rejected folkways record cover

Postmodernism Ruined My Life Part III

After watching Brazil again last night, I noticed that before the bleak end of Gilliam's preferred cut of the film, the protagonists are driving off into the studio-imposed happy ending of Blade Runner, which,of course, is actually the beginning of Kubrick's The Shining. You figure it out.

rock stars and conquistadors, more shocking true stories from the daily grind

Before the Cuban joint, there was the right-wing Christian bagel shop, a paradox that could only occur in the Florida panhandle. When I saw my boss's yellow jeep outside with the Bush stickers plastered all over the back, I knew I was in trouble. America really has become a country divided. The guy had an indisputable rule for everything, including the order for condiments – in case you are wondering, mustard always goes on the bottom of a sandwich. Despite all that, I guess he really wasn't such a bad person. Before long I was working, in addition to my regular shifts and my job at TCC, two or three graveyard shifts cooking the bagels. Apparently, real bagels are boiled, but we cooked them in this slow revolving steam oven contraption.

Around this time I was working on two “screenplays” with two different friends. One of them was a completely absurdist, Charlie Kaufman kinda biopic about Faith No More / Mr. Bungle frontman Mike Patton. Basically my friend and I took all the frustrations of our daily life and put them into the life of someone who may be a rock star, so you had a lot of scenes of our hero saying things like, “ If I really am famous why does my car keep breaking down on the way to the laundromat?” The New York Times called it a “meditation on the nature of identity and the desire for fame” - we called it where we were at. There was going to be this musical number where Mike Patton is turning around inside the spinning oven, suspended upside down and singing some of his creepy Fantomas stuff. If this sounds ludicrous the other screenplay was about conquistadors wandering a modern day Florida. That one had potential too.

Once the bagel boss posted this article by the time cards – a ridiculous, patronizing story about a black man who smiled while he shined shoes for pennies – somehow this has something to do with Jesus and bagel making. We were told to sign this form that we had read the story, and I, of course, refused. That was one of three arguments I had with this jackass. I was finally learning to express my anger and I wanted to express the fuck out of it.

To be continued....

art school jokes aren't funny anymore

another intermission - coming attractions

yeah, I've been working hard.

Shocking “True” Stories from the Daily Grind, or bad jobs will put hair on your art

In the fear that this blog is already becoming too pretentious and/or weighed down with a pop culture references (I saw an old Louisiana girlfriend recently and asked her about some Sonny Chiba movie or some bullshit and she said, “I don't know about stuff like that anymore. We broke up.”) I decided to bring this thing back down to earth with some stories about that most mundane and miserable of subjects, work. I worked more jobs in a three year period when I first moved here to Tallahassee than I had ever worked in the previous twenty-eight years in Louisiana. And for the most part they were all bad jobs, the kind of jobs where you drive around the place a few times and listen to those last few songs on the radio before you finally give up and clock in. Maybe no one else does that. I'm not gonna lie, I've always struggled with work. Someone once gave me The Dalai Lama's Art of Happiness at Work and that actually worked for a little while until the cynic in me asked, well what does the Dalai Lama really know about working? I mean exile is hell and all, but has he ever peeled two sacks of onions before 9 am? I bitch about work A LOT, trust me, I know. And I almost always find myself wishing I had appreciated the previous job – it's that “you don't miss your water” kinda thing. I hate routine yet I often fear the unknown. That sort of leaves me in a grey zone when it comes to finding employment. Teaching high school is ultimately the worst of both worlds –9 to 5 (7 to 3) tedium and total unpredictable unexplainable howling chaos.

I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings in the following stories. Names have been changed or not mentioned at all, though any of these places with their pronounced idiosyncrasies will be pretty obvious to those already in the know.

I fantasized about a bookstore job for years. Maybe it started with The Abortion, the Richard Brautigan novel I mentioned in my first post. The story of a young man who works in a special sort of library in San Francisco and falls in love with a woman with amazing breasts – Brautigan really spends a lot of time on those breasts, as if the breasts are a subplot. I guess the metaphor is that the library is some kind of womb, though I didn't really read it that way but right there on the surface cause I just dug the idea of living in a library, or thought I did until I started spending most of my working hours in this broken down last refuge of paperbacks that I will not name here. But first, I worked at a corporate bookstore (Books A Million). I remember my righteous indignation when they told us at a store meeting we were not allowed to blog about the company– so I went right to work on a blog that told all the ugly truths about a store that “had lots of books. Really a lot of books. It is hard to imagine the millions of books that this store is selling” . Goddamn I had so many principles then. I've completely sold out now, and my price was simply health insurance. But I digress. Books A Million was a complete corporate sweatshop nightmare, with muzak. The only good to come of it was a short story I wrote on my lunch and dinner breaks, a slice-of-life kind of thing about two aging punks checking out the historical punk rock spots of New York City. So anyway, I quit BAM to work at this smaller, local bookstore. My boss was... well, she was overweight and unattractive. She had a tongue ring that mangled her speech. She slowly (and with great relish) removed any thing I might do to entertain myself in my eight hour shifts. The books themselves were pretty hopeless ranging from Danielle Steele to novelizations of 70's action films to those weird adventure series that are always favored by the handful of true drifters I've met in my various adventures as a dishwasher (ever read any Killinger?) I found myself actually browsing Amazon for something to read while I sat there surrounded by books. She told me to stop spending so much time on line, the computer was for work only and yet the browsing history told a different, more sordid tale - I could see no real reason for so many big black cock themed websites to relate to our inventory control. Sometimes I think the hours I spent in that place were the beginning of a slow slide into a withdrawal that I still haven't quite beaten. I was living in some pocket universe of dusty books and no human contact. My diet consisted of really intense pastries and cuban sandwiches from the bakery next door. My cholesterol was through the roof. Eventually I started to know the other folks in our little strip mall – the somewhat rough looking woman that worked the morning shift at the bakery, the gay ex-Navy man who owned the florist shop and stopped by constantly to look for books about the Civil War and make eyes at me and just generally act like a stereotype. My Brautigan and Borges-inspired dreams of a library as heaven or womb were quickly turning into something more nightmarish, Burgess Meredith in the Twilight Zone, instead of a reader trapped with broken glasses, I was a man trapped with reading material rejected by Goodwill and an aspiring dominatrix for a boss. Nothing happened in that place. No child ever came in with a book to donate. My friends really came through for me those few months – I had them coming in on shifts. I felt like someone confined to the nutward. I made a lot of random drawings of frustrated little men in their socks raising angry fists. Eventually the story ended, as so many stories do, with our hero falling for a young woman. Living with her I knew that I was doing no one any favors trying to hold on to the bookstore job, so I said some prayers and quit.

I worked for awhile making sandwiches at a Cuban restaurant. The chef was a little man with a heavy accent and a legendary endowment. While chewing on Viagra he told me how when he was a boy the Cuban prostitutes would have sex with him for free, just to feel true satisfaction again after so many years on the job had “ruined” them. The stories of his escapades, which went really well with all the free burgundy he was always pouring me in the afternoon, were the only really interesting part of the job – most of it was tedium and the constant harassment of his wife, the true owner of the place. It wasn't long before I had enough – throwing down my knife in anger one day I shouted at her and stormed out, then realized I'd left my jacket behind so I had to creep back in for it. If I wrote or drew anything during those few months in that particular nuthouse, I don't recall it.

To be continued....

Intermission #1

I will never understand why Gris Gris is so underappreciated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaMBFGNaYQo

Names I considered for this blog and how I think I ended up here. Or, lies I have chosen to believe in. (part two)

“I was a Catholic boy. I was redeemed through pain, not through joy.” - Jim Carroll

Apocrypha collector - Misunderstanding can become a way of life, especially for a young(ish) artist desperate for some sort of new vision. Maybe not an “utter derangement of the senses” but a selective amnesia, selective denials, not Freudian slips but Freudian misunderstandings. Here are some little scraps of things I've held on to over these lean years -

Captain Cook and the possible derivation of the term “nailing” as in “to nail someone” -Captain Cook and his men were exploring some remote corner of some flyspeck of a Polynesian island when they discovered that the gorgeous native girls would trade sex for nails. Once the sailors had completely exhausted the ship's inventory of surplus nails, they began to pull them right out of the ship itself, until their vessels were a heap of useless lumber on the shore. There's a part of me that loves those men for their recklessness, explorers made stranded by their own lusts.

The final freeze frame in Once Upon a Time in America is the hippest thing I've ever seen - Speaking of derivation, I read somewhere that the word “hip” comes from the sore ass one would get laying on the floor of an opium den back in the early 1900's. I really loved that one but never could find that particular explanation of the word again, but recently came back across it in Martin Torgoff's fantastic Can't Find My Way Home.

The bibles of the poor read through a glass, darkly - In a college art history class we learned that the stained glass windows of the great European cathedrals are thicker at the bottom than the top, a phenomenon caused by the slow run of the cooling glass over centuries. Unfortunately, that is, like Santa Claus and Castro's failed try-out for the Yankees, completely not true. The variance in the thickness has something to do with how the glass was held as it was crafted – I don't know, read the wikipedia article. But goddamn I was sad to let that one go – I think I might have even repeated it in my own art history lectures. I love the slow atom drip, the trapped light of the once hot faith pooling now at the low end, something thick for our heavy feet to trudge through. There is also this awesome notion of a mirror fashioned of glass thick enough that light is slowed in its passage, so that in the end the glass reflects the “past” - this is an idea called “slow glass” that I think was first posited by the sci-fi writer Bob Shaw. More on that later.

All answers floating in aether, with spoilers – In the film Waking Life two characters discuss a study where test subjects were able to solve day-old crossword puzzles easier than “fresh” ones because of some sort of collective unconscious/world mind that now knew the solutions. I accepted this when I first saw the movie as fact when I saw it in my 20's because in my 20's I believed everything in the movies – or at least the good movies. I've been researching this one a little this morning but I can't find anything to really substantiate it, other than some theories of a guy named Rupert Sheldrake who most folks don't seem to put much stock in though I want to read a little more of his stuff now. I want to live in a world where yesterday's knowledge makes today's living a little easier – isn't that the point of all this? Anyway, this idea also kind of resonates nicely with another sci-fi writer, Philip K. Dick, particularly his novel Time Out of Joint about a guy who lives in this sort of simulacra of 1950's America doing crossword puzzles – telling much more would definitely ruin the book.

Stanley Kubrick plays handball and Paul Schrader gets an ulcer – This was after Kubrick finished Barry Lyndon. According to his secretary there was a frequent and alarming thud from his office – one can imagine that Stanley was not the kind of guy to bother when he had the office door closed, so the sound continued unchecked. Later it was discovered that the maestro was making his way through a huge stack of paperbacks, looking for a “property” to adapt. The sound was each successive novel smashing into the wall as Kubrick read a few pages and hurled the book. Finally The Shining made its way to the top of the stack, the thudding stopped and film history was made. Kubrick is Jack Nicholson throwing a tennis ball at the wall, the echo booming through the snowbound Overlook Hotel – one of my favorite scenes in the film. Screenwriter Paul Schrader's own Overlook Hotel is a snowbound car (I think he was living in LA tat the time but in my mind it has to be snowing). Schrader is working on the script for Taxi Driver. He has just lost his woman and his home and he has not spoken to another human in at least a week. It is America, it is the 1970's. It has to be a typewriter in his lap, just for the violent clang of the carriage at the end of the line. He is writing about a man who is also car - bound and alone and by the time he is done, like his protagonist, he will be in a hospital bed. For all of that, he will eventually say that he misses those times when the writing comes easy.

Artmaking as a form of shadowboxing, Jake LaMotta is an action painter – All my art metaphors are violent metaphors. All my art heroes are strugglers and reckless explorers and lost causes and all of them are way down in the dark with their own worse selves. I have always seen the whole thing when its done right as a physical act like fucking or fighting. When I am painting and it actually starts rolling, it is almost like hacking through a veil, like sculpting something rough hewn out of all this confusion. When Martin Scorsese's childhood priest saw Taxi Driver he told him it was “too much Good Friday, too little Easter Sunday”. I had a professor in grad school that said it shouldn't be hard and I wanted to choke the guy – one more proof that I was in the WRONG place. I still believe in art as some sort of holy redemption and I think you have to really earn it. Somewhere between those two moments, the sound of a trashy paperback's spine breaking and the orgasmic final bang of the typewriter's carriage in a snowy car live pretty much all my feelings about art-making.

Names I considered for this blog and how I think I ended up here. Or, lies I have chosen to believe in. (part one)

Naming stuff -drawings, paintings, stories, house pets – is something I avoid as much as possible. It was hard enough before the internets, but now, in the rare chance that you have actually come up with something that feels not only right but also “original”, all it takes is a quick Google search to destroy your illusions. I tend to agonize over this sort of thing, even though I've read my Foucault and lectured countless students on the pointlessness of the quest for originality. The title I finally settled on is currently being used by at least two other websites.

“Ragwater, bitters, and blue ruin” is something I kept coming back to. Its a line from a Tom Waits song - 9th and Hennepin from Rain Dogs, the first Waits record I ever really listened to after encountering a few of its treasures on the soundtrack to Down by Law. I had come across Waits before on the Letterman show at a sleepover when I was a kid, but I honestly thought he was a Chris Elliot character (maybe one day he will reveal he is) – no one really sings like that we kids agreed nodding over our X-men comic books. Anyway, I think I misunderstood the line in my naïve and tortured teenage years – bitters having something to do with bitterness and blue ruin being some deeper kind of, well, ruin. You can see what kind of kid I was right there I guess. I loved its rhythm (especially in Wait's growl) and it struck a chord when most of the things I was seeing and reading and doing seemed to lack any harmony at all. I was almost disappointed when I found out bitters and blue ruin were just alcoholic drinks and not some kind of condition of the teenaged soul.

“God's Lonely Man” – Thomas Wolfe, of course, though I learned it from Taxi Driver – a line in the script that is often criticized for being a “writer's line” that doesn't belong in the mouth of a working class Vietnam vet. I don't know, I like to think of Travis Bickle in his teenage years, already obsessing over some icy blonde, already starting to drown in some of the uglier waters of his brain, but surfacing for a moment in English class when the teacher dishes out a little Wolfe. And then holding on to that scrap of wisdom through the jungles of Vietnam and Manhattan. I've met all some sorts of people who have surprised me with the things they've managed to hold on to – I remember, for example, a friend, not really much of a reader, who was well on his way to some pretty heavy addictions that kept a typed fragment from Catcher in the Rye taped up in his bathroom.

“Muddy Puddles” or maybe “Lovely Puddles” - see below.

“Growing Geraniums in Hotel Rooms by Candlelight” – the title of an imaginary book in Richard Brautigan's The Abortion. Seems pretty clunky and I'm almost certain I have it wrong but I refuse to travel the five feet to my bookshelf to look it up. Because, yes, I can be lazy, but also because there's something important in the way the mind holds and reshapes the things it remembers and I guess one of the things I wanted to write about here was the idea of those very “misunderstandings”, how they can become somehow more vital. Or as John Ford said, “Print the legend” (another title I considered.) Besides, I like the lonesome magic of the candles and the hotel, the nurturing of something desperate or impossible in tranquility, that's something I can understand. I guess we're getting close to a point here.

“Deathstar Anxiety” - Because all the other titles were starting to feel heavy. And it sums up something of my tendencies for cultish nerdy referencing and just feels right – I could tell you more about this one now but we've got time.

“Saran wrap all you can” - Scott Walker. Also kind of falls in that same cultish category but more hipstery than nerdy as if there was any difference. I really like this one though.

Truth be told, my favorite line from 9th and Hennipen comes right after the blue ruin - “and you'll spill over the side to anyone that will listen.” As good of a definition as any of what I might hope to do here, or in the studio, or the classroom - anywhere but a barstool,where I did most of my spilling in my 20's. In the end that's all I've got really, just some muddy puddles that hopefully look something like art when its last call and the lights come on.