return to PROMISELAND

Another day off, another day reading on the beach.  Up a tree and beneath it.  A peculiar feeling, to be nearly fifty, sitting on a stack of books.  Not literally, but near as damn.  PAINLESS, AZURE PANTRY, DENIZEN, THE KILL HOUSE, and PROMISELAND.  Five of the fuckers.  Who'da thunk.

I keep saying, "I'm not a writer," and there's nobody to argue.  But the OCDemon in my head has different ideas.  Quite a few, if page count is any indication.  Not sure where the OCDemon gets them all.  I don't quite remember writing the possessed monologue toward the end of the PROMISELAND script.  Not entirely.

I do remember having Christian's Smith-Corona at the Hip Pharmacy, back in my late teens, early twenties.  He loaned it to me to fuck around with and clean up.  I used it for sure, but for what, who the fuck knows.  At some point he swung past, curious what I'd been up to, said no-one had seen me for two weeks.  Said Chris Neal told him "Dee is writing the great american novel," to which I replied "The great american novel is a rosy bucket of balls."  Which elicited a laugh, and he asked to swap the Smith-Corona (was it his dad's?  i think it had been his dad's) for his old IBM tower, which I guess was my first computer, after leaving home.  I'd had an Apple IIc in high school, and vague recollections of 'writing' / free-associating a freewheeling script-- about 60 pages, single-sided --with conceits largely swiped from Phantasm (1979) and teevee Peaks.  So I repeated that process of typing whatever the fuck seemed compelling, on the new machine, and the results weren't half-terrible.  There was a lot of Wild Palms (1993) and Destiny Turns On the Radio (1995), and not much else that wasn't swiped from Fire Walk With Me (1992).  Can't even remember the title.  Prob'ly best.

Christian was the one with the lit degree, and over the course of our time in Auburn-- 1994-99  --we were engaged in a friendly competition to see who could read the western canon of 90s hipness quickest, so his constant encouragement meant a hell of a lot.  I always expected him, or one of his friends (Christian was, is, a great collector of people with talent) to produce that Great American Ballbucket.  But, y'know, life didn't happen that way.  He went off to work for fuckin' Google, to drink and smoke his way across Europe, leaving me in Atlanta, having literally broken up his last home, 'The House of Slack'.  Twentysomething years in Atlanta was tailormade revenge for that wrong, I figure.

See, I kind of ruined his room-mate situation, after he'd ruined the previous one, by not fucking the right room-mate.  We both fucked incorrect room-mates, which sent us caroming off into weird, wrongly-angled lives, billiards-style.  [Let us avoid the subject of Charlie and Kate, except to note how thoroughly frustrating it is to be a witness & interlocutor to friends fucking other friends over.  Which I'm sure Christian grokked, given what happened with me...]  I still haven't forgiven myself, exactly, for failing to fuck Saneesh.  I should have.  Instead I stole his girlfriend.  Typical ol' me.  To be fair she was only with Saneesh because she'd made a pass at me the year previous & I redirected her at Saneesh.  Then he left town, for several months; though she & I only waited a few hours after his car left the driveway.  Hyptertypical old me.  Zero impulse control.

Dennis Whorehopper: that shoulda been my name.  If I couldn't smoke it or drink it, for sure I'd eventually fuckit up, up and away.

I know the whole idiotic scene tore Christian up.  But he was tired of watching me be crazy.  I cannot disagree.  Crazy Dee wasn't great entertainment.  Witnessing me losing my shit over & over, destroying everything and starting anew.  It was endless.  If there was a sin committed on C's side it was simply that he didn't try to arrange psychiatric help.  He did every other damn thing he could think of:  including encouraging me to be a writer, whether I was one or not.

So hey.  Christian.  The g.a.n.?  Still a ballbucket.  But PROMISELAND is my ballbucket.

Figure I know who the dedication will be to.

on reading 'red x' by david demchuk

Not much to say here, apart from the epiphany that sometimes, when reading, a work does not sit well with a reader because they have their own book.  My experience of being queer in North America is certainly not this author's, and vice versa.  But he's using a familiar toolbox, the tools are anyone's to use, & I do not believe what he has built is very like what I have built.  It's been a couple years since I decided to create a queer horror novel; I think mine stands on its own, and does not make the choices made here, because--  I'm not writing for the marketplace.  I don't want to write for the market.  I think orienting oneself towards that goal neuters the actual emotions of apprehension, anxiety, nervousness & fear that power such work.  All that said, 'Red X' is not a bad book; but it is not a Great Book, as horror / folklore goes.  It reads like work by a writer who feels beholden to the broader history of horror, as chronicled in the twenty-first century; it feels like 'Danse Macabre' and many other King books besides; it echoes too many other things, and speaks not enough for itself.  It feels like a second novel, shepherded to print with the assistance of an editor who's looking to make their career off a Hot Young Author.  But mostly it feels like I need to stop reading it, soon, because I have forty pages to go and too little patience left.

scrying the shelves / oracular consultation

These days-- these post-drug, post-drink, post-derangement days --reading is a straightforward affair.  Like consulting an oracle, or the "books" of the tarot.  You go to a book because you know you need something from it:  the need is yours, and the reading is For You.  One goes for divination as much as inspiration or straight-up knowledge.

It wasn't always so unmysterious.  There was a time, away & over my shoulder, in the rearview, that derangement & literacy were glove over hand.  The first time I did acid was seventeen.  With wages earned at Ace Electronics I bought a couple tabs from Layne Milwood, that band kid everyone wanted to befriend, and early one September night holed up in my claustrophobically cramped bed with my headphones on, the 'Fixed' remix by Coil on repeat as I read Al Columbia's 'Tar Frogs' and whatever else was in that issue of Deadline Magazine that perv at the CD shop, Carl, sold me.  Those were not good tabs.  It was lowgrade acid, if it even was acid.  I recall at some point that the norwegian wood paneling of my room began to flow & pulse like tides of pollen in mud puddles, but there wasn't much-if-any action beyond that.  Jitteriness.  Anxiety.  A sense of being too tightly sewn into my own skin.

To be honest, I got better results from sleep deprivation.  Which was my go-to for derangement, as it was cheap and also my natural state.  Sleep deprivation, it adds a paranoid cast to people's faces, makes how they perceive you more interesting: livens up conversations by letting folks talk loudly without moving their lips.  Sleep deprivation makes you feel like you're telepathic, and in low light conditions, really kicks out the jams.  I remember my first real dance with the stuff had me full-on hallucinating; sneaking out to the woods to study the shadows of animals gliding and pouncing through the dark...  Good times.

Sleep dep was a drag on my C to D average, though, and took too long to trigger.  I'm pretty sure the idea came from the paperback edition of 'Dale Cooper:  My Life, My Tapes'.  Insomnia wasn't my natural state, at the outset.  After a while fucking with my brain chemistry in this fashion, however, being nocturnal became a habit.  I don't think it did me any favours when it came to reading comprehension or retension, though.  Pretty sure it did the opposite.  Trying to retain information with a sleep deprived brain is a little like trying to make a tape recording with scotch tape over the recording head on a reel-to-reel: the encoding is faint as fuck if not partly absent.  So while I read anything I could get my hands on--

(and there was a lot to read, growing up, from sci-fi to horror to "adult comix" to architecture to occultism to engineering to my parents' separate, discrete Secret Libraries of hardcore smut & hippy-dippy witchlore.  My parents were the kind of people who built their own bookshelves.  Every house we lived in had ever-expanding sets of shelves, in distinct contrast to the amount of living space available.  But back to the previous paragraph)

--keeping that data available in my mind was a struggle.  It would take my developing some OCD and a tendency, in my twenties, to read every book twice in a row, to make it possible to Know What I Was Talking About.  If my memory failed me, usually, I'd bluff.  Which is why my test scores were abysmal.  Probably.  There was the PTSD nobody recognized somewhere in the mix, too.  At any rate, all the components for a half-bright artfag's development were in place:  a bibliophile with brain problems & a recreational interest in neurochemistry.

At that stage of my life pot wasn't really a thing.  I'd tried my parents' stash, once, and didn't dig it.  It wasn't until after running away, in my mid-twenties, that I got into that nasty shit, and even then, not habitually.  Nope, mostly it was books & being On The Natch crazy.  I developed an oracular faith in books; they became my muse & my offboard memory, part of my daily creative process.  Somewhere between that first taste of acid and the time I ran away it became common practice to read two to three books at a time.  Not that my reading tastes were particularly elevated.  I gravitated towards trash, until some sort of personal snobbery developed.

Anyhow.  Some two years after bailing from the nest, and plummeting into the depressingly workaday world of being a kitchen drudge, I tried acid again.  The tabs were free, this time, a gift from my room-mate & co-worker, Chris Beck.  By this time I was into my Burroughs worship, so after hours at our coffeeshop we all dropped.  While my idiot friends did their "Whoaaaaa" thing listening to Skinny Puppy by the blue neon of the Galleria's signage, I read The Ticket That Exploded.  At some point Chris looked over, incredulous.  "Are you reading!?  You're on LSD, and you're... reading?"  So maybe it was ever-so-slightly his fault when the typesetting spilled off the paper and into the oily fractal patterning that slid over and through every surface, from my sallow skin to the denim of my JNCOs to the checkered tile floor.  Maybe I wouldn't have developed that particular hallucinatory default, where I see words materially inveigled everydamnwhere.  'Environments speak to you,' as Ol' Uncle Bill sez.

It's happened since.  Without the influence of mindmelting technologies.  But putting that aside...

Reading is the practice.  Without chemicals for casual inspiration, the shelves are where I gravitate.  Mine, or anywhere in the world.  If there's a book I go for it.  And when I can't get myself to focus on the book I'm in the middle of--  I'm halfway through 'The House of Impossible Beauties' by Joseph Cassara  --my brain will drift onto other authors.  Usually those I've found most inspirational.  Over decades, my shelves have become a repository not simply for fiction but lived experience.  Particularly lived experiences of writers whose lives are most unlike my own.  Because I don't read just to get out of my own head:  I do it to enter others' minds & times.  It's the finest escapism I know.

Escapism, and research.  Because it's a resource!  And a necessary part of having that resource handy is making sure there will always be surprises.  If I hit a dead end with a project, I don't want to go to the fucking internet to figure out a solution.  I'd rather consult the oracle(s).  Like last night.  In the Ds, under Duras, there's a translated collection of Marguerite's journalism & essays, titled 'Outside'.  Clearly I've never sat down to read it end-to-end, because if I had the presence of an interview with Francis Bacon wouldn't have surprised me.

Most useful, libraries.

I'll post excerpts from the interview, later.  But it was revealing.  Because there's a writer who's never done art, asking the most incisive questions of a notoriously self-taught & curiously chaotically disciplined artist.  It's almost as though they were holding a miniature seminar for me.

Stating all this in light of my recent decision to go 100% sober again.  It's not the easiest road to be on, in this life.  But it's necessary for body & mind.  Because, fuck, have you SEEN Francis Bacon's studio?

out of a variety of nowheres

That's where the writing gets done, largely.  The writing and the thinking.

Your Warren Ellises of the world will talk up their gear and their precious rituals for genius and the albums they were given as gifts and the live shows they saw and the meals they ate and the booze they saturated them with and the gardening they struggle over.  They will blog.  They have blogged.  They are blog.

Yet I am blog, and you can too.  Because you do not need the frills & the fripperies of a content hound to triangulate the origins of inspiration.  You can pick up those signals... anywhere, everywhere, and in my case, most readily, in a wide variety of nowheres.

Of late I refer to them as Woods Offices.  I have two Woods Offices--  the first so designated is nice in spring but utterly inaccessible by summer.  It consists of a log thrown across some other fallen logs, by a fence, right next to the Evanston channel trail.  Woods Office number two is technically a River Office, as it's beneath an overpass, but the woods are also right there.  These are places I habitually hang out in the hour(s) before my actual job begins.  I'm a compulsive tidier, so when I head out it's with plastic bags & vinyl gloves at hand, the better to clean the world with.  Usually I average one to two commercial grade trashbags.  This past couple weeks I've pulled gallon cans of paint outta the woods, found a cop's lost maglite, cleaned a burnt-down homeless encampment, et cetera.

I may often be found at the beach, picking up.  You would wrinkle your nose at the things I've picked up.  Just rest assured I do so with a great many precautions & barriers between myself and worldly filth.  The upshot of this compulsive behavior, while distracting, is that it calms me and leads me to Notice all kinds of oddments.  The cleaning has rewards built in, as well.  My new Leatherman multi-tool, for instance, came from a beach clean, as did my new collection of novelty cocaine spoons.

The point I am making here, painfully slowly, is that one may find inspiration in the world, in a wide variety of nowheres.  The cocaine spoons are useless to me, practically & personally, but it's a lovely character note to append somewhere within A HERO OF THE FEVER.  Because...  the sort of personality that would collect coke spoons?  That's something I couldn't have brainstormed.

It takes being in the world.

Warren Ellis might have been able to conjure the cokespoon collector.  Because himself is a poseur and a degenerate who quite enjoyed cocaine.  I also imagine that, though he was once as scrawny and gutter-oriented as myself, he only hung out in curious out-of-the-way overlaps of urbanism & opportunistic nature as a hipster flex in his twenties.  Carousing, like.  Doing his weekend warrior bit with the lads, getting into shit, desperate to pull some bird.  

Whereas I've always been the guy who needs to avoid humans.  And if you need to avoid humans, you explore.  Now I know how to access the Metra rail corridor.  Like, there's a great deal of mapmaking that gets done, just walking around.  Because people take walking for granted.  North American urbanoids rely on their cars for virtually every sojourn and consequently never get to grips with how their city is constructed.  It's very, very useful to know every square inch of the places you live & work.

Anyway, recon:  It's how creation gets done, as much as any of the Art or Craft shit I usually drone on about.  I've written four going on five books by being absolutely nowhere, writing at fucking dumb hours, in conditions of relative-to-absolute dark, cold, and rain-- by being persistent, prepared, and pathological.

Try it.

writing around death

As with every time a script hits the Finished pile, the ritual resets.

Mornings begin with the commute.  I'm on day four of a twelve-day stretch at work, so an essential element in the morning ritual is recharging.  Find a space to Be In, a place to walk, pace, think, sit, stretch, do yoga, listen and focus.  Focus is precious.  There's not much else one can do at my job BUT focus on the immediate.  So I need a recharge space.  There are several--  what I refer to as --'woods offices' along the way to my gig.  The current preferred favourite is beneath a major bridge, where cliff swallows nest.

Yesterday, sheltering there from the rain, as I observed heron and river otters and, yes, beaver, I went through the scripts, from most recent (THE KILL HOUSE) to secondmost recently completed (AZURE PANTRY / DENIZEN) and that put me in mind of the first to be completed in the pile (PAINLESS).  Looking for...  not similarities, so much as resonances?  Because I wanted to reassure myself that they aren't all The Same Book.

And they aren't.  But they aren't unrelated, either.  It's occurred to me that four of the seven major projects on my desk are about Dying.  At least in part.  It never occurred to me before that I'd turn into the kind of writer who writes the same book, essentially, time after time.  First off, I'm Not A Writer.  Secondly, I didn't think not-dying had been that big of a knock.  But, faced with the facts?  It's obvious that I'm trying to work through something.

Because all these books are about one's relation to mortality.  One's proximity, if nothing else.

A couple years ago, one morning in a burst of basic arithmetic, I tallied up the number of times death buzzed my ass.  It came to three, officially.  Surviving the murder attempt.  Surviving the suicide attempt.  And surviving the accident.  I'm sure there were other close calls, or at the very least WAKE UP calls, but of the times death was close enough for hugs:  three.

I have not done therapy for that.  Unless one counts four scripts.  Do these count as therapy?  Clearly I wrote them for that purpose.  Technically they were written because the OCD demanded their invention.  I don't write because I want to, I write because crazybrain commands.  Anyway, they're all plainly of a piece.  They're very different (or at least arguably different) approaches to the High Seriousness of that practical jester, mortality.

Maybe that's why the next book is just about sex.

i know things about chicago

and it doesn't require an audience.  anymore than the things i now know about chicago require an audience.  i see a lot.  always have.  it's a runaway thing.  having my degraded vision restored by glasses makes it possible to study an entire nightworld which, for a decade plus, was receding into fog.  chicago is a marvelous vista in the dark, the vast accordioned silhouettes with their rave-pastel windows grown from obsidian coral, and the roustabout gloam below, with its shadow circuits...  i go chasing police torchlights and trolling nervous patrolmen, who can't seem to find the crime they're after.  returning i see:  swift as cliff swallows cruising cyclists stop and organize a threeway with a willing benchsitter, kneeling as i pass.  the giver presses his right hand on the kneeling recipiant's shoulder, signaling not to stop, as his riding partner traces the small of the giver's back from latissimus dorsi to heavy rhomboids.  the trio pick up the pace as i leave them in dark tangles of overlaid park bench slats & inky whispering eruptions of brush, and i think of the thin young thing who preceded the threesome-- sauntering with the lip of his pants tugged beneath his iliac crest, signifying with his eyes and sniffing loud.  men like them number in the unknowns, as infinite as the number of nights that have incubated in this centre of teeming industriousness and accomplishment, as up against itself as it is against the elements

i can't say i know these people or know anything about them:  but i know me, so i can extrapolate the endless varieties of explanations, and i know need like few may imagine.  it's decent material.  the stuff from which life is built, though it's rarely said as plainly and openly as these minor demonstrations.  chicago never sleeps, like some aquatic mammal alternating autonomic activities between lobes of the brain; forever in motion, negotiating currents and avoiding obstacles, as some fathomless aspect of itself dreams deeply of kindnesses alien to light and the smoke-reddened eyes of john and karen q. public

on the other side of the smudged chalkmark of the horizon, in ontario, there is fire.  i do not know it, but the fog that has seeped between my eyes and the dim beach is thick with toxins.  the air has taken on a pervasive flavor of dried, salted meat.  a trio of friends-- two dykes and a skinny male  --caper in the tide, and i balance my ass on the steel cable guidewire in the center of the pier, sketchbook angled on my knee toward the floodlights.  felt-tip nib dancing in imitation of life.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will have a cough, and a persistent flavor in my mouth, and my chest will feel heavy.  tomorrow (yesterday) i will worry about the way the particulate count has shifted the refractory index of light toward the red, and how the vacant beaches echo high desert.  (yesterday) the next day i will wear a mask, and curse myself for heeding the call to adventure, and the seven-to-eight cigarette hangover coating my lungs; and the-today-after [earlier than now] i will contemplate the couples swimming, heedless of the white and khaki film of ash scumming the tide.  i will not speak to these daytimers, maskless, dapping their cans of coca-cola together, who cannot see the flaccid, eyeless, carrion-white bass with the hole torn in its back, lolling against the rocks.  death does not require an audience.  merely opportunity.  it will occur to me that these maskeless daytimers should be warned, but-- surely they were.  i know things about chicago.  and so must they

executive healthcare for artfags below the poverty line, oh god o'clock edition

Today's menu:  SHOTS!  SHOTS!  SHOTS!

Renewing covid jab this morning, downtown, at a free clinic.  Since getting a shot at CVS-- where it had been free for individuals w/o insurance up until three months ago  --now sets a body back a min of $200.

After that, we'll see if my arm functions well enough for a complete re-type of the working draft of PROMISELAND.  Probably at Loaves + Witches, because I need to work in a cozy atmo that isn't home.

It's how I usually do these things:  write a draft, review, re-type, revising as I go.  This would be the third draft.  I normally only do two to three drafts.  This fucker might go to four; PAINLESS ran four drafts.  AZURE PANTRY only went three drafts.  DENIZEN was two.  That was easier because I knew the Big Beats, since it was a historical crime thing.  KILL HOUSE is on its third draft.  PROMISELAND, I'm off the res, because it's massively ahistorical & has consistently been surprising me.

I have to insert a bus scene and some characters--  Robert de Grimston (of the Process church), David Berg plus other creeps.  de Grimston's working as a sideshow geek & pole sitter at the local boardwalk, where beachcomber David Berg and his wife(?) are heckling the simp.  Dennis Hopper is walking home after a particularly disastrous pass at Bobby Beausoleil.  There's gonna be a surprise waiting for Dennis on the bus.  A surprise fresh out of jail.

For my travels I hope there are no surprises on the train to, or from, the clinic.  Chi transit surprises sometimes have a predilection for setting hair on fire.

little free libraries

are a joy & a marvelous resource.  landed a pair of nice coffee table style, photo-heavy reference books, both relevant to projects on deck, in as many weeks as i pursue AZURE PANTRY and DENIZEN.  the mayan data is on point for the chapters i'm sketching, as is the 40s manhattan photo ref.  art dork heaven up in heah.  i donate to L.F.L.s regularly.  as the sole other reader of this blog is aware, i am a biiiiiiiiig believer in circulating books.  generally i don't try to sell 'em or trade 'em, unless it is a season for purging the stacks.  (sometimes you want to recoup your losses!)  category need not apply:  comics, fiction & non-, art books, any & all of it, i like to give 'em away.  it's how the world should work: and i believe this is rewarded, with synchronicities like finding the perfect book, relevant to the topic at hand.  environments talk to you when you communicate with them.  i tend to take these messages that i'm On Mission, artistically.  they're reassuring when you don't really know how to talk to, well, people about the multitudinous obscure fixations that fuel this lifelong hobby, comix

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: 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?

promiseland: stuntcasting

Embracing the nature of the thing I am compelled to write, have built a complete cast list for PROMISELAND, which now includes Vincent Price, among others.

 

Vincent is a good example of how the cast list is being built, as a sort of structural guide to my intentions:  Vinnie's part is listed as "distinguished patron of the arts", which he certainly was, in real life.  I don't have a scene for him yet, but when I get there it's plain to me what purpose he'll serve.  Most of the supporting / auxiliary cast have titles like that, with very few proper names; Donald Cammell is listed as "a hedonist", where Val Lewton is a "blind shopkeeper", and Curtis Harrington is a "peepshow regular".  These will all be fun rôles, I can tell.

Of the few actual names for these historical persons, Leslie Van Houten surprised me by being the 2nd Mansonoid to make my mental casting call:  she's won the part of "creepy Sally Streetmeat".  I thought Bobby Beausoleil would be the only Mansonoid, with hir marquee role as the enchanting & difficult "Bobbi Beautiful Soul".  Leslie's secondary cast, though, so she won't be stepping on Bobbi's feminine energies.

That starfucker Manson's insisted on horning in, but I've relegated him to the absolute end of my cast, subheaded as "introducing", and made sure he keeps his shit in check by crediting him as "a recidivist".

Can't let these freaks take over my show.

new scar, new me

Tamed the bookmarks, today.  That's about two years of bookmarking & notes for the four GNs I've been building like a layabout hobbiest.  Nobody cares what you say:  they only care that you DO.  While I've been allowing myself to age like a scar collector and pretending to be unafraid of the inevitable-- when what I should fear is it all having been for naught.

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.

tarot, shmarot

No major art updates lately because, simply, I've barely been drawing.  Work's put a minor damper on productivity.  That said, the Hierophant card's coming along slow, and I'm working out the future cards for the deck.  Normally on a Saturday I'd be slogging through a shift at the bakery but it seems the chill has blown a water main over in Skokie, thereby shutting down Evanston, so I'm going to be in the studio, hacking away.  Perhaps expect some art / studio process vid later on this evening.

On the script front, as ever, if I'm not writing on Promiseland I'm pondering how to move forward with it.  Set myself a minor challenge & not really quite certain what to do with it.  It's my fault for asking "What have you never seen done with a seance, in fiction & film?" because the answer (I came up with one) is a bugbear of bother & bullshit.  So Promiseland remains in process.

Meanwhile, over at the comix I draw & you never see, thumbnailing continues.  Page layouts for Azure Pantry & Denizen are ongoing.  Who knows, maybe I'll just start posting roughs.  Practicing on Painless could prove fun, too.  Protip for amateurs:  don't have too many projects.  Just don't.  There are days when it pleases me to have three whole novels in my workbag, and there are days when I wish I'd had these scripts in hand a decade ago, when I was a little less physically challenged.

on frank miller (a.k.a. the greatest punk song ever cut to vinyl is the final 85 seconds of "by you" by fugazi)

been thinking about frank miller a lot lately

there was a very punk thing manifesting through that dumb kid

a very punk, reactionary, inherently conservative thing that couldn't understand anyone who wasn't a white man angry at the near-certainty of dying in cities made terrible by mutant hands

i mean why did i like repo man.  why am i a nearly-fifty gay punk who got the ethos behind the jokes in a movie that is 99% joke*, but didn't understand why the jokes were funny.  why was i so dissociated & damaged by violence in the home that i didn't get why the "real" punks in the movie are so fucking funny.  you have to be a punk in this fucking world, because how can you be comfortable in the skin you were born in, in america?  the only way you can be comfortable being defined by this oppressively dumb, barely sentient lumbering Thing calling itself society is through complacency & sedation

* the remaining 1% is a sincerity pure & intense as boomslang venom spat in your eye.  that is why i liked repo man, by the bye.  because it Believes the shit it talks, to your face, as it smiles like harry dean stanton fingering a straight razor

(listen i never promised your a primrose path of seagues.  just keep reading & pretend i'm not here)

i've never read anything that said frank miller saw repo man but i mean christ, look at frank when he's firing on all cylinders as a satirist.  'give me liberty' is as punk & anarchic as any alex cox movie.  the Whole of a frank miller project is never as great as its opening chapter.  i think we can all agree on that:  the martha washington book miller & gibbons death-marched to conclusion does not interest me as a work of fiction because frank really wanted to write a dave sim length essay on (of all people) ayn randian theories and YAWN, man

but that opening salvo, 'give me liberty', was as fucking punk as it gets, and it's magnificent comix, and it's miller giving alan moore the business, and it's the stadium rock equivalent of listening to fugazi live in the snow on their fourth encore and the people who were there were fucking living the music, believe

[lest you fail to identify my synesthesiac tendencies i consider elektra: assassin one of the finest cyberpunk novels i've ever gobbled.  so maybe i feel art more strongly & specifically than most ordinary people who weren't deeply traumatized.  i experience music.  there's no other way to say it.  every time i hear one of  my favorite songs i am forever hearing some part of it anew because the experience is new and i'm still playing that track, motherfucker]

anyway.  i'm never going to assemble all these notes in one place & edit them into a cogent slab because who cares, on the internet.  i'd rather make art & think about art & blither about it where & when-ever i feel like it, because i've survived death three times & once it was nearly at the hands of my dad.  i've earned the right to not give a fig about brevity.  and i think frank the tank is a guy i need to thank, cringe as his name goddamned be.  he's just as fuckin' bad as dave sim and has just as many weird sins to answer for, and i say this counting alan moore's name also in the lot, because they're all popular artists, and i hold my favorite creators' feet to the fire all the time no matter the medium.  i've kept a list of who was naughty & who was nice & who can be considered an architect of the present moment because these sumbitches have been shaping popular imagination for decades, baby.  and frank's a fuckup, first & foremost, so his work has produced a fuckoff bevvy of idiots who in time came to shape conservative tendencies in young white men

insert existential drawn-out heaving sigh here

but frank's a great artist, no matter whether i think his linework has irreparably deteriorated or not, because he's made some Great Art, and chapter one of the dark knight returns is an excellent 48-page graphic novella that's < the dark knight returns as a whole, which is a very clumsy book.  ronin is a fucking excellent graphic novel from start to finish; there's no up-and-down to the tone that fucks up what miller's doing.  it's mathematically perfect in its pacing.  it's assured, it's practiced, it's stadium rock...  yet i'd rather read the first chapter of the dark knight returns, any given day, because it is a perfect batman story that shoulda been an annual or one of those "elseworlds" prestige format things DC started squatting out

and what the fuck is punk about batman, anyway?  what in the name of balls has happened to this meander of sentences since i first typed the words "there is a very punk thing" about young frank miller.  i dunno.  but there's something there, because miller had batman become King Of The Punks in his weird dumb superhero comic about an aging son of old money dressing up in armor to bruise superman's jaw, and frank miller identified with the blank angry irony of sid vicious's swastika fetish, and frank miller was a dumb white kid who got the crap scared out of him when early 80s new york beat him up & took his money.  he very nearly wound up being a victim in a mike hammer book, chewed up and covered in filth--  or at least he clearly felt that way, and as a lifelong violence survivor i can totally empathize what's it's like, living in terror, so no surprise when the guy who barely held it together after getting robbed saw the twin towers fly apart, no surprise That Guy turned into a really embarrassing coked-out uncle and started drawing supercrude bat-fantasies about killing saddam with his hands & his love (of america)

but still: there's that punk Thing.  because the dark knight strikes again is as tonally weird as tdkr, and it's goddamned beautifully abused by lynn varley, at the other end of a creative partnership that i'll never quite comprehend because creeping jesus, imagine having sex with the dude who considered himself the physical inspiration behind 'that yellow bastard'?  the confidence to draw himself as the main monster in his best "hard-boiled" book, that's fuckin' Punk

and the way frank miller drew Ben Grimm, recently? 

punk as fuck

and anyway when i say i've been thinking about frank miller a lot lately usually it's for the pacing & all that "writing" jazz--  and what the fuck is writing when it's done by re-arranging a literal wall of post-it notes?  don't answer that  --but in this instance it's i've been thinking about frank miller a lot because i really used to admire his artwork even though it's ugly & there's never been anything sensual about his line, his lines had this Energy.  and i know that energy wasn't all caffeine and booze and coke

the energy was punk.  it's for-sure there.  it's a guy who was making some of the best comix of his young life and survived getting robbed by new york at the same time as a pandemic is destroying the city and reagan's in office & that fer shure meant we were all gonna eat a nuke.  so fuck it, fam, clamber in my chevy malibu & let's bang.  the line of a repo man is always intense