Did I stop keeping these or what.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) - dir. by Steven Spielberg
* batteries not included (1987) - dir. by Matthew Robins
Fire In The Sky (1993) - dir. by Robert Lieberman
Communion (1989) - dir. by Phillipe Mora
Dark Skies (2o13) - dir. by by Scott Stewart
Nope (2o22) - dir. by Jordan Peele
The Arrival (1996) - dir. by David Twohy
Contact (1997) - dir. by Robert Zemeckis
[freshly-plagued by biting flies edition. welcome to the heat dome...]
StormWatch #44 (1996) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Tom Raney
Fell #1-9 (2oo5-o8) - written by Warren Ellis & illustrated by Ben Templesmith
A Body Beneath: collecting issues 2-5 of the Comic Book Series, 'Lose' (2oo9-'13) - written & illustrated by Michael DeForge
Correspondence from the End of the Universe vol. 3 (2o2o) - written & illustrated by Menota
The Ticking (2oo5) - written & penciled by Renee French
Anti-Gone (2o17) - written & illustrated by Connor Willumsen
Patience (2o16) - written, illustrated & coloured by Daniel Clowes
Days of Hate (2018) - written by Ales Kot, illustrated by Danijel Zezelj, & coloured by Jordie Bellaire
Cities, cities, cities.
There's a lot I don't talk about. Mainly because it makes people uncomfortable. I do that. Easily. By talking. Most citizens of the you ess don't want to talk about material reality. The incalculable, mountainous waste and its (arguable) redistribution. The inhumanity & the conditioning required to maintain it. The filters we are not born with, these blinkers-that-do-not-blind, which we inculcate in the young. I've seen it all-- though, not like Waits, not exclusively --through the yellow windows of the evening train; through silver rain and jitterbugging snows; through piney carnage adjacent to the tracks, in pressboard lean-tos toppled by police order; through the narrow angled concrete armpits of overpasses, overlooking the topographic impasto of leaves, flattened to-go cups, and silver plastic pouches ground together & mixed by the witchy hands of seasons, zephyrs and storms.
Like Dane McGowan and Austin Osman Spare, I've seen the wildstyle murals in the living rooms of the invisible, and found them beautiful. Like them, because "real" & Not; like them, because pale & forgotten; like them, because barely the main character of my own life. (Parasocial cretin!) Like them, because I am quite unlike anyone I've ever met. People rarely admit to being truly lost, let alone admit to homelessness as a semi-constant in these inconstant States of amnerika.
Cities are where I live, eat, sleep, and think, and they are where I have done most of my Time on this prison planet we call North America. They're where I've found sufficient bits to collage together, to approximate the Human Suit which camouflages the inchoate ugliness of my psyche. Cities taught me to write. I write because it's easier than drawing. Because even though I'm worse at writing than drawing, drawing takes more time & concentration, and the elements do not always permit it. Sometimes the elements are environmental-- the noise and weather of bad emotions, of barroom chatter, of human imposition and resentment, of bodily complaint --and sometimes the environments are elementally cruel and careless. Drawing and painting are high concentration, whereas any fucking fool can blurt a sentence.
I've yet to form a sentence that accurately captures what hell is. Much less bliss. Cities are both.
Yeah, homelessness is part of everything. Class neurosis. Like the anxiety over brain damage. It's inescapable. It's part of me: I talk about it / I don't talk about it. Like being queer. Or being a half century old. I don't expect to be listened to. I turn my ears off too. It's all very inelegant and tiresome, and it tends to not have a Point, because it is a chronic condition of this life we are, we say, acclimated to.
Do you want to hear about it? I don't. I have been homeless several times. Had "phases" of it. If a 'phase' may be terrifying and interminable and a hidden stain on one's will to power thru Life. Because, in the long view, cities have been my salvation as much as they've played purgatory. Cities are the counterbalance on the scale of justice, for me; when I fled the countryside and the wilted flower power entrenched there, the failed and fractious past that is the american South, I found the future-- not in science fiction, but in the science fictional state OF city existence. It is not natural. It is far from nature. In theoretical practice as much as reality.
But what is nature? At the end of all this. It's the rat with one eye who bounds from beneath the crumpled rear fender of your neighbor's Uber, to stop at the concrete bumper by your feet, to rise on its hindlegs and sniff, as if to say "Fancy meeting you here," before fucking away to the evening's routine.
Samuel R. Delany does not entirely capture this state of grace, in Dhalgren. But he gets right up on it.
That's all I have to say, today. You don't need to hear the rest.
Because what good is "the conceptual incomplete"? (If I had to name these ambient thought projects I call scripts for graphic novels. They're concepts that haven't been fucking finished because they're not fucking drawn.) It's not like a fuckin' readymade, is it? No one's going to pick these things up and finish them for me. No-one's liable to say OOOOH that pile of overwriting's lovely let's wear it like a fabulous mink stole.
It's only going to moulder in a box, like me when I'm done.
Which is morbid, but fuck it. Yesterday my husband was talking wills, and I was nursing a fresh scar. If one requires more motivation than that to get up off the old rusty-dusty and DO something, then that person is prob'ly a PC gamer. So it's up and at 'em, today. Tidy the bookmarks. Tidy the studio. Add lines to pages. Fix scripts. Buy a new print cartridge & start a fresh round of revisions. GET TO IT.
I am not leaving a pile of work for the love of my life to sort out. He's not going to want to draw all this rubbish. I barely do, as it's intimidating and seems like more than life's worth, some days. But these are the tasks we are set, the roads we pave ourselves so our inheritors may travel more easily, yes?
New scar, new me. And I've accrued enough scar tissue I barely recall myself. The memory is loose as milkfed stool, falling out all nasty. Like I've been meaning to amend the final few pages of Denizen for a few months now. And here are all these bookmarks on the moon, staring at me. I don't remember researching these things, honestly, like I don't remember finishing sketches for so much of this tarot.
If god tires of tapping your shoulder for attention it raps you on the skull.
Let's get to it.
