promiseland: castlist / interpretations

stuntcasting, typecasting, tropecasting-- all accounted for

promiseland: struggling w/ omniscient skies

UFOs.  Another aura in background radiation, growing up.   UFOs were everpresent.  Not an issue of OMNI mag passed without some perversely sexualized mention of alien abduction; my school's book fairs were littered with baby UFOlogist pulp; unidentified flying objects were a favourite of Time-goddamned-Life books & Forteana; weekly, Robert Stack would intone that They were In The Skies, Waiting, Watching.  "WHEN WILL WE FIND OUT?"

And, of course, there was the big guy's big divorce movie: Spielberg hisself gave me fuckin' nightmares with that TV tuned to static as the doors shook & light poured in every window.  'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' was more of an influence on my childhood than either 'E.T.' or 'Poltergeist.'  Maybe someday I'll tell ya'll about the life-size, stuffed E.T. one of mom's friends made me as an Xmas gift.  If you thought the film version looked like a lumpy scrotum...  But selah.

In the 90s, I had my first & only alien abduction-themed dream.  The imagery was essentially ripped from The X-Files.  Though, to be fair, a far stronger-- and stranger! --influence was Murphy & Zulli's 'The Puma Blues', which felt closer to reality than any of the strained attempts by TXF to spoop me...  And as I sit here this morning, Zulli's drawings of grays have more power in my imagination than any frame of 'Fire In The Sky', or 'Communion', both low-budget, Z-grade hauntings.  There's a very personal power to Murphy's ruminations on the subject of extraterrestrial intelligence-- a sense that the main character's struggle to understand his father's obsession with the subject contained evanescent Truth.

The dream's symbolism was all swiped, of course:  in my dream I'm laid out beneath the small cedar tree closest to my side of the house, unable to move, watching a circuit-mesh of lights scroll over the wiry silhouettes of branchwork, unable to look away, strangely unnerved by the sense that I'm being watched by an animal in my periphery-- a stray cat, not one of ours.  As the hazy, glowing circuit scanned, I strained to turn my head, panicking, wondering why I was on my back in the scratchy uncut grass, wondering whose slitted eyes I sensed on my face.  There was no sense of events before or after the dream, no prologues or codas, no previous dreams nor any concluding acts to that night's mental theatre.

I had just started keeping a dream journal, at 17, not that I needed one, given my recall for imagined events was photographic.  Visually the dream was among the strongest from that phase of my life.  It nagged me with its inexplicability, because *I* didn't believe in UFOs-- I was a witchkid, inclined to fantasies invoking magick & hauntings & curses.  Little gray men were an irritant, grit in my mind's eye.  My parents didn't credit such things with reality, as amusing as it had been for them, growing up in the 50s & 60s, to imagine.  If they spoke of UFOs at all, it was to speculate about the united states government using foo fighters as a smokescreen for sketchy shit.

No, the dream's central image, of a literal Circuit of Lights, as seen through cedar branches, I knew what that was.  It was literally a circuit pattern, composited from any of the hundreds of thousands of circuitboards I had seen & studied.  Electronics & electronics repair was my dad's professional passion, a fascination he vainly hoped would inflict itself on his kid.  I saw electricity as being on the other side of Nature, a trick we had harnessed, expressing lightning in mathematics & engineering: lightning, bottled up in industry.  I didn't get the math part in the slightest.  The equations necessary for comprehending electronics, that stuff slid right off my sloppy brain.  Even as electrical components piled up in our barn, I was retreating from the profession dad was so intent on forcing me to take part in.  I could fix a cold solder joint & troubleshoot a mechanical glitch, but when it came to reading an oscilloscope or measuring resistance I was absofuckinlutely hopeless.

So it makes sense that what actually haunted me about the dream was that classic "I always feel like, somebody's watching meeee" element, the paranoid sense that some living thing was studying my (intellectual) paralysis.  The sense that I only thought I knew what was happening, beyond my field of vision, that the quote-unquote cat was not an actual cat.  Cats were mom's totem; when I was a baby, my mother was literally performing Bast worship, caught up in Crowleyana and certainly higher'n'hell.

I mean, in terms of personal symbolism, the dream breaks down dead easy.  I'd had a tougher time disassembling VCRs.  Even at 17, I basically understood what all this shit was.

Today, it's a tough road, trying to make myself pretend for five seconds that UFOs are a Reasonable Assumption.  PROMISELAND has a couple characters caught up in the then-new phenom of Unidentified Flying Objects, and that's why I'm poring over this tired-ass trope today.  I need to be able to make myself believe, on these imaginary idiots behalf, that what's happening in the background of this intersection of Hollywood & occult crap is Real, rather than irreal.  It feels kinda like a copout to make my rubes sped & too-drunk enough to treat UFOs as credible.  Because that's what was going on, fer shure: everyone's brains were fizzy with benzedrine when they weren't ripped on cheap red lush.  Like, the lights in the sky were strictly synaptic misfires, mannn.

At the risk of adding another five feet to the scroll of text above, I must explain that one of the main characters in PROMISELAND is artist, actor, and art-witch of obscure renown, Marjorie Cameron, the widow of Jack Parsons.  Marjorie was a radio operator & mapmaker, when she was in the military during WWII, and she had resigned from the war for "matters of conscience"; after she took up with Parsons, she inhaled more cocaine & peyote than possibly even Dennis Hopper, and there were more than a couple of nervous breakdowns along the way.  She wove a personal mythology involving the End Times and her own identification with the Babylon of Revelations and UFOS, claiming to have had a couple of Close Encounters of her own.  She sounds like a fun, nutty broad, right?  Like, her being a radio operator & that "matter of conscience" and the postwar invention of little green men as a coverup for actual weapons testing, that's all too perfect an expression of the period to ignore.

That Cameron would go on to live with, and star in, films by Kenneth Anger-- such as the very UFO-curious flick 'Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome' --only cements the need for an extraterrestrial dimension to this kitchen sink drama I've been writing.  That shit was just In The Air, y'know?  UFOs have always been an essential component of what I have come to term Amer-arcana.

So.  Yeah.  This one's just gonna peter out.  No big point, no smartypants cinch to this essay.  I'm wrasslin' with the omniscient skies this morning, only way I know how, by attempting a peek back to ask "WTF was that all about?"  But I can't... quite... glimpse...

promiseland: shadowfucks

Well into it now, darlings.  Reading a John Rechy I've not sampled before, the extremely catholic & angry about it Rushes, about the meat-packing-district era of paved-over, punk, drugged-up NYC.  Which has led to visiting online interviews with Rechy, and realizing how much philosophically I have (or perhaps had?-- dunno how postdated that last interview was) in common with him.

The commonality being anger, chiefly.  Anger as gleaned from reflection.

Sexually I've always resented arriving after the party had been officially Crashed by AIDS.  I've never lived in a world without the equation sex can, may, potentially-possibly-probably equal death.  Of course it's always been thus, because sex has always been sus.  You can't have sexuality without the wild variety of individual wants, and Want is what tends to make things suspect, don't you think?

In the wake of the heteroflexible--  & in terms of Pop Culture, largely cis & consequently internally conflicted (no matter how loudly the Free Love generation declaimed its proud feminism) --60s...  In the wake of the heteroflexible 60s, my people decided to get hep and claim Free Love for themselves, so the 70s were when we tried to really make the scene.  We fucked as publicly and loudly and politically as we could.  We clamored, darling, craving that Big Brass Ring, straining for it.  We wanted what the hets had:  cheap cynicism, and comic cruelty, and clone conformity.  Christ knows why.

I mean, we already had camp.  So what was there to add?  The ability to bang a rail & a stranger & wake up on a strange, slightly sticky couch?  The ability to be as fake & frail & fucked in the head as any long-suffering, highly-medicated housewife?  What were we after, in the 70s?  

Don't invoke freedom.  Freedom's just another word in a Kris Kristofferson song.

I don't know that we knew what we were after, in the 70s, any more than Hunter Thompson knew what he was invoking when he ranted about The Great American Dream in 'Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas'.  I think we know, now: in retrospect.  The Great American Dream took Hunter S. Thompson's head off, a great many decades too late to bring him any peace or sense of higher moral purpose.  Imagine waking up one day to discover you're best friends with Johnny Depp and George Bush senior's shitweasel child is the president.  That, friends, is a hangover guaranteed to end your life.

But back to the 70s:  "my people"--  what a crock of shit that phrase is --were partying, hard & fast & loose as only a strict diet of booze & cocaine & poppers can get you.  The gay world of America was wide awake & getting weird every chance they could get, even as my parents were have a meet cute in a squamous drug den.  Because everyone has to meet somewhere, so why not make a buy while you're doing it?  Somewhere around the time I was being conceived to the sound of the Allman Brothers Band--  not gonna let 'em catch me, no --John Rechy was teaching at UCLA and working on two-or-three novels even as he hustled himself for fun & finance.  Because the grindset mindset has always been a thing.

I'm looking at Rechy's 'Rushes', and I'm thinking what an angry book this is.  Righteously angry.  The anger isn't simply with catholicism & false contrition--  as I read it, both central themes of Rechy's novel --the fury at the heart of this hungry little book is with The Internalized Oppressor.  My name for it.  Rechy calls it something else, in interviews; he doesn't outright call it The Collaborator Within, but same-o, same-o.  Rechy's anger (& mine, inasmuch as we may share it) is with wanting to exist in the Straight World, with all the straight world benefits, all the trappings & illusory certitude of rôles.  Anger with wanting to believe in lies, with Needing, with being compelled to need to believe in lies.

It's anger with not feeling like you exist, as a complete creature.  One must have the status, the glamour, the trappings; then, and only IF one can afford to tip considerably & graciously, can it be yours.  For a limited time.

There was definitely a limit on the 70s.  For Rechy, you can read it in the first chapter.  On page 16:  "....a heated gust of wind shoves loose trash against the curbs, where plastic bags overflow with packed garbage.  Piled to be picked up, the bags are like corpses after a deadly plague.  New free-form sculptures on the landscape, [he] thinks."  In the New York Rechy describes, the garbage strikes are coming.  The city, about to declare bankruptcy.  The party, at its nadir.

It's in these shadows Rechy fucks around.  He's writing a stage play.  Or is it a novel?  Whatever, Rechy reasons: no reason to not combine the impulses.  Isn't that what all this art shit is about, anyhow: combining impulses?  Understanding sex, explicating sex, expressing sex?  Art and sex live & die on the same altar, he seems to be saying, and I dig that.

Of course all this stuff is the 70s, and PROMISELAND is about the 60s, five minutes after James Dean died, but it's all the same snowball, toward the center.  The outer layers of jagged ice and accumulated filth as the generations tumble down, down, bearing ever more heavily down, that's just what your grandparents & your parents added.  For decoration.  The cold dead center of my thing, that's James Dean's much-denied sexuality, the hard-rockin' rebel who empathizes with his sissy friend.

The 60s weren't friendly to "my people".  You can see that all over Rechy's work.  I first read 'City of Night' in '95, pissed off to have only then learned about Sachenhausen & the origin of the pink triangle, and what I encountered in that book staggered & awed me.  The idea of a world before the STD that decimated the gay population of New York, the idea that you could just, y'know, hook up.  Of course the life of the hustler wasn't glamorous:  I'd already learned that from Burroughs, and Wojnarowicz.  But it was luminous, nonetheless, blackly lit as the streets of 'Taxi Driver', and enticing, oh, so enticing.

The idea that you could share a cigarette, and then a kiss, with a stranger, and find something more actual & alive than cityCityCITY all around you.  The notion that a passing conversational & physical connection could re-shape your world so much more thoroughly than some tacky drug.  The possibility that if you fucked in the shadows it wasn't mundane, or morbid, or moribund.  The shadows might fuck back, and moreover, the shadowfucks might even be... fun.

That's what Rechy brought me, with 'City of Night'.  And I value that.

But more than that I value what Rechy has in 'Rushes', and that's the anger one experiences in looking back on a Scene and discovering that the good-time-had-by-all was not only not-shared but also mainly not-accessible-to-the-majority, because THERE WAS NO MAJORITY, in the gay scene or in the straight world or anywhere else, for that matter.  The consensus is, there is no consensus.

Do gay men want love, or do they want their fuckparty exclusive, no bitches or sissies allowed?  Do queers want acceptance, or do they want political power?  Do we want art, darling, or do we want the artifice of eternal adolescence?

Shit if I know.  All that's certain is this book is where my head's at today, contemplating a whole lotta chaos & context.  Somewhere in the middle of trying to type all that tripe my husband asked what I was writing, and I didn't say "Read my blog."

promiseland: gentle hackery

Look, we all know I'm not a writer.

What I chase are impulses.  The impulses in this case are, well, all the dumb hollywood trivia I've been stockpiling since 2007.  Because I wasn't a filmbro before Atlanta.  Not really.  I had a tiny VHS collection, for fucksake.  I didn't memorize directors or actors or anecdotes about flix.  Movies weren't that big a part of my life: they weren't "part" of my mind much at all.

So, in the spirit of crucial advice I received from an old art partner, I'm "writing out my education"-- purging the tanks, flushing all the acquired (& likely erroneous, largely anecdotal) associated bilge.  All the satanic panic stuff that was going on in the b/g of my childhood, as AIDS burned its way into the pain & pleasure associations of a society which refused to accept sexual liberation for women & queerfolk...  All the post-'Nam, soured hippy drek that formed the basis for my parents' tastes in movies as I was growing up...  That's what this thing is being built from.

Some of it is true.  Some of it is blarney.  A lot of it is instinct.  Structurally, that's where the instinct is most at play.  Since realizing that this project isn't like PAINLESS, or AZURE PANTRY, or DENIZEN (inasmuch as PROMISELAND isn't as fixated on historical truths as emotional ones) I've been trying to make sense of the stew it has become:  there's a vast cast of real names up front, playing bit parts, but only a couple of those "actors" or parts are there for any real purpose beyond my weirdly specific aesthetics.

Like, why do I need Vincent Price in this?  Because he was Dennis Hopper's friend in real life?  Or because he was an art collector, and got Dennis Hopper into art collecting as an investment strategy?  Or because Vincent Price is, was, shall always be, a walking talking symbol of where Queer meets Cinema?  Vincent Price is camp as a boy scout jamboree, and about half as scary.

This sort of bullshit has been building in my head for a long time.  Long before I settled on Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell as the main characters in this offroad-movie about Amer-arcana.  For the last five years I've been pretty fixated on Val Lewton & Curtis Harrington & Donald Cammell & Marjorie Cameron & the fact that Jack Parsons blew himself up bootlegging nitroglycerin for the film industry, after he was blackballed from gov't work for being the kind of screwball who fucked too much & too publicly for the squares funding the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Like, Satanic Panic was this dumb dumb dumb meme that meant exactly one thing to xtian fundamentalism, when I was a kid...  But I don't believe it was exclusively projection from a bunch of deeply neurotic, sexually repressed eschatologists.  I think there was something of the return of the repressed actually at play in & around Hollywoodland, and it had disguised itself in discordant, bizarre, clangorous drag.  Sometimes it was called a UFO.  Sometimes it was called Free Love.  Sometimes it was called in the dead of night from a payphone on the strip, and the breathing we heard from the other end of the line was labored with phlegm & tears.

Of course the Mansonoids had something to do with it:  the mansonoids emerged from beneath the semen-crused fringes of our national subconscious.  They were products of the Process Church as much as the Scientologists, as much products of The Family as a twisted-up, paranoid, frustrated hippy substrate of an America which knew the nuclear family was less than ten minutes from midnight.  But Manson himself was a cheap little no-talent hustler, a drug dealer & pimp out to revenge himself on the arts & recording industry, using stupid, abandoned kids.  Manson was a nothing, a null, a nobody.  Manson wasn't important the way the movies were important; he knew it & he resented it.  Manson was little better than a walk-on.  He wasn't a speaking part.  I mean, have you heard him talk?

No, this story has never been about Manson.  PROMISELAND is about the dumb teenage runaway who, decades after James Dean had been & gone, decided to live in the desert & obsessively edit his own little epic about how people confuse film with fact; while Dennis Hopper was binging on cocaine & booze & fucking around trying to get Jodorowsky to bless 'The Last Movie', he felt compelled to interview Manson.  He was dressing & living as close to the Mansonoid standard as he felt comfortable, for a few years, clearly out of his tree on a diet of speed, getting his ego spoonfed by groupies & hangers-on.  But how did Dennis Hoppper, the bright young new face, arrive precisely there?

How could Dennis Hopper see the word PIGS in blood on Polanski's door and conclude, "Manson understands me"?

That's what this story is supposed to be about:  how did Dennis Hopper go so wrong?  How did he wind up being Billy, the lame-o sidekick in 'Easy Rider', the hairy burnout clearly not in control of himself or his filmmaking?  By having the wrong friends, seems like the obvious answer.  By inserting himself into the Wrong Narrative.

Which of course inspires the question:  What's the correct narrative? 

Well.  There isn't one.

[looks around]

Is there?