The film concentrated more on his eccentricities than his filmmaking process.
The film is bound with witty and funny stories he tells about his youth. We do get see moments when he’s directing “Inland Empire.” Of course he also speaks about his meditation that he’s been doing for 34 years. But still I didn’t feel this film was telling me anything that I didn't really know about him already.
Don’t get me wrong it was fun to watch but I guess I was searching for more.
I wanted to dig deeper and get to know more about the man, his life his process.

"In Hollywood, more often than not, they're making more kind of traditional films, stories that are understood by people. And the entire story is understood. And they become worried if even for one small moment something happens that is not understood by everyone. But what's so fantastic is to get down into areas where things are abstract and where things are felt, or understood in an intuitive way that, you can't, you know, put a microphone to somebody at the theatre and say 'Did you understand that?' but they come out with a strange, fantastic feeling and they can carry that, and it opens some little door or something that's magical and that's the power that film has."

"Film can do amazing things with abstraction, but it rarely gets a chance. People are treated like idiots, and people are not idiots. We're hip to the human condition, the human experience, and we love mysteries."

"I keep hoping people will like abstractions, space to dream, consider things that don't necessarily add up."

-David Lynch

Final Thought for the Year

2007-12-30T11:52:00.000-08:00

Hello and thanks to all whom have been reading my blog.
Another year has blinked by.
The year for me has been full of positive change in my life.

I'm fortunate to have such a great circle of inspiring and artistic friends that always keep challenging me.
Thank you all and you all know who you are.

I finished writing my feature script this year.
It was a great experience, I learned a lot.

I met and got to work with filmmaker Dave Markey.
His films inspired me as a kid and I never thought I would end up working with him.
The documentary I cut for him got into The Rotterdam film festival 08.

And the biggest thing that has happened to meet his year, I got married.

She's great. She makes me live in the moment. Or what Kafka called "the existent moment."

I plod along into the New Year very hopeful and very grateful.

So what’s in store for the new year?

A house purchase?

I’m working on finishing a new feature script called “Floodwood.”
I’m taking some courses at MIT. That should be interesting.
Working on a documentary about 80’s punk band SIN 34.
I’m also adapting a book written by Dave Markey.

And of course you never know what kind of surprises will spring up during the year.

The roller coaster is headed to the top and just about to plunge down over the peak.

Happy New Year.

Sin 34

2007-12-20T15:56:00.000-08:00

My new documentary focuses on the punk band SIN 34. Forming in the early 1980's.
Sin 34 was a seminal band of the time. Now 24 years later they tell their story.

Fortune Teller

2007-12-20T15:54:00.000-08:00

Only in America!

2007-12-20T15:45:00.000-08:00

Once again greed and the horrible insurance racket is playing games with peoples lives. Just more proof of how peoples lives are truly controlled by big business.
Companies can now condemn our children to death in this country, how truly sad.

It's all slipping away from us before our eyes.

17-Year-Old Cancer Survivor Denied Transplant
Health Insurance Company Denies Liver Transplant That May Save The Girl
GLENDALE (CBS) ― 17-year-old cancer survivor Nataline Sarkisyan has been denied a liver transplant by CIGNA insurance company that doctors think could save her.

Sarkisyan, of Northridge, is in the intensive care unit at UCLA Medical Center in Westwood. According to her mother, Hilda Sarkisyan, she has been in a vegetative state for weeks and will die without the transplant.

Nataline was diagnosed with leukemia at age 14. The cancer went into remission after two years of treatment, but re-emerged this summer, Sarkisyan told the Daily News.

Doctors recommended a bone marrow transplant, and her only sibling, Bedig, 21, was a match. He donated marrow, but Nataline developed a complication from the bone-marrow transplant. Because her liver was failing, doctors recommended a transplant, according to an appeal letter sent to CIGNA earlier in December, the Daily News reported.

Doctors said in the letter that CIGNA was denying the liver transplant because Nataline's plan does not cover "experimental, investigational and unproven services."

The Sarkisyans have filed an appeal with the California Department of Insurance, but the agency sent a letter this week saying it needs more information.

Registered nurses, members of the Armenian-American community and Nataline's family and friends planned to march in protest in front of CIGNA's local offices Thursday.

Why I make Films

2007-12-13T16:37:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago I was asked to contribute to a magazine asking the question, "Why do you make films?" This question was asked to a bunch of new up and coming filmmakers.

Here was my answer.

Asking a question about why I make films is a complex question.
Not very simple to answer, it's almost like asking why do I breath.
So in some ways for me to make films is to live.
For me it has nothing to do with making money or being famous.
It's not as shallow as that.
For me film is an artistic expression such as painting or composing music.
It's a radical convergence of luck, art and patience.

Some make films to be famous.
Others try and try to say something profound but in the end really have nothing profound to say at all.
There is of course room in the big gooey pot of filmmaking for everyone.

And in the end no one is more right then the other.
That's what makes it an art form.
One might like Nora Ephron while others prefer
Gaspar Noe.

"The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all."

-John Cassavetes

War on Greed

2007-12-06T12:35:00.000-08:00

Greed
by Cliff Schecter

"Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit." So said fictional character Gordon Gekko, the embodiment of a 1980s corporate raider in the movie Wall Street.

Yet, sadly, just as the Gekko character was based on real men and the greed speech on an actual address, today we also see real live Gekkoesque creatures of venality known as equity fund managers. For these self-appointed demi-Gods who lord over Wall Street, no amount of compensation is too much and no amount of compassion too small. Furthermore, it is this very ruinous rapacity that is playing an important role in damaging our economy, assaulting the standard of living of middle class Americans and raising economic disparity to levels unseen since The Gilded Age.

In general, while policy and our cultural ethic dictated that in the 1950s and 1960s, CEOs didn't make exorbitant salaries while the wages and benefits of their workers stagnated, the Right has led an assault on both since the 1970s, which has been a startling "success." According to Paul Krugman, in an article entitled The Great Wealth Transfer:

The reason most Americans think the economy is fair to poor is simple: For most Americans, it really is fair to poor. Wages have failed to keep up with rising prices. Even in 2005, a year in which the economy grew quite fast, the income of most non-elderly families lagged behind inflation. The number of Americans in poverty has risen even in the face of an official economic recovery, as has the number of Americans without health insurance. Most Americans are little, if any, better off than they were last year and definitely worse off than they were in 2000.

But how is this possible? The economic pie is getting bigger -- how can it be true that most Americans are getting smaller slices? The answer, of course, is that a few people are getting much, much bigger slices. Although wages have stagnated since Bush took office, corporate profits have doubled. The gap between the nation's CEOs and average workers is now ten times greater than it was a generation ago. And while Bush's tax cuts shaved only a few hundred dollars off the tax bills of most Americans, they saved the richest one percent more than $44,000 on average. In fact, once all of Bush's tax cuts take effect, it is estimated that those with incomes of more than $200,000 a year -- the richest five percent of the population -- will pocket almost half of the money. Those who make less than $75,000 a year -- eighty percent of America -- will receive barely a quarter of the cuts. In the Bush era, economic inequality is on the rise.

Rising inequality isn't new. The gap between rich and poor started growing before Ronald Reagan took office, and it continued to widen through the Clinton years. But what is happening under Bush is something entirely unprecedented: For the first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth -- and they know it.

Here is another example of what Krugman is talking about:

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics. Such concentration at the very top occurred in 1915 and 1916, as the Gilded Age was ending, and again briefly in the late 1920s, before the stock market crash. Now it is back, and Mr. Weill [Sandy Weill, of Citigroup] is prominent among the new titans. His net worth exceeds $1 billion, not counting the $500 million he says he has already given away, in the open-handed style of Andrew Carnegie and the other great philanthropists of the earlier age.

One of the largest culprits in this economic sea change are the latter day financial predators known as private equity firms. They borrow money from banks to take over companies--often companies in distress. These leveraged buyouts are great for their bottom line, as the head honchos at these firms receive compensatory stock options, management fees, tax writeoffs, etc., that reach the multi-millions and sometimes even billions. But this gratuitous wealth is often accomplished by slashing jobs and benefits of workers who don't have access to the corporate jet or "company housing." In fact, here is an example of how this market dynamic often plays out, to the chagrin of everyone not sitting in a corporate boardroom or owning large caches of the stock:

Employees knew that Hastings Manufacturing Co., a family-owned auto-parts supplier 30miles south of Grand Rapids, Mich., was in deep water. Facing financial pressure, 375 employees--two-thirds of whom were in the United Auto Workers' (UAW) bargaining unit-conceded $1 million in benefits to save their company, relinquishing newly negotiated pay raises and agreeing to cover part of their own health care costs. But according to UAW Local 138 Chief Steward Kim Townsend, who testified before the House Commercial and Administrative Law subcommittee in September, when Hastings' management declared bankruptcy and was taken over by the private equity firm Anderson Group in December 2005, the slicing didn't stop there. Sick days were cut in half, an existing two-tier wage system with a top rate of $13.49 an hour was maintained and the allotment for bargaining time was limited to two hours a month on company time. For retirees, the consequences were more dire, with pensions and health care coverage all but severed.

To market analysts, Hastings appears more profitable today. But its value stems not from innovation but from breaking obligations to the company's employees and retirees. "We make the same products," Townsend said at the hearing, "in the same building, with the same equipment, for the same customers as we did before the asset sale."

And as if the plethora of these kind of stories are not bad enough, a tax loophole, one that both Democrats and Republicans alike appear loathe to do anything about, allows these fund managers to declare their compensation as capital gains. This means their income is taxed at the 15% capital gains rate instead of the 35% rate appropriate for this kind of obsene economic gain. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you're paying more in taxes than a hedge fund manager who made a cool billion last year. Big name firms such as Cerberus Capital Management, The Carlysle Group, The Blackstone Group and Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts (KKR) take advantage of this loophole with stunning success.

How's that for fair?

So what are the economic consequences of this kind of behavior for our nation? Well, it's that we start to resemble the very Developing World dictatorships we often sanctimoniously decry in the press. Here is a nice helping of this hypocrisy for you:

According to Executive Excess 2007, a study released in August by the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, the 20 highest-paid fund managers made an average of $657.5 million last year--22,255 times the average annual U.S. salary of $29,500.

This is not only an immoral way to treat the middle class and working Americans on whose backs this country's economy has been erected. It also provides an atmosphere ripe for the kind of Abramoffian political corruption to which we have all become accustomed over the past seven years. Furthermore, this increasing subjugation of everone except those at the very top of the income ladder is dangerous for a democracy, as any historian can tell you.

Which reminds me. Gordon Gekko had another piece of sage advice in the movie Wall Street. At one point in the film he turns to his new protege, stock broker Bud Fox, and offers this prescient observation with practiced nonchalance, "now you're not naïve enough to think that we're living in a democracy, are you, Buddy? It's the free market, and you're part of it."

Yes, indeed we are.

Where are the revolutionaries?

2007-12-02T13:38:00.000-08:00

Where are the revolutionaries?
Where is that movement that happens with every generation?

Where is the fire?

Vapid and apathetic Emo scream.

Is this the best you can do?

As your future and rights melt away before your dark eyeliner eyes.

What has happened to this generation?

Why are they so quite?

As things become worse, don’t they know about the 60’s?

They stare and drool into their MTV mastabatory lives.

Buying and buying, taking and taking spending and spending.

Becoming the flock
That has no history.

They sit back and wine and nod their pretty pho hawk heads.

And reply with a straight face and a vapid stare.

“Well, What am I supposed to do?”

As we all sit back and watch it burn to fuckin ground.

Mr. Mrs. Everyday

2007-12-02T13:26:00.001-08:00

Where did the rosy suburban dreams of cul-de-sac nightmares go?

As one by one every home is taken by the banks.

Broken dreams living in a plastic world;
Thinking like sheep;

Trying to buy into it all,
Being kicked out on your ass

Don’t look back.

Don’t you cry!
Don’t you dare cry.

As the walls come tumbling down;

As the bricks, the mortar, the glass, the paint the fuckin dirt all look back at you.

And scream until you shatter.

What now Mr. and Mrs. everyday for the everything?

End The war

2007-11-13T22:39:00.000-08:00

Photo By: Kris Berrios

Into You

2007-11-09T19:33:00.000-08:00

Everyday I walk past myself
Falling from lost leaves that scatter
Scatter across my soul

A forgotten match that strikes forth to you

Sudden to a sweet red kiss
Thrashing through the doves

Bound by sheets through sheer in and out of wet time

And earning that last deep and deadly kiss

Escaping into you

Backwards American

2007-11-02T14:22:00.000-07:00

I’m a backwards American
What does it mean when those who shun the desolate meaning of torture
Look away brushing the lint off their dark blue suites
I’m a backwards American
Living within a glory that has no sun
A fading light that falls across the eyes of children
A fading light that falls with every solider falling onto the hot red earth
Hot red earth

Looking for that day
Our daily bread
Washing away the hate and the lies
Open your mouths and take the wafer
Washing it down
Washing it down
With bile

I’m a backwards American
Watching everyday
As behind closed doors
Behind red oak doors

Words with a smile
A dark black smile

As the crow flies over our heads

As the winds blow through our hair

As a baby is born

As we die

As we make love

As we drink from the cup

As we end

Not understanding why

Fascism is a feeling

2007-11-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

Don’t stick to the arid dreams of decay
Thinking about your nostradamus nightmare lie
Who become the factors of our own demise?
Setting fourth a reality all to common to the bible,
How then walking up and down skidrow
How then walking through the streets of New Orleans
White trailer city under the thoughts of the forgotten
In a refuse society of the have knot’s
Fascism is a feeling
It’s like a virus
It pours into your rectum
Spreading out like fingers through your insides
It devours your sense of reason
The unknowable
You just start to believe.
Your function as a body
As a heart
As a brain
Soon starts to blacken and decay
So when the battle cries sound
You come around and lend the shell of what you once were
Over to what you have become
And then when you sit
Across from concentration camp 1,2 and 3
You lean up against a wall
And cry for the now
And for the should haves

Poker Night

2007-10-31T12:53:00.001-07:00

The cigarette smoke rises above the poker table
3 am
Open sores and open wallets
A puddle of money
Washing the floors
With greed and hunger
Every hand is breath
Every tick, tock, tick
Of the clock gives soundtrack to the night
With hangdog eyes
And keen sense
The players wipe the small crystaline beads of sweat from their brows
4 am
The night moves forward like a slug leaving it’s long wet and slipper trail
I look up to my father as I hold the groceries in small brown paper bag
A carton of eggs, milk, chocolate chip cookies, toilet paper and some turkey meat.
I tug on his shirt like any 9 year old would

“Dad” I whisper.

“Mom is going to worry.”

He shoos me away taking another puff of his desire.
Never taking his eyes off the table.

Self

2007-10-31T12:34:00.000-07:00

I’m not your blanket of the absolute
I’m not your falling feigned heart
I’m the coward the pity
I’m the masturbated
Fantasy of a broken dream

Over and over
Craving the day
When the tough comes easy
And the easy tough

8th and Spring hard sunny winter day
No rain of inspiration or rain to cleanse the air
Somebody got shot today.
Somebody lost there everyday

Walking through a Murakami world

Trying to see my true self in the mirror today.

i dream

2007-10-31T12:24:00.000-07:00

I dream of the day when stormy tears dissinagreate like sand.
When the hope of the poor inspire the change
The cardinal eye of justified hope
Bleeds through the thoughts of broken hands destroyed by the hammer of deceit.
A Japanese whisper
A mountain of despair
The road along the highway swallowed up all those many more
Raping the posterior question of desire
And honoring the hangnail bloody stump of society
Gives me a fuckin headache

Don’t sit and honor the wicked
Don’t feed them from the bile within.
Strap up your pride
Take control of your acid reflux of regurgitated lies.

The End of Art

2007-10-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

10.21.07 : by Orion Star

The following exchange between Ray Carney and Arthur Vibert was pulled from Ray Carney’s website, source here. This exchange is followed by Rob Nilsson’s reply on the subject.

Ray Carney: (to his readers) I print the following letter as a “word to the wise,” a lesson that each and every one of us can learn from. It is a deep letter from an important person with a lifetime of worldly accomplishment behind him. It is the story of a life, the story of many lives, the story of a culture where too many live the Faust legend and sell their souls for dollars.

I have a plaque on my wall, just above my writing table. It was given to me by a friend. It has a beautiful inscription in calligraphy. I read it every time I sit down to work and re-read it at odd moments when I am searching for a thought or a word, and when I feel aimless or discouraged or want to give up. It says:

Evening Gatha
Let me respectfully remind you -
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by, and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken … to awaken.
Take heed. Do not squander your life.

This letter takes its place with the Evening Gatha inscription. May the writer have the courage and strength to go on in the right direction — the hard way, the path of greatest resistance, against all of the forces in our culture to soften and compromise and despair (our feelings of “powerlessness” are part of the system of control and conformity). To reverse the biblical formulation: The flesh is willing, but the spirit can be so weak — too weak to go on. Don’t allow yourself to give up. I say to every reader of the site: “Take heed. Do not squander your life.”

Arthur Vibert: (orginal email from Arthur to Ray Carney, Subject: Film, advertising and the end of art) I discovered your site yesterday, Ray Carney’s Website, whilst surfing the internet and have spent most of my free time since devouring it. This has proven to be both an exhilarating and terrifying experience. Exhilarating because your perspective is a breath of fresh air in a mind-numbing sea of mediocrity that confuses slickness of execution with art; terrifying because I’ve happened upon it at a time in my life when I am grappling with the challenges of committing myself to the pursuit of my art.

I’m looking at resuming my commitment after 25+ years working in advertising as a creative director. I was quite successful. You may even be familiar with some of my work (though I suspect you watch little, if any television). Max Headroom for Coca Cola. The original Saturn Launch campaign (the car, not the planet). Work for Levi’s. And a lot more.

Advertising is very seductive for a person who hopes to make a living creatively. You get to “be creative.” If you are successful you receive the adulation of your peers. You make a lot of money, get to eat in the best restaurants and stay in the best hotels. You get to travel all over the world. And you do all this while creating something that most people claim to hate.

Of course doing this slowly sucks out your soul until you are a lifeless husk. You may lose the ability to understand the truth, let alone be able to tell it after a career of telling lies. I recall a story, perhaps apocryphal but still telling, about an art director who, after a life spent in advertising decides to pursue his first artistic love — painting. After months spent working on many canvases he finally works up the nerve to show the work to a respected critic he knows. The critic looks at the work and shakes his head. It’s all kitsch — just awful. By spending his life in advertising he’s lost the ability to perceive — or tell — the truth. This, of course, is my great fear.

In the course of my career I have worked with many commercial directors who went on to become movie directors. Ridley Scott was one of these directors. He shot several of the Max Headroom spots for me. At that time — the mid 80’s — I wanted to BE Ridley Scott, as did every art director I knew. I happened to run into another English director I was working with at the time by the name of Howard Guard at a restaurant in London and we ended up having dinner together. He knew I wanted to direct commercials and asked who I admired and when I mentioned Ridley immediately took me to task for my shallowness. He pointed out that Scott had admired Kubrick and tried to model his own approach to filmmaking on Kubrick’s career. Guard observed that in his opinion Kubrick was ultimately a superficial and empty filmmaker, and Scott was the same. While that may make sense for commercial directing, it is anathema for anyone hoping to create film art.

Naturally I ignored him, since my goal at that point was to be a commercial director. When I finally achieved that goal several years later I lasted about 4 years before I returned to advertising because I found that being a commercial director is a shallow and superficial “craft.” There is no art to it at all. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to you, but having been fixated on doing this for so long it took the wind out of my sails. After that I worked in advertising for another 10 years until I finally couldn’t stand it anymore. I had my epiphany when I was standing before a tray of just-cooked “Funky Fries” that had a mass of slowly congealing fat beneath them. My son was only 3 years old at the time and I realized that I was engaged in the business of selling poison to children.

A month later I was gone.

Interesting, isn’t it, that commercial directors have had such success in Hollywood? Ridley Scott is an obvious example. Michael Bay. David Fincher. The list goes on. Since their careers before Hollywood were based on helping sell things by creating one elaborate visual artifice after another, it just makes sense that they would continue in that mode once they moved to Hollywood. And that Hollywood would delight in it.

At least some of them know they’ve only traded one lie for another. Tony Scott’s increasingly desperate attempts at creating “art” through camera and editorial and other post-production tricks suggest he senses something is missing. He’s just incapable of identifying it. This renders his films completely unwatchable, in my view, because not only is one denied the guilty “pleasure” of watching a Hollywood movie, his tricks ultimately fail at disguising the utter emptiness of the films he’s made. He completely misses the point.

David Fincher is someone I think might actually have been a filmmaker capable of creating art had his career gone differently — and he might still. He is a child but trying desperately to grow up. He knows that the usual Hollywood fare is just dreck. He attempts to make films within the system that are not of the system. He fails at that, of course, as anyone must. He ends up with something that is neither fish nor fowl. Interesting failures. He lacks self-knowledge that would enable him to make a work of art that would allow him to relax his control enough to let a truth squeak out.

Hollywood shares many qualities with the advertising industry. Indeed, they might be reasonably perceived as two heads of the same Hydra. Hollywood is about money, and nothing else. Everything that is done there, every decision that is made, everything that is created is ultimately at the service of money. Now, I actually don’t have a problem with that as long as no one is pretending otherwise. Where I take issue is with the notion that somehow “art” can sneak out of this money-making machine. We end up with Steven Spielberg, who wants desperately to be seen as an artist but who is apparently incapable of understanding - let alone capturing - a genuine moment or emotion. How anyone can utter the words “art” and “Spielberg” in the same sentence with a straight face is beyond me.

What Hollywood creates is the celluloid equivalent of the best selling novel — the mystery, thriller, science fiction or fantasy summer read whose only purpose is to pass some time in an entertaining way and extract money for having done so. While it is possible to admire the craft of the writers and filmmakers who do this work, in the same way as it’s possible to admire the craft of fine leatherwork or pottery, it ain’t art.

We now have wonderful digital technology that puts the machinery of filmmaking into the hands of anyone who takes a notion to make a film. The irony is that the first thing everyone does is to try and make their own action/horror/war movie — using every trick in the book to try and apply a Hollywood production patina to their DV movies. People have become convinced that the only way to make a film is the Hollywood way, that somehow their own thoughts and feelings and emotions are inadequate and that only the “official” three act structure, hero’s journey and character arcs can be used to create a film. Many young people hope that if they can only make a DV movie well enough Hollywood will notice and bring them into the inner sanctum.

I don’t know if you watched any of On the Lot this Summer. The producers found what they considered to be 50 or so promising directors and put them into a production crucible from which one shining talent would emerge –American Idol style — triumphant, to take his place beside Steven Spielberg at Dreamworks Studios with a One Million Dollar Contract (and what is he supposed to do with that, one wonders?).

Note: (Ray Carney) Indeed, I am familiar with the show since one of my former students, Hillary Weisman Graham, was a finalist on it. To read my views about it, click on the links to the following Mailbag: page 43 (where I write a letter to one of the show’s publicists), page 78 (where I print a comment about it from one of the site’s readers), and page 80 (where I respond to a reporter’s inquiry about the show.) I was also, incidentally, mentioned on the show’s web site, though they omitted any reference to my objections to it. How surprising. How strange. Re: the “million dollar contract.” That was as much a fraud as the rest of the show — and the rest of American television. All million dollars would go toward the “rent” of the office space, the “retainer” for the required “representatives” (agents and publicists), and the office “staff” (switchboard operators, secretaries, and office managers) The winner would not actually be getting a penny toward making a movie. But, as someone once said, Hollywood is less about making movies than making deals. What’s not to like? That’s the “Mark of the Burnett” way. Blue smoke and mirrors masquerading as reality TV. As real as anything on the Evening News, for sure.

The ultimate irony here was that these filmmakers were all directed to come up with their own ideas, script them and shoot them and then put them up for all of America to watch and vote on. But real Hollywood, as you know, doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to make “your” movie. Do these young directors really believe that some studio is going to hand them 50 million dollars and tell them to go ahead and make “their” movie? Of course not. There will be a bunch of hand-wringing suits along for the entire ride, making sure that their investment doesn’t go awry, that they have a decent chance of making a nice profit.

The more outside money involved in an artistic endeavor, the less control the artist has over the work, until ultimately it ceases to be art and becomes product.

Anyway, as I’ve been writing and shooting and cutting I’ve been wrestling with a lot of this. I came upon your work as I was being tempted by the “dark side” and found the strength I needed to resist. Whether what I ultimately create is art or kitsch at this point in my life is not up to me. All I can do is work as truthfully as I am able to tell my story. For me, anyway, that’s enough right now.

Regardless of how the work is ultimately judged, I will know that, for once, I’ve tried to create something honest. We’ll see if advertising has left me with enough of a soul to achieve that. Thank you again for your excellent work.

Comment: The Arthur Vibert note is absolutely stunning and amazing! What more does anyone need to know than that? Bravo for his courage, insight and honesty, and good luck to him in his attempts to create art. Surely you had a response, even if only to say Bravo! Standing ovation!
-Marty (A Reader of Ray Carney’s Website)

Ray Carney: (two weeks later) Many other readers wrote in to thank me for posting Arthur Vibert’s letter, saying how much it meant to them to hear from someone who had worked in a commercial field, and how his words inspired them as artists to continue along “the path of greatest resistance.” Since I didn’t post them, I wrote him and told him about some of the other letters I had received. His response follows.

Arthur Vibert: I have been deeply moved by the various comments you’ve made about my letter. As you know, there are times when one feels very alone in this process, so to receive the kind of acknowledgment, support and encouragement you (and Marty) have offered is invigorating and inspiring.

Thank you for that.

I’m glad that the letter was useful to younger artists. There are not many voices that encourage people to take the hard path in our culture. I didn’t set out to be one of those voices, but if I’ve helped fight the good fight I’m happy. When one is younger it is often difficult to articulate the reasons why it is a mistake to pursue advertising or Hollywood film making or other culturally approved forms of “art.” Somewhere along the line the idea that art for its own sake was enough became a cliché and so we’re left with an aesthetic that places commercial art in all it’s forms at the top of the cultural pyramid. It’s not surprising that many younger artists are confused. Especially when the temptations are so great.

Spielberg collects “art” in the form of Norman Rockwell paintings. That tells us everything we need to know about the man and the culture that reveres him.

Arthur Vibert: (this email was forwarded to Rob Nilsson by Ray Carney) I had the great pleasure of seeing Rob Nilsson’s film Presque Isle at the Mill Valley Film Festival last Thursday night.

It was good to be able to watch the film with beginners mind, letting it unfold before me without automatically knowing that everything was going to fit into the standard Hollywood 3-act structure. I had no idea how the film would evolve, let alone end. It was all new and unexpected and fascinating for it.

I sat with Mickey Freeman who was Nilssons cinematographer on the film. Mickey and I have worked together on some corporate projects in the past and that is how I knew him. I knew nothing about this side of his professional life. It was a revelation. The camerawork is spectacular. At no point did I feel the look of the film detracted from Nilssons vision. Mickeys cinematography complemented it beautifully.

I discovered Nilsson on your site serendipitously his announcement of the screenings of his films at the Mill Valley Film Festival appears just before my letter on page 88.

The universe works in mysterious ways.

Rob Nilsson: (Rob Nilsson’s reply to Ray Carney) What a great thing that Arthur Vibert should have come to PRESQUE ISLE. And his letter to you, discovering you much as I did many years ago, through your ideas and your views, in my case, your ideas about Cassavetes! Great. These are the sparks shooting through the splitter cables that reward and feed.

As you might have imagined I was knee deep in festival details over the last three weeks but another rich reward was the joyous, and also tearful, ending of the 9 @ Night Films with the MV Fest Premiere showing of GO TOGETHER, the last film in our, all told and accounted for, 15 year sojurn in the Tenderloin. Standing ovation and great feelings.

What can I say? So many friends and collaborators to thank in a world where most audiences would be sitting on their hands wondering when the movie was going to begin. The crucial need for education in the slipstream of inspired Art is made more evident by the joy which can happen when people begin to “understand.” Not that there’s anything to “understand” in any final sense, and of course, my work is only as good as my lungs ability to inhale the distillate of my mentors, Cassavetes, Bergman, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, etc. but there’s the life long “experience” of inspiration and grasps and glimpses of the “something out there” or “that longing in here” which art provides, the “secular spirituality” of being alive to both the world, and the creations of our sublime interpreters, which seems to me the only salvation. And if salvation is only those few moments of joy before the void closes over our heads, not to have experienced them at all must lead to a dark conclusion, to quote and re-purpose Goethe, that “you are only a troubled guest, on the dark earth.”

Well I don’t deny that I am a troubled guest, but I can say that (now here’s a re-fitted Auden-ism) mad America hurt me into poetry. I’m grateful for that wound and I hope to reveal and heal, heal and reveal as long as I have the energy and the artesian sources still percolating.

Looking forward to the Harvard show. I’ve told them everywhich way by Sunday that I want you mentioned in their publicity and the fact that Haden has looked to you for guidance I hope assures that your advocacy will be a big part of the show.

Thank you for your website promotion all along, and for your belief and support. You are that good smoke wafting upwards from the sacrifice. I’m an inhaler and I’m with you in your lifetime of struggle to encourage others to inhale as well.

Visualizing a Revolution: Emory Douglas and The Black Panther Newspaper

2007-10-22T19:38:00.001-07:00

I had the pleasure over the weekend to meet Emory Douglas. Douglas was the artist for the Black Panthers. His political images were so effective and brought an image and a style to the Black Panther paper. His work has inspired artist like Shepherd Fairy and many others.

I came across this great article about Emory.

Depending on a person’s politics, age, race and class, mention of the 1960s and ’70s radical “Black Panther Party” can elicit a range of responses. One extreme: the Panthers were a bunch of charismatic, grandstanding violent thugs, exploiting oppressive conditions to promote their own pathological agendas, and the United States is fortunate that the FBI and police stopped them before they started a bloody civil war. The other extreme: the Black Panthers were brilliant revolutionary visionaries who tried to expand the African American civil rights struggle into an opportunity to end Western imperialism, global racism and capitalist exploitation of working people. The truth is somewhere between those extremes. To understand the Panthers’ mission, it is more important to consider the range of possibilities than to pinpoint an exact ideological location.

In 1966, after civil rights legislation was passed and before many more inner city blocks would burn in riots, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense in Oakland, California. Like other African American communities in post-civil rights America, Oakland’s black ghettos had disproportionate poverty and unemployment rates, substandard education and health care. The Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation states that, “The Black Panther Party boldly call[ed] for a complete end to all forms of oppression of blacks and offer[ed] revolution as an option”

But police brutality was the most galvanizing issue for the Panthers. After riots in Detroit, Watts, Harlem, Rochester, New York, Jersey City and Philadelphia in 1964 and 1965, in which mostly black people were killed, police “occupied” black ghettos across the United States, often ignoring basic civil rights and breaking the law to “maintain order.” A generation of young people like Flores Alexander Forbes of San Diego became receptive to the idea of armed retaliation.

“I was 16 years old, and after having read the Black Panther newspaper and most of my older brother’s Black history and literature books that he brought home from UCLA, I was convinced that this was my calling. I had heard from my brother and his college friends that the brothers up north in Oakland had a program to deal with the ‘man.’

...In general, I wanted to be a Black Panther so that I could help my people overcome the oppression they and I were experiencing. In particular, I wanted to get back at the San Diego policeman who had been harassing me since I was 12”.

The Black Panther newspaper, started in 1967 as The Black Panther Community News Service, regularly reported incidents of police brutality and promoted organized armed resistance as part of the solution to oppression of black people in America. In a 1967 moment of synchronicity, the young Black Panther and artist Emory Douglas met Panther leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton, who had published the first two issues of The Black Panther newspaper using a typewriter and copy machine.

Understanding the emerging visual media culture, Cleaver and Newton wanted to graphically show the party’s work assisting people in their communities and prepare oppressed people for violent revolution, if necessary, in pursuit of psychological and economic liberation. They found the man to do this in 22-year-old Douglas. That night Douglas committed himself to creating and maintaining the organization’s visual identity and produced The Black Panther until it ceased publication in 1979.

No stranger to the criminal justice system, as a teenager, Douglas was sentenced to fifteen months at the Youth Training School in Ontario, California. He worked in the prison’s printing shop. Later he studied commercial art at San Francisco City College. At his first meeting with the party’s minister of defense, Huey Newton, and minister of information, Eldridge Cleaver, he volunteered to go home immediately and get some supplies to make the paper look more professional.

Continuing a long tradition of resistant and revolutionary art, concurrently practiced in conflicts all over the world, Douglas was the most prolific and persistent graphic agitator in the American Black Power movements. Douglas profoundly understood the power of images in communicating ideas. The newspaper’s back page poster was often reprinted separately, sometimes in color. His posters were not displayed on pristine gallery walls, but were pasted on abandoned buildings in ghettos, and the newspapers sold on street corners and college campuses all across the United States. At its peak in 1970, The Black Panther had a weekly circulation of 139,000.

Inexpensive printing technologies—including photostats and presstype, textures and patterns—made publishing a two-color heavily illustrated, weekly tabloid newspaper possible. Graphic production values associated with seductive advertising and waste in a decadent society became weapons of the revolution. Technically, Douglas collaged and re-collaged drawings and photographs, performing graphic tricks with little budget and even less time. His distinctive illustration style featured thick black outlines (easier to trap) and resourceful tint and texture combinations.

Conceptually, Douglas’s images served two purposes: first, illustrating conditions that made revolution seem necessary; and second, constructing a visual mythology of power for people who felt powerless and victimized. Most popular media represents middle to upper class people as “normal.” Douglas was the Norman Rockwell of the ghetto, concentrating on the poor and oppressed. Departing from the WPA/social realist style of portraying poor people, which can be perceived as voyeuristic and patronizing, Douglas’s energetic drawings showed respect and affection. He maintained poor people’s dignity while graphically illustrating harsh situations.

Political cartoons showing policemen and those in power as pigs became another of Emory’s signatures. He was not the first to use pigs to represent police, but he certainly helped make “pig” the preferred epithet for law enforcement officers in the 1960s and 70s counterculture. His cartoons extended the pig icon to represent the entire capitalist military/industrial complex.

Douglas’s statement “Without the party, the [Black Panther] paper wouldn’t have had the same impact” reiterates the symbiotic relationship between the party’s and the paper’s mission. The party’s Ten Point Program outlined an agenda that included obtaining full employment, decent housing, education, and health care, and finally “people’s community control of modern technology”. The Panthers’ community programs, like free breakfast for children, clinics, schools and arts events were featured in the paper, representing implementation of the ten points. Most of the back-page posters directly referred to one of the ten points, illustrating tight coordination between the paper, the party and the mission.

The leaders believed that The Black Panther was not just reporting news, but causing radical change. Like Emory’s drawings, the paper was a tool for liberation, visualizing violent confrontations with perceived oppressors. The drawings showed brutal realities of post-civil rights ghetto life for African Americans. Encouraging metaphoric (fighting oppression through self-help) or physical (armed confrontation) revolutionary action, Douglas’ harshest images simultaneously elicited revulsion at the graphic violence and attraction to the idea of effective self-defense.

Douglas understood and effectively used visual semiotics before its theory and methods were widely understood and routinely taught in graphic design programs. He fought the revolution with more than presstype and Xacto knives. Because of his leadership role in the party, in producing the paper and participation in the Panthers’ range of community programs, he was closely watched by law enforcement officers. The level of surveillance was so intense the FBI knew the paper’s weekly choice of PMS color. As the paper’s circulation grew, so did the FBI’s efforts to shut it down. They contaminated printing facilities, enlisted Teamsters to refuse shipments and even convinced United Airlines to cancel the paper’s bulk mail rate discounts.

Individual members of the party were clearly targeted, as well as the overall infrastructure. In 1969 alone, 27 Black Panthers were killed by police and at least 749 arrested. The police raided offices and seized documents, sometimes without a warrant. The next year, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, declared the Panthers “the greatest threat to U.S. security”. Federal law enforcement agencies responded by attacking the organization through COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence propaganda), sabotage and infiltration, contributing to the party’s demise.

In retrospect, it is clear that the Panthers were not the terrorist threat the FBI feared. It does not matter whether the Panthers intended to wage a large-scale retaliatory attack against perceived agents of oppression such as police, politicians and Western ideology. Douglas’ call to revolution, in the form of thousands of drawings, cartoons and page layouts, survives as a lasting vision of empowerment. For 13 years, every week in the pages of The Black Panther, Emory Douglas gave “all power to the people.”

References

(1) Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation. “What Was the Black Panther Party?”

(2) Nelson, Jill, ed. Police Brutality. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000). p. 39-42.

(3) Carson, Clayborne. Foreword. Foner, Philip S., ed. The Black Panthers Speak. (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002).

(4) Forbes, Flores Alexander. “Point No. 7: We Want an Immediate End to Police Brutality and the Murder of Black People: Why I Joined the Black Panther Party.”
Nelson, Jill, ed. Police Brutality. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000). p. 225.

(5) Foner, Philip S., ed. The Black Panthers Speak. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002. p. 8.

(6) Doss, Erika “Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation.” Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, ed. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 179.

(7) Memo, FBIHQ to Chicago and seven other field offices, May 15, 1970. Cited by Ward Churchill, “To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy: The FBI’s Secret War against the Black Panther Party”, Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 86.

(8) Doss, Erika, “Revolutionary Art Is a Tool for Liberation.” Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 183.

(9) Rein, Marcy, “The More Times Change... The Bay Area Alternative Press ’68-’98”. (1998). Media Alliance. Media File. Vol. 17 #5.

(10) The Ten Point Plan

(11) Rein, Marcy, Ibid.

(12) Churchill, Ward, “To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy: The FBI’s Secret War against the Black Panther Party”. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 86.

(13) Nelson, Jill, ed. Police Brutality. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000). p. 41.

(14) Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, p. 187. Cited by Ward Churchill, “To Disrupt, Discredit and Destroy: The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party.” Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas, eds. Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party. (New York: Routledge, 2001) p. 83.

Additional online references

Gaiter, Colette. “The Revolution Will Be Visualized: Emory Douglas in The Black Panther.” Bad Subjects. Issue #65, January 2004.

Emory Douglas Revolutionary Art Work - Index

Position Paper #1 on Revolutionary Art (PDF)

Art for a Change: Black Panther Artist: Emory Douglas

Images courtesy of San Francisco African American Historical and Cultural Society Library and Archive, The Center for the Study of Political Graphics, and Emory Douglas.

About the Author: Colette Gaiter is a professor in the Interactive Arts and Media Department at Columbia College, Chicago and a new media artist and designer. She has exhibited her work internationally at the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), SIGGRAPH, and in numerous galleries, museums and public institutions in the United States. http://www.digidiva.net

Avant-Garde artist you should check out

2007-10-15T21:31:00.001-07:00

The avant-garde hasn't had a performer like Margaret Leng Tan in years. She's one of those rare pianists whose performance style takes equal billing with the music.

-Village Voice, New York

The first woman to graduate with a Doctor of Music from Juilliard, Margaret Leng Tan has since evolved a radically individual performance style fusing sound, choreography and drama. Hailed as "the world's premiere string piano virtuoso" and "the diva of avant-garde pianism" (New York Times), she is known for her performances of Asian and American music that defy the conventional boundaries of the instrument. She is closely identified with the work of John Cage. The New Republic called her "the leading exponent of Cage's music today." She has performed his music throughout the world and has recorded it for audio as well as film releases. Her Whitney Museum appearance at the Jasper Johns Exhibition was hailed as one of the most memorable performances of 1991 by the New York Times. She performed for the opening of the 45th Venice Biennale in 1993, selecting a music tribute to John Cage. Her several recordings have received critical acclaim. She has appeared at major festivals around the world including Ravinia, Spoleto USA, New Music America, Bang on a Can, MANCA (France), Inventionen (Berlin) and Lincoln Center Out-of Doors Serious Fun. Born in Singapore, Ms. Tan made her debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1991.

Margaret Leng Tan's website is located at http://www.margaretlengtan.com/.

SMOKE

2007-10-15T20:58:00.000-07:00

Homeless Youth Project

2007-10-12T18:33:00.000-07:00

This is a work in progress.

Baghdad Burning

2007-10-10T16:05:00.000-07:00

If you don't know about Baghdad Burning you should. An amazing blog by a young Iraqi girl who documents what life is like since the U.S. invasion of her country.
Current excerpt below.

There is also a book with the first few years of her blog that documents the moments when the U.S. Invaded.
http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Leaving Home...
Two months ago, the suitcases were packed. My lone, large suitcase sat in my bedroom for nearly six weeks, so full of clothes and personal items, that it took me, E. and our six year old neighbor to zip it closed.

Packing that suitcase was one of the more difficult things I’ve had to do. It was Mission Impossible: Your mission, R., should you choose to accept it is to go through the items you’ve accumulated over nearly three decades and decide which ones you cannot do without. The difficulty of your mission, R., is that you must contain these items in a space totaling 1 m by 0.7 m by 0.4 m. This, of course, includes the clothes you will be wearing for the next months, as well as any personal memorabilia- photos, diaries, stuffed animals, CDs and the like.

I packed and unpacked it four times. Each time I unpacked it, I swore I’d eliminate some of the items that were not absolutely necessary. Each time I packed it again, I would add more ‘stuff’ than the time before. E. finally came in a month and a half later and insisted we zip up the bag so I wouldn’t be tempted to update its contents constantly.

The decision that we would each take one suitcase was made by my father. He took one look at the box of assorted memories we were beginning to prepare and it was final: Four large identical suitcases were purchased- one for each member of the family and a fifth smaller one was dug out of a closet for the documentation we’d collectively need- graduation certificates, personal identification papers, etc.

We waited… and waited… and waited. It was decided we would leave mid to late June- examinations would be over and as we were planning to leave with my aunt and her two children- that was the time considered most convenient for all involved. The day we finally appointed as THE DAY, we woke up to an explosion not 2 km away and a curfew. The trip was postponed a week. The night before we were scheduled to travel, the driver who owned the GMC that would take us to the border excused himself from the trip- his brother had been killed in a shooting. Once again, it was postponed.

There was one point, during the final days of June, where I simply sat on my packed suitcase and cried. By early July, I was convinced we would never leave. I was sure the Iraqi border was as far away, for me, as the borders of Alaska. It had taken us well over two months to decide to leave by car instead of by plane. It had taken us yet another month to settle on Syria as opposed to Jordan. How long would it take us to reschedule leaving?

It happened almost overnight. My aunt called with the exciting news that one of her neighbors was going to leave for Syria in 48 hours because their son was being threatened and they wanted another family on the road with them in another car- like gazelles in the jungle, it’s safer to travel in groups. It was a flurry of activity for two days. We checked to make sure everything we could possibly need was prepared and packed. We arranged for a distant cousin of my moms who was to stay in our house with his family to come the night before we left (we can’t leave the house empty because someone might take it).

It was a tearful farewell as we left the house. One of my other aunts and an uncle came to say goodbye the morning of the trip. It was a solemn morning and I’d been preparing myself for the last two days not to cry. You won’t cry, I kept saying, because you’re coming back. You won’t cry because it’s just a little trip like the ones you used to take to Mosul or Basrah before the war. In spite of my assurances to myself of a safe and happy return, I spent several hours before leaving with a huge lump lodged firmly in my throat. My eyes burned and my nose ran in spite of me. I told myself it was an allergy.

We didn’t sleep the night before we had to leave because there seemed to be so many little things to do… It helped that there was no electricity at all- the area generator wasn’t working and ‘national electricity’ was hopeless. There just wasn’t time to sleep.

The last few hours in the house were a blur. It was time to go and I went from room to room saying goodbye to everything. I said goodbye to my desk- the one I’d used all through high school and college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the bed and the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair E. and I broke when we were younger. I said goodbye to the big table over which we’d gathered for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the framed pictures that once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long since been taken down and stored away- but I knew just what hung where. I said goodbye to the silly board games we inevitably fought over- the Arabic Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no one had the heart to throw away.

I knew then as I know now that these were all just items- people are so much more important. Still, a house is like a museum in that it tells a certain history. You look at a cup or stuffed toy and a chapter of memories opens up before your very eyes. It suddenly hit me that I wanted to leave so much less than I thought I did.

Six AM finally came. The GMC waited outside while we gathered the necessities- a thermos of hot tea, biscuits, juice, olives (olives?!) which my dad insisted we take with us in the car, etc. My aunt and uncle watched us sorrowfully. There’s no other word to describe it. It was the same look I got in my eyes when I watched other relatives and friends prepare to leave. It was a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness, tinged with anger. Why did the good people have to go?

I cried as we left- in spite of promises not to. The aunt cried… the uncle cried. My parents tried to be stoic but there were tears in their voices as they said their goodbyes. The worst part is saying goodbye and wondering if you’re ever going to see these people again. My uncle tightened the shawl I’d thrown over my hair and advised me firmly to ‘keep it on until you get to the border’. The aunt rushed out behind us as the car pulled out of the garage and dumped a bowl of water on the ground, which is a tradition- its to wish the travelers a safe return… eventually.

The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I’ve learned that the best technique is to avoid eye-contact, answer questions politely and pray under your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves.

The trip was long and uneventful, other than two checkpoints being run by masked men. They asked to see identification, took a cursory glance at the passports and asked where we were going. The same was done for the car behind us. Those checkpoints are terrifying but I’ve learned that the best technique is to avoid eye-contact, answer questions politely and pray under your breath. My mother and I had been careful not to wear any apparent jewelry, just in case, and we were both in long skirts and head scarves.

Syria is the only country, other than Jordan, that was allowing people in without a visa. The Jordanians are being horrible with refugees. Families risk being turned back at the Jordanian border, or denied entry at Amman Airport. It’s too high a risk for most families.

We waited for hours, in spite of the fact that the driver we were with had ‘connections’, which meant he’d been to Syria and back so many times, he knew all the right people to bribe for a safe passage through the borders. I sat nervously at the border. The tears had stopped about an hour after we’d left Baghdad. Just seeing the dirty streets, the ruins of buildings and houses, the smoke-filled horizon all helped me realize how fortunate I was to have a chance for something safer.

By the time we were out of Baghdad, my heart was no longer aching as it had been while we were still leaving it. The cars around us on the border were making me nervous. I hated being in the middle of so many possibly explosive vehicles. A part of me wanted to study the faces of the people around me, mostly families, and the other part of me, the one that’s been trained to stay out of trouble the last four years, told me to keep my eyes to myself- it was almost over.

It was finally our turn. I sat stiffly in the car and waited as money passed hands; our passports were looked over and finally stamped. We were ushered along and the driver smiled with satisfaction, “It’s been an easy trip, Alhamdulillah,” he said cheerfully.

As we crossed the border and saw the last of the Iraqi flags, the tears began again. The car was silent except for the prattling of the driver who was telling us stories of escapades he had while crossing the border. I sneaked a look at my mother sitting beside me and her tears were flowing as well. There was simply nothing to say as we left Iraq. I wanted to sob, but I didn’t want to seem like a baby. I didn’t want the driver to think I was ungrateful for the chance to leave what had become a hellish place over the last four and a half years.

The Syrian border was almost equally packed, but the environment was more relaxed. People were getting out of their cars and stretching. Some of them recognized each other and waved or shared woeful stories or comments through the windows of the cars. Most importantly, we were all equal. Sunnis and Shia, Arabs and Kurds… we were all equal in front of the Syrian border personnel.

We were all refugees- rich or poor. And refugees all look the same- there’s a unique expression you’ll find on their faces- relief, mixed with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the same.

The first minutes after passing the border were overwhelming. Overwhelming relief and overwhelming sadness… How is it that only a stretch of several kilometers and maybe twenty minutes, so firmly segregates life from death?

How is it that a border no one can see or touch stands between car bombs, militias, death squads and… peace, safety? It’s difficult to believe- even now. I sit here and write this and wonder why I can’t hear the explosions.

I wonder at how the windows don’t rattle as the planes pass overhead. I’m trying to rid myself of the expectation that armed people in black will break through the door and into our lives. I’m trying to let my eyes grow accustomed to streets free of road blocks, hummers and pictures of Muqtada and the rest…

How is it that all of this lies a short car ride away?

A Day at Vollmann's Studio - By Terri Saul

2007-10-09T16:17:00.000-07:00

William T. Vollmann appears at the door just as I turn in to his driveway. It's raining, so he helps me carry my camera bags in. I offer up a Christmas cactus and a box of tangerines. Vollmann has a Christmas cactus story, and after he first checks that I've locked my car, he tells it: as a child he saved one segment of a Christmas cactus, and it lived, soon to germinate in his rooftop garden.

Although Vollmann is best known for his writing, I am here to see his visual artwork. I'm prepared to talk art all day long, but with Vollmann the divide between the arts is always fluid: our conversation ranges from Noh theater to contemporary music to his novels and everything in between.

Once inside Vollmann's studio I'm confronted with walls that are covered, salon style, with art. Just past women's and men's restrooms painted in rough strokes of bold color (in the restrooms hang longtime Vollmann collaborator Ken Miller's prostitute photos) there's a dark bedroom/library complete with Vollmann's oft-mentioned meat-locker closet. After that an art-lined corridor where art hangs on blonde wood runners, ready to be critiqued. Over the studio entrance is a collection of Soviet propaganda posters. It appears that Vollmann's prodigious writings are matched by his capacity to produce and collect visual art.

Inside the studio there's art equipment everywhere, much of it looking like art itself--vintage, accordion-shaped view cameras, vacuum powered printing machines, an ultraviolet cyanotype exposure unit, darkroom trays, an enlarger, baker's trays lined with drying prints, and a work bench as long as a strip mall parking lot.

Vollmann says everything should be displayed in the studio. "I figure, if you don't see things, all the things that you have, all your watercolors together, your engraving tools and everything else together, you're not going to use them all. When they're all out there, you can get inspired and say, 'oh, I'd like to do this right now.'"

It's an embattled sense of art one is tempted to link to his gun collection. If it's not used regularly, ink will dry up, watercolors will crack, wood cuts will gather dust. Vollmann has even made his workbench modular so that if he were ever forced to downsize he could take smaller pieces of it along with him.

His daughter has her own drawing space in the main room, her notes to daddy and sketches pinned up near low-lying tables. Vollmann tells me that he's struggling with the creative parent's dilemma, how to have the freedom of a studio, a place where his individual (often explicit) work can germinate unhampered, without shame, but also provide a place for his daughter to grow up, where her friends and their parents will feel comfortable. How would it feel to be the daughter of William T. Vollmann? The conservative parents in his area aren't necessarily fond of his photos of prostitutes, even though in most of the photos the prostitutes are not acting particularly risqu�, sometimes wearing everyday clothing, or simply posed facing the camera straight-on. Still, the subject matter is taboo. He's a good father, he says. Having a child has been the most fulfilling part of his life. He enjoys having her around in the studio.

As an artist Vollmann is completely self-taught. He's never taken a class in printmaking or photography. Everything he does with paper and images he's learned about in books. A purist who never considers his audience, he makes the art for himself only; he says he doesn't care about showing his work in galleries. His interactions with his daughter's classmates and their families may be the only time he's really had to weigh how his work might be perceived.

Once we're in the studio, Vollmann shows me around, starting with a row of Oak Park photos he took while following Sacramento prostitutes. Most are platinum, but others are gum over cyanotype. I'm struck by one haunting portrait.

WTVWTV: This is a palladium-toned printing-out-paper print, and it's been sitting out here for a couple of years without any change, so the palladium seems to really make it pretty stable. This is gum over platinum, and this is just straight gum. The gum is really, really hard. I don't know if you understand the process. It's one of the first photographic processes. Basically you take Gum Arabic, with watercolor in it, and you make it photosensitive, and so it's as permanent as the watercolor itself. Artist's grade watercolors will last for hundreds of years, presumably. But, each time you print it, you get a very, very thin print. So you have to print over and over. So, this has about 12 or 13 printings in register on it. So you get this special kind of look to it. You can't get great detail with gum. It's just more of a moody thing.

TS: It looks like a ghost.

WTV: Yeah it does. And, she is a ghost. She's dead now.

We stand in the hallway silently staring at the photo of a ghost, together admiring her strong visage. He tells me about another prostitute friend of his, a grandmother, who used his tube of Cadmium red paint as lipstick. Cadmium is used to get the most brilliant hues of red, but is a heavy metal, highly toxic, even in minute doses.

WTV: When she was posing for me here she was talking about one of her customers who was really, really nice to her and she said she didn't know what she would do if he died. And then I was told later that she was strangled. I haven't seen her since. But I knew her for probably about three years, and every time I would get a hotel room and I would see her, I would say, "you know, you can come in, and you can sleep here." Sometimes she would. If I wasn't around she would steal my cadmium red watercolor and use it for lipstick. I said, "you know, that's kind of bad for you." But, seeing as how she died from being strangled, well, I guess it didn't do her any harm. Poor thing.

TS: You've really gotten to see a different side of prostitutes.

WTV: There's another. This was a very, very nice woman. Usually, they say, "Oh, can you give me a little bit of money to 'get well' before I pose for you?" And, you know, maybe 25 percent of the time they just run away when they have the money. But, I always think, that's ok.

So, this woman went, and got her crack, and she really wanted to share it with me. You know, she wanted to be really nice. I thought that was so generous, it was giving me the thing that she most valued.

He shows me more platinum, more gum. We look at photographs of prostitutes posing any way they want, more of the women Vollmann met in Oak Park, and then at another set of photos. There seems to be no end to Vollmann's photo collection. He tells me that he's working hard to make lots of prints from his--you guessed it--prodigious negative archive, taken around the world over many years.

WTV: These I'm just flattening. I just printed them yesterday. This one is 35mm. It's from Columbia from about 1999. This is a child prostitute. I think this is her mother, the procuress. I said, "Well, how about instead of paying for sex, how about if I pay for a picture?"

We view another Columbia photo. Two besieged policeman sit apprehensively in their station.

WTV: These two police had one machine pistol between them, but they felt relatively safe in their police station because they had a picture of Christ. I will say, they didn't really want to get in trouble with the criminals, so they tried to stay in their police stations. It was very bad for them, Terri.

I notice that Vollmann uses a medieval-looking soapstone WTV stamp as his signature, with the W on the right side, the V on the left side, and the T in the middle. At that point, Vollmann offers me some tea. Putting on some Tchaikovsky, he takes some kind of medicinal tea from a metal tin box he'd decorated with one of his etchings of a grasshopper. The incised metal is rubbed over with printer's ink.

TS: Do you live here in the studio?

WTV: Sometimes, yeah. It all depends on my mood, but I also have a home, and I spend some time there. It's unclear which space I'll spend more time in, in the future.

TS: Where do you do most of your writing?

WTV: It depends on what I'm working on. I do a lot of poetry and stuff here, and if there's some current fiction or non-fiction then I tend to work in the other house for that because it's my preference to have no phone here. No one can reach me here at all, so I can get a lot done and have a lot of peace. But a lot of the time I need to be near the phone, so the other place, where there's a phone, is a good place to be when I'm working on some of the books with deadlines.

I point to a door-sized table filled with hefty, upright, over-sized books, balanced like a domino rally and covered in plastic sheeting.

TS: Tell me about this.

WTV: It's called The Book of Candles and it's a folio. There are 10 of them. Let's see, I started it in 1995, and I've finished most of them this year. I finally sent one off to my dealer [Priscilla Juvelis] and one off to the Lilly Library.

Priscilla Juvelis's rare books site describes The Book of Candles as

A suite of eight religious and blasphemous love-poems to prostitutes . . . housed in a sailcloth-covered basswood clamshell box which the artist/author has painted, collaged with hand-painted woodblock prints, and suitably adorned with gewgaws. . . .

The woodcut image on the underside of each box is different. Four Japanese "doughnut hold" [sic] coins have been screwed in to the underside of the box to comprise protective feet. Inside each box, a narrow channel, collaged with painted paper, runs around three edges, leaving the spine side open. Within this are set two wooden corner blocks mounted with selenium-splotched flower-engraved brass plates, a strip of painted walnut engraved with a print of a female nude, two engraved beeswax candles on engraved brass supports wrapped round with brass wire. Even the brass screws of these assemblies are engraved and rubbed with oil-based ink.

On the inside of the spine are one engraved and inked aluminum plate and one engraved and inked brass plate which is signed and numbered.

Vollmann unwraps some boxes and books covered with more plastic sheeting. It's used, he tells me, to protect the art from his leaky roof. The box is a folio edition of The Book of Candles, hand engraved on two blocks of wood. Inside a hinged door is a set of loose prints.

WTV: There are the candles that I've engraved. See, even the screws I've engraved, and these little things. Each one of these is different. I decided not to bind them, but just to present them in a box. You can flip through if you want.

TS: Do you think the sentiments in your letter, "Crabbed Cautions of a Bleeding-hearted Un-deleter," would apply to your art too?

WTV; With the visual art, I'm probably a little more selective. Actually, you know, I do throw away. I don't use a lot of the stuff that I write--I might keep it, but I don't use it, necessarily. And with the visual art, often I'll produce a print or an image, and I'll realize it's just not good enough.

TS: Do your works show in a gallery space before being sold?

WTV: Usually they go straight to collectors. The editions are really small, and I'm not sure that it really makes sense to have shows. I could change my mind on that, but it seems like if you do that you spend a lot of money, probably more than you're going to get.

TS: On airfare, hotels, framing . . .

WTV: Yeah, that's right, Terri. And, I'm not really a vain person--I couldn't care less if people look at my stuff--I'm just happy to make it and if I can sell enough visual art and writing to get by and do more, that's all I care about.

Vollmann takes me to his fully stocked wood engraving area where I see a block of wood covered with a breathtaking sketch of a snow-capped mountain.

WTV: Back in February or March, I spent about an hour and a half in one place, standing in the snow on top of this truck, drawing this--the mountain. Here's a bunch of pine trees, and so on and so forth. I've just started engraving this sketch.

TS: Those illustrations in your novels, like in the Seven Dreams series, are they engravings?

WTV: Most of those are pen and ink drawings, but sometimes I'll use them as masters for engravings. So, in Butterfly Stories for instance, I did a bunch of drawings, which I then made into magnesium plates that I printed by hand.

TS: Do you prefer printmaking or your drawings with pen, where you're drawing the figure more loosely?

WTV: Well Terri, I think, probably, if I had to choose, I would choose printmaking because I love the crispness of the line, and then it's great to watercolor afterwards. But what you gain with a print you loose in spontaneity. And with a drawing it's really nice if someone is posing for you, and you can just go to town with a handful of watercolors. That's very, very relaxing.

Vollmann shows me how the engraver works. It's hooked up to a very loud air compressor, so he pulls me over to him and places some headphones over my ears. I turn off the recorder while he engraves. After the motor whirs to a stop, we take off for the island of tables in the center of the studio.

WTV: I was in Norway and did some illustrations of some of the Norse Eddas. The ancient Norse myths are best preserved in the Eddas, so they found me some professional models and cut me some Norwegian pine wood, to get it just right.

TS: Norwegian wood.

WTV: That's right. This is one of them, the goddess, Freya. It says her name in Runes--carved backwards obviously so it'll be right-reading--and then there were these petroglyphs that my editor showed me from the Sami people, the Laplanders. So, I did some drawings of some of those and put these ancient petroglyphs in too.

This woman [Freya in the engraving] is actually an anthropologist who was excavating some Norse stuff at the time that she modeled for me. I just drew her. This woman was like the perfect woman for it. She could actually recite some of this poem, the seeress's sayings to Odin, you know, in Old Norse. I did a bunch of drawings of her.

We move on to a set of prints Vollmann is doing in conjunction with a book he's writing on Japanese Noh theater. He shows me one. As I inspect a gum print of Yoroboshi, the blind priest's song, I ask him who his favorite artists are.

WTV: I like William Blake very much.

TS: His work is really ecstatic, the blue and yellow . . .

WTV: Yeah, it's beautiful. Absolutely. Then there are overlooked artists, like Andrew Wyeth, passed over because he wants to paint every pine needle, or every single blade of grass.

TS: I wanted to ask you about the Shostakovich passages in the "Palm Tree of Deborah" from Europe Central. I read them over and over again.

WTV: Oh, you like Shostakovich?

TS: I like Shostakovich. But I liked more the metaphors about the chromatic scale, the "transgressive harmonies of the chromatic scale."

WTV: Oh, that was fun. Yeah. I really, really enjoy listening to Shostakovich now. It was a little hard for him to live the life he did. Actually, it took me a lot of work to get to the point where I could understand him a little bit. It wasn't natural for me to appreciate those harmonies. I'm sure it isn't for most people. It was a good stretch of self-improvement.

TS: Do you think that's what people need to do when they see your work, or when they read your work, that they need to be open to the transgressive harmonies?

WTV: If they want to, but I think that if they don't like my work, or don't want to ever study it, or enjoy it, that's okay with me. That doesn't hurt my feelings.

Our time up, Vollmann asks me to shuttle him from Sacramento to Berkeley. Before we step out into the pouring rain, however, Vollmann turns the tables and asks me a question.

WTV: So, if I were going to draw you, how would you want to be drawn?

TS: I think I'd let you decide, since you're the artist.

WTV: Oh, that sounds good.

TS: How would you want to draw me?

WTV: It depends on whether you'd want to be drawn with or without clothes.

TS: I could think about being a model. Would you pay me anything?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Driving to Berkeley through water that covers my windshield in sheets, we talk about parenting, and then about criminal justice. Vollmann is passionate about the need to have a more lenient judicial system in place; he thinks that that the overly harsh punishment of criminals--the stretching of the three-strikes law and lengthy prison stays for drug crimes--is taking away the basic rights of people who require at most a slap on the wrist for petty crimes. He tells me about the research he's doing on a book about the court system's response to men accused of rape.

Hydroplaning in my Cutter on Interstate 80 in a flood zone, I learn that the old standby of removing pressure from the gas and the brakes, while not attempting to steer, works wonders and impresses a veteran of foreign wars.

Before we pull in to Berkeley Vollmann tells me that, like his anti-hero from The Royal Family, he's taken to hopping freight trains on weekends. He's even discovered an atlas, originating in Portland, for freight train hoppers. I recommend the photo journalism of the Polaroid Kid, and he offers me the chance to be a box-car warmer, or to arrive via train on my next visit. When we reach Berkeley Vollmann says I'm a good driver, because we're still alive. He is indeed a genius.

© 2006 Scott Esposito
Photos © Terri Saul

A writer to know about

2007-10-08T16:13:00.000-07:00

William Tanner Vollmann (born July 28, 1959 in Los Angeles, California) is an American novelist, journalist, short story writer and essayist. He lives in Sacramento, California with his wife and daughter. Vollmann studied at Deep Springs College and earned a B.A., summa cum laude, in comparative literature at Cornell University.

After graduation, Vollmann worked odd jobs, including as a secretary at an insurance company, and saved up enough money to go to Afghanistan in 1982. His experiences traveling with the mujahideen formed the basis of his first non-fiction book An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World which was published in 1987. Upon his return to the USA he briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley as a graduate student but dropped out after one year. He then worked as a computer programmer, despite having virtually no experience with computers. According to a New York Times Magazine profile by novelist Madison Smartt Bell, he spent the better part of a year there writing his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels, after hours on office computers, subsisting on candy bars from vending machines and hiding from the janitorial staff.

He has written for Harper's, Spin Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, Gear, Granta, and sometimes contributes to The New York Times Book Review among other publications. Vollmann has called himself a "former hack journalist" and his travel writing and reportage often inform his fiction, giving it a hybridized and journalistic feel.

In early 2004 (after many delays) McSweeney's published Rising Up and Rising Down, a 3,300-page, heavily illustrated, seven-volume treatise on violence which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A single-volume condensed version was published at the end of the year by Ecco Press, an abridgment he justified by saying, "I did it for the money."[1] Rising Up and Rising Down represents over 20 years of work and attempts to establish a moral calculus to consider the causes, effects, and ethics of violence. Much of it consists of Vollmann's own reporting from places wracked by violence, among them Cambodia, Somalia, and Iraq.

Vollmann's other works often deal with the settlement of North America (as in Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, a cycle of seven novels), or stories of people (often prostitutes) on the margins of war, poverty, and hope. His 2005 novel Europe Central follows the trajectories of a wide range of characters (including Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich) caught up in the fighting between Germany and the Soviet Union, and won the 2005 National Book Award for Fiction.

Vollmann's papers were acquired by the Rare Books & Manuscripts Library of Ohio State University

For more info on Vollmann check this site out.
http://www.edrants.com/wtv/

bio info from wikipedia

The Ethic

2007-10-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

An old bum on Grant Street could not sense an entire Columbus Day parade of dragons and monsters and drum-beaters and yellow-clad Chinese girls standing in the backs of pickup trucks, clashing cymbals; he just sat on the edge of a tree box and his head was on his trembling hands; and he shook it whenever there was a concussion of drumbeats or firecrackers in the street beside him, not understanding this loud night world of cheers and Chinese families waving Taiwanese and American flags and child-orchestras and marching woman; he was blinded in himself- but when I gave him twenty-two cents he looked up, and although he could not see me or acknowledge me, he began counting the money very rapidly and practically. We are all anchored by something. Most of us are anchored by money.

Excerpt from "The Rainbow Stories by William T. Vollmann

How is it

2007-09-28T16:29:00.000-07:00

How is it that we sit back and watch it all crumble away?
How is it that the dream is turning into a nightmare?
How is it that people still hang nooses from trees?
How is it that black, brown, Asian young kids kill each other in the streets?
How is it when the hot needle enters our vein for the 19th or 20th time we expect that?

How is it that the suites in the house of white pontificate for education and healthcare but in the end care very little about helping except for their wallets.
How will it be when the walls come tumbling down?
What will it sound like?
What will the people say?
Will they take to the streets and cheer?
Or will they cannibalize themselves?

We’re all founders of our past and destroyers of our destiny?

Can we change?

Dressed in red

2007-09-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an ouvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgments but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep.

Perhaps it would invent them sometimes -- all the better. All the better.

Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I'd like a criticism of scintillating leaps of imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.

-Michel Foucault

Art Whore

2007-09-18T16:05:00.000-07:00

“There is a time to stop reading, there is a time to STOP trying to WRITE, there is a time to kick the whole bloated sensation of ART out on its whore-ass.”

-Bukowski

My Response to the Article Exiles on Main Street

2007-09-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

What is so hip and cool about living right outside so much suffering?
While they sit in their IKEA decorated faux arty style loft, observing the wonderful view from their windowsill, and drinking a nice brewed cup of coffee made in their brand new Krups coffee maker, they catch a man laying face down on the sidewalk. Vomit surrounds his head. "Mmm…I love to watch people suffer in the morning."
"Good thing I can capture this with my brand new Iphone."
If this doesn’t conclude the idea that Los Angeles is full of vapid idiots nothing will.
Bukowski didn’t live in squalor and filth because he wanted to.
He found places he could afford while he struggled.
And you bet your ass he had no hesitation when the opportunity came to move to San Pedro.

What I want to know is what are these people doing to help all those hungry on the sidewalk below them?
Do they just silently step over them as they walk to their Prius and drive away?

Or the prostitutes, what nostalgia-watching, old, sad, and broken women walking the streets for sex. Oh forget the sunsets. I’d rather watch someone writhing in pain on the street while I watch from my windowsill safely in my IKEA vomit dream.

Artists my ass.

And you compare this to Paris in 1898?
Are you serious?

And with the spirit of the gritty street with all the hungry and lost, I give you one last image.
All the homeless standing outside the lofts giving them all a glorious middle finger.

So Hip It Hurts/Vapid Los Angeles

2007-09-18T15:31:00.000-07:00

Exiles On Main Street

Portraits of downtown's endangered artists. Case study: The Canadian Building
By LINDA IMMEDIATO
Wednesday, September 12, 2007 - 2:00 pm
(Photos by Kevin Scanlon)
The hookers downtown don’t look anything like they do in movies. No fishnets or pushup bras. They are in their 50s and 60s and look like little grandmas — which is why they’ve become known as the abuelas. They dress like secretaries and keep bankers’ hours, working days to cash in on a little lunch and rush-hour action. For years, they were fixtures at the perpetually C-rated greasy spoon known as El Trouble but whose real name nobody seems to recall. It was part of the Canadian, a building on Skid Row’s Main and Winston streets, which also held a XXX movie theater, an adult bookstore, a few empty storefronts and, on its two top floors, a collection of crumbling lofts. The Canadian used to be called the Birdhouse, because pigeons had come through broken windows to roost in a few of the vacated lofts; they covered the floors with bird shit and flapped their wings through the wide hallways.

By 1996 only three people were living in the building.

That same year, the owners began to advertise for tenants to fill the lofts. The raw spaces were dirty, most of the fixtures were broken, there was no heat or gas, and bathrooms and showers were in the hallways. The people who moved in were starving artists picking up the scraps from the boom and bust of downtown's earlier art-loft era in the '80s and early '90s. Living an often overly romanticized hand-to-mouth existence, struggling from painting to painting, freelance job to freelance job, no sign of a steady paycheck in sight, they came for one reason: cheap rent. At first, there were a few residents, basically functioning drug addicts, who were able to hold on to a job, at least for a little while, between benders. One, from a wealthy Santa Barbara family, was a severe alcoholic with a crack addiction, habits made worse by a slight mental illness. He’d often pass out in the hallways or hang from the banisters. Occasionally he brought home male crack whores. Then there was the bona fide nut case — he was paranoid, delusional and occasionally aggressive, particularly toward the female residents. He’d corner them in hallways when no one was around or while they were in towels, skin still wet, fresh out of the shared bathroom showers, to interrogate them about some imagined conspiracy. In his calmer moments, he'd show up in the doorways of male residents, swishing red wine around in a wineglass and making small talk in an attempt to gain allies so that he wouldn’t get kicked out of the building.

Keep Reading

“People have this romanticized view of lofts. They come in after we’ve
all put thousands of dollars into them. Not to mention the love and hours and
hours of work. It's like, where were you when I needed help moving four years ago?
When did downtown become the epicenter of cool? When I moved in it was the epicenter
of hood.” —Dina Chang, pictured with her live-in boyfriend, Emilio Ramirez

Click here for more pictures from the Canadian.

What follows are the stories of some of the current residents of the Canadian and about a way of life that’s become increasingly threatened ever since developer Tom Gilmore began packaging “the artist’s life” down the street with a series of luxury lofts now known as the Old Bank District, and other developers followed his lead. Before downtown echoed with jackhammers and cranes filled the skyline, residents of the Canadian spent a decade living with the constant interruptions of film crews shooting car chases, explosions and murder scenes. There were bonfires in the middle of the streets, bicyclists riding through empty thoroughfares in their pajamas, knife-wielding neighbors, clouds of crack smoke, homeless fights, underground art galleries and record stores, and parties that went on for days.

To hear them tell it, downtown L.A. circa 1998 was like Montmartre, the epicenter of bohemian Paris, in 1898. And if downtown L.A. was Montmartre, the Canadian was Le Bateau-Lavoir, the squalid tenement that housed the likes of Pablo Picasso and Amadeo Modigliani in the late 1890s. Before the current attempts to turn it into a yuppie playground, downtown's Main Street was the kind of petri dish of hunger and humanity that artists crave and thrive on. Right in the middle of it all was the Canadian, where crack and abuelas became absinthe and courtesans, and the party never ended.

The Brothers Banales

Back in the late '90s, you could roll a bowling ball down the middle of Main Street and not hit anything. Shadows moved, street lamps illuminated nothing but lonely stretches of sidewalk and deserted buildings. In 1998, whatever functioning businesses that were left would close for the day and silence would descend. Often, the unmistakable hum of a Banales brothers party would rip through that silence. Ground zero was the brothers’ 2,000-square-foot vaulted loft in the Canadian, where a dense graffiti forest thrown up by local artist Vynl wrapped around a stage with pro speaker cabinets and a manned mixing board. The source of the commotion? Maybe it was Deerhoof, or the Minutemen, the Centimeters, the Adolescents or any of the 50 bands that played for free to a packed crowd in the brothers’ loft. The parties usually lasted till the wee hours of the morning. The average bash drew 400 bodies, some of which were still around come morning, sleeping it off in a hallway. The Banales brothers’ parties became the stuff of legend.

They told me their story as we sat on stools at their homemade bar, drinking beers while a DVD of avant garde images looped on a screen overhead. It all began in the spring of 1995, when Dan Banales, baby faced, big boned and clean cut, had just gotten back from Tokyo, where he had spent the previous five years representing a group of psychedelic artists who lived in downtown Los Angeles. These artists’ lofts made an indelible mark on his memory; they were totally different from what he had seen growing up in Pasadena in his self-described Rockwellian existence. There was the Swiss Family Robinson–esque series of wooden platforms in the middle of the loft belonging to a 20-year-old artist named Stravinsky; another had a giant marquee from an old movie theater propped in a corner that really put into perspective just how much space there was. Dan saw in those lofts how young people could own their space, how they could do whatever they wanted. He was on that search for freedom in the spring of ’95 when he found out that his brother, Andrew, had been kicked out of yet another apartment, this time in Hollywood. Andrew paid his rent on time, he just had noise-management issues. He was in a punk band in the late ’80s called the Fin, and the noise has never left him. He needed to find a place where he could get crazy and loud. The brothers realized there was only one place for the both of them, and they headed downtown.

Most buildings they saw were in a weird transitional phase (read: of dubious legality), or empty. Back then a lot of the leases were on the downlow, since most of the buildings were zoned for commercial use, not tenant occupancy, and bringing them up to code was too costly for many landlords. Needless to say, most vacancies weren’t advertised. A modest sign would appear in a window with a phone number, a signal that a room was available. Dan and Andrew went on the hunt. They encountered all kinds of shady situations, like at the San Fernando, where they were greeted by a man in a suit who gave them the grand tour. He told them a developer already had the building in escrow but was only thinking about making it residential. The suited man touched the tips of his fingers together like a villain in a silent movie, asking, “Really, so... you’d live here, then?” The brothers got the feeling he was just conducting some market research. (The San Fernando became part of Gilmore’s Old Bank District project.) Walking to their car, they looked toward the building on Winston Street and saw heads silhouetted in the large windows. People were obviously living there, but what was that place?

Some elementary detective work led them to the Canadian, which was once owned by Mort Wexler, who used to own the Linda Lea, Little Tokyo’s mythic Japanese-language movie house on Main. As the story goes, Wexler gave the building free and clear to Robin Linden, who is rarely seen around the Canadian these days but is a life-long friend of the building’s manager, Dave Perry. Fatefully, the Canadian was the only building on a list of 20 that was actually ready for the brothers to live in legally. Once they had proved they were artists, signed a contract and paid the security deposit, a raw 2,000-square-foot space was theirs. It was dirty, decrepit and filled with holes and rats, but it was their new home.

“I was so scared when I first moved here,” Dan remembers. “There was this roof next to us. I’d lie awake thinking someone was going to crawl through the windows and stab me. We didn’t have locks, and we had no frame of reference if we should be scared or not.”

One time their own neighbor, a prostitute, jumped out of her loft in her robe, hair a mess, reeking of crack, and pulled a knife on Andrew and his friend after they accidently bumped into her door.

The people living on the street assumed the Banales brothers were cops. Why else would some well-fed white kids be moving to the skids? “It was all ‘Excuse me, officer’ and ‘All right, officer’ in the beginning,” laughs Andrew, who dresses like a rocker. (You'd have to be on drugs to mistake him for a cop.) Slowly their “street neighbors” accepted them as part of the community. Neighbors like Lisa. Lisa lived on Winston, in a cardboard box that she called her “house.” They would often hear her throwing her husband out.

“Oh, her tirades were poetry,” says Andrew. “When she told anybody off, it was beautiful; it was a soliloquy. I wish I had recorded it.” She called the Banales brothers her “babies.”

After the new buildings went in and started to well up with residents, the brothers started getting noise complaints. Andrew left for Koreatown. The new downtown isn’t for him.

“It didn’t bother me at first,” he says. “We knew it [redevelopment] was coming, but this wasn’t what I signed up for. This wasn’t the downtown I wanted. I have to be realistic — there’s a housing crisis, but it seems like you’re only getting one kind of person down here now.”

Dan wouldn’t dream of leaving his loft — the place where he runs the Web site downtown.la and where he and his brother still operate the Web-hosting company Inhost.com. (They manage servers in data centers around the world, and host Devo’s offical site and fan site, as well as Roger Moore’s and the maybe-not-quite-as-cool Tony Curtis’, along with sites for large-scale corporations and new artists.) But he also has qualms about the changes engulfing his neighborhood.

“I just wish,” says Dan, “that it was more organic. It seemed so planned. It’s as if [downtown developers] were looking at the Santa Monica promenade or Old Town Pasadena, thinking, ‘What do we need to do to get that sort of thing happening here? How do we bring in all the yuppies?’”

They still throw those infamous parties a couple times a year, though with some adjustments, like the addition of security guards.

There isn’t a courtyard or rooftop garden at the Canadian, so Liz McGrath
and Morgan Slade took advantage of the foot-wide strip of sunlight that pours in
from the space between their loft and the building next door to make a small garden.
At night Christmas lights tucked above the window illuminate the brick wall, and of
course the dead things, like animal antlers, that Liz collected and hung there. Leave
it to an artist to make the view of a brick wall an aesthetically pleasing focal point.

Lady McGrath

Upon entering Liz McGrath’s loft you arrive in a foyer, a square room with dark-brown walls adorned with black molding and her signature taxidermy creatures hanging in boxes like gothic sepulchers. It’s small and dark, like the elevator in the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, but it’s a deceptive introduction to the bright, white and vaulted living space behind it. McGrath, tiny, with an impish smile and bleach-blond hair that is as pale as her skin, and her similarly complected husband, photographer Morgan Slade (who is McGrath’s band mate in the goth-western outfit Miss Derringer), look like a match made by Tolkien. Their space is actually the amalgamation of two lofts. One used to be a gay-porn studio called Chocolate Drop Productions, which eventually got the boot when tenants got sick of feces in their showers and douche bottles littering the floor of their shared bathroom. The other part of her loft belonged to a set director, who left behind the most coveted thing in the Canadian — a private shower and toilet that he had installed himself. Moving into the Canadian was moving up for McGrath.

See, McGrath was coming off a streak of bad housing juju. She doesn’t necessarily see it like that, though, and tends to characterize her adventures in habitation as part of the artist’s life she chose, one that also had her working at fast-food joints and mall shops. As far as previous living situations go, she laughs when talking about the giant mansion she lived in while attending Pasadena City College. Some dude had built an oversize home on Lowell Street in El Sereno that was ruled by the Mexican Mafia. After a series of break-ins, including one in which the burglar left a trail of hand-print smudges down the wall and over the window ledge, the cops eventually apprehended the thief. He was found in the basement, where he’d been hiding for months, high on PCP and surrounded by McGrath’s and her roommates’ stuff, including keys, a VCR and more than $500 in cash. Eventually, McGrath and her roommates got kicked out for failing to meet their rent.

That was in 1994. McGrath’s friend and fellow artist Winter Rosebud invited McGrath to move downtown with her in the Spring Street Studios. McGrath liked how downtown felt dangerous. When McGrath and Winter got kicked out of the apartment because it was being redeveloped, McGrath moved across the street to the Fenton building. The view from her window was obstructed entirely by the flashing sign for the dime-a-dance place below. She paid 100 bucks for the 100-square-foot room that, come evening, was awash in flickering red light. She didn’t have a bathroom back then — she had to head over a few blocks to the Biltmore’s gym to shower. Not that she minded; the Biltmore offered a little old-school glamour to take the edge off her daily hassles.

From the Fenton she moved to the Tomahawk. A guy named Greg St. John owned the Tomahawk, and he had a vision of bringing artists together in one living space. He let McGrath trade rent for paintings — artists downtown would often trade art for shelter, clothes or food back in the day. But the Tomahawk eventually fell into decline, in part because of St. John’s tragic flaw: In his desire to help people, he let in too many crackheads.

“It got crazy,” McGrath says, curled up on her zebra-print couch, her hairless Chinese dog Blue on her lap, and her new pup, King Tut, at her feet. “One night some dude knocked on my window, said his girlfriend called the cops on him and asked if he could stay with me. Then there was the guy who asked me to watch his pit bulls and never came back because he went away to jail. But mostly, I had to move because I had to literally step over people doing crack outside my door.”

By this point, her childhood friends Dan and Andrew Banales (see “Brothers Banales”) were living in the Canadian, which had an advantage over the Tomahawk in that most of the crack was smoked out on the street below. The fighting, the stench of piss and crap rising from the alley behind the building, the pregnant crack whores fighting, all of it was worth it to McGrath, who shows at Bill Shire Gallery and has published a popular book of collected works called Everything That Creeps. “There is no way I’d be doing art,” she says, “no way I’d be doing what I’m doing now if it wasn’t for living here.”

Before the current wave of downtown yuppification went into overdrive, McGrath used to watch the comings and goings of the thousands of workers, bankers, politicos, lawyers and drug dealers who flooded the streets by day and vanished by degrees with the darkening sky. The droning buzz of activity that seemed by day to reach as high as the heavens dissolved into a peaceful underwater silence by evening. McGrath would get a bottle of wine and sit in the park on the grass outside of City Hall, or walk around the Gehry-designed MOCA. She and her friends lit bonfires in the street. The cops would either tell them to put out the fires or just grab a beer and hang out. A white van would come around and sell beer; so did a guy on his bike with a little bell and a basket. He was like the addicts’ ice cream man; you’d hear him start his route around 11 p.m. with his trademark call, “ICE... COLD... BEE-ER!” Sometimes he’d add, “Drug-side service!”

“Back then," she says, her voice singed by nostalgia, "it really felt like the entire world was ours.”

The Expat

Susan Bolles, a delicate, elfin woman, is sitting in her sun-soaked artist’s studio: 1,000 square feet of organized white space. She is staring at the models for her new series of paintings — plastic bottles filled with translucent candy-colored liquids, lined up like a row of half-licked Jolly Ranchers. “They look so bright and happy, so Barbie, don’t they?” Bolles asks, scanning the assortment. “But they’re toxic chemicals.” Even Bolles’ voice is fairylike, soft and high pitched as she explains how she came to be at the Canadian.

She was staring at the black-screened iron gate of the Canadian when she heard the lock turn from inside. She couldn’t see who was on the other side, but as the door opened, a blast of whiskey slapped her in the face. It was coming from a man with stringy hair wearing women’s bell-bottomed, cuffed trousers that flared out about a foot too high at his calves and a way-too-small child’s size flannel shirt. He was nearly falling down drunk. She explained to him that she was there to see the manager, and, teetering a little on his heels, the building's resident trust-fund crack addict made a big swooping bow and slurred, “Wellll, come ’n in!” To Bolles, that pretty much summed up the Canadian in the late ’90s, and downtown in general.

Artist Susan Bolles shows us the door . . . the door she got from an old shoe
store in Missouri and added to separate her bedroom area from the living
room. With her is Fridgeir, a photographer and her live-in boyfriend. On the wall
to the left, the 1930s billboard lights Bolles found in an alley are perfect for
showcasing the art she collects, including paintings from fellow Canadian
residents like 67-year-old Greg Brissom. It took lots of elbow grease and
a few buckets of paint to make her loft magazine-spread worthy. She found
the outsized windows the hardest to cover up; she used white plastic roll-up
patio blinds from Home Depot with white canvas drapes from IKEA. IKEA is
one of the few places that carries 120-inch-long curtains
that can cover her 8-foot windows and reach the floor.

Bolles was one of 17 people who responded to the for-rent ad in the L.A. Weekly, but she was the only one to actually fill out an application. “I had a hard time finding a loft back then,” says Bolles, who paints full time and takes on production work to pay the bills (including a few episodes of Scrubs). “So I wound up renting a postage stamp in the Hollywood Hills.”

Then she found the Canadian, and with some elbow grease and about 20 cans of white paint, settled in to her 1,500-square-foot live/work loft. Bolles’ loft is neat and homey. The kitchen has a European farmhouse feel, with an old enamel stove, enormous windows and a rustic, wooden table. Huge canvases hang in each of the three divided rooms. On an exposed-brick wall in the sitting room, illuminated by a set of 1930s billboard lights, hangs a giant, moody photograph of low-lying fog thick above crossroads that seem to stretch an eternity in either direction. The lights were found on the street, and the photograph was taken by her live-in love of six months, Fridgeir.

“For me, downtown was normal,” says Bolles, who came here from New York City. “The buses, the grime — it was more normal to me than, say, Westwood. That’s a foreign concept to me — security guards and pool boys? That I don’t understand.”

Though the boundaries of normal were often pushed. One night when Bolles had invited a friend over, and they sat on her living room couch sipping wine and catching up, a giant fireball of red and orange light exploded without warning in front of her seven-foot-tall window, filling the loft with heat. A movie was being filmed in the alley. Film crews still shoot in the alley now and again, but with more people living downtown, full-on pyrotechnics have become harder to pull off.

There were loftwide parties every few months, where residents invited friends and sometimes close to a thousand people hopped through the building in a single evening. Some of them were still there the next day. The neighbors rode their bikes down to Al’s Bar, the local crusty punk club, or went on pizza runs. If you needed to bum a cigarette, even at 2 in the morning, you could find someone in the building, door open, awake and painting. The shared bathrooms and showers were not an inconvenience but another chance for community. Though most times it was peaceful, that community was not without drama. Particularly when it came to romances.

“Oh, my god,” declares Bolles, “it’s a crisis when somebody in this building breaks up. You wouldn’t believe it. There have been breakups where the whole building was involved. You’ll know because the chalkboard will have a big note on it: ‘Do not let him in the building!’” The chalkboard is sort of the MySpace of the Canadian, a rectangular slate at the landing of the main staircase. Often, passive-agressive anonymous word wars are carried out in multicolored chalk.

And if there was drama inside, it didn’t compare to the performances going on nightly among the homeless outside Bolles’ door. Grown men clucked like chickens, puffing up their chests, winning imaginary arguments. Women who were worse for wear, toothless, with bad skin and matted hair sashayed down the street as if they were Gisele Bundchen. Artists generally have a live-and-let-live ethos, and Bolles didn’t view the people on the sidewalk outside the building as something to fear, get rid of, or even feel sorry for; they were merely participants in the street theater.

“It was almost performance art,” Bolles says. “People knew they were performing. They were trying to climb street poles, the most outrageous things. We called it ‘the nightly entertainment.’”

The Reformed

More commune than dorm room: One of the shared bathrooms at the Canadian. (Click image to enlarge)
Fridgeir moved from Iceland (he went to high school with Björk) in 1986. He briefly settled with his mother in Pacoima, but the pair left for downtown a year later. Fridgeir was 20 and not really sure what he wanted to do with his life yet, so he followed his fashion-designer mother, Stella, to a 3,000-square-foot warehouse off of Santa Fe Avenue, which cost about $800 a month at the time. That was back when Al’s Bar was really happening, when the first wave of artists ran around downtown before real estate speculation priced them out and galleries started moving west, when life down there consisted mostly of parties and underground gallery openings — when Danny Elfman occupied an entire floor of the Canadian.

Six months ago, Fridgeir moved in with Susan Bolles (see “The Expat”). They met at the Banquette, kind of like the neighborhood Central Perk. Sitting in his well-lit, gallery-like loft, he pushes his wire-frame glasses back up his nose and gets kind of excited talking about the old days. “We felt like pirates,” he says. “We did our thing in 1989, then the rents went up and the artists moved to Silver Lake or Echo Park.”

Fridgeir went to New Orleans to learn how to be a chef, thinking he had finally found his calling. He worked there for 14 years. But life began to unravel for him. “I like drugs and I like alcohol,” Fridgeir says candidly. “I got more and more caught up in it. As a chef, it was socially acceptable for me to drink, so I started drinking more and more, until it all crumbled and I came to L.A. to get sober.”

Los Angeles didn’t prove to be the kind of rehab Fridgeir needed, at least not right away. He ended up on Skid Row, on San Julian and Sixth streets, living in a cardboard box, living only to drink. “I drank alcohol like people smoked crack,” Fridgeir says. “My only thought was where will I get my next drink from.”

When he finally hit rock bottom, he went to the Midnight Mission. “I crawled into the mission,” he says. “I was almost dead.” He came back every day for three weeks to see if a cot had opened and waited for hours in a room with 300 people, watching an endless rotation of Chuck Norris movies. Ironically, the room was called the Reading Room.

He finally got in, and at 8 every night he and his 150 roommates pulled their cots out and went to sleep. Slowly, by demonstrating his commitment to staying sober, Fridgeir worked his way upstairs to the bunks. “And when I got a bunk, I felt like I was really moving up in the world,” he says with a smile.

Fridgeir got a job that paid $2 an hour, working in the mission kitchen. “It was a start,” he says. “I remember when I got that first paycheck, I realized how long it had been since I’d had money to see a movie. That was major.” He went to The Aviator.

He lived at the mission for a year and a half and decided to go to film school, winning a full scholarship to LACC. But it was during a prerequisite photography class that Fridgeir discovered the passion and serenity he was looking for.

To support his new love for photography, he got a part-time job as a personal chef to some bigwigs in Venice and moved to the Rosslyn Hotel, an SRO where, until six months ago, he was renting a room for $300 a month. The hotel was 700 rooms of crack, heroin and insane drinking.

“It was hardcore Bukowski,” says Fridgeir, who's been sober for three years now. But a cheap pad allowed him to concentrate on his art. “But not to concentrate on it as a means to a paycheck,” he says. “Making money is what I do to pay the rent; it’s not my driving force.” He pauses and then jokes, “That’s not very L.A. of me.”

Settled in now with Bolles, he’s been shooting downtown landscapes, a series of 4-by-5 images of lonely and forgotten buildings and areas downtown that he shoots in a palette of grays, of light and shadow. Life at the Canadian now is calming, filled with little luxuries, such as being able to cook at home in his own spacious kitchen. He’ll leave the door open when he cooks, allowing the aromas to circulate through the halls, and generously feeds anyone who shows up at his door. Any inconveniences he’s encountered at the Canadian, like the shared bathrooms or the lack of heat in winter, is a drop in the bucket compared to where he’s been.

“When I lived downtown here in the ’80s,” Fridgeir says, “I saw the homeless guys and I thought, I’m never gonna be that. That’s never gonna happen to me. Being homeless gave me a totally different perspective. Anything that comes after that you feel grateful for. It humbles you for the rest of your life.”

Hacksaw

Brian “Hacksaw” Williams is a heavy-metal vocal coach at the Musicians Institute and the lead singer of the band Damn Hippie Freaks. Looking a little like Meat Loaf and possessing the raspy sound of someone who regularly abuses his vocal chords, he fits the part. In between sips of his Heinekin — ’cause, hey, he’s on vacation — Hacksaw speaks in bullet points about life at the Canadian.

“I came for two reasons,” he says. “The cheap rent, and I could play music as loud as I want.”

When he picked his loft, the rest of the building thought he was nuts or joking. In the 1980s that loft belonged to a famous architect who built structures inside the space, including three little houses with a gravel moat running alongside them connected by a bridge made of iron grating. The space appeared in a book published at the time called The International Book of Lofts. But by the time Hacksaw got to it a decade later, the loft was caked with soot and grime, the little houses’ floors had started to come up and, what’s worse, he couldn’t vacuum or sweep the years of dirt out of the rock moat.

Back in ’96, when the Canadian started advertising for tenants, he paid $370 a month for the space. Prior to moving in, he had been bartending and living in Culver City, floating in a pool and working on his tan more than his music. “So I moved into the Canadian,” he says, pacing in his oversize living room. “I liked the hungriness of it.”

Hacksaw's girlfriend came with him, and it got all Peyton Place when she started shagging Dave Perry, the building manager, and eventually shacked up with him down the hall. “At one point,” Hacksaw says, “I think they were going to get married, but it didn’t happen. And she ended up back here.”

For Hacksaw and Perry, it’s all water under the bridge. “We were all doing a lot of crystal at the time, and it was out of control. But in the end, after we did every bad thing to one another, there was nothing left to do.” (Meanwhile, Hacksaw’s got a 20-year-old daughter from an ex-girlfriend who lives in Arkansas with her mother and visits now and again.)

“I came to this pivotal moment,” says Hacksaw, “where I said if I’m gonna stay in L.A., it’s going to be doing something with music.” He found himself in a band with a guy who scheduled substitute teachers over at the MI, where Hacksaw had studied. Thirteen years after graduating, Hacksaw was back teaching.

“I have to sing a lot of classic metal stuff,” he says. “Once I had to sing Judas Priest for two hours.” To the chagrin of a few of his neighbors, he also gives private lessons out of his home. Hacksaw regularly plays with Damion Wagner (see “The Big Jerk”). He takes a break from singing to play bass. “That’s why I like to come down here and be reminded that music is art.”

Meanwhile, Hacksaw’s mom asks him every year, “How much longer are you going to try this [music] thing?”

The Big Jerk

All of scene number seven on the Collateral Damage DVD was shot in Damion Wagner’s loft. When Arnold Schwarzenegger gets Tasered, look closely and you can see him kiss the black, glitter-dusted floor when he falls. Wagner’s fridge and his silver peg board are in the background. Apparently, a location scout thought Wagner’s loft, with its huge windows, ample light and wide-open space that can host a film crew and equipment looked like the kind of place that would make a fine headquarters for a Colombian drug cartel. Wagner negotiated a large sum of money for that shoot. He and Bob Perez, a former Canadian resident/den mother, would pull a good-cop/bad-cop routine on the production companies that (sometimes without permits!) were looking to blow stuff up or have a helicopter hover 200 feet above the building, causing the windows to vibrate for eight hours. Back in those days, crews kept cash on hand to hush the natives. Wagner would pretend to be an outraged tenant on the verge of going postal, while Perez would play the placator, asking the location manager to grease a few palms. This little skit usually managed to get 100 bucks per day for each loft. But the deal Wagner made for himself with the Collateral Damage shoot bought him a record store.

When life closes your record store, make a wall hanging. Damion
Wagner sits in front of a tapestry of 45s — souvenirs from his old shop
Metamorphosis Records, which was shut down due to redevelopment.
Artists have a way of finding the silver lining and turning even
overstock into self-expression. Look for the record wall in Usher’s
bomb Into the Mix, where it makes its feature film debut.

It was called Metamorphosis Records, and it was part of a 6,000-square-foot space in a warehouse located off Santa Fe that also housed Canadian resident Richard McDowell’s Gallery 835 (see “The Mayor of Main Street”). Back then, Wagner, McDowell and another woman were all given space by the warehouse’s owner to do with as they pleased — no rent required; it was all to enrich downtown. McDowell says Wagner did a great job and that he created a community with “plenty of music, a good vibe, a really nice layout with chairs, and all the knickknacks and trinkets usually found at a bona fide record store.”

Then the building was sold, and they all got kicked out. Which was fine with Wagner, who realized after a year and a half that he “never wanted to be in the retail business again. I got lots of records now,” he says, smiling. Nowadays, the movie crews don’t come as much. The last production inside Wagner’s loft was a movie starring Usher, a straight-to-video that was so low budget the set designer didn’t change a single thing. “You can see my record collection, my bed, you can even see my high school yearbook in one shot,” Wagner laughs.

Some of his neighbors are still a little bitter about his score with the Schwarzenegger film, but that’s not why he’s known as the Big Jerk. “One of the things that makes me the Big Jerk,” he says, “is that I totally play music really loud.” He and his band the Dizzys often rehearse in the loft. And Wagner, who has an entire recording studio in his place, complete with a makeshift sound booth repurposed from someone’s loft bed, will play with anyone — like a local homeless kid named Nicholas, who was in his late 20s, black and good looking when Wagner finally met him. Wagner had seen him for years around the hood, always banging drumsticks on a street sign or what have you. He remembers their first jam session.

“Most of them tend to be older, but when he came up, he reeked of crack. He sat on the drums and he was John Bonham. He’s high and once he’s wound up he can’t stop. After a while, it’s this barrage of drums. I’m playing guitar and my other friend is playing bass, but we can’t keep up. ...He was so good, I invited him back the next week.”

Wagner doesn’t see Nicholas around anymore. “I knew something was happening when Pete’s went in,” he says. To him, Pete’s Cafe seemed like the yuppies’ Maginot line. “They were going into defense mode.”

Recently he got some complaints about the noise. “I had the cops call me a couple of times,” he says. “One time, it was because someone was screaming on the mike and the windows were up. I try to be polite as possible, but those buildings didn’t have anyone in them before, and I was doing this for years before anyone came. It’s not like I’m going to change. I don’t even know them.”

The Orphan

In an Illinois cornfield, getting burned under the morning sun, 14-year-old Aileen Duke would dream of Hollywood as she pulled the top tassels from the cornstalks so that the females could fertilize the males.

“I always thought I was a big fish in a really small pond,” she says. “I always longed for the glitter. I thought I’d find it here.”

She made it to L.A., by way of Tempe, Arizona, where her family moved when Duke was in high school. In Tempe, Duke had her eyebrows, lips and nose pierced, and even got her first tattoo, a star. She decided every time she lived somewhere new, some place farther from Illinois, she’d get another star. She wanted to be a walking constellation.

She remembers her first drive in from Arizona as a 17-year-old with big ideas. “My eyes were as wide as saucers that day,” says Duke, a curvy blonde with a touch of trailer park. You can see the milk-fed wholesomeness under all the makeup and face piercings. But in L.A., she and her friend Casey got kicked out of student housing while attending the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. Duke had nowhere to go when a girl she knew from school invited her to share her space at the San Fernando. They got another roommate off of Craigslist, a guy who listened to Bob Marley all day and started to smoke crack.

One day, while she and Casey were watching TV, the roommate came in, unplugged the set right in front of them, and pawned it for crack money. When their lease wasn’t renewed, Duke and Casey were left with nowhere to go except the Cecil, another notorious, drug- and prostitution-plagued SRO.

“We paid extra to have our own bathroom,” says Duke, “and there were many nights where I curled up at the bottom of that shower crying.”

The rule back in those days was that you had to leave an SRO after a month, so when their time was up, the girls carried their stuff in FIDM duffels and plastic garbage bags and moved into the Rosslyn, still another SRO. “Because we had no fuckin’ other thing to do,” says Duke.

One night, when Duke had been up for three days on a meth bender — explained away as a combination of college experimentation and easy access — she thought she had begun to hallucinate while doing her homework. The walls were crawling with cockroaches. Duke realized that it wasn’t lack of sleep causing this vision, but that a steady stream of roaches was streaming out of cracks in the windows and crown molding. She knew she had to get out of there.

In March 2005, she met a 25-year-old girl named Krista who lived with a friend at the Canadian. Krista offered Duke her place since she was always at her boyfriend’s. “I idolized her,” says Duke. “She took me in, ’cause she was made of fashion-design blood also. I thought she was wonderful.” Before long, Krista got married and wanted Duke out. She told her so by emptying the fridge of all of Duke’s produce, and scrawling, “God protect me from my friends. I can take care of my enemies,” across the kitchen wall. But in the end, Krista left, leaving Duke with the loft.

That was the same year Duke started working for Trashy Lingerie, just a month before she was to graduate from FIDM. She was helping a girl named Winter Rosebud, who is also a good friend of Liz McGrath’s (see “Lady McGrath”), make pirate hats for Halloween costumes and do odds and ends. On Halloween, the owners of Trashy Lingerie asked Duke to start designing for the company. Duke was so happy she cried.

“My parents don’t get it,” she says. “So in a way, it makes sense that I’d be here doing this thing that they would never dream of doing in a million years.”

The brothers Banales, Andrew, left, and Dan, right, in front of their legendary
stage. The space, where bands like the Centimeters, the Adolescents
and Deerhoof played to packed crowds right inside their living room, is bigger
than some L.A. venues. The back wall bears a commissioned piece of graffiti by
L.A. artist Vynl of a forest coming alive, while the floors show the scuffs and
scrapes made by the souls of a decade’s worth of neighbors,
friends and first-time downtown visitors.

Click here for more pictures from the Canadian.

Duke finally felt like she was arriving. She had aced her finals, and she was walking back to the Canadian feeling so good she started singing Sinatra’s “I Got the World on a String” out loud. She turned the corner on Main just in time to see a guy erupting diarrhea. “That kind of deflated me, and I went home.”

Duke thinks of the places she still wants to go and the star tattoos, like passport stamps, she’d collect. She’s been eyeing the Pacific Northwest, but when she thinks about leaving, she starts to cry.

“It’s just that,” she says between sobs, “there’s never going to be another Winter Rosebud in Seattle. There’s never going to be another Liz McGrath. They took care of me when I could have easily been left behind. They are the people who, in a sense, raised me, and it’s hard to imagine life without them.”

The Chef

Dina Chang was all set to move in. All she had to do was deliver the signed lease, and the run-down dirty loft would be hers, all 2,000 square feet of it. “You’re still moving in?” the manager asked from his apartment, eyebrows raised. “Didn’t Valerie tell you?” he asked. “That someone shot himself in that apartment?” No, Chang was not aware of that. Michael Franz was an artist who had lived at the Canadian for years. He used to work off his rent by fixing things around the building. But then the work ran out and he was asked to pay a modest amount of rent, which he refused to do. When the Sheriff’s deputies finally came to evict him, crowbars in hand as they marched down the hall, Franz put a pillow to his chest and shot himself. He left a note blaming the building’s owner. There’s a bullet hole in Chang’s kitchen, but she thinks that one came from the outside. It doesn’t faze Chang.

Prior to moving in, Chang had been living across the street at the Hellman, before Tom Gilmore bought and polished it up. Back then, it was only slightly more glamorous than the Canadian. When she quit her job in postproduction to pursue her dream of becoming a pastry chef, she knew she wouldn't be able to afford the $1,050 monthly rent for her 800 square feet in the building whose hallways flooded when it rained. One day at Banquette, the little coffee shop down the street, Liz McGrath mentioned that she thought a space was opening in the Canadian. Chang got the loft. Rent was $550 a month; there was no air conditioning, no heat or gas. She had to buy and install her own electric stove and refrigerator. It cost her close to a couple thousand just to paint the place.

“People have this romanticized view of lofts,” Chang says. “They come in after we’ve all put thousands of dollars into them. Not to mention the love and hours and hours of work. It took me three days just to clean and disinfect it. I had to literally hose it out and suck the water out the window.”

Then there are the fair-weather friends who now want to come hang out in Chang’s place and coo about how “lucky” she is to live there. “I get resentful,” says Chang. “It’s like, where were you when I needed help moving four years ago? When did downtown become the epicenter of cool? When I moved in, it was the epicenter of hood.”

She left a 400-square-foot apartment close to the beach in Venice for downtown because she wanted to be in the middle of nothing. “It was peaceful,” she says. “It felt postapocalyptic when I first moved here. The bankers went home at 5. There was nothing but tumbleweeds and crackheads. My friend Jason and I would ride bikes in the middle of the night and it was like we were the last two people on Earth.”

She recalls the night she was driving home at 3 a.m. after a night of partying and saw the flashing lights of cop cars. As she approached the scene, she could see glass everywhere and then the body, covered in glass. She looked up and saw the broken 12th-story window at the neighboring Rosslyn Hotel.

“Someone must have been pushed,” says Chang. “Usually when someone commits suicide, they open the window first. There was so much violence at the Rosslyn that it gets to a point where you get used to it.”

Dina Chang painted every grungy surface, then added a stove,
cabinets, countertops and even ran extra electrical wiring to make her
kitchen fit for a pastry chef. Now her kitchenboasts the tools of
her trade, and a bullet hole, either from the suicide committed there
before she moved in, or a stray from the outside. You don’t get that
kind of authenticity at some of the newer
artists” buildings being built downtown.

On Fridays, Chang and her friends would play a game called Hipster or Hobo. They’d guess whether the stringy-haired skinny dude was homeless or a hipster from Silver Lake who’d come down in his beat-up old Benz to score his weekend crack. They’d pour a drink and sit there watching doctors pull up in BMWs; once they spotted a tow-truck driver, with a car still attached, stopping to make a score.

“I’ve seen every type of person smoke crack underneath my window,” Chang laughs.

The Mayor of Main

Richard McDowell, with the worried look of a mild neurotic, is leaving the Canadian. He’s already moved out of the loft he shared with Valerie Davis, who is a photographer, but he was still toying with the idea of keeping his art studio, the 800-square-foot space that was once his bedroom. McDowell sits in a big wooden chair, leaning back with his feet on the type of big metal desk you’d expect to see in a police station. A cloud of black paper bombs are suspended from the ceiling on invisible fishing line, in a frozen state of attack, threatening to rain down from above.

McDowell had wanted to live at the Canadian for the past five or six years. Every six months, he’d call the manager, looking for an opening. He was living at the Baltimore Hotel, a Skid Row SRO, where he paid $270 a month. He stayed in the Baltimore, even though he had a job that paid him enough to live decently in the most gentrified of neighborhoods. He remembers the roaches. “Ah, man,” he says, still shivering, “it took a long time to get rid of those bastards. When I moved in, I slept in the middle of the bed, and I didn’t turn on the light, ’cause whenever I did, I’d see they were right near me.”

He wasn’t staying out of necessity. He actually liked living there. He got a kick out of his 74-year-old neighbor, Art, a retired engineer with a 20-something girlfriend.

“I’d hear the funniest conversations through the wall. I’d hear her say, ‘No, no, no, don’t do that, Art, you’re dancing in my underwear!’ And he’d be singing, ‘Doodle-dee-doo!’” Then, there was the night McDowell was smoking outside the building. Someone tapped his shoulder. He turned, and it was a petite, blonde bombshell in a halter top and a little skirt with a pink-and-purple floral pattern and just enough of a black eye for McDowell to notice how the maroon color matched her outfit. McDowell knew who she was. She came down on the weekends from the Westside, where she lived with her boyfriend during the week, to shoot heroin. She’d let a few of the guys, the ones she either trusted or even liked, have sex with her. For most of the guys, McDowell says, “She’d take off all her clothes and let them do what they do as men without touching her.” She passed out the sexual favors in exchange for a place to “do what she did, as a human being, away from the streets and the jeers and catcalls,” says McDowell softly. “I wish I’d taken her upstairs that night, but I didn’t.”

McDowell came downtown in the late ’90s seeking human interaction. He found shelter in an abandoned bank and opened up a little gallery in the ghost-town streets around Santa Fe Avenue. It was cold and desolate, something out of the movie Silent Hill. People came out of the woodwork to check out Gallery 835. Early Cannibal Flower shows were held there. After getting kicked out of his squat in the bank building, he moved into the gallery to live. He paid only $200 a month for the 6,000-square-foot space. McDowell proudly boasts of how he received a letter from the Mayor’s Office saying he and his gallery were pioneers.

“I don’t know if I was the pioneer of anything,” McDowell says. “But I felt like I was in front of a massive wave.”

McDowell’s gallery caught the attention of the owner of the Spring Arts Tower, on Fifth and Spring streets, a building that housed artists for either cheap or free back in the day. The owner sent him a Christmas card saying he liked what McDowell had going on and should he ever need a place, he was welcome to stay in his building. Eventually, McDowell took him up on the offer. He lived on the third floor of the 12-story building, which was convenient since the plumbing only reached that level. No one ventured above the eighth floor. “It was a real community,” he says. “Everyone was an artist or a writer or a musician, minus a heroin addict or two.”

The Spring Arts Tower was a former law office that had been abandoned and left almost completely intact, as if everyone fled just before the apocalypse. What was left behind — cubicles, lamps, chairs, desks, old doors, a bumper-pool table — was claimed by the new inhabitants. McDowell wrote a book about living there called 30 Days on Spring: A Junkie Needs Relief. In 2003, all 37 residents, including McDowell, got the boot. McDowell moved to the Baltimore until Valerie Davis took him in at the Canadian.

But living with Davis wasn’t working for McDowell. He didn’t touch brush to canvas once in the time he lived with her. When it looked like his own loft wasn’t in the cards, he debated going back to the Baltimore but instead moved “further into the mayhem,” as he calls it, to a renovated loft on Wall Street. He says his new space is an artist’s dream: skylights, a freight elevator that opens into the kitchen, private access to the roof. It costs three times what he paid at the Canadian — $550 for his art studio and his shared living space with Davis.

Rocking back in his metal office chair, staring at the bombs overhead, McDowell relates a scene he remembers in some film where Picasso takes the artist Modigliani out to meet Renoir. Picasso and Modigliani lived in meager accommodations in Montmarte, while Renoir lived in a villa with 28 rooms, maids, butlers and a garden. Picasso was trying to show Modigliani that you didn’t have to live like a pauper to be an artist, that you could create and still have whatever you want. McDowell explains, “Modigliani asks Renoir, ‘How are you able to afford all of these things?’ Renoir answers, ‘I traded it for two paintings.’”

What did Modigliani do? He stole a bottle of wine and climbed over the wall.

Musicplus.tv visits Miss Derringer's loft

Hunter

2007-09-05T22:08:00.000-07:00

Fear and Loathing on the Road
Uploaded by lilalilaloum

Hard Up

2007-08-29T22:35:00.000-07:00

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink.

-e.e. cummings

Causality

2007-08-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

Its days like this that make me want to scream.
Scream so loud that I cry blood.
Sitting thru the 9 to 5 drill.
Falling
Naked
Zombie
Drool
Blistering, backwards, bludgeoned day
I’m not about to go home today.

I’m causality in my 9 to 5.

I’m fighting to keep sane.
I’m wishing we would have some rain.
I’m trying not to listen to the news.
It’s all a bunch of lies that buzz around my brain like big fat deer flies.

I’m a causality in my 9 to 5.

Humanity can’t take it anymore.

They run through the streets and hit strangers with bats.
Right on the back of the skull.
Splitting them open all over the fuckin floor.

I heard that today.
On the news.

I’m causality in my 9 to 5.

I’m not so different from you.

I like to drink, curse and screw.

The problem is.

You think you’re so different.

"question and answer"

2007-08-26T01:06:00.000-07:00

 he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
 night, running the blade of the knife
 under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
 of all the letters he had received
 telling him that
 the way he lived and wrote about
 that--
 it had kept them going when
 all seemed
 truly
 hopeless.

 putting the blade on the table, he
 flicked it with a finger
 and it whirled
 in a flashing circle
 under the light.

 who the hell is going to save                                
 me? he
 thought.

 as the knife stopped spinning
 the answer came:
 you're going to have to
 save yourself.

 still smiling,
 a: he lit a
 cigarette
 b: he poured
 another
 drink
 c: gave the blade
 another
 spin.

--from The Last Night of the Earth Poems

-Bukowski

Like an Animal

2007-08-25T10:06:00.000-07:00

“Don't allow your animal nature to rule your reason.”

-RUMI

In the White

2007-08-22T13:01:00.000-07:00

Minor White (1908-76) was one of the greatest American photographers of the period after the Second World War as well as one of the greatest teachers of the medium. One of the best-known names in photography until the end of the 1970s, his life and work has since then virtually dropped out of photographic discourse. Probably for many younger photographers his name means little or nothing.

White was a deeply religious man whose whole life was a spiritual journey. His photography arose out of this and was an inherent part of this pilgrimage. It isn't an approach that has been fashionable in academic circles in recent years.

His legacy to photography has been an important one, but not without its negative aspects, which in recent years have perhaps been encouraged to obscure his great achievements. It is unfair to tar him with the brush of those lesser talents who followed some of the more superficial aspects of his teaching while failing to follow its main thrust, the need to find yourself.

White was a truly great teacher, but one who tended to overpower his students, turning out too many who mimicked his methods but with little real understanding or talent. There are plenty still around, taking out their view cameras as he did and justifying their technically perfect but spiritually empty landscapes and still life with the doctrine of self-expression.

As well as his photography and teaching, White's other vital legacy to photography is the magazine 'Aperture', which has done more than any other publication to improve the quality of photographic publishing in the last 50 years. It was founded by White, together with others including Nancy and Beaumont Newhall, Dorothea Lange, Barbara Morgan and Dody Warren in 1952, and White continued to edit it until 1975.

Aperture is still going strong (since 1963 it has been published by the non-profit corporation, Aperture, Inc) and remains the finest photographic magazine in publication. I've been a subscriber to this quarterly for many years and it now occupies several feet of shelve space in my front room. It isn't the sort of magazine that you read and then throw away, and many issues of the magazine have also appeared as books. Aperture is now the leading photographic book publisher and also publishes some fine limited editions of photographs and photogravures.

Later, in 1978, Aperture published 'Rites & Passages' in which White's pictures are accompanied by a lengthy biographical sketch by James Baker Hall, including lengthy excerpts from White's own writing. As a view of his pictures it was disappointing only when compared to 'Mirrors Messages Manifestations', since it contains much of his best work. Hall's text and the chronology included are the major source for most of the biographical information in this feature. Another fine book on White is 'Minor White: The Eye That Shapes' by Peter C Bunnell, published in 1989.

Descriptions abound of White's unconventional teaching methods, which alienated many of the students. There were some who felt they had come to learn photography and were upset to find they were expected to spend long times in relaxation exercises and meditation. Some assignments would involve activities such as simply standing on a street corner, watching. For most his methods were hard to take at first, but he was an imposing figure, very tall with striking and appropriately white hair that made, a prophet or guru. Those who stayed long enough usually came to admire him, and to take his ideas seriously.

For those who survived the initial shock of his methods, one of the major parts of his method were the field trips where he and the students would go out to photograph together. There was much to be learnt watching the way he worked with his 4x5" Sinar view camera in the field and it was also greatly instructive to see later how the prints they produced compared to his taken in the same place.

Workshops would involve pre-dawn body practice in the fields, vegetarian food, and camera projects such as 'What is your original face?' He aimed to make students aware of what they really felt about the pictures and their lives, asking them to question themselves and probing their responses.

It was a teaching method that was at odds with the normal methods of schools and also with the inhibitions of his mainly male students who were used to hiding their feelings even from themselves. Even many of those who came to benefit greatly from them often had a great deal of initial inhibition to overcome. For many it was a dramatic turning point in their lives; one militant atheist went on to found a Zen monastery.

A very receptive state of mind... not unlike a sheet of film itself - seemingly inert, yet so sensitive that a fraction of a second's exposure conceives a life in it.

-MINOR WHITE

essay by Peter Marshell

Nick Cave

2007-08-21T16:27:00.000-07:00

Taken at Slim's San Francisco 7/07 at the Grinderman show.

An artist's duty is rather to stay open-minded and in a state where he can receive information and inspiration. You always have to be ready for that little artistic Epiphany.”

-Nick Cave

Wasted History

2007-08-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

“We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar”

The Reinactors

2007-08-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

A new documentary feature by David J. Markey and edited by me, "The Reinactors" interweaves the disparate lives of street performers and celebrity look-a-likes on Hollywood boulevard over the span of a year. Shot cinéma vérité style with no narration, the story unfolds through the day-to-day lives and back-stories of the oft rough-hewn street characters. These self employed individuals dress as Hollywood film icons and forge a living one dollar at a time, posing for photos with tourists in front of Graumen's Chinese Theater. Some see themselves as undiscovered stars, others are just struggling to make ends meet. Most are striving to keep themselves this side of the law. These characters have dreams that seemingly intersect on the corner of the boulevard of broken dreams, and the highway to hell. Darkly hilarious, twisted, and surprisingly moving, the film has a Robert Altman-sized cast of characters right off of the silver screen. Their lives are literally right out of the movies and threaten to eclipse the wide array of Hollywood characters they portray. The Reinactors plays somewhere between Martin Bell's "Streetwise" a sublime 1980's document of street kids in Seattle, and the brilliant improvised absurdity of Christopher Guest's mockmumentary "Waiting For Guffman". Director David Markey says, "'The Reinactors' is like a great-depression era Hollywood classic retold for the new millennium... Would be stars arriving from far away places with all their dreams packed in a nap-sack. It's also a film about the cut throat nature backstage and behind the scenes of show business. A pop culture implosion, a profound statement on where we are at culturally at the moment. An "American Idol" on crack, if you will."

The Reinactors trailer

Add to My Profile | More Videos

Dahr Jamail's MidEast Dispatches

2007-08-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

"Independent News From the MidEast"

"In late 2003, Weary of the overall failure of the US media to accurately report on the realities of the war in Iraq for the Iraqi people and US soldiers, Dahr Jamail went to Iraq to report on the war himself.

His dispatches were quickly recognized as an important media resource. He is now writing for the Inter Press Service, The Asia Times and many other outlets. His reports have also been published with The Nation, The Sunday Herald, Islam Online, the Guardian, Foreign Policy in Focus, and the Independent to name just a few. Dahr's dispatches and hard news stories have been translated into French, Polish, German, Dutch, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, Chinese, Arabic and Turkish. On radio as well as television, Dahr reports for Democracy Now!, the BBC, and numerous other stations around the globe. Dahr is also special correspondent for Flashpoints.

Dahr has spent a total of 8 months in occupied Iraq as one of only a few independent US journalists in the country. In the MidEast, Dahr has also has reported from Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Dahr uses the DahrJamailIraq.com website and his popular mailing list to disseminate his dispatches."

"Indymedia Presents" is available on the internet at:
Blip TV-- http://indymediapresents.blip.tv
VlogMap-- http://community.vlogmap.org/node/1699
Mefeedia-- http://www.mefeedia.com/feeds/22908/

... or download/subscribe to the Indymedia Presents podcast via the iTunes Store.

BE THE MEDIA!

I had Nothing to offer

2007-08-17T19:26:00.000-07:00

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

-- Jack Kerouac

Nice Day For An Earthquake

2007-08-17T16:05:00.000-07:00

FADE IN:

EXT. HOME -- EVENING

A dark faded green door is illuminated by a small porch light. An arm slowly extends into frame knocking firm on the door. The arm extends back out of sight.

An older woman's voice calls out in Spanish.

WOMAN'S VOICE
(In Spanish)
Just a minute...coming.

The arm extends back out knocking on the door again.

Footsteps from inside the house approach the door.

The door finally opens revealing ELENA, a Mexican woman in her late fifties, early sixties. Her smile is warm and inviting. Slowly, her smile begins to fall to a frown; she stares at the individual standing at front of her. She turns away. Her eyes fill with tears.

She opens the door wider for the individual to step into the house.

A man walks into the house. He pauses before going in and hugs this woman. The woman appears emotionless and withdrawn.

FADE OUT:

FADE IN:

INT. SHOWER -- CONTINUOUS

A beard is drenched in water. Water swirls around the man's feet mixing with a few soap suds just before being sucked down the drain. His hand moves shampoo through his hair. He closes his eyes as the water moves down his face.

FADE OUT:

FADE IN:

INT. BEDROOM -- CONTINUOUS

VICTOR HERNANDEZ sits on the edge of a small twin bed. A towel is wrapped around his waist. Victor is short and slightly over weight with short curly brown hair. His freshly shaven face gives a younger appearance. He looks around the bedroom examining his surroundings. Baseball posters hang on the walls. He notices small trophies sitting on a small bookshelf along with some family photos.

Over a dresser, he notices several calendars tacked to the wall.

Victor stands from the bed and walks to the dresser. He begins to thumbs through the pages of a 1998 calendar. He stops at February 13th. A thick red X mark starts on the 13th and is followed by a red line that continues on through every year and every day. The word MISSING is written above the 13th.

Victor slides open the top dresser drawer. Inside he sees underwear and white t-shirts all folded and clean. He takes one pair of each putting them on the bed behind him. He goes down the drawer and pulls out some blue jeans.

FADE OUT:

FADE IN:

EXT. BACK YARD -- AFTERNOON

Elena's hand moves slowly towards a bright colored rose as she trims it. Elena has a tragic and strong sense about her. Her hand slowly moves up touching the petals very gently. She wears a straw hat that shades her face.

In the window above her Victor watches Elena work in the garden. Elena doesn't notice her son observing her.

ELENA (V.O.)
(SPANISH)
His hair is so long. He looks fat.

INT. HOME -- AFTERNOON

Victor, now freshly cleaned up and dressed in clean clothes, observes his mother in the garden from the service porch. An old grandfather clock is heard ticking off in the distance.

VICTOR (V.O.)
She looks so old. Since when does she garden?

Victor taps on the glass. Elena doesn't respond. She continues to work in garden.

Elena clips a rose from its stem.

FADE OUT:

FADE IN:

INT. KITCHEN -- EVENING

Elena cooks carne asada in a large pan. A metal spatula moves in and turns the meat every now and then. The kitchen is small but very clean. A large spice rack is mounted against the wall above the stove.

Elena hums to herself as she cooks.

Victor walks into the kitchen watching his mother as she cooks.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
Hungry?

Elena doesn't look up to Victor. She stays focused on the food in the pan. Victor sits down at a small dinner table pushed up against a wall. A small picture of Jesus hangs on the wall next to table.

VICTOR
Smells good.

Elena doesn't turn around she still stays focused on the pan.

ELENA (V.O.)
(SPANISH)
Has that changed? Why is he smiling?

Victor stands up and walks over beside his mother.

VICTOR
I still like it. Still my favorite.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
Well, that's nice to hear.

Victor looks at his mother and watches as she avoids looking at him.

Elena puts the food onto a plate. She then opens the lid to a pot and scoops out some Spanish rice and beans putting some on the plate. Elena hands Victor the plate.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
Here.

Victor takes the plate from his mother.

VICTOR
Thanks.

A cat jumps onto the kitchen table. Elena claps her hands trying to scare the cat away.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
You know better. No walking on the counter tops.

The cat jumps off the counter and runs away.

Victor looks up to his mother who avoids looking at him.

VICTOR
Mom...

She takes her apron off setting it on the kitchen counter. She walks out of the kitchen.

Victor sits alone at the table. It's silent except for a small clock that's mounted above the kitchen sink.

FADE OUT:

FADE IN:

INT. LIVING ROOM -- NIGHT

Elena sits in the living room alone. She knits. Her fingers curve around and over her knitting needles as she finishes a blanket.

From the kitchen, Victor slowly walks out into the living room. He sits on a small chair next to his mother.

He looks over to her and watches her knitting away. He then turns and looks out a window. A few cats are nestled in window sill looking outside.

Victor looks back to his mother. He notices his shoelaces are untied and bends down to tie them. A small beads of sweat begin to cluster on Victors forehead.

VICTOR
You have a few more cats then before?

Elena continues to ignore her son.

ELENA
Almost done with this blanket.

She holds up part of what she was working on.

Victor looks up at it.

VICTOR
Looks great. Ah...how long have you been working on it?

Elena doesn't answer. She goes back to knitting.

ELENA
(In Spanish)
What do you want from me?

Victor looks to the floor uncomfortable by the question? He pauses for a moment squirming and fidgeting in his seat.

Victor looks up from the floor at his mother.

Just as he's about to say something to his mother, a tremendous SCREECH of a car tire cuts through the moment followed by a HORRIBLE SOUND OF A CAR CRASH fromoutside. This sound startles both of them.

VICTOR
God!

Elena makes the sign of the cross over her, but still focuses down to her knitting.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
Stop signs. I told them many times to put a stop sign in at that corner.

Suddenly, there is a loud pounding on the front door. Startled, they both jump out of their seats.

VICTOR
WHAT THE HELL!!!

Elena puts down her knitting.

Suddenly, the front door flies open.

MYRTLE SANDERSON slams the door closed behind her. She appears to be in her forties in business clothes. Her blondish brown hair is all disheveled. She looks a mess.

VICTOR
Can we help you?

Her breath is frantic. Her words are unintelligible. She talks in half phrases and is in a panic. She crouches down onto the floor for a moment as if she's trying to regain her balance.

MYRTLE
OH MY GOSH!!! Oh MY!!! GOD!! I.. Ohh My GOSH!!

Myrtle red in the face looks around, panics runs off down the hall screaming locking herself in the bathroom.

Victor stands up.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
Whose that crazy lady?!

VICTOR
I don't know?

Victor runs down the hall to the bathroom door.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
I'm going to call the police!

VICTOR
Ma, Just calm down.

INT. NEXT TO BATHROOM DOOR -- CONTINUOUS

Victor starts pounding on the bathroom door.

Myrtle can be heard sobbing. She lets out a loud wail every so often.

VICTOR
Are you okay?

MYRTLE
(Crying)
Go away! Go Away!

VICTOR
Are you hurt? Were you in that accident?

MYRTLE
(hysterical)
The lines! The lines! I couldn't...

VICTOR
What!? Take a deep breath.

MYRTLE
I couldn't see the lines...the road...I couldn't see them.

Victor gets down on his knees and tries to look underneath the bathroom door. He can only partly make out her leg.

VICTOR
What lines?

MYRTLE
The road...you know the lines in the road. I couldn't see them...and I..

VICTOR
Crashed?

Elena yells from somewhere in the house.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
What does she want?

VICTOR
Ma! Please.

Victor tries to look under the door. A movement of shadows under the door jam can be seen.

VICTOR
Hello in there.

Quite.

Then.

Myrtle lets out a sobbing cry.

MYRTLE
(Sobbing)
MY CAT!!!

Her breathing becomes loud and erratic.

VICTOR
Whoa! What...your cat?

MYRTLE
MY Cat...Herman! Herman.

Elena peeks around a door from another room to take a look at what was going on.

MYRTLE
I...I..he...was gone.

VICTOR
Gone?

MYRTLE
It was a week...or...a month..

Elena walks in closer.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
Cats do that.

VICTOR
He ran away?

MYRTLE
(Sobbing)
But he came BACK!!! He came Back.

Elena is even closer to Victor now. She stands in the doorway next to her son looking down onto him.

ELENA
(SPANISH)
They DO have a way of always coming home. To eat? To shit!

VICTOR
Mom.

Victor looks up to his mother meeting her stern gaze.

MYRTLE
He was gone! Then he came back.

Slowly Elena bends down next to her son. Victor smiles and then mouths "I'm sorry" to Elena.

ELENA
Hun, what's the problem? The kitty came back, right?

Myrtle lets out a loud scream. Elena and Victor jump.

MYRTLE
NO! Oh God! No!
(Beat)
I...RAN OVER HIM!!

Victor looks down from the door just has his cat walks over to him.

VICTOR
(To the Cat)
Go on, get outta here.

MYRTLE
What?

VICTOR
No not you.. My cat...I mean... Never mind.

He pushes the cat away.

VICTOR
Ready to come out?

Silence falls over the bathroom.

Elena and Victor both look at each other concerned.

VICTOR
(SPANISH Whispering)
What do you think?

Elena shrugs.

ELENA
(SPANISH Whisper)
Should I call 911?

Victor shakes his head "no".

They start to hear something that sounds like sanding.

VICTOR
(Whispering)
What's that?

Elena taps on the door.

ELENA
(In English)
Honey, you okay in there?

The sanding gets a bit louder.

MYRTLE
Do you have any nail polish?

ELENA
(In English)
What was that?

MYRTLE
Polish. I found your nail file. I hope you don't mind?

Victor lets out a half laugh and tries to cover the sound. Elena hits her son playfully on the head.

ELENA
(In English)
Ah, sure dear. I have some polish on the left hand cabinet in the little basket.

The sound of some shuffling through cabinets can be heard. Elena lovingly pats her son's back trying to stop from laughing at the situation.

ELENA
(In English)
You find it?

MYRTLE
Oh yes..thanks.. I love this red...I had a bottle of this. I love this brand.

ELENA
Good. Good.

Victor and Elena both laugh at the situation.

VICTOR
Ready to come out Myrtle?

MYRTLE
One sec.

They both press their ears against the bathroom door when the sound of the toilet flushing breaks the silence.

The door suddenly opens.

Myrtle stands in the doorway smiling, her hands fanning back and fourth trying to dry her nails. She looks down to Elena and Victor who are still crouched next to the door.

MYRTLE
Hi.

Elena and Victor both stand up next to her.

ELENA
You OK dear?

VICTOR
Do you need anything?

They both try to console her.

Myrtle stops and ponders the question.

MYRTLE
Well, I am a bit thirsty.

Elena gives Myrtle a little pat on the arm.

ELENA
Well let me see what we have.

Victor takes Myrtle over to the dining room table while Elena goes into the kitchen.

VICTOR
Here, sit here.

INT. DINING ROOM -- CONTINUOUS

Victor slides out a chair for Myrtle to sit.

MYRTLE
Thank you. You're both so kind.

Myrtle looks around the room.

MYRTLE
Oh, what a nice dining room. I love the colors.

Elena calls out to Myrtle from the kitchen.

ELENA (O.S.)
Water, milk or some tea?

Myrtle thinks for a moment.

MYRTLE
Some hot tea would be very nice, thank you.

ELENA (O.S.)
No problem dear.

Victor sits down next to Myrtle at the table. An awkward moment sets in as Victor watches Myrtle look around the room.

MYRTLE
Your home is very warm.

VICTOR
Well, it's my mother's home. But thanks.

Elena walks into the dining room with a pot of hot water and some mugs. Several tea bags protrude out of the lid of the tea pot.

ELENA
Here we go.

Elena sets the pot in the middle of the table. Elena pours tea into three mugs. She hands a mug to Myrtle.

MYRTLE
Oh, thank you.

Elena and Victor sit staring at Myrtle as she comfortably sips her tea.

Victor and Elena both glance towards one another.

Myrtle takes another long slurping sip of her tea.

ELENA
(Encouragingly)
So...You probably want to get your car taken care of?

Myrtle nods her head as she puts down the cup of tea.

MYRTLE
You know, I was thinking of redecorating my living room. And I love what you guys did. Although you know I'm not spanish but I love the style. It's very retro.

Elena and Victor both look at each other trying to make heads or tails of Myrtle.

Victor stands from the table and Elena follows her lead. Myrtle notices them both standing looking at her.

MYRTLE
Oh. Geesh, what time is it? Really ought to be going.

Myrtle suddenly lets out a loud Beverly Sills-styleoperatic, note.

Frightened by Myrtles sudden outburst, Elena grabs her son's arm.

ELENA
(In Spanish)
Crazy white woman.

Myrtle finishes her operatic note and then smiles and stands from the table.

MYRTLE
Well, I guess I should get going?

INT. HOME/FRONT DOOR -- CONTINUOUS

Victor and Elena walk Myrtle to the front door.

Myrtle turns and hugs both of them at the same time squeezing Victor and Elena together.

MYRTLE
Thank you. I feel much better. You made me realize things about myself that I never knew.

VICTOR
(Being squished)
We did? Glad we could help.

ELENA
Ouch! Your welcome.

Myrtle releases them and they both fall back and away from her. Myrtle opens the screen door and steps out onto the porch.

Elena and Victor move to the doorway. Their backs are to us as they wave to Myrtle.

ELENA & VICTOR
Bye!

VICTOR
Don't crash into anything.

ELENA
Victor!

Victor looks over to his mother and smiles. Victor reaches over and gently holds his mother's hand.

THE END

(C)WGAw1222068

Horrible Lives

2007-08-16T16:18:00.000-07:00

“Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live”

-Charles Bukowski

Algren

2007-08-14T18:49:00.001-07:00

“The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man.”

-Nelson Algren

By The Balls

2007-08-14T16:23:00.000-07:00

Larry Clark was standing in front me the other day.
Filmmaker, Photographer and artist.
One of only a few American filmmakers that I admire.
A by the balls director.
Something most American films lack.
Balls.
Someone who isn’t afraid to go outside the fuckin mainstream and do films that are original.
A filmmaker that would eat the Michael Bays and the Brent Ratners for dinner.
He’s Algren with Dash of Burroughs peppered with Ballard, Selby Jr and Carver.
Nowadays trying to shuffle through all the remakes and bad emo style cry fest films that make it to Sundance one has to wonder, what the fuck happened?
If I have to sit through another cable showing of “Me and You and Everyone we Fuckin Know” again I think I’ll vomit something pretentious.
Can vomit be pretentious?
That annoying Miranda July film.
And many more of those type of films must we sit through.
Once something does big at Sundance every first time poser thinks that they have uncovered some kind of formula, instant cool artist formula.
I guess that can be likened to people who would rather use some kind of fat burning cream than go to a fuckin gym and sweat like a goddamn piggy.

So were was I.
Oh yea.
So there I was standing across from Larry Clark.
Since I’m a filmmaker as well some may say why didn’t you go up to him and say “Hi”
Well I did think about going up to him.
But I stopped myself.
I kept thinking of all the other cunts before me going up to talk to him.
“Hi, ah…I like your films…ah..yea..humm...you did that film KIDS right?”
So I walked away.

I thought of things that I could have said.
“Hi Larry, I just cut Dave Markey’s new documentary and I really admire your work. If your every looking for an editor I’d love to work with you.”
Not so bad.

You never know. There could be this whole other reality living out there where I said something.
Like the rise in the proletarian 1950’s mentality that is sweeping this country so is the censoring of our artist.
We are regressing as a culture.
We are so quick to judge.
We are living in the best and the worst of times.
I feel like there should be more artists out there creating.
It’s strange, it feels like renaissance with no artist.
During the 70’s film and fine art was booming in terms of work.
It was truly a time to create and to be part of a movement.
It’s seems like this TV generation of MIGHT MORPHING POWER RANGERS and MTV have some how lost there way.
And instead embrace the regurgitated painted colors of a lost fantasy still waiting to be realized.

The Abbey

2007-08-13T01:00:00.000-07:00

A good philosopher is one who does not take ideas seriously.

-Edward Abbey

An Interview With Jacques Derrida by Nikhil Padgaonkar

2007-08-13T00:28:00.000-07:00

We love.
We are beings that form strong attachments to another.
Be whomever that other may be.
Man or woman, woman and woman or man and man.
Love has no bias in emotions.
The chemicals in our brain pump away and we react.

What is it?
Some of the greatest minds have tried to explain love.
The late Jacques Derrida explains love by of course applying his deconstruction terms.

Here he sat down with Nikhil Padgankar at the University of Northridge.

N.P.: Let me begin this interview by asking you what has been retained today from the word "philosophy" as the Greeks understood it nearly three thousand years ago - that is, as love of wisdom. Are either "love" or "wisdom" issues today?

J.D.: Well, when we teach philosophy in France, at the beginning of every academic year, we recall this etymology. We remember that philosophia in Greek means the love or friendship towards Sophia which is wisdom but also cleverness or skill or knowledge. So then we ask what is Philia - what is love or friendship or desire? In this way, we begin defining philosophy on the basis of this etymology. And there are a number of texts today concerned with love and friendship. I myself wrote a book on the politics of friendship. Deleuze was interested in friendship, and so was Foucault. I would agree that in fact we often lose this etymological definition of philosophy: every philosopher has his own definition of philosophy, and this is one of the typical features of discussions among philosophers about the essence of philosophy - when and where does it start? What is the origin of philosophy? And you cant of course rely simply on the word to define the concept of philosophy. The word by itself is not enough. And when one agrees that philosophy is a Greek noun and that philosophy as such was born in Greece, then there are so many interpretations of what happened then - when did it occur and why, and is every thinking a philosophy? As you know, Heidegger claimed that there was a Greek thinking before philosophy, that philosophy was putting an end to something, to some thought by Parmenides or Heraclitus. So philosophy was in a way, the beginning of an end to thinking...

N.P.: Over the years, you have repeatedly defended the view that deconstruction is not an inherently negative term, that it is not to be understood as criticism or destruction. And indeed in an interview you gave in 1982 and which was subsequently published in Le Monde, you even said that deconstruction is always accompanied by love. Could you comment on this "love". Is it the same love as in "philia"?

J.D.: This love means an affirmative desire towards the Other - to respect the Other, to pay attention to the Other, not to destroy the otherness of the Other - and this is the preliminary affirmation, even if afterwards because of this love, you ask questions. There is some negativity in deconstruction. I wouldn't deny this. You have to criticise, to ask questions, to challenge and sometimes to oppose. What I have said is that in the final instance, deconstruction is not negative although negativity is no doubt at work. Now, in order to criticise, to negate, to deny, you have first to say "yes". When you address the Other, even if it is to oppose the Other, you make a sort of promise - that is, to address the Other as Other, not to reduce the otherness of the Other, and to take into account the singularity of the Other. That's an irreducible affirmation, its the original ethics if you want. So from that point of view, there is an ethics of deconstruction. Not in the usual sense, but there is an affirmation. You know, I often use a quote from Rosensweig or even from Levinas which says that the "yes" is not a word like others, that even if you do not pronounce the word, there is a "yes" implicit in every language, even if you multiply the "no", there is a "yes". And this is even the case with Heidegger. You know Heidegger, for a long time, for years and years kept saying that thinking started with questioning, that questioning (fragen) is the dignity of thinking. And then one day, without contradicting this statement, he said "yes, but there is something even more originary than questioning, than this piety of thinking," and it is what he called zusage which means to acquiesce, to accept, to say "yes", to affirm. So this zusage is not only prior to questioning, but it is supposed by any questioning. To ask a question, you must first tell the Other that I am speaking to you. Even to oppose or challenge the Other, you must say "at least I speak to you", "I say yes to our being in common together". So this is what I meant by love, this reaffirmation of the affirmation.

N.P.: To many of your readers, one of the important consequences of reading your works is the realization that criticism from an "outside" position is no longer possible, that one is always working with inherited language, and because one inherits language, one inevitably works within a shared framework. Now, if one seeks to question or to displace without seeking recourse to an outside position, does one not run the risk of conservatism?

J.D.: Well you see, everything depends on this concept of inherited. When you inherit a language, it does not mean you are totally in it or you are passively programmed by it. To inherit means to be able to, of course, appropriate this language, to transform it, to select something. Heritage is not something you are given as a whole. It is something that calls for interpretations, selections, reactions, response and responsibility. When you take your responsibility as an heir, you are not simply subjected to the heritage, you are not called to simply conserve or keep this heritage as it is, intact. You have to make it live and survive, and that is a process - a selective and interpretive process. So no doubt, there is a temptation simply to repeat and to take up conservative positions. But it is not absolutely necessary, and I would even say that in order to make something new happen, you have to inherit, you have to be inside the language, inside the tradition. You would not be able to transform or displace anything without in some way being inside the tradition, without understanding the language.

N.P.: There is no difference without repetition...

J.D.: Of course, of course, some repetition, some kind of repetition. But the choice is not between repetition and innovation, but between two forms of repetition and two forms of invention. So I think there are inventive forms of respecting the tradition, and there are reactive or non-inventive forms. But I would not say that in order to invent something new, or to make something new happen, you have to betray the tradition or to forget the tradition. If I may say something about the way I try to work within the French tradition, I have the feeling that the more I understand from within a poet or a writer, the more I am able to, let us say reproduce what he is doing, the more I am able to write something else, or to counter-sign. That is, to sign another text which encounters the generic text. When I write on authors such as Genet, I dont write like them, I try to incorporate what they give me in order to perform something else which bears my own signature -which is not simply mine but which is another signature. And this happens not only in philosophy or literary theory; it happens all the time. To speak with someone else, you have to understand what the Other says, you have to be able to repeat it - thats what understanding means - and to be able to answer, to respond, and your response will be different, it will be something else, and the response includes the possibility of understanding what youre responding to. So I would put all this in terms of response - and responsibility -towards your heritage.

N.P.: You have argued that language is subject to a generalized "iterability" - that is, it can be grafted into new and unforeseen contexts...

J.D.: I have a vague idea of the Sanskrit etymology of "itera" which means again, the same, repetition, and something else, some alteration...

N.P.: ...so language reproduces itself in new contexts, in new frames, and it becomes impossible therefore to limit the range of possible meanings it thus produces. Significantly enough, iterability suggests that one cannot attempt to delineate the meaning of a text by referring to the intentions of its author. This much said, is there any possibility of holding an author responsible for the fate of his or her book? I am of course thinking of your discussion of Nietzsche, but more generally, can a writer be held to account for the way his or her writings are interpreted or could possibly be interpreted? Is there any way for an author to regulate, in advance, the range of possible interpretations?

J.D.: If you expect an answer in the form of a "yes or no", I would say no. But if you give me more time, I would be more hesitant. I would say that a philosopher or writer should try of course, to be responsible for what he writes as far as possible. For instance, one must be very careful politically, and try, not so much to control, but to foresee all possible consequences some people might draw from what you write. Thats an obligation - to try to analyse and foresee everything. But its absolutely impossible. You cant control everything because once a certain work, or a certain sentence, or a certain set of discourses are published, when the trace is traced, it goes beyond your reach, beyond your control, and in a different context, it can be exploited, displaced, used beyond what you meant. And this is the question I asked about Nietzsche since you mention him. Of course, there was an abusive interpretation of Nietzsche by the Nazis. No doubt, Nietzsche didnt want that, it is sure. But, nevertheless, how can we account for the fact that the only philosopher or thinker that was referred to as a predecessor by the Nazis was Nietzsche? So there must be in Nietzsches discourse, something which was in affinity with the Nazis, and you can say this and try to analyse this possibility without of course, concluding that Nietzsche himself was a Nazi, or that everything in Nietzsche was in affinity with the Nazis. But we have to account for the fact that there was a lineage, there was some genealogy. So, we are all exposed to this - I am sure that some people could draw reactive or reactionary or right-wing conservative positions from what I say. I struggle, I do my best to prevent this, but I know that I cant control it. People could take a sentence and use it...let us take the example of what I was telling you this afternoon: of course, I am in favour of, let us say, the development of idioms, the differences in language so as to resist the hegemony or the monopoly of language. But I immediately added to this statement that I was also opposed to nationalism. That is, to the nationalistic reappropriation of this desire for difference. Now, maybe someone can say, "well, youre in favour of divisions against a universal language, then we would use your discourse in favour of nationalism or reactionary linguistic violence" and so on and so forth. So, I cant control this. I can only do my best, just adding a sentence to my first sentence, and to go on speaking trying to neutralize the misunderstandings. But you cant control everything, and the fact that you cannot control everything doesn't mean simply that youre a finite being and a limited person. It has to do with the structure of language, the structure of the trace. As soon as you trace something, the trace becomes independent of its source - thats the structure of the trace. The trace becomes independent of its origin, and as soon as the trace is traced, it escapes. You cannot control the fate of the book totally. I cant control the future of this interview (laughter)...You record it, but then youll re-write it, re-frame it, build a new context, and perhaps, my sentence will sound different. So, I trust you but I know that it is impossible to control the publication of everything I say.

N.P.: But there is an implicit faith, an implicit relationship...

J.D.: Its a matter of faith, of good faith, but its faith, its faith..

copywrite@17March1997CSUN
photo© Steve Pyke

Time

2007-08-06T12:33:00.000-07:00

Time is annoying. All it does is stress me out.
So then, I don’t wear a watch.
I try and ignore it as much as I can.
I’m never late.
Although I hate time.
It can push me.
It can taunt me.
It can make my life feel lazy compared to what others might get done in the span of day.
So I chose to shun it as much as I can.
The sun goes up and the sun goes down.
So visually the actual achievement of ignoring sort of crumples into a huge pile shit.

But still I try and ignore time.

I wish I could take each day and squeeze out more hours more seconds.

Sometimes the day’s race by like a NASCAR race.

If you yourself are an artist you will probably understand this dilemma with time.

Time: The monkey on my back.
It claws at my flesh and is merciless.

Writer Paul Bowles said:

... we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

Freedom in the Park

2007-05-20T17:16:00.001-07:00

There I was standing in front of Los Angeles policeman. Shields up and club wielding, he was like a manic in some midnight b movie coming at me swinging. A black cloud of pain ready to stomp on me. I was amazed when this madman lurched past me to hit some unsuspecting bystander with darker skin. The young man fell to the ground beside me writhing in pain.
The day was sunny.
Here I was thrust into a full riot, fighting for my life.
I bent down to help this poor man, getting up from the grass.
“Are you okay,” I asked half scanning the area for more pigs.
The man was 44-year-old Jose Ramos. A day labor from Guatemala.
I told him I love his country. I remember going to Guatemala in 85’ tripping out on LSD with large hipped woman named Celina.
He told me he came here to support immigration rights. He spoke in broken english.
Too take a stand and do something he believed strongly about.
He had soft and gentle eyes. A large bushy dark mustache arched around is mouth, hard-callused hands that earned him a living.
He told me he has three kids. Two boys and a girl. He’s been in the US for 22 years.

Suddenly, the sound of small explosions started to cluster around us. White smoke started to billow around. Frantic people started leaping over us and running in all directions.
Is this the end? I stood up and looked around and saw the law enforcement lobbing tear gas at the crowd. I got Jose up to his feet and we both headed out of the park.

I’m lost in a combat zone.
Hoping to find my out soon.

Until next time.

Self-Portrait

2007-05-02T17:12:00.000-07:00

Saturday Afternoon

2007-04-30T16:39:00.000-07:00

America of the Stupid and Vapid.

2007-04-18T18:12:00.000-07:00

Bombings Kill at Least 171 Iraqis in Baghdad.

Stupid idiot kills 33.

I'm not one to start a war of numbers or lives.
But the US Media likes to make stars out of killers.
Why give this guy the time of day?
It all comes down to Ratings.

America is sick.
And getting sicker.

2007-04-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

Good Bye Kurt

2007-04-12T16:32:00.000-07:00

Whore

2007-04-05T19:11:00.000-07:00

So there I was. Sitting in an office at a film studio I will not mention. The office smelled like old cigars and aged bourbon. I wore my best shirt. A nice button up black bowling shirt I got at a thrift store about two years ago. To accent my good dress I wore some nice blue jeans and some great leather sandals that I bought in Mexico.

Let me step back for a second. About three weeks ago I was sitting at the Beacon, a small bar I like to go to from time to time. I’m sitting, enjoying my drink when out from the hot Los Angeles afternoon walks in this guy about thirty.
He comes over and sits down next to me. Lucky funckin me.
He looks completely out of place. Not your typical patron at two in the afternoon.
Naw. He was too clean. Too fresh.
So I ignore him and light up a cigar and drink my beer.

Out of the corner of my eye I notice that this fucker keeps looking over at me.
Suddenly he taps my shoulder.
“Excuse me.” His voice shakes.
I turn around sending a billow of cigar smoke into his face.
I look him up and down. “Yeah.”
“Do we know each other?” He asks.
I give a little smirk and answer.
“Nope.”
I turn back around and ignore him.
So he taps my shoulder again.
I’m gonna thrash this guy.
I think to myself.
I turn to him like a burley bear.
“What?” I growl.
“I think I know you.”
“Yeah so.”
“You’re that writer guy.”
“Writer guy?” I turn away from him.
“Look I work for…I mean…I like your work.”
“Fuck off.” I watch the TV mounted on the wall across the bar.
“ I work for a studio and we want to talk to you about your writing.”
He leaves his card on the bar.
“Call me.”
He walks out.
I hate studio people.

But then again.
The only good whore is one that works in Hollywood.
Right?

Hollywood Fire

2007-03-30T16:33:00.000-07:00

March 30, 2007

Woke up today about noon.
Went to the fridge and got a beer.
Look outside and saw a smoke filled sky.
Brown, billowing dirty smoke.
Falling like a shroud across the city.
I took a swig of my morning beer.
Scratched my belly and went back to bed.

Today Hollywood is on fire.

One day the Sky Went Black

2007-03-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

One day the sky went black.
One day my days went still.
One day my love was ill.
One day the sky went black.

Sitting on some thorns.
The thorns of my life.
I fell to hell
On an old twisted slide

Old twisted slide.
Old twisted slide.

One day the sky went black.
Went black.

I was sitting face to face with the devil himself.

With the devil himself.

He was sitting on a thrown made of souls
Sitting on a thrown made of souls.

He pointed at my soul and tempted me to hell.
Told me I was doomed.
Told me I was doomed.

So I tipped my hat.
And gave a smile.

For a deal I would make.
For a deal I shall seal.

I knew I could make this good.
I knew I could roll the dice for this precious price.

So a deal I made.
So a deal I sealed.

And so sealed the salted deal with blood.
And so I sealed the salted deal with blood.
With blood.

One day the sky went black.
One day my days went still
One day my love was ill.
One day I made deal with the devil on a full moon night.

One day I made a deal with the devil on a full moon night.

Full moon night.

Finger

2007-03-09T18:41:00.000-08:00

I was walking home from work the other day. It was a Tuesday. Yes. A Tuesday afternoon. It was hotter than horseshit. The sweat ran down the middle of my back soaking my shirt. I drank a bottle of scotch wrapped up in a brown paper bag. I take a few swigs here and there. So here I am walking along minding my own goddamn business when I look down to the sidewalk. No real reason I just look down. Guess what I saw.
A finger. Yep. One digit. One lone half bloody stump of a finger. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I looked around as if half expecting someone to be running toward me yelling that it’s there fuckin finger. I scratch my head. “Humm.” Nobody. I take the handkerchief out from my back pocket and scoop it up and put into my pocket.

I continue on my walk toward the Starlight. The starlight is a great bar. Always open. I like that. I head in and plop down on a stool. A Hank Williams tune fills the air from the jukebox. Johnny Farnsworth the bar tender walks over to me. Johnny is an old school rockabilly guy. Aged and gray but still sporting the side burns and the tattoos.
“What can I get you?”
I smile like he’s my Jesus. As if he’s about to give me the juice of the gods to bless my soul.
“The usual Johnny, just bring me the usual.”
He nods and goes over and pours me some whiskey on the rocks. He puts down the glass in front of me.
"Here you go."
“Hey, you wanna see something?” I ask him.
“That depends what is?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well there are some things I don’t want to see?”
I lean back on my stool.
“Like what?” Johnny scratches his head.
“Ahhh…well…I don’t know…someone stabbed in the face…your balls.”
“Funny Johnny that hadn’t occurred too me?” “What?”
“That you think about my balls?”
“Very funny” he chuckles.
“What do you want to show me?"
I search in my pant pocket and pull out the handkerchief and set it on the bar.
He looks at it.
“Your snot rag?”
“No!” I bark.
Another man comes in and sits next to me. Lefty Tillman.
Lefty is a black albino who works at newspaper stand out in front of the bar.
He’s 48 years old but looks a young 38.
“What you guys lookin at?” He scoots in.
“Not sure yet” Johnny drawls.
“Looks like a snot rag.” Lefty chimes in.
I give Lefty a sharp stare.
“Very good, but its what’s in the rag”
I open up the rag revealing the finger.
They both look bug eyed at the finger.
“Shit!” Johnny blurts out.
“Well look at that” Lefty smiles.
“How about that shit, I found it while I was walking over here on the sidewalk.”
“You should return it man” Johnny complains.
“What do you mean return it?”
“I mean someone may come back looking for it.” I take a swig of my whiskey.
“Come back for it?” I fold the handkerchief back over.
Lefty and Johnny just stare at me with a weird look.
“Why would you take that?” Johnny asks.
I shrug. “I don’t know?”
I put the handkerchief and finger back into my pocket.
Lefty walks away and Johnny moves down to the other end of the bar.
Guess I freaked them out.
Fuck’em.
I take the last swig of my whiskey and slam some money down to the bar.
I walk out.

I start walking back the way I came. Sweat runs down my neck. The hot sun beats down upon my head. I come to the place I found the finger. I look around. Nobody. A few cars pass by. But know one is running around looking for a missing finger.
I decide to pull the handkerchief out of my pocket.
I unwrap the finger and stare it.
Whose finger is it? Are they still alive? What do they look like?
I put the finger back down onto the ground.
I look up at the sun as I stand back up.
I put the handkerchief back into my pocket and then walk away.

Sometimes the things we don’t understand are the greatest treasures.

Ceasar

2007-03-03T23:19:00.000-08:00

Ever had the shit kicked out of you?
A smash to the head by a bare knuckle.
A kick to the ribs.
The cracking of your own bones.
Flesh on flesh.

It can make a man a man or turn them into a child.
It reveals the true self.
It can unlock the rage within.
True therapy.

My good friend Cesar Mendoza.
A true friend.
Smuggled across the border as a child he works the kitchens of a Mexican restraunt.
He works hard.
Tooth and nail.
Sometimes his hands bleed from washing the dishes.
The sharp edges of glasses or a broken dish bite at his flesh.
All for a dollar.
All for rent.
All for his children his family.

We both love bar fights.
A pastime, if one can call it that.

Oh the sweet sound of smashing glass against a skull.
Mariachi music playing sweetly in the background.
The hot Santa Ana wind whipping up our fears and our disappointments.
Filling our dreams of woman with warm whiskey washing down our salty throats.

Ahhhh…I miss those days.
I miss my good friend Cesar.
A good man.

Shot while trying to come across the border for the 10th time.
He was bringing some family across.
Trying to help them start a new life.

Rest well my friend.
Rest well.

2007-02-28T16:39:00.000-08:00

Don't Look at me

2007-02-28T16:35:00.000-08:00

Don’t look at me;
Don’t judge me;
Just except me the way I am;
You say you love me;
You say you belive in me;
Well do you really see me;
Do you really smell me;
What is it like to love me?

I’m a stranger in a kafka nightmare;
I’m a philosopher spitting my venom to the pigs;
I watch as the city decays around me;

Don’t look at me;
Stop staring;
What do you want from me?

I’m foul and dirty;
I live in box on 3rd and Slauson;
You don’t want to know me;
Really babe I’m bad news;

I’m not the one for you;
I’m not the one you want;

I think civil disobedience is a ballet an art;

I think religion is a joke with no punch line.

My skin is wrinkled and old;
My hair is falling out onto the floor;

Don’t look at me that way;

What was that?
What did you say?
Are you serious?

You want to get married?

Seems Okay

2007-02-27T14:18:00.000-08:00

You’re a visitor here
A tourist in a falling down city of lost souls
With my newspaper under my arm I head down the street.
It’s a windy day a day that can inspire a child.
They say we have the worst president in history.
They say our government can give a rat’s ass about us little people.
The cab drivers the waitress the window washers the whores the winos the people that make the city a colorful place to live.
“Huh, what a prick.”
I think to myself as I walk past two transvestite whores.
I turn the corner and run into a good friend.
Basco Billy Bones.
Basco is a one-armed Armenian, Mexican, Pilipino.
He runs a newsstand on the corner of 4th and Broadway.
“Howya doing Harold?’ he laughs. Basco has a great smile.
His smile almost covers his whole face.
His rotting teeth screaming to the world not shy for all to see.
“Howya been Basco my friend.”
“Oh been better.”
“What happened?”
"Oh well the cop’s muscle me every time they get a chance."
"And Arleta Jones my girl went back to join the circus."
"NO Shit!" I say slack jawed.
Arleta Jones was Basco's old woman for 12 years.
She worked for many years in the circus as a contortionist.
Arleta was from Miami where she was smuggled over from Cuba by an alpaca rancher named Herb Faust. Herb used smuggle people over from Cuba all the time. For him it felt like he was doing a great service. Until that is, INS agents shot him. That was all in the 80’s sometime.
Arleta wasn’t happy. She needed the circus. So now poor Basco is all-alone.
“Isn’t that a kick in the head?” I put my arm around him to console him a bit.
“I lost my job I tell him.”
So we comfort each other.
We laugh out pain away.
We both head over to a bar and go in.

Some days everything really does seem okay.

I’d trust a wino before I trust a politician.

I'm Gonna have a beer

2007-02-23T16:34:00.000-08:00

And so then I rise to my own reflection.
Don’t fuckin talk to me about your rising constitution.
Don’t tell me about your confused state of mind.
Tell your children before it's too late.
Hold on to their pride and self worth.
Rise up from the ashes of disbelief as the world spirals away.
Professor and politician what’s the difference in a world of no more?
When all comes down to it.
I’m gonna have a beer.

By the Early Morning

2007-02-23T16:17:00.001-08:00

With the bull tie around my neck the stock white blur of a Saturday afternoon goes to my head like Monday morning traffic.
Hot steaming satisfaction of one early afternoon day. Funnel and grass scoped by dirt falling grains through my fingers lost in perpetual thought, perpetual hurt, perpetual shock as my head slowly hits her breast like soft down pillow.
Nobody knows all the horrors going on everyday.

Document Number one

2007-02-20T19:15:00.001-08:00

So I turned my head to the left and watched as Greta Von Bitchkin walked into the bar.
Her hair was all piled up high like a tossed salad.
Two black chopsticks held the whole thing together.
She was a train wreck that looked like an angel.
Tits and ass that never stop.
We live together we fuck, we get drunk together.
We were like two peas in a pod.
She walked up to me and slapped my face.
“You're such an asshole.”
She railed on how I ignore her.
How I don’t clean up after myself.
How I am the single root to all her problems in her world.
So I stared at her and smiled a half smirk.
I turned and ordered another drink. "Scotch!" I call out.
“Sit down” I ask her and pulled out the bar stool for her.
“NO I don’t have too”
"You don’t control me”
"You know what you are?”
The bar tender drops the shot down in front of me.
I shoot it back.
“What am I babe?” "You're a son-of-a-bitch that’s what you are."
I turn away from her.
She’s getting on my nerves now. “Sit down”
I bark at her. “You’re making a scene.”
She spits at me. “I can make all the scenes I want.”
"You can’t control me."

I start to laugh.
I let out a laugh down deep within.
A laugh that both hides my pain, my tears, my regrets and my anger.
A laugh to end all laughs. It shakes the walls and breaks the glasses.
I laugh because I don’t know what to say anymore.

I laugh so that I know I'm still alive.

I lost my job today.

The Birthday Blues

2007-02-14T22:55:00.000-08:00

I’m living down today.
I’m putting up my dreams
And I’m cashing in my thoughts.

It’s the birthday blues,

I’m alive an well;
Well still breathing
Still walking.
Still worrying about the what ifs and how comes.

It’s the birthday blues,

What should I do?

It’s a car wash of broken dreams
When I think of my past

The future still ahead
But what does it mean?

It’s the birthday blues,

I sit on my couch and drink beer all day

I’m having trouble bending over to tie my shoe

I think I may have a cataract in my left eye.

It’s the birthday blues,

Someone said that Johnny Cash is still alive

And that someone has the cure for the migraine

Wish I had that cure now.

It’s the birthday blues,

How old was Johnny when he died?
Will I get to that age?

Children call me sir.
I hate that term.
I’d rather “Yeah dumb shit”
Anything is better than Sir.

It’s the birthday blues,

Will I get a chance to have the world laugh at me?

Will I own a house before 2023?

Will the band Men At Work Reunite?

It’s the birthday blues,

Will organized religion cease to be?

Someone once said
"If an idea is good it’s on the verge of being stupid."

Happy Birthday to me.

What's Wrong with me?

2007-01-24T21:28:00.000-08:00

What's wrong with me?
I’m hurting everyday.
My bones,
My back,
My fingers,
My legs,
My toes.
I walk different now.
I walk with a slight lean to the left.
When did that start?
What's wrong with me?
At times my head feels full of water.
I swear I can hear the water sloshing around.

What does that mean?
I sometimes start to limp on my right foot for no reason.
It just happens.
The other day I was driving through Santa Fe and I swear I felt like I was starting to float.

I stopped my car and pulled over next to a cactus.
The sun was laughing at me.
Taunting me.
I shook my fist at it like some kind of crazy loon.
I felt like those people that hang out in bus stations all night.
My god!
What's wrong with me?
So I got out of my car and still felt a bit weightless.
I thought I could shake it off.
Was it something I ate?
Something I drank?
How bout that new herbal enhancement drug I was taking?
Hummm…
Suddenly I started to rise.
I swear.
I started to…
Well…
Fly.
I rose up.
Straight up.
I wasn’t going side to side or straight ahead.
I just started to go up.
I thought about children walking home from school pointing up and asking a schoolmate.
“Whose that fat homeless guy in the sky?”

I thought about cars veering off the freeway crashing as people were trying to get a glimpse of me rising up higher and higher.
A Code red Stage 9 terrorist alert was sounded through the state.
Was I gonna fall?
Would I go into space?
Would I freeze to death?
I always thought flying would be cool.

But I always find a way to turn my dreams into nightmares.
What's wrong with me?

MONDAY MORNING

2007-01-22T23:20:00.000-08:00

The rumbled and crumpled.
The arched backs ache..
Turned in on themselves sitting
At the oak bar.

Each look is a desperate scream.
A scream for survival in a cannibal world.

I’m sipping on my scotch
It’s 10am.
The morning broke in like a thug.
Smashing me in the head with a crow bar.

I watch Howard Dent the bar owner as he counts the till.
Each dollar, each red cent.
He trusts me.
His fingers are fat like hot dogs and the bills stick to his greasy fingers.
He has to shake some of them free.

He’s a large man. By me saying large I don’t me fat. I mean LARGE.
Fuckin fat ass.
Food runs away from him.

He knows me.

He lets me in before he opens.

Well along with a few others.

“Say, Harold what the fuck are you doing back here?”

He barks at me.
I smile.

I know to him this his way of saying.
"Nice to see ya."

“Where the fuck else would I go!”
I yell back.

“You fuckin smell!”
He snarls.

I laugh.

God I love Monday Mornings.

My Wedding Speech

2007-01-17T19:32:00.000-08:00

How should this be said?
How many a time, a letter is written and spoken out loud to proclaim love.

So. I stop.
I stop and chose my words very carefully.
I stop and look at my life.
I look at my dreams.
I look at everything taking me here to this moment.
To this very second in my life with you all.

Each step in our lives changes our souls.
Every morning we wake.
Something is different.
Even if it’s something we can’t see, taste or smell.
Something has changed.
Something has crossed over.

For me.
Moments are stories.
Each change each new day is a story or a new script or short story.

But having all those moments all those thoughts and dreams alone.

Makes my soul feel empty.
For me sharing all those changes all those days with the one I love gives it all a new meaning.

For me it enriches my soul.
It fuels my art.
It challenges me.

I believe things happen in life for a reason.
That we all live on a plain of possibilities.
It’s just up to us to see those possibilities and strive for them.

When I met Kris I knew something was different about her.
Something stood out beyond anyone I had ever met.

She is the one that has captured my heart, my mind my soul.
She is the one that holds my dreams and future within her eyes.
She is the one that has made me see my world in a whole different way.
She is the one that I want to spend my life with.

Life just got even better.

2007-01-17T19:29:00.000-08:00

A New Harvest

2006-12-31T16:56:00.000-08:00

A champion of the season;
I cross my fingers for the coming new year.
I hold my head high.
I blow off the dust of last year good-bye.

The band plays its tune on stage
As I gaze across the floor at the dancers.
Drunk and smiling sober and crying.
The New Year crosses over.

How do we sing?
How do we live?
To our new song we write
Each year that makes us fight.

How long does this last?
How powerful is the blast?

How can I better myself?
How can I retain my health?

So many things come through my mind.

A new year.
A new day.
A new life.
A new world.

We all harvest our reality.
We are all captains of our own
Destiny.

A blind man told me.

2006-12-27T13:49:00.000-08:00

It’s a blind man that told me.
He told me he was going to rob a bank.
Here I am sittin on bench in Venice beach, California.
Trodden and dirty this blind man about forty walks up to me. As if he could really see. As if for some reason a rope was leading him to me.
Lucky me.
He sat next to me. More like plopped down.
He’s a thin white man.
Short grey hair.
Long beard. Sunglasses covering his eyes.
Lines of age criss crossing his face like a road map of life.

“Mind if I sit here”
His voice was cracking.
I looked up from my notebook and said.
“No go ahead.”
I noticed he was blind by his cane.
A long white cane with two red marks at the end.
The cane let off a series of tones telling the man information on distance.
I moved over a bit to give him some room.

“I’m gonna do it”
I looked up to him again.
“Excuse me.” I answer carefully.
“I’m gonna do it.” He drawls then coughs.

“Do what?”
I ask.
“I’m gonna rob that cocksuckin bank.”
Humm..I almost let out a small chuckle.
But I could tell this blind stranger was serious.
“Why would you do that…?”
“Why…?”
“Huh…To get cash…”
“Right..” I felt a bit stupid for asking that question.
“Well…that’s not a good idea…”
“Who asked you?”
I went back to my notebook not answering the man.
“You know my wife died.”
I tried to pretend I didn’t hear him.
“I’m sorry to hear that”
“She’s buried on a hill.”

“Is she?”
Lots of flowers and a huge oak tree shade her grave.

Some skate boarders zoom by.
A blonde with a thong bikini rolls by on some blades.

“I used to be an actor.” He says.
“Really?”
“Oh yeah. That was before when I could see.”
“So sorry.”
“Sorry for what.” He barks at me.
“Never mind.”
I get back to my reading.
“Never mind what?” He pushes.
“Look. I’m trying to write here…I mean all you’ve done is act rude…”
“Have I?”
“Yeah..”
“Sorry bout that.”
“You know my wife died.”
“So you said…I’m sorry.”
“I’m 56 years old. I used to be an actor.”
“I have a son somewhere.”
“Really…”
“Have I seen you in anything?”
“What?”
“TV movies. Would I have seen you in anything?”
“Maybe. You ever watch Adam 12.”
“The cop show from the seventies?”
“Yeah that’s the one.”
“I was a suspect in that and a few other cop shows.”
“Great…”
“It was work.”
“And now…look at me.”.
“You know there are lots of blind people who live normal lives…”
“Are you preaching to me?”
“No I’m just…”
“I was on Broadway.”
“So are you going to look for your son?”
“Yep. I have a lot of catchin up to do. Thirty years worth.” He hangs his head down.
“I walked out.” He looks up.
“Did you?”
“We lived in a trailer at the time.”
I looked closer at the strangers face.
His eyes. His jaw line. His hands.
I put my book down.
“My father walked out on my family when I was young.” I say.
My stomach began to turn.
“My wife died. I remember the first time I saw her. She was so beautiful…she was so beautiful that grey skies would clear up and turn into sunny days.”
“Sounds like a movie.” I smile.
“Where was this trailer park?”
“Ohhh it was around Long Beach.” He looks away.

I stood up.
It was as if I was slapped.
How could this be happening?
“Okay…stop the shit who are you?”
“Just a guy.”
“Bullshit!”
“How…”
I look around almost expecting some kind of hidden TV show camera to come popping out.

“Are you really blind?”
“Yep.”
“Who are you?”
“Who did you think I am?”

“I don’t know. Some crazy guy.”

“Are you?” I stop myself.

Some things in life you can’t explain.
Chance meetings.
A bird shitting on you.
Being hit by lighting.
I guess some things happen for a reason.
If you believe in that kind of stuff.

Was this man standing in front of me my father?

He told me that he had been coming to this bench the same time for four years. Telling his story over and over.
He told his tale to anyone.
Anyone who would listen.

He said he was going to do it until one day he would find his son.

One day he would find his son and try and mend all the heartache he caused.

In his mind he thought that finding his son would somehow fill a void.
A very dark void in himself.
He thought that reason would come back to his life.
He knew what a monster he was when his son was a boy.
He knew the abuse he caused probably left an emotional scar on his son.
He knew that in those days when he drank he forgot who he was.
He forgot everything.
Until one day he forgot the one thing that was dearest to his heart.
His family.
He refused the love and blocked out the pain he caused.
And instead. He Ran.
He ran to forget his past.
To forget his life.
To forget who he was.
He went to Mexico.
He met a woman and married her.
They went to Texas.
Only this time his new wife became very ill and died.
After her death he became ill and started to lose his sight.
He was alone. Alone with himself.
He decided to find his son.
He contacted family who all thought he was dead.
They told him his son lived by the ocean in California.
That he was happy and had his own family.
They told him that he never talked about his father.
And that to him his father was dead.
That was four years ago.
From then on he came to this bench everyday.
And as crazy as it sounds.
Everyday he told his stories in hopes to find his son.
Hoping to one day make that connection.

Perhaps on this day.

He found him.

Copywrite@danglinginthetournefortia2006

The Anchor

2006-12-21T16:20:00.000-08:00

I'm just a borrowed anchor rusted and rotting in this tin pan ally of a life.
I’m walkin up that hill.
I’m walkin up that reason.
I’m playin the dice.
I’m makin a fence.
Doing my goddamn.
Livin my days looking over broken bottles scattered and broken on the floor.

I’m just a borrowed anchor rusted and rotting in this tin pan ally of a life.

What do they say as you cross the floor.
As you dance through the crowded bar.
Same faces wear the same looks as a week ago.
Faces of desperate silent rage.
They smile and say “Hiya doin Slim”
“Doin Fine” I say in my inebriated gaze.

Every look telling a story of ripped up hearts and tarnished dreams.

I exit the bar.
I take a deep breath.
Morning.
The cold snappy snap of the winter air flowing down my rusted air pipes.

A new day.

A new day.

Got to head over to the mall and be Santa for the day.

You Should check out "SHOULD"

2006-12-14T16:23:00.000-08:00

Re-releases of fairly innovative, yet somewhat obscure bands are somewhat of a two-sided coin. On one hand, you get to hear some great music by a group that you probably wouldn't have heard before (which is the case of this release), but at the same time, in the years that have passed since the original pressing, chances are that the innovative qualities the band held in the first place have been repeated scores of times by others. Granted, it doesn't diminish the quality of vision of the first release, but it inadvertantly takes some of the excitement out of hearing it.

Originally released as an 7 track EP clear back in 1995, A Folding Sieve is a nice example of the early shoegazer scene with flourishes of other styles. Expanded to double the songs and well over twice the amount of music as the original, this re-release offers a good batch of extra material, which compliments the older tracks nicely and helps to fill out the edges a great deal.

The album begins with the tracks from the original EP, and the first of them is a twinkling ambient piece called "Rolling." Mixing piano with some almost disconcerting noise samples, it drones along while vocalist Tanya Maus adds some haunting vocals. "Breathe Salt" moves into more familiar territory, as the group lays in a round of nicely feedbacked guitars while the two part harmony vocals of Maus and Marc Ostermeier combine in a way that recalls those of Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker of Low. It's one of the best tracks on the release for the duo and mixes a touch of My Bloody Valentine with early 4AD work by Lush.

They continue with a similar sound on the next couple tracks before dropping off into dark territory on the dark, rhythm and drone of "Resonate." With vocals that fall into a cold baritone range, the track sounds like something that could have come off a Projekt release. Arriving after the tracks of the EP are two tracks from a 1997 7" release, which tread the same sort of lo-fi feedback-drenched slowcore/shoegaze feel of the beginning of the disc. Some of the newest tracks find the group working into a slightly more pop feel, with upped tempos, while still holding onto their core sounds.

As mentioned in the first paragraph, one of the pitfalls of re-releasing an album 7 years later is that many groups have done things similar. Taking the easy route in my review, I even fell prey to referring to other bands in comparison of Should's sound. While one of their most recent songs is also their best (a cover of 18th Dye's "Merger"), I'm not even sure if the group is still together (their last true release came out in 1998). Some very good moments from the group, and if you're into some of the groups mentioned above, you'll probably find lots to enjoy.

You can download this band at www.emusic.com. Then do a search for the band.
Enjoy.

Trajectories of Decay: An Interview with Bill Morrison by Maximilian Le Cain and Barry Ronan

2006-12-08T15:43:00.000-08:00

Having coming out of film school in the later half of the nineties my background was mostly experimental. Filmmakers like Stan Brakage, Maya Deren, Bill Morrison and Chris Marker were the people that fueled my passion for filmmaking. Being able to be abstract and still be powerful was very attractive to me. And that brings me to filmmaker Bill Morrison whose work contains all those traits and passion that inspired me as a an eager film student.
The following is an interview with Bill Morrison.

Over the past fifteen years, Bill Morrison has created a remarkable series of found-footage films that highlight the ravages of time and decay on the filmed image. These are as much celebrations of the sometimes-frightening beauty of decomposing film as laments for vanishing relics of cinema’s origin. Although not drawing exclusively from early cinema, Morrison specialises in this originary epoch of movie history. On the material level, he appreciates the paradoxical fact that nitrate simultaneously offers what he considers the most perfect film image and is also notoriously unstable. Beyond this, he sees the invention of film as the only precisely locatable birth of an art form, one whose inception is not lost in the mists of time but is more or less contemporary with the emergence of modern man. From the decaying body of film, he extrapolates an analogy for the fate of the human mind and body.

As an introduction to his films, he explains:

The frame pauses briefly before the projector’s lamp, and then moves on. Our lives are accumulations of ephemeral images and moments that our consciousness constructs into a reality. No sooner have we grasped the present, it is relegated to the past, where it only exists in the subjective history of each individual. The images can be thought of as desires or memories: actions that take place in the mind. The film stock can be thought of as the body, that which enables these events to be seen. Like our own bodies, this celluloid is a fragile and ephemeral medium that can deteriorate in countless ways.

This statement appeared in the catalogue of the 2006 Cork Film Festival, which held a three-programme retrospective of Morrison’s work. This selection traces his career from early pieces like Footprints (1992) and Photo Op (1992), which first appeared as part of stage productions, through the semi-documentary, The Film of Her (1996), and the reconfigured narrative, The Mesmerist (2003), to the more detachedly contemplative recent works, Who By Water (2006) and The Highwater Trilogy (2006), and the ‘city symphony’, Gotham (2005). Moving away from silent-era material, he also uses more recent home-movie found-footage in Porch (2005), newly shot images in East River (2003), and has made a very mysterious short narrative, Ghost Trip (2000), shot under the influence of Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995).

Whilst several of his films are masterpieces – The Death Train (1993), Trinity (2000), The Mesmerist – two stand out in particular as the highpoints of his endeavours to date. These are the feature-length Decasia (2002), the apocalyptic culmination of his nihilistic view of man’s place in history, and the contrastingly ecstatic Light is Calling (2004), in which bodies and movements dissolve in swirling waves of golden light, the film’s decay radiating as a glorious self-immolation.

An important element of Morrison’s filmmaking is its collaborative aspect. He continues to work with Ridge Theater and has had his films screened in installation, concert and other performance contexts. As he emphasises, sound accounts for at least fifty percent of his work’s impact. The contribution of composers, such as Michael Gordon (Decasia, Light is Calling, City Walk (2003), Who By Water) or Bill Frisell (The Film of Her, The Mesmerist) and sound designers like Michael Montes (Trinity, Ghost Trip) or Jim Farmer (Footprints, The Death Train), is crucially important to his cinema.

We met with Bill Morrison when he was in Cork to present his work at the October 2006 Film Festival retrospective.

* * *

MAXIMILIAN LE CAIN and BARRY RONAN: Your background is in painting. How did you come to work in film?

BILL MORRISON: I was taught by the great animator, Robert Breer, who was a painter-turned-animator. I was a painter in art school, interested in how painting could command attention over a period of time. You could stare at a really great painting, but an average painting you’re just going to glance at. I was interested in film because it dictated how long you could look at it and what you could hear while looking at it.

Robert Breer espoused this theory of 24 paintings a second and I started to dabble in animation and then deconstructing pre-shot 24 frame images. So, I was looking for pre-existing footage and especially footage where you’re aware that each frame was different. In early cinema – for instance, in that footage that’s depicted in The Film of Her, where it’s been transferred to paper – each frame has its own blemishes and so, when it’s projected, you realise you’re looking at a number of different pictures. That has an energy that I find exciting.

In some ways, it deals with memories: you can think of all our days as a series of frames. So, I started looking at old footage for that reason, for its material qualities. And, more often than not, it’s in the public domain, so it’s available for life!

I started to introduce that footage into the theatre company. I started out shooting Super8 off a VHS monitor and optically printing it, always this very compromised image. With the nitrate, there’s this added tension that, when it’s not ravaged by time, the pristine image is cleaner than anything else we see. There’s more silver content in the nitrate than you’ll have in your safety film and so, when you can see a face or an image where there isn’t a swathe of decay going through it, it’s incredibly pristine. It’s all the more violent when something does happen to it and that’s an added dimension of the tension that I was interested in.

MLC-BR: You started out working in the theatre and much of your work has had a theatrical context.

BM: Coming out of art school, I was eager to join any community, basically. And there happened to be a theatre group that was working with a composer who used a lot of sampled sounds. So, it seemed like a good fit that, if I was using sampled images, I’d work with a composer using sampled sounds.

When I started, they would ask me to make films to exist within their performances. Back then it was 16mm film and I started thinking what the implications of this would be. The real performance element of a film projection is, of course, that it’s a piece of film running through the projector in real time. And this is what it has in common with the theatre: it’s happening in the room at the moment.

So, I started making films that were referential to the fact that the film was alive, and the frame was being frozen for a millisecond in front of the lamp and the shutter was open. I was interested already in film being a collection of images, but it became a collection of images being shown, that became the subject matter.

I still work with the [Ridge] theatre company. The staging of Decasia is done by the same group. I’ve married the set designer and there are three of us who are the principals now. We work on things together. I think we’re up to 20-22 productions that we’ve done together.

So, to a degree, I still see this work as having a theatrical context. There are certain pieces that were built for musical performance that have retained this really ambient feel to them. There are not as many quick cuts as in my earlier work.

MLC-BR: How do you approach presenting these films in a cinema context when the live show is finished?

BM: Yesterday you saw Footprints. That intro with the 20th Century Fox logo was from a different part of the theatre show.

Footprints was pretty much shown intact, but it was before we had our relationship down. It was like, “Okay, everything grinds to a halt and we watch this film.” And, of course, that killed the theatrical buzz. So traditionally I would take footage from disparate parts of the show and put it together and release it afterwards. With Photo Op all the footage would loop for minutes at a time. That was cut down to a five-minute piece from the intro. Death Train pretty much showed as it was in the theatre. I think it was a little bit longer and I clipped it down.

With Decasia, there was no way I could make sure of hitting the beats when we did the performance. So, I made a rather atmospheric installation type of edit. Then we made the record that was going to be the master skeleton of the finished film. I re-cut and condensed it down to match those musical cuts. Its life in a multimedia theatrical performance was its first incarnation and was much more sprawling.

MLC-BR: How great do you find the difference in audience reaction between versions?
Decasia
Decasia

BM: Sometimes I think the live theatre show is more appropriate. I think with Decasia, in particular, it’s such a forceful symphony that it can be quite oppressive to watch in the cinema. You literally have nowhere to run. If you don’t like the music, you’re trapped there. If you don’t like the imagery, you’re trapped there. In the installation environment, there are people all around you, performers and audience members, and you’re actually invited to get up and walk around. So, it becomes sort of a state of mind for an hour rather than a bludgeoning. If there is a failing to Decasia that I can acknowledge, it is that it’s created for that installation environment and it may be a bit too forceful to put on an audience, just saying ,“Listen to this now.”

MLC-BR: Do you feel under any pressure to ensure these films have a life after the show?

BM: I wouldn’t say “pressure”. I determine whether I think they could have a life and whether I should go that extra mile. It’s quite a bit of work once the show’s over and quite a bit of money because, after we’re done with the show, all the commissioning funds are gone. You have to make a soundtrack, and title it and re-edit it. And everyone else is rather bored with the project by then.

The most recent piece, the one that’s making the festival circuit now, is The Highwater Trilogy. It was part of a multi-media project called Shelter that was performed early last year in Germany and late last year in New York. In those contexts, it was shown on video because it’s loaded into the computer as a series of QuickTimes, so you can hit the beats as the performers perform. The decision to go from that cheap medium back to the original 35mm nitrate was a proposition of something like $20-25,000. It was an expensive project but what happened in the ensuing months … The subject matter is floods and storms, and we had incredible news stories where the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans were dominating the headlines, as was global warming.

I had these two projects I’d done with Shelter, and one I’d done with David Lang, on a separate project the same year called How to Pray. And they all sourced the same archive in South Carolina – Fox Movietone News Reel Outtakes – that dealt with flooding and high water. I put them together and called them The Highwater Trilogy, and released it as a 35mm film because it was now informed by world events. It’s something I probably wouldn’t have done had there not been those disasters.

MLC-BR: How do you go about sourcing the footage you work with? Have you ever taken a concept from footage that you’ve discovered or do you always bring the concept to the footage?

BM: What’s nice about the way I work is that there are incredible conversations between those two things and I’m allowed the latitude to make these decisions, which a lot of directors aren’t. In most documentary films, I think, you get out in the field with a team and a camera, and you think you’re making one film but there’s this guy that’s much more interesting than whatever you set out to make the film about and you redirect the project. I certainly allow myself that.

Whenever you go to search, you need a laundry list of what you are looking for and you have to figure out where you’d be apt to find whatever theme you’re looking for. You have to think, “Where would that evidence itself?” And then, in so doing, you’re looking through a series of tapes that are a collection of stories and you’re fast-forwarding to get to the one you think is going to show The Futility of Man in the Face of Nature and, two stories before that, there is this incredible piece of footage. Then you start thinking, “That might not show the futility of man in the face of nature. But whatever it does show, that’s what my film is about.” [Laughs.] So I try to leave myself open to that.

If it’s not that movie, then it’s another movie. In The Highwater Trilogy, there’s a whole sequence that’s entirely icebergs. I’m working with Gavin Briars on a project about the sinking of the Titanic, so originally I just started looking for footage of icebergs for obvious reasons, literal reasons, and never thought that same footage would end up in a piece by David Lang in which there’s maybe two or three notes going on for ten or twelve minutes. But when I thought of David’s music, I thought of that footage and went back to it.

MLC-BR: You take advantage of chance discoveries?

BM: Absolutely. For instance in The Film of Her, there was never a porn star who inspired an archivist to rediscover an early film collection. I think in real life that guy is gay, so I don’t know if he’d been inspired by that woman. I don’t even know if a straight guy would be inspired by that woman! The fact of the matter is I was looking for a plot point that would have some passion in it, because the reasons he has giving me in the real-life interviews weren’t adding up; he was just wondering what was down there. As it turns out, there have been various accounts that Theodore Huff of the Museum of Modern Art told him this collection was down there and this guy was used as a sort of pawn for Huff. But, of course, he wasn’t telling me that side of the story and I hadn’t heard of that yet. So, there was this sort of blank, like, “What was the impetus for him to discover this thing?”
The Film of Her
The Film of Her

At that moment, I was rummaging through a flea market or a second-hand store and found all these stag films which contained the starlet in The Film of Her and the extended footage in Trinity. I thought it contained this awareness of the camera that made you think, “Who is this actress who looks directly into the camera?” It is an incredibly amateurish production, but the carnality had to do with the physicality of the film as much as how old it was.

And, of course, I fell in love with this footage. I think if I had found it a few years later or a few years before, I might not have remembered it but, because I was looking for this thing at that moment, it was like, “I have to take this. This is the moment.” It’s somewhat frivolous, but I think I’m working in a way that not only allows that, but sometimes demands it.

MLC-BR: Do you see yourself working in a cinematic tradition of found-footage filmmakers: Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son (Ken Jacobs, 1969) or Bruce Conner, for example?

BM: Certainly Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son was an enormous influence on me, in that I had never heard of the paper-print collection before that and I had read Ken Jacobs’ catalogue notes in which he attributed the reason he was able to see that film to a photographic engineer, Kemp Niver, who took each paper print and painstakingly photographed it. I got interested, thinking, “Well, who is this guy?”, because I was in a way doing the same thing. I was taking these pieces of films and rephotographing them into modern viewership. In researching him, I realised that he did very little of the work at all. He had some cameraman who did it and someone else had discovered the films, and both these people are forgotten by history. And so I made The Film of Her to sort of rewrite that. That was a direct result of Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son.

I’d say with the modern work and the orchestral work, Berlin, Portrait of a Great City (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), and, more obviously, Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1982), I still remember seeing when it came out and not being able to comprehend that there was a film that didn’t have characters or plots or dialogue. Someone took me to it, and said, “You have to see it”, and I had never been so excited by a movie before in my life. It’s hard to remember a time when it was hard to conceive of that being a film. And Godfrey became a friend and was an influence on me in the years after that.

MLC-BR: How do you work with your sound designers and composers? Sound is hugely important in your films.

BM: It’s at least half the thing, and I’m deeply indebted to these guys. In most cases, I’m cutting to the music, so it’s usually what the point of departure is. We’ll usually start with a project that’s either been commissioned by the same source, or we’ve approached a sound designer whom we want to work with. But ultimately I’m cutting to the sound.

MLC-BR: A lot of the films we saw yesterday had sound by Michael Montes.

BM: Actually, it was pretty evenly split yesterday. It was two by Jim Farmer, two by Michael Montes and two by Bill Frisell, one half of which was also [Henryk] Gorecki. And then two other composers we worked with in the early nineties.

Today’s screenings will all be Michael Gordon and tomorrow will be an assortment of Bang On A Can collaborators: Michael, his wife Juliet Wolf and his other Bang On A Can cohort, David Lang.

Decasia was basically a commission for Michael to write a new symphony. They had European cultural funds, enough so that they could support a visual apparatus that go around the music. We had collaborated with Michael before, he’d brought us along, and I had seen this imagery. I had recently visited an archive and had seen this boxer seemingly boxing a boxing bag. But the boxing bag had exploded into this amorphous blob of decay and it seemed like a very powerful image to me, so I suggested we build the whole thing around this image, this idea of decay and fighting decay.

MLC-BR: What draws you to found footage?

BM: Well, I guess if I were to go back in time, the obvious answer is that it looks really cool. The Mesmerist looks pretty cool.

MLC-BR: To what extent is the decay in films like The Mesmerist as you find it?
The Mesmerist
The Mesmerist

BM: Entirely. What’s remarkable about The Mesmerist, and really sets it apart from anything else I’ve done, is that, not only have I borrowed the images, I’ve also borrowed the plot points. But I’ve reshaped the plot. The Mesmerist was originally a 1926 feature called The Bells, directed by James Young, and starring Lionel Barrymore and Boris Karloff. It is a particularly odd film in that the protagonist, [Mathias Barrymore], commits cold-blooded murder and it basically solves all his problems. I wanted to re-invent the film so he doesn’t get off the hook, as it were.

What was incredibly fortuitous was that there was this pristine print in the Library of Congress and they had this one where two or three rolls of it had been damaged or had deteriorated. They knew already from my work on Decasia that I fancied this kind of stuff, so they set it aside and they said, “Oh, this is the film you should have included in Decasia.” I said, “I’ve already made Decasia and now we’re onto the next thing.” I looked through it and it was quite remarkable that you had this decay in the scenes of the fairgrounds, but the scene of the murder is relatively pristine. In the original, the murder plays in a linear sequence, but in my version it replays as a flashback. The decay becomes representative of a dream state or, in this case, a reality state, and the pristine film became a dream state.

MLC-BR: The decay representing the ravages of conscience on perceived reality?

BM: Yes, exactly.

MLC-BR: How does your work with found-footage relate to films you shoot yourself – Ghost Trip, for instance?

I’m certainly known as a found-footage guy and I wanted to have some sort of faith in the medium. So, I loaded two friends into this Cadillac hearse – I bought the hearse – and we went off across the country. It sounded like a great time; it had its moments. I didn’t really want to start out with much of a plot, but I knew I was going to hit these spots along the way. I knew there was this preacher in Mississippi; I knew there was the guy that sang over his mother’s and grandmother’s graves in New Orleans. I knew that I could stop in New Mexico and see Godfrey Reggio, for instance, and the landscapes would present themselves and, at the end, I would have a film of sorts.

So, that was an experiment. It would have been very difficult for me to have a shooting script and go out with these two guys and say, “Okay, now you guys act!”, but that was the trip I could make at the time. They were two childhood buddies who, at the time, I was getting along with and so we could do it. Anytime they spoke, I ended up cutting it out because they’re not actors. So, for them, it was very frustrating, because they thought that were embarking on their movie careers. But, for me, they were ciphers.

Basically, it’s a guy getting from the beginning of the film to the end of the film, and you can see the road as the film and these things that intercept him as markers along the way. In some ways, it’s an imperfect film, but I very much like to see it. There are some quite nice bits in it.

MLC-BR: The journey appears important to several of your films and it seems linked to the progress of the film passing through the projector or the camera. All of these trajectories don’t seem to lead anywhere; they just seem like evolutionary loops.

BM: Right, often the first frame and the final frame are the same.

MLC-BR: The journey, the passage of film through light and the evolutionary patterns are linked in your work?

BM: I guess this must have been a big theme. [Laughs.] It seems a little bit nihilistic to think we haven’t made any progress at all, but I’m not sure we have. I think we are doomed to repeat our mistakes. And film is somehow fascinating to us because, every time we unspool, we see this hero go through the same thing unwittingly, not knowing what’s going to happen at the end.

With Ghost Trip, I see it the same way: this guy walks into the ocean and comes back in limbo, unaware that he’s dead and everyone he’s met is dead. That is the fate of the film character.

MLC-BR: You’ve compared film to a decaying human body. Yet images of machinery – notably film equipment and vehicles – feature prominently in your work. How do you relate the solidity of machinery in your films to the very organic processes of decay you explore?
Trinity
Trinity

BM: That’s a good question and one I haven’t been asked before. I think we’ve created these machines, of course, and the way our brains work in order to understand this organic decay is to cut it down to these little increments that run at 24 frames a second. In this way, we analyse it and pass the shutter over it twice within a microsecond. And this way we study it.

Maybe this was the point of Trinity: to try to capture this woman and understand all her mysteries. Of course, we can’t, but the way that the western male mind works, it thinks, “Okay, we’ll break it down into tiny, discreet intervals and study them. This way we’ll know something.”

So, in some way, the machinery is running at odds with amorphic organic decay that is unknowable. But, at the same time, it’s the way that we’re given to view the world, the model that we’ve created, and, for better or worse, the projector is the closest we’ve gotten to expressing our ability to see and hear in time.

MLC-BR: What is your opinion of video?

I’ve relied on video editing since 1996. Decasia was cut on a flatbed, but that was the last film I cut on a flatbed and I dare say it was the last film I will cut on one. It certainly was the most difficult film to cut … and I’ll never go back. [Laughs.]

There are people who swear by the hard cut. I had the great fortune of collaborating in the capacity of an actor with a young filmmaker, Andrew Bujalski. He cuts on 16mm and really believes in the violence of the hard cut. I just saw something he recently shot on HD, where he was able to attain some of that. But he didn’t trust it as much, of course, because he couldn’t have done it a frame here, or a frame there. I think there is something to the physicality of film, being able to hold it, that we’re losing and, of course, I’m someone who’s talked about that: how film interfaces with the material world.

On the other hand, the capacity that I’m using Final Cut Pro in is to match back to original film when I’m making a 35mm print. In this way, it’s an editing tool and I’m somewhat distrustful of these cookie-cutter filters that people apply – though of course, like anyone, I’ll tweak contrast or colour correct.

That said, I think it’s amazing the access it’s given people, and I think it’s something we’re only starting to tap into. There’s always been this utopian idea that this overweight ten-year-old girl from the Midwest could create an epic about her family with a $150 video camera. We haven’t really seen that yet ...

MLC-BR: Will you be sticking to found footage or shooting more of your own films as well?

BM: I like to do that, but Ghost Trip was certainly challenging for me and it tested how many hats I could wear on the set. The two guys I went on the ride with were little help. They were a lot of fun, but they didn’t lift too many boxes!

I’d need to have a team assembled and that’s not a way I’m used to working. On the other hand, I’ve received an enormous grant to do just that, so I have to figure out how to make a narrative film again – or how I’m going to make a narrative film I can live with. As I go through the course of the day, I’m always seeing things that I think would be beautiful moments. So, maybe it’s just a matter of collecting this.

MLC-BR: It sounds as if you have a distrust of narrative filmmaking.

BM: Maybe of the big teams and the lights and the craft services and stuff like that.

Yes, it intimidates me. I think there are people who are quite good at it and I don’t mean to demean what they do in any way because I simply just can’t do that … Some of my best friends are narrative movies! [Laughs.] … Those are the films I like to see like anyone else.

It’s very tough to sit through a programme of Bill Morrison films, even for me. It’s more that I wonder – maybe too much – how my previous work would relate to a narrative film or any of the things I’ve already established in cinema as somehow being in conversation with it. But maybe that’s over-thinking and the thing to do is just to do it.

MLC-BR: You still remain between three art forms: painting, theatre and cinema, drawing from all of them yet, perhaps, not belonging completely to any of them.

BM: Right, because whenever I feel I’m belonging to something, I run away.

Maximilian Le Cain is a filmmaker and cinéphile living in Cork City, Ireland. Barry Ronan is a filmmaker currently based in Cork, Ireland.

© Maximilian Le Cain and Barry Ronan, 2006

A Small Rant

2006-12-07T16:23:00.000-08:00

This week has been a rough one. I've been working on a new TV show for ESPN2 called Micheal Waltrip:A new Era. It airs this Sunday.
In the midsts of working on this show I'm also getting married and working on finishing my new feature script.
I work nights at my editing job. 5pm to about 2am M-F. I've been doing this for about five years now.
Last night I didn't get home until almost 5am finishing up the show.
There is a team of great people working on the show. And I really do love my job.
The problem though is me.
I tend to be very hard on myself.
Hard on myself when it comes to my work and getting things done.
I tend to take a lot of the burden on myself. When in reality I need to be a bit more removed emotionally.
Well, as you can tell I'm venting right now.

The good news is that the wedding plans are all set. Everything is great. And I did get my feature script finished. Now the next step. Getting the film made.

Director Robert Altman, 81, Dead

2006-11-21T16:10:00.000-08:00

Robert Altman, the man behind the lens on "M*A*S*H," "Nashville" and "The Player," died Monday night at a Los Angeles Hospital, his Sandcastle 5 Productions Company said Tuesday. He was 81.

The cause of death was not disclosed, but a news release is expected later today, Associated Press reports.

Altman was nominated for an Academy Award five times for directing, most recently in 2001 for "Gosford Park." He was given a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2006, where Altman revealed in his acceptance speech that he had a received a heart transplant a decade earlier.

Altman's most recent film was "A Prairie Home Companion," starring Meryl Streep.

Robert Altman's films have inspired me and has fueled my passion as a filmmaker.
His work was unique and stood out in style and writing from any other American director. He's our Truffaut, Antonioni, A true master to learn by. His films span a generation. He made films till the end. For that is what its like to be an artist. To live it. To breath it. To ends one life doing what one loves.
Today we lost a real original.

Flipside Interviews Aaron Cometbus

2006-11-17T13:13:00.001-08:00

AL: What's the name of your fanzine?

Aaron: The general name is Cometbus, but every issue has a subname.

Joe: Are the different names just to trick your way into getting more fanzines from Flipside?

Aaron: And records!

Joe: Has this actually happened before?

Aaron: Oh yeah, but mostly in the past. Then, they found out that I don't do reviews.

AL: Why didn't you ever review fanzines or records?

Aaron: I figured there were already plenty of others doing it and that people didn't really give a shit about my opinions. I want to be different, so I do book and movie reviews, cereal news and things like that.

AL: You started out as a small fanzine, right?

Aaron: It started out with me and a friend doing a weekly little newsletter during the summer of '81, when he was 12 and I was 13. When he left for Pittsburgh, I started doing my own, Tomorrow's Hope in October 1981. The names were never terribly important. They were just to confuse people and have some fun. Originally, it was 1/2 page size, but my printer thought it would be kind of a novelty to make them 3" X 2". So, we ended up printing them that small for two years until it got kind of boring. Then, I went bigger because I wanted to do more with graphics and stuff. Originally, it was only eight pages. Eventually,
it got to be forty eight.

AL: I can't believe that you actually sold to distributors that small.

Aaron: No, because I didn't sell them. They were always free until about a half year ago because they were so cheap to print. It was always easy to distribute them because people would always put them in with their mailing. For example, MDC would send them out with albums.

AL: Do you prefer doing zines with hand printing instead of typing?

Aaron: I believe hand printing adds a personal feeling and quality. But, it's not always that easy because it takes a lot more time to do. I forgot how to type after I learned. So, now I have to use the two finger method which seems to take me just as long as writing.

AL: You mentioned that you took the pictures in the early fanzines.

Aaron: I used to do a lot more photography because I had a class at school which gave me a good opportunity. Later, I changed schools, so I can't do that any more. I did try having a darkroom in my basement, but the quality of the pictures just wasn't good enough.

AL: I know that many of the bands which you've interviewed became popular as opposed to bands that get together, you interview, then they brake up. What criteria do you use?

Aaron: The important part is the local aspect because I think that there are enough local fanzines covering only big out of town bands. I like to interview bands that aren't known. I don't wait until they have a record out. Right there, I think other fanzines miss out. I'll interview a band which has something interesting to say even if I might not agree with them. I think that, if you interview a band, it's not unfair to put them on the spot because they get the chance to prove themselves or come out looking pretty stupid. Either way, the interview turns out to be better.

Joe: What's kept you motivated over the years? Many people burnout on fanzines fairly quickly.

Aaron: If I didn't do it, I wouldn't feel right. I can't exist without being productive.

Joe: Have you ever thought of channeling your energy into another area?

Aaron: Well, I tried to channel it into a few other areas, like music and a few others: a tape magazine, four compilation tapes, and some radio stuff. But, when I was in school, it was pretty hard to slide through that and, at the same time, do a fanzine.

Joe: Do you find doing your fanzine a rewarding experience?

Aaron: Sometimes... I put more into it then what I get out, but I don't think that is necessiarlly bad because I want to do the fanzine and the rewards are just extra.

AL: Did you ever think about writing for another zine instead of doing your own?

Aaron: After the five year anniversary issue, I may be changing the way I channel the fanzine because it's going to be the best of the last five years. All the small issues that people, like Tim Yohannon, couldn't read are going to be in big print. After summing up those five years, I'm going to move on and I will probably not be doing Cometbus anymore, but I may be collaborating with someone else on something or contributing to a lot of fanzines or something. I still going keep the same mailing address and keep doing projects.

This stuff was printed in Flipside 50. RIP Flipside

Lowest Common Dominator

2006-11-17T10:58:00.000-08:00

For all that is going on in the world.
I was taken back by news broadcast showing people fighting
And rioting over the latest playstation 3 video game systems here in the United States.
Is this a huge commentary on the United States people?

In this apathetic country more concerned about huge cars and large wheels.
These are the people that vote. These are the people that don’t understand why they are unemployed. Are these the people that end up in Iraq? Are these the people that believe this country is spreading democracy to the Middle East because they are so uncivilized to understand anything more?
Are these the same people that will riot in the streets for a cause and then forget what the cause is?

A Passionate, Cheerful, and Troubling Film All Should See

2006-11-09T23:33:00.000-08:00

Just one image among others—but this is the image that best symbolizes the stark power of Ten, a film by Abbas Kiarostami: A young Iranian woman is sitting in a car, on the passenger side. Conversing with the woman driving the car, she talks about a man who has left, a man she was thinking of marrying. She weeps. Then she loosens her scarf, suddenly uncovering her shaved head. Between laughter and tears, she admits she feels much better this way.

In a country where people know the force of these symbols—the scarf, hair—the seeming simplicity of the scene takes on a resonance all its own. That is how it is for Ten, which lays down its cards one by one, all the better to capture the full spectrum of Iranian society. Ten cards. Ten sequences. Ten encounters between a driver and her passengers: her son, her sister, a prostitute, an old woman, filmed with alternating stationary shots of each partner in the conversation. (Those familiar with Kiarostami’s universe can use their free time to reflect on the car as both a metaphorical element and one that drives the plot.) No, it is not boring, not for a single second.

Ten is an absolutely fascinating film, both cheerful and troubling. Kiarostami, who is already a master in the art of distillation, pushes his formal process to an extreme degree of systematization—the same types of scenes, the same value given to the shots, the same dramatic art based on a conversation—in order to better uncover the truth of the situations and the feelings that dwell therein. And through this radical stripping down, we manage to read the frustrations and hopes of a society that is both immobile and changing.

WORDS FROM THE PAST COME BACK TO HAUNT US

2006-11-05T22:57:00.000-08:00

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Iraq. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Iraq. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

"Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Iraqi and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Iraq. It will become clear that our minimal expectation is to occupy it as an American colony. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Iraq, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Iraqi people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways.

We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country if necessary. Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Iraq. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service we must clarify for them our nation's role in Iraq and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is the path now being chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Iraq a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors.

There is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Iraq. I say we must enter the struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing. The war in Iraq is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Katrina. They will be concerned about the Darfur genocide. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Iraq, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

John F. Kennedy comes back to haunt us. "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When oil, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Saudi Arabia and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of torturing human beings of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

A speech delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City. This speech was changed to reflect our times now.
Scary how times really have not changed.

All Photos made © by David Leeson in April 2003

Thank-You

2006-11-02T16:28:00.000-08:00

Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has been reading my blog. Feel free to comment on anything. Don't be shy.

This week has been going great. For those of you who don't know I'm in the process of getting my first feature film off the ground. Doing a polish on the script right now. I've been getting very good feedback so far on the script. So I'll post as things happen.
I'm also getting married in January.
The wedding is moving forward great. My Fiancé has disigned a great invite card. So great when you have something personal and artistc to share.

Well I'll leave with that for now.

Enjoy the blog.

Best
T.

There is No God (And You Know It) by Sam Harris

2006-11-02T16:06:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings.

The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe -- at this very moment -- that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?
No.

The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not want.

It is worth noting that no one ever need identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (eighty-seven percent of the population) who claim to “never doubt the existence of God” should be obliged to present evidence for his existence -- and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our situation is: most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.

Consider: the city of New Orleans was recently destroyed by hurricane Katrina. At least a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and over a million have been displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: these poor people spent their lives in the company of an imaginary friend.

Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm “of biblical proportions” would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina’s path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that eighty percent of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.

As hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran. Indeed, their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence: their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God’s grace.

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world’s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is -- and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If He exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man.

There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the world’s suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion -- to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions, and religious diversions of scarce resources -- is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.

This is an excerpt from An Atheist Manifesto, to be published at www.truthdig.com in December.
Copyright 2006 © HuffingtonPost.com,

Olbermann’s Special Comment : There is no line this President has not crossed — nor will not cross — to keep one political party, in power.

2006-11-02T00:22:00.001-08:00

Tonight we got another one of Keith's special comments and this one was another top-notch job. Olbermann left no stone unturned while going through the exhaustive list of how the Republicans love to manipulate words and turn them into something they are not.

And finally tonight, a Special Comment.

On the 22nd of May, 1856, as the deteriorating American political system veered towards the edge of the cliff, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina, shuffled into the Senate of this nation, his leg stiff from an old dueling injury, supported by a cane. And he looked for the familiar figure of the prominent Senator from Massachusetts, Charles Sumner.

Brooks found Sumner at his desk, mailing out copies of a speech he had delivered three days earlier — a speech against slavery.

The Congressman matter-of-factly raised his walking stick in mid-air, and smashed its metal point, across the Senator's head.

Congressman Brooks hit his victim repeatedly. Senator Sumner somehow got to his feet and tried to flee. Brooks chased him, and delivered untold blows to Sumner's head. Even though Sumner lay unconscious and bleeding, on the Senate floor, Brooks finally stopped beating him, only because his cane finally broke.

Others will cite John Brown's attack on the arsenal at Harper's Ferry as the exact point after which the Civil War became inevitable.

In point of fact, it might have been the moment — not when Brooks broke his cane over the prostrate body of Senator Sumner - but when voters in Brooks's district started sending him new canes.

Tonight, we almost wonder to whom President Bush will send the next new cane.

There is tonight no political division in this country that he and his party will not exploit, nor have not exploited; no anxiety that he and his party will not inflame.

There is no line this President has not crossed — nor will not cross — to keep one political party, in power.

He has spread any and every fear among us, in a desperate effort to avoid that which he most fears — some check, some balance against what has become not an imperial, but a unilateral presidency.

And now it is evident that it no longer matters to him, whether that effort to avoid the judgment of the people, is subtle and nuanced — or laughably transparent.

Senator John Kerry called him out Monday.

He did it two years too late.

He had been too cordial — just as Vice President Gore had been too cordial in 2000 — just as millions of us, have been too cordial ever since.

Senator Kerry, as you well know, spoke at a college in Southern California. With bitter humor, he told the students that he had been in Texas the day before, that President Bush used to live in that state, but that now he lives in the state of denial.

He said the trip had reminded him about the value of education — that quote "if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you can get stuck in Iraq."

The Senator, in essence, called Mr. Bush stupid.

The context was unmistakable: Texas;the state of denial;stuck in Iraq. No interpretation required.

And Mr. Bush and his minions responded, by appearing to be too stupid to realize that they had been called stupid.

They demanded Kerry apologize — to the troops in Iraq.

And so he now has.

That phrase "appearing to be too stupid" is used deliberately, Mr. Bush.

Because there are only three possibilities here:

One, sir, is that you are far more stupid than the worst of your critics have suggested; that you could not follow the construction of a simple sentence; that you could not recognize your own life story when it was deftly summarized; that you could not perceive it was the sad ledger of your presidency that was being recounted.

This, of course, compliments you, Mr. Bush, because even those who do not "make the most of it," who do not "study hard," who do not "do their homework," and who do not "make an effort to be smart" might still just be stupid — but honest.

No; the first option, sir, is, at best, improbable. You are not honest.

The second option is that you and those who work for you deliberately twisted what Senator Kerry said to fit your political template. That you decided to take advantage of it, to once again pretend that the attacks, solely about your own incompetence, were in fact attacks on the troops — or even on the nation itself.

The third possibility is, obviously, the nightmare scenario; that the first two options are in some way conflated.

That it is both politically convenient for you, and personally satisfying to you, to confuse yourself with the country for which, sir, you work.

A brief reminder, Mr. Bush: You are not the United States of America.

You are merely a politician whose entire legacy will have been a willingness to make anything political — to have, in this case, refused to acknowledge that the insult wasn't about the troops, and that the insult was not even truly about you either — that the insult, in fact, is you.

So now John Kerry has apologized to the troops; apologized for the Republicans' deliberate distortions.

Thus the President will now begin the apologies he owes our troops, right?

This President must apologize to the troops — for having suggested, six weeks ago, that the chaos in Iraq, the death and the carnage, the slaughtered Iraqi civilians and the dead American service personnel, will, to history, quote "look like just a comma."

This President must apologize to the troops — because the intelligence he claims led us into Iraq proved to be undeniably and irredeemably wrong.

This President must apologize to the troops — for having laughed about the failure of that intelligence, at a banquet, while our troops were in harm's way.

This President must apologize to the troops — because the streets of Iraq were not strewn with flowers and its residents did not greet them as liberators.

This President must apologize to the troops — because his administration ran out of "plan" after barely two months.

This President must apologize to the troops — for getting 2,815 of them killed.

This President must apologize to the troops — for getting this country into a war without a clue.

And Mr. Bush owes us an apology… for this destructive and omnivorous presidency.

—

We will not receive them, of course.

This President never apologizes.

Not to the troops.

Not to the people.

Nor will those henchmen who have echoed him.

In calling him a "stuffed suit," Senator Kerry was wrong about the Press Secretary.

Mr. Snow's words and conduct — falsely earnest and earnestly false — suggest he is not "stuffed" - he is inflated.

And in leaving him out of the equation, Senator Kerry gave an unwarranted pass to his old friend Senator McCain, who should be ashamed of himself tonight.

He rolled over and pretended Kerry had said what he obviously had not.

Only, the symbolic stick he broke over Kerry's head came in a context, even more disturbing: Mr. McCain demanded the apology, while electioneering for a Republican congressional candidate in Illinois.

He was speaking of how often he had been to Walter Reed Hospital to see the wounded Iraq veterans, of how, quote "many of the have lost limbs." He said all this while demanding that the voters of Illinois reject a candidate who is not only a wounded Iraq veteran, but who lost two limbs there: Tammy Duckworth.

Support some of the wounded veterans. But bad-mouth the Democratic one.

And exploit all the veterans, and all the still-serving personnel, in a cheap and tawdry political trick, to try to bury the truth: that John Kerry said the President had been stupid.

And to continue this slander as late as this morning — as biased, or gullible, or lazy newscasters, nodded in sleep-walking assent.

Senator McCain became a front man in a collective lie to break sticks over the heads of Democrats — one of them his friend; another his fellow veteran, leg-less, for whom he should weep and applaud, or at minimum about whom, he should stay quiet.

That was beneath the Senator from Arizona.

And it was all because of an imaginary insult to the troops that his party cynically manufactured — out of a desperation, and a futility, as deep as that of Congressman Brooks, when he went hunting for Senator Sumner.

This, is our beloved country now, as you have re-defined it, Mr. Bush.

Get a tortured Vietnam veteran to attack a decorated Vietnam veteran, in defense of military personnel, whom that decorated veteran did not insult.

Or, get your henchmen to take advantage of the evil lingering dregs of the fear of miscegenation in Tennessee, in your party's advertisements against Harold Ford.

Or, get the satellites who orbit around you, like Rush Limbaugh, to exploit the illness — and the bi-partisanship — of Michael J. Fox — yes, get someone to make fun of the cripple.

Oh, and sir, don't forget to drag your own wife into it.

"It's always easy," she said of Mr. Fox's commercials — and she used this phrase twice — "to manipulate people's feelings."

Where on earth might the First Lady have gotten that idea, Mr. President?

From your endless manipulation of people's feelings about terrorism?

"How ever they put it," you said Monday of the Democrats, on the subject of Iraq , "their approach comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses."

No manipulation of feelings there.

No manipulation of the charlatans of your administration into the only truth-tellers.

No shocked outrage at the Kerry insult that wasn't; no subtle smile as the First Lady silently sticks the knife in Michael J. Fox's back; no attempt on the campaign trail to bury the reality that you have already assured that the terrorists are winning.

Winning in Iraq, sir.

Winning in America, sir.

There, we have chaos: joint U.S./Iraqi checkpoints at Sadr City, the base of the radical Shiite militias — and the Americans have been ordered out by the Prime Minister of Iraq… and our Secretary of Defense doesn't even know about it!

And here — we have deliberate, systematic, institutionalized lying and smearing and terrorizing — a code of deceit, that somehow permits a President to say, quote, "If you listen carefully for a Democrat plan for success, they don't have one."

Permits him to say this while his plan in Iraq has amounted to a twisted version of the advice once offered to Lyndon Johnson about his Iraq, called Vietnam.

Instead of "declare victory — and get out"… we now have "declare victory — and stay, indefinitely."

And also here, we have institutionalized the terrorizing of the opposition. True domestic terror:

– Critics of your administration in the media receive letters filled with fake anthrax.

– Braying newspapers applaud, or laugh, or reveal details the FBI wished kept quiet, and thus impede or ruin the investigation.

– A series of reactionary columnists encourages treason charges against a newspaper that published "national security information" — that was openly available on the internet.

– One radio critic receives a letter, threatening the revelation of as much personal information about her as can be obtained — and expressing the hope that someone will then shoot her with an AK-47 machine gun.

– And finally, a critic of an incumbent Republican Senator, a critic armed with nothing but words, is attacked by the Senator's supporters, and thrown to the floor, in full view of television cameras, as if someone really did want to re-enact the intent and the rage of the day Preston Brooks found Senator Charles Sumner.

Of course, Mr. President, you did none of these things.

You instructed no one to mail the fake anthrax. Nor undermine the FBI's case. Nor call for the execution of the editors of the New York Times. Nor threaten to assassinate Stephanie Miller. Nor beat up a man yelling at Senator Allen. Nor have the first lady knife Michael J. Fox. Nor tell John McCain to lie about John Kerry.

No, you did not.

And the genius of the thing, is the same, as in King Henry's rhetorical question about Archbishop Thomas Becket: "Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?"

All you have to do, sir… is hand out enough new canes.