re-reading / up a tree

a good sign, when re-reading & you no longer see things to fix.  all the gaping wounds & obtrusive scar tissue have been elided and there is now a flow whereas before it was ALL roadwork, to my weary eyes

edits are coming to an end

i have of late been doing a lot of my editing in a tree.  this isn't gonna be one of those posts.  it feels good to climb a tree and sit and think.  i feel like i've re-discovered something.  i've always done a bit of climbing & perching, but it's been years time since i've felt confident enough to really Climb.  apparently i have the upper body strength for it, whereas in my youth-as-a-squirrel my arms were flabby & tremulous

also i have no fear.  which i keep noticing and wondering at--  it should bother me, or there should be some leeriness, some anxiety over imbalance, but i just look down with unarticulated certainty that i'm secure.  you'd think i haven't been afraid of climbing stairs or taking a tumble...  which i have, rather significantly, since cracking my skull.  i've had a veritble case of the Mortals ever since the skullcrack.  a stair without a banister spooks me.  and since my right knee started giving me grief i've been rather reliant on banisters.  but this tree climbing thing is instinctual, apparently, and does not strain the joints, somehow

maybe tree climbing reverses aging.  what's the harm in believing that?  don't answer

anyroad.  a photographer noticed me the other day and asked "why" and i didn't have an answer since it was an impulse.  but...  it's nice to be in a public place and people simply either take you for granted because you're not at eye level, ergo you're out of mind's reach, or when they do notice you, it's with a pleasurable envy.  that look that says "fuck, i wish i'd thought to climb up there".  it's a nice perch.  good shade.  great spot to think & read.  reading in a tree is the fuckin' best

my favourite tree at the moment, to be completely honest:  my editing suite

cue the endless edits & amendments & revisions

This phase of things shouldn't be too bad.  Usually, after completely scripting a book (Painless, Denizen, Azure Pantry), I'll go into reread & edit line by line; testing the rhythms of dialogue, the pace of exchange, and fix all the Real Obvious Fuckups.  Chop.  Fill in.  Until the thing has defined itself satisfactorily, when I really Hear the words spoken, without reading them aloud.  The persistent problem with this stage, I've found, is the abundance of really obvious mistakes spellcheck doesn't get-- where there's an automatic linefill, some kind of substitution situation where you didn't mangle the word, you just mistyped so the processor can't hang any red lace on it...  A completely nonsensical sentence will sit there for weeks of revision with a Bad Error which I can't see because my brain's glazed over with all the other work that must be attended to.  It's embarrassing and a real argument for having an independent editorial voice, a reader who isn't the author, but at this phase in my professional personality as an Artist I'm no longer interested in sharing unfinished work with others, and I certainly don't want to hear "I'm going to read it, I swear" used as an excuse by ANYone, let along a friend, so why put people through it?  I'm not using fucking AI to read my scripts, so it's down to me and my OCD to find all the goofs and fine-tune the troofs I wrote while wearing my SmArt Faggot hat.  I don't think this one's gonna be too much of a problem because if I fuck up continuity between chapters it's only going to enhance the final effect THE KILL HOUSE is going for.  Art house is where it's at, and aggressive unconcern with a reader's comfort only becomes more attractive to me as I grow ever further estranged from John & Karen Q. Public.  I like Refn movies with no dialogue, and 800-plus page books about imaginary cities written with the structural conceit of a geometrical puzzle, whose primary Plot is fucking and who does who where.  So this book shouldn't be any surprise to anyone familiar with my psyche.  It's more cluttered & up its own ass with theory than this blog.

writing by accident

Yesterday was one of those where I committed a scene without meaning to.  I was writing something else, hacking bits together--  in this compositional phase of a script I refer to this as "roadwork", where patches get steamed out & fitted into a sequence  --when a morbid thought hit me.  A morbid thought adacent to personal experience.  So that was given room to grow, and next thing, three extra pages.  Going to hack at that today.  THE KILL HOUSE is now at 56 pages, pre-formatting & editing.

Some of "writing by accident" is discipline.  Write a little every day, whether intended for posterity or greater purpose or just farting around.  Eventually bits happen, whether intended or not, or accrete material as a result of scale & gravity, and next thing one knows:  writing.

In the midst of the unplanned Bit, comedic instinct appears.  Gestates, as the lines are honed, then breaks the surface of the roadwork.  Now these bits have to be shaped.  Line edits happen.  Read, re-read for flow.  The Bit has become a Sequence.  Toward the end of the sequence, unbidden, a joke flowers.  A pun, sobconsciously conceived & thrown into the mix.  Too much?  Or just right?  Where did all these jokes come from, anyway.  Weren't we just writing something serious?

This is where it's most important for me to trust instinct.  There was no outline, but there's a rise & fall to the action & dialogue, one I can sense the shape of now.  The verisimilitude I'm after requires human response, and a vital impulse in this craft, I've found, is making room for jokes.  Leave room for response.  The jokes grow all on their own.  Some of it may be the Editor's Mind, taking shots at the Writer's Tendencies-- the editor, with his red pen, can cook like it's open mic at an improv club  --but then there's the Writer, who's just trying to break tension with the Three Stooges (my Script Idiots, known as Motive, Plot, and Post-hoc Justification (patches plot holes)).  The writer just wants to sit all his little freaks together in the front row and run through the lines.  He didn't set out to make a big production out of it.  He needs his creatures to co-habitate, profitably.  The quickest way is to get 'em giggling.

I keep writing horror, because I've experienced enough of my own to need an outlet.  Part of writing horror is needing breaks to vent tension, deflate things, break it down and build it back up.  So there's a lot of dumb comedy in my work, and it would (I'm confident) be considered surplus to considerations in terms of page count or runtime.  But it's my shop.  I'm the letterer, too.  So I get to do whatever I fucking want.  And mostly I don't want to run a by-the-numbers, Serious shop.  I want to keep it moving, keep it organic.  The only way to get there, in my experience, is by trusting Accidents.

the mytho-literary calculus of considering cruising ÷ the dérive = a night journey, or, i am why you hate blogs

(sundry notes regarding queertopian artfaggotry)

panel to panel transitions have been less on my mind as i work increasingly ONLY in single panel images, no longer concerned with greater page or presentation, those variables having been ruthlessly determined to be fixed & beyond my artistic control, so no more really fucking cute games involving page layout or movement of bodies (or directed flow of dialogue) at diagonals intersecting with the Focal Points of BLAH FUCKING BLAH.  the panel is the Non Submersible Unit, just as the sentence is the emotional core of the paragraph, to entirely misquote gertrude stein, bless her dead ass.  you work on each panel equally; no panel takes priority.  every panel is another part of the story.  the only one that was a Big Deal was figuring out the very first image.  once i had that, the rest was flow.  the script is very interesting to me right now as i build it; there's a renewed sense of surprise & invention in the moment-to-moment of my experience as i write.  when the characters surprise me, or do something other than i originally intended, it's always a treat.  when it occurs in an erotic context it's especially intriguing to me, as i generally don't consider myself that inventive or horned-up enough to write Pornography.  sex is a very Literary thing to me, as it's an internal-- or perhaps most aptly --interior state, a state of Being: "outside" of (the bog standard linear perception of) time.  sex is also an artistic thing, a preoccupation bordering on obsession, in how to present it in my art without looking like more of a weirdo than i already am.  i feel judged enough on all number of things:  actually putting my sense of sexuality out there & cojoining it to my artistic impulses, that requires raw courage of the average joe.  i'm not average, or normative, in a great many senses; not because i have outre tastes or behave like a weeaboo-- like that even matters anymore, living as i do in both a culture, and sub-culture, that's too far gone in jerking it publicly to judge nothing ol' me for my dull hangups  --but because i haven't had the experiences (or built up the bank of experience) that the majority of gay men have.  mostly i haven't had the opportunity, or the physical, sexual courage, to celebrate my body or my desires the way most queers my age have.  i have limits, and my hangups are to do with my face.  i want to be exhibitionistic.  i want to be proud of my body, and to show off, and to feel Present and Real in my physical being-- to be myself.  but i can't, because i have the Wrong Face.  i'd like to have pictures taken of myself, to be in videos, to be a cute little freak like all the other cute little freaks up and down my beach, to hang out with my equally fucked up friends and be vain and do the selfie thing and talk endless drama about how hard it is to have a good time and still earn a living selling underwear and whatever...  but i'm not that, and i think that's all well & good but also my brain never shuts off unless i'm fucking or making art or lost IN art or bicycling or maybe exercise, yoga, if i'm lucky, so i can't check out and pretend people give a shit how i look or particularly want to fuck me anyway because i have the Wrong Face.  so i spend a lot of time window shopping, daydreaming, and writing little erotic "skits" that ultimately get refined into parts of stories.  i think they're smutty but i also believe they're good writing for the kind of story i want to tell (ultimately, a positive one), and honest interpretations of human experience.  so yeah, i dunno....  judgy old queen writes litporn instead of giving in to a lifelong urge to behave like a hedonistic ho.  newsflash, or something

point being, thinking about time, pacing, presentation.  the beats of the story.  the music of the experience.  because sex & musicality aren't--  though dancefloor culture would have you believe otherwise  --exclusively driven by beats, and time is queer.  time is queer, in sex, and in how time expresses itself through art; time is a suspension, in comix:  each unit, each panel, considered as a "whole" moment, an integer of time, is a Monad, the nucleus of the atomic circumference of the greater story:  so too is the Self whole, in the heightened awareness of sex that comes from being both embodied and outside concern with restraint or convention or table manners.  not to get all wittgenstein but the world is all that is the case, and if you're in the world, and in the moment, it's all about balance, ultimately.  set, and setting.  i know i overthink shit and i yammer and nobody cares but this is what is always happening, and it's why i make art, and comix, and it's why i blog.  because otherwise these would be the substacks NOBODY WOULD READ, because who needs to read my pseudophilosophical daisy chains anyway.  *i* don't.   (i just keep compulsive notes)

somethings i write in notebooks like this, and brother, the typos would make samuel delany wince because at least he had dyslexia as an excuse

anyway.  where was i.  oh yeah.  the panel.  i spent a long time thinking about dick tracy, this past winter, and it all comes down to the panel.  that box is a microcosmic unit of perfect potential.  i get why the modernists were obsessed with its structural utility.  i've spent most of my life thinking about little boxes, what to put in them, and what order to put them in.  i've gone through a lot of notebooks.  and i'm never gonna be done with filling 'em.  i have been haunted by sequences of squares my whole life, almost as much as i've been haunted by lettering.  i have a pattern seeking mind.  and the panel:  the panel IS the most powerful thing there is.  it can be a page, or multiple pages at once, even as it may only ever be but a sliver of story.  there is an awesome malleability to what may be done with it.  i don't know if i recognized that before my recent meditations on chester gould's art, and comic strip art writ large.  i believe i knew it, that it was in the fundamentals of my toolkit, but i don't believe the fundamental Facts of the art had explained themselves to me, before indulging my OCD and studying the shit out of dick tracy for like four, five months

incidental to that insight, i've always had a fixation on the comix page as being analagous to the architecture of the physical space in a story.  of it being an architectural cutaway of a building, or the dimensions of the panel conforming to the space of a stairwell.  it's a Will Eisner stagecraft thing.  my favourite frank miller comix make use of the conceit.  everybody lauded the hawkguy comic for doing it, everybody loves it when frank quitely does it...  it's a real boss move, taking the little boxes and using them to capture the feeling of bodies moving through a Lived Space.  you see where i'm going with all this stuff, right?

the erotic potential of cities, capturing life in little boxes, putting it all on array like windows in a building and building the story pane by pane, glimpse by glimpse.  lighting the windows the right way, so you can find your way back to them, to stare in again, and marvel at life & how it is lived, in all its curious detail

i'm nearly done re-reading dhalgren, and it's been extraordinarily useful to me, on the heels of rereading 'the screwball asses', in re: the whole queertopia thing.  our experience of society, and of social spaces, and natural spaces, and shared spaces...  all very much on my mind.  plus i have this whole Very Gay beach right next door to me, and the lights tend to be off in the park a lot.  the city has a lot to say about the human condition beyond being horny, of course.  but it's nice to recognize the positive, in life as much as in art & one's experience of it, and i have not spent nearly as much of my fifty years on this planet as i would have liked, being happy about being a gay man, and liking men.  men have not done much to make this world pleasant, these past fifty years.  i find i empathize perhaps too well with the amoral Kid at the center of dhalgren.  i get where delany was at when he wrote it.  he was very conflicted about the world that produced him.  i do not feel dissimilar.  but i do find joy in this life: an extraordinary amount: and i believe i have found the means & the medium by which to express it.  which is also where i think delany was, when he wrote dhalgren (and the book(s) that dhalgren contains-- beause, as a container, it refers to notes towards a modular calculus, which is a structural conceit within delany's corpus which contains all of neveryon + trouble on triton).  

boxes within boxes within boxes

(it just ends there)

to wound the autumnal

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.

THE KILL HOUSE - vapour to vapour

A backburner, or side-burner, is this DeathBro script I've been hacking at.

 

A long while back-- maybe two years ago, now? --my interest in certain lapsed properties at Image Comics began to bubble anew.  It's probably, at least in part, the fault of the Xtinction Agenda podcast.  Like, does anybody remember when Image started revitalizing their store of old Rob Liefeld projects?  Prophet went to Brandon Graham & his friend circle, Glory went to Joe Keatinge + Sophie Campbell, and Supreme was shopped to Warren Ellis & Tula Lotay.

While obviously a market-driven thing--  like, Image owned those properties because Liefeld didn't, any longer, and what good's an I.P. when it's left in the bottom of the toychest?  --it made me super nostalgic for all the other shit Image used to have and didn't do all that much with.  Like, Prophet, Glory & Supreme were all capeshit.  Then there's a whole other tier, purely military-adjacent; all those Jim Lee / Brandon Choi / Whilce Portacio / Chuck Dixon riffs:  Deathblow!  Wetworks!  Team 07!

I am not saying my favourite decade for trash entertainment was the 90s.  But when it comes to quality, smoothbrained idiocy, you could do worse than Wetworks.  It's a Delta Force level military unit that gets dipped in T-1000 sauce and recruited into a blood feud between vampires & werewolves.  Sometimes you don't need smart comix:  you only need visually exciting stuff.  Which is why I read them.  Deathblow, at the outset, was Jim Lee flexing his skills & amusing himself.  Nothing more, nothing less.  It's a project he abandoned because Frank Miller threatened to sue, for biting Sin City's style.  And Team 07-- that book introduced me to Aaron Wiesenfeld, a strange & exciting talent for excess.  God bless excess.

Of course none of it's aged well.  DC apparently owns it all, now, because Jim Lee gave it to 'em as a kind of wedding dowry.  The company hasn't figured out what to do with any of it, effectively.  DC doesn't need any of it, so it's all just kind of packed into the hinges of the casement, where Black Label World is ported onto earth-52 or what the hell ever.  It's accessible whenever Kwyzz bounces off the orbit of Wonderworld and caroms against earth-34 and the bumper lights spell out TILT.

Highly technical trick, doesn't happen all that often, but ever since I was a young kid I've played the silver ball.  Anyhow:

The Xtinction Agenda had a contest, two-and-a-half years ago, and somehow I entered it.  Also somehow, I won.  Probably had to do with the paucity of contestants.  But the prize:  the prize was 'The Wild Storm', a big dumb comic that doesn't need much explaining.  It was I.P. maintenance, farmed out to Warren Ellis, meant to re-engineer all those leftovers & re-invigorate them.  Then Warren Ellis was exposed for having his dick out online and the whole thing got shelved.

What that meant, what that SIGNIFIED, was that people who loved 90s excess were still craving it.  The project wouldn't have gotten greenlit any other way.  Everybody in comix knows that American Audiences are Trash Humpers and always will be.

So I went on a quest, and started re-reading.  Now, let's be clear:  Team 07 is as dumb as any offbrand rip-off of any movie you like.  Nothing is as good as the original Predator.  But there's some interesting stuff, deep in the mix, and it takes a brain less brutalized by physics than mine to point out the useful conceits.  Doc James over at the X-A did some heavy (unpaid!) lifting on Deathblow, and what scuttled from underneath those corpses were some weird-ass phages, fer shure.  Like, Chuck Dixon & Brandon Choi & Jim Lee & Warren Ellis all together were grafting Ancient Aliens, Genetics & Spiritual Warfare onto Toxic Masculinity, and the results did not rock any stadiums or collect any stage panties.

But they COULD have.  They could have.  So that's where I'm at, today.  Figuring out how to arrange all these leftovers into something cogent & compelling without losing the weird inchoate broken-ness which continues to charm my ass.  Because I do not want an internally consistent, logical comic book about alien angels using Delta Force rejects to save makind.  That shit is why I remember these comix:  these comix were never planned to be consistent, these stories were never built to be Whole.  It's all vapour.

I've been very fixated on the concept of Vaporwave, because as a critique [of capitalist detritus], vaporwave makes aesthetic concerns the organizing principle behind the re-configuration of found materials.  I'm a huuuuuge fan of found materials.  All my favourite art--  art I've made  --has emerged out of found materials.  Please, let's put this business of Originality to bed.  All I want is to make lines on paper.  It's the pleasing arrangement of things that charms me.  I build little sculptures & scenes out of scrap, all the time.  It's what my mind does, generating & configuring component parts into patterns.  I'm good at pattern recognition; I'm good at sorting & filing.  Everything is Systems, I like to tell myself.  It makes living with OCD bearable.  In fact it puts my OCD to work, making art.

And the conclusion I've come to is, Deathblow should have been gay.  Or at least queer for Jackson Dane.  Because Delta Force is packed with toxic males, some of whom find it funny to perform night raids in drag.  All that Seal Team 6 worship that came out of Jim Lee & Brandon Choi, all those Special Operations military-industrial handjobs Chuck Dixon loved to script, that stuff would have hit different if Michael Cray were knocking boots with Jackson Dane.

Further down that road-to-nowhere-good: if Team o7's goodoleboys were woke enough to recognize that they just wanted to fuck each other, why, they might decide fragging the chain of command would be a laugh.  And, well, there's no way that story ends anywhere satisfying anybody.  How can it?

It's all vapour.  It's ALL vapour.

So that's what THE KILL HOUSE is.  Me, playing with toys that aren't mine to play with, putting Barbie dresses on my GI Joes and generally Making Shit Up, with no intent to tie it off or put a fancy Alan Moore-style, purple, flowery bow on it.  It's that scene where Dutch's Green Berets are all emptying their mags at absolutely nothing, chopping green hell into bagged salad, and at the end all you can hear is the high plaintive whine of Blain's overheated m134 minigun, spinning down.  That's what the whole of THE KILL HOUSE is:  confusion, heartbreak, and doom, peppered with Shane Black style quippery.  That's the intent.

I'm finishing off the last of my Research, ironing out a final chapter, now, and will start drawing it sometime.  There's more pressing material on deck right now.  But the fun thing is, this book IS vapour.

Because I haven't mentioned maybe the best bit:

I literally do not remember writing 9/10s of it.  I found almost an entire script for this thing, filed away, that must have happened sometime in the last year.  I must have begun writing it before moving to Chicago!  But when...?

Not remembering things, as any reader of this blog will know, worries me.  But in this case it's perfectly suited to the project.  Where did it come from?  Out of my brain fog.  Where is it going?  nowhere, fast!  If THE KILL HOUSE ain't Vapour Comix, then I dunno what could be.

morning rain, morning gray

Contemplating distractions, like an "audioplay" reading of DENIZEN, for my own amusement.  Which isn't entirely true:  it could be useful to hear the material acted-out so I can refine the staged action on-page.  I've read and re-read this accursed thing end to end uncountable times, now.  It's part of my morning ritual, before clocking in at The Job, re-reading any of the four novels I've been working on.  A little reminder that even as I am not. a. writer., I seem to have written things.  A necessity, methinks, for staying sane, particularly in this accursed moment in history.

Don't lose sight of the fact that you are accomplishing good works, fam.

S'pose if I do go forward with this dopey radio play edition of my script, it'll go up on Internet Archive.  I should research what the bandwidth limits are on that site.  Never had reason to before now...

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

radio melltfaace [playlist] o52325

mick jagger - invocation of my demon brother

mount vernon arts lab - the black drop

rachel's - some things never happen

sbwy - broadcast

cousin silas & glove of bones - nightjar blues

new york rivals - coup d'etat [circle jerks]

ryuichi sakamoto & alva noto - duoon

carter burwell - blood simpler

oni sakti - don't do anything (i wouldn't do) [angelo badalamenti]

do say make think - winter hymn winter hymn winter hymn

doppdopp & minayeva - lipstick [sbwy remix]

scott walker - nite flights

joan bibilioni - doble volta

graeme revell - love theme

gil scott-heron - new york is killing me [chris cunningham remix]

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.

DENIZEN - postscript.

 

This tasty extract from the [revised, 2nd edition of] 'The Soft Machine' occurs midway through the book.  When I was re-reading & researching for DENIZEN, this paragraph (which was not a paragraph unto itself, originally, as it was merely one runon in a greater blobwall / passage) struck me as a total encapsulation of my intent with the project.  For months I had been wrestling with an explanation-- if not justification --for why I had returned, like some self-incriminating idiot, to my teenage fixation with the furtive, seedy, wife-killing Beat ikon, William S. Burroughs.  And the explanation was this:

I am not a writer.

I like to say that.  Set aside whether or not it's true.  I'm not a writer.  I'm a bad forensic scientist.

DENIZEN began with this choice:  I chose the Carr-Kammerer homicide as a junction where all of modern gay life changed forever.  The Carr-Kammerer case was used by the legal system of New York City as the foundation for what became known as the "Gay Panic" defense.  Burroughs was complicit in the lies told in that courtroom, as was Allen Ginsberg, as was Jack Kerouac.  The whole Beat movement began with a pair of flailing, failed writers trying to carve a book out of their best friends' senseless homicide.  Ginsberg initially dedicated his most celebrated poem to Lucien Carr.  Everyone in the circumstance had opportunity to save their friends from the murderous impasse in the relationship of Lucien Carr & David Kammerer-- and no-one tried any harder to prevent it than anyone tried to avenge it.  Everyone in the situation was complicit.  Everyone in New York.

Much has, quite rightly, been made of William Burroughs' killing of Joan Vollmer.  In my view, most if not all the same parties are culpable:  Allen Ginsberg & Jack Kerouac pressured Burroughs to stop "being queer" and become romantically entangled with Joan.  Nobody made the correct choices there, either.  In every instance, everyone resisted the sensible, honest course of action:  Be Yourselves.

No-one assumed any responsibility.  They simply constructed the circumstances permitting the experiment's disastrous result.  "It just happened," as we like to say.

It can be argued that the reason why Lucien Carr's lawyer was able to successfully sell Self-Defense in court in 1945 is because no-one wanted to hear the facts of the case.  Nobody in New York in 1945 wanted to understand why homosexuality was criminalized, or why the participants ultimately came to behave in such a callous, stupid and inexpertly criminal fashion.  Nobody wanted to hear why Lucien Carr rehearsed his excuses for murder with both his "best friends", nor would anyone want to hear why Lucien Carr-- a male prostitute with a family history of mental illness --attempted to cajole Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs into helping him dispose of evidence.

No-one in New York in 1945 wanted the responsibility.  Everyone just wanted it to go away.

In picking apart why I couldn't portray the events of August 1945 completely factually, I had to use the "facts" of August 1945 to explain how fucked everyone and everything was.  So the facts wound up with my fingerprints all over them.  A Real Writer might have the discipline & integrity to depict all the facts of the case faithfully, with absolute clarity-- but the facts, as they arrived on my desk, were murky as sin.

Lucien Carr's motives were as murky as his attempted disposal of David Kammerer's still-breathing corpse, and the facts were as bent as the police manning The Tombs.  Lucien tried to stab Dave with a cheap knife that could barely break skin, then he tied his friend hand & foot and put bricks in his pockets and threw him in the water.  Taking time to empty Dave's pockets of money and cigarettes.  The same Lucky Strikes Lucien offered Bill to smoke, when Burroughs answered the door and discovered Lucien in a less-than-fresh hell of his own invention.

In some versions of the story, Burroughs helped Carr dispose of the cigarette pack and knife.  He did not.  In other versions, Carr presented Burroughs with Dave's bloodied glasses as he said, "I finally had to off the old man."  The exact same phrase Lucien would use to greet Kerouac.

Burroughs' own version, in 'And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks', has Lucien killing Kammerer with a hatchet and throwing the body off a roof.  Because one gets the sense that Bill had had enough of Facts.  Facts couldn't account for Carr's stupid, brutal, delusional act of finality in a set of circumstances which never required stupidity, brutality, or delusion.

In Kerouac's version, Lucien and he spent the day at the movies, juiced as fruits on cheap vino, trying to decide when, not If, to tell the cops.  In every version, it was Lucien Carr's own mother-- who'd had a traumatic enough life already --who was left to convince her idiot son to turn himself in to the police.  In the public version, Carr was forced to defend his honour from a scary elder queer with the only means he had.

Etcetera.

I couldn't tell any version of that.  I had to tell every version of that.  In order to tell it, I had to get away from everybody but one solitary witness, William S. Burroughs, a.k.a. Will Dennison of St. Louis, worldweary young traveler, failed medical student, self-mutilator and recent denizen of wartime New York, with his admittedly auto-impaired perspective.  So.  Those are the facts.

I am not a writer.  "I used abstract reports of the experiments to evolve the formulæ of pain & pleasure association that control the planet."  Mea culpa, my friends.

We Three: Dennis Hopper, addiction, & writing out one's bad patches.

What's the name of that tune, tinkling away on the musicbox in the back of my head, today?

A downside of withdrawals is that marijuana used to cancel my dreams.  Now the floodgates are open, I dream all the damned time, and what's worse, I remember them all.

This means regular cameos from foresaken family, longlost friends, and-- joy --my deepest anxieties.

Today it was The Anxieties taking center stage.  In my worst years of PTSD, when my obsessive-compulsive tendency was at its peak, no art survived very long.  Anything I found satisfying & worthy of love one day might not survive my perfectionist tendencies, come the next.

This was, of course, a form of self-destructive behavior.  Self-mutilation, even.  Because I don't self-harm anymore and I've lost the taste for suicide.  But a drawing can be sundered and burn, which satisfies the old death drive, dunnit?  It's all very dramatic & gauche, and I am not proud of any of it.

Growing up seems like the thing to do before turning fifty.

So: dreaming myself as Dennis Hopper, struggling to ink a piece in public then wigging out and publicly shredding the work...  As unsubtle as christ and all his miracles.

I woke feeling utterly disgusted and not a little self-reflective.  That is not who I am anymore.  Some part of me was that, and some part of me still only recognizes that programming.  I had hoped to leave that self-indulgent skullfucker back in Atlanta.

Ah well.

I suppose the Dennis Hopper dreamsuit was because of the ongoing research binges as I build PROMISELAND.  I hit a few snags this morning when it became apparent that my chronology is utterly fucked and most of the geography in my story doesn't line up with the timeline & the cast.  It's frustrating trying to fit all the details together, even though this story's meant to be fictional & the characters are all supposed to be expy versions of real world personalities.  It's that perfectionist streak.

Of course the other part of dreamsuiting up as Hopper is that Hopper "sobered up" in the 90s-- which meant he quit drinking & snorting & popping pills & mainlining, restricting himself to a working actor's diet of coffee, cigarettes & marijuana.  California Sober, they call it.

I have been California Sober ever since my skull fracture.  Not that cocaine or most any other hard drug factored into my life.  I would drink, now & again, but outside of the occasional Guinness & well whiskey booze was never my thing and I had no patience for drunks because my father was one, and I spent a solid decade babysitting them when I was working at a pool hall.  The only form of alcohol I showed a weakness for was wine:  I could neck a bottle of red all by myself in under half an hour.

I tried not to do that too often.  (During the pandemic lockdown it happened fairly often.)

Weed was, above them all, the greatest weakness.  Weed was what kept me functional and together, living in Atlanta.  I'd never really smoked it before my time at the pool hall, but if I'm honest marijuana was about all that kept me from going totally bugfuck over that ten to eleven year span of propping up my adopted family of fuckoffs.  When you're the only guy who never shows up hungover, never calls out sick, never dragasses through a shift, well, it grinds.  It grinds superfine.  So marijuana, once I'd officially Discovered its utility as a tool for focus & motivation, marijuana became my best friend and number one lover.

The dependency became official once I realized it kept my dreams at bay.  Because the dreams are insidious.  Nobody knows their way around your skull like your Shadow, my friends.  And my Shadow wanted to kill me and made every effort, when I was very young.  It's the impression left by my father's hands on my throat and the look in his eyes as he stared into mine while he tried to make me die.  My Shadow is all the bad code left behind from my upbringing.

Weed kept the Shadow on the other side of a locked door.  Marijuana kept it from crossing the threshold or trying to creep over the transom.  Or at least, that's how I thought of it.  Now I recognize that the Shadow was high on my supply, and the Shadow's the one today who so badly craves a toke.

So there.  I've named it.  That's the name of the dumb tune tinkling away on the tinny li'l music box back of my skull:  My echo, Dennis Hopper, and me.

They say you can't get addicted to marijuana.  Fuck them.  Humans can become addicted to anything.