The Fauna of Kannapolis

Now let's creep up on a very special animal that's probably only in town for a short visit: the elusive Vacation Bible School Panda. Laurie and I were utterly charmed by this critter.

Look, there it is!

















That is one lovable panda.



But here's my favorite Kannapolis animal:




AWWWWWW.

Superflat in the Back Bay

I was considering doing another review of another kitsch art book, but I can't do it now because I've been hanging out in Boston's art museums and galleries for a week, and off-brand Frazetta just can't bear the comparison. One thing about galleries: in the South they assume you're broke until you indicate otherwise, and they're fine with that. Places in Boston, though, are terribly huffy about all these nonpaying looky-loos. I would have paid a reasonable admission fee to see (and sometimes resee) the art, so perhaps they should switch to a ticket-price-refundable-with-purchase-of-art model.

Miro gets closer to my idea of the Fantastic than more representational fantasy art does. He's joined Klee and Kandinsky in the first rank of my fave nonrepresentational artists.

New respect for Salvador Dali. His overexposed famous works are by no means the whole story; I've now seen a slew of his little funky drawings that gave me fresh appreciation for his skills and imagination. I've failed to find the image I want online, but the Martin Lawrence Gallery (Actually fairly friendly about the whole looky-loo thing) had a small etching or something on a Biblical theme in which little stick figures acted before soft, lovely colored background... then on closer inspection the background revealed itself to be towering angels looming over the action, some in the foreground rather than the background as a first glance suggested. A remarkable shift of perception, but also an intriguing theological statement.

Cubism works better for me live than in reproduction, and Picasso's cubism especially. He did for portraiture what Charlie Parker did for pretty tunes.

Also new respect for Warhol. I never noticed this before, but in some of his silkscreens he's hand-drawn a tracery of lines over the figures in his shaky hand. I've always liked his sketches of shoes and whatnot, and when he incorporates it into his silkscreens it really makes the images pop. So to speak.

Scroll down here till you get to "Jellyfish Eyes - Black 4" and you'll see my favorite of the images I saw that were made within my lifetime. What isn't visible at this resolution is the way each pupil has many rings of color, pupils within pupils, or multiple rings of coronas around an almost microscopic core pupil.

Oceanic art is inspiring to me in a way I'm not sure I can articulate. Currently a lot of the dreamier nerds out there are terribly excited about Transhumanism; Oceanic peoples took such polymorphing of the body for granted, at least at a symbolic level. I recall being hypnotized by the Oceanic collection at the museum in Birmingham, Alabama as well.

Cornelia Parker's Hanging Fire (Suspected Arson) was my other favorite contemporary art discovery. A sort of mobile made of blackened burnt wood, suspended by thin lines tied to rough nails and pushpins in the wood. It looked like the fruit of a Clive Barker/Katsuhiro Otomo collaboration.

Also got to see some Nan Goldin and Cindy Sherman photography. They both seem so necessary and so close to the truth while being so different in their approaches. Goldin is pure documentary, while Sherman is pure artifice, yet they both understand so much about our era.
***

Other delightful things about our trip to The Back Bay:

Meeting and dining with Laurie's friends (hello!) I hope to see and hear more from all. (For those who came in late: "Laurie" is my online to-protect-the-innocent pseudonym for my wife.)

Boston, or at least the Back Bay, is so pedestrian-friendly that it's driver-unfriendly. It completely inverts the Southern car culture thing where the attitude is "Why are you using the legs you were born with when you could be using a loud stinky expensive deathtrap? What's wrong with you?" In the Back Bay you can just cold stop in the street in order to focus in the conversation you're having with a fellow stroller, and all that the cars you're blocking can do is fume and honk. You could probably lie down on the nearest vibrating hood and take a nap if you chose, such is the cultural deference giving to pedestrians. My Wife's heedless jaywalking and complete disregard for driver's right-of-way finally makes sense to me. I've gotten a lot more arrogant about crossing the street.

Kannapolis to Austin

Laurie and I went traveling last week. Here's a few highlights:

Visiting two delightful Austin swimmin' holes, Deep Eddy and Barton Springs. It turns out that what I didn't like about swimming was clorine.

Spending time with Laurie's sister, a hilarious nurse who filled us in on the funny and dark sides of her profession. A sample: nurses call motorcycles "Donorcycles." Also, she wants her funeral music to include "Ghostbusters". That just gets funnier the more I think of it.

My return to Birmingham, Alabama, where I reconnected with some old friends, finally ate some V. Richards bread (A staple of my B'ham days which I've been pining for ever since leaving) and discovered a groovy bar, the Red Lion Lounge, a year too late to hang there regularly. Red Lion is a good quiet bar for sitting outside with a cluster of chums, or going inside to watch a fourtysomething guy in a suit chat up a goth Gen X'er ("See, I'm the last of a dying breed...")

(sidenote: there was an apartment complex near my old digs which was full of Latin American folks. Every weekend you could walk by and hear guys speaking spanish and playing Reggaetone as they worked on their custom-painted trucks. Then, one weekend, they were GONE. All of them. The building became an exhibit on the theme of broken windows and enigmatic grafitti; I was tempted to explore it but was afraid of antsy squatters. Now the building is also GONE, replaced by a tan grassy hillside.)

Driving through small towns in Texas. My notions about modern Texas have been shaped by the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, Joe Bob Briggs, and the novel Stinger by B'ham native Robert McCammon, in which aliens invade a dying Texas town. I'm happy to report that Texas lived up to my pulpy hopes... rusty trailers, shirtless country folk with sun-browned muscles, odd jury-rigged diners...

Seeing Professor Cox again. He's about to spend a year in China on a Fulbright grant, which is more that I can say, so it was our last chance to catch him.

Another interesting and mysterious sighting: a dilapidated, closed rest stop in Louisiana. I believe it's one I stopped at back in the Nineties: it stank from the moment we got out of the car, and was full of bums demanding money. The march of the moaning bums was reminiscent of a George Romero movie. Now Louisiana's rest stop is clean and bum-free. Except when I show up.

Theory into practice

Ten minutes after publishing my last post (and believe me, the posted version is a model of restraint compared to the earlier drafts) I stepped outside to find my cat toying with a crippled bird. No points for guessing who crippled the bird. I grabbed a shovel and reluctantly but definitively killed the fluttering creature. The cat yowled at me, either because he mistook my violence for cruelty or because he was miffed about my spoiling his fun.

Man Oh Man

Laurie had a bad allergic reaction to something (shrimp, we think) yesterday. Ambulance, emergency room. Some drugs, some waiting. As cranky as I am about our little town's littleness compared to the bustling megalopolis of Birmingham, Alabama, I gotta commend the professionalism of the ambulance crew and the Emerg. Room staff. My honey went from sick to safe in short order.

As we sat in the waiting room I saw a Thunderbird in the speckles of the floor tile. Clearly the tension made me receptive to uncanny perceptions...

* * *

And speaking of receptivity to uncanny perceptions, I recently found a Canadian bookseller on who's willing to sell me a copy of Man After Man by Dougal Dixon for $30 instead of the more typical $100. It's a book that rips the lid off Humankind's Evolutionary Future by showing us paintings of creepy humanoid critters. L'il Aaron thumbed through it in a Waldenbooks and experienced his first taste of the uncanny. In the early Eighties I didn't quite get that this was a work of imaginative speculation, rather than Scientific Certitude. I figured the Scientific Community had done the research and figured out that we were gonna evolve into shambling things. The notion that these creatures with human faces were our destiny was like a cosmic wind blowing through my ribcage and playing dissonant notes on the reeds of my heart.

Recently I was paging through a book of similar creepy creature art by Wayne Barlowe in which he accused an unnamed artist of ripping off his ideas for... a book about creatures into which humans might evolve. He didn't mention Dixon by name. My dim recollection of Man After Man certainly resembles Barlowe's idiosyncratic creatures more than Dixon's more straightforward art on display in his more easily accessible dinosaur illustration books. Still, whether or not it's Barlowe's creativity fueling Man After Man, I wanna see the images that chilled me when my age was still in the single digits.

Speaking of things that bugged me out when I was young, I recently rewatched Michael Jackson's Thriller video on Youtube. When I was a boy I would run out the room every time I tried to watch it. Nowadays it just seems silly. Will Man After Man seem equally limp to my adult self, as jaded to Sci-Fi as I am? Or will it still carry a charge?

Well, it's in the mail to my address, and you know I'm not gonna refrain from updating you on this weighty matter.

Second Post of the Day

Best wishes to Andy, who per his blog is suffering from back trouble. Get well soon, Andy!

An Open Letter to Laurie

I'm in my room in High Point. I'm sharing a nice apartment with two other guys. Both of them are very nice, but very young, and very up-and-coming. They're hardcore with the pro theatre at an age when maybe I should have been. So it's pretty intimidating for this 35-year-old geezer.

So anyway, I'm in a small carpeted room on a teensy bed, listening to the past-midnight chatter of other folks in the room. It reminds me of the poverty serious actors have to swim through. The Theatre is being very nice to us, putting us up in a reasonably nice place.

But you're much nicer to me.

I miss you and I love you.

If you're in Birmingham and not as cash-strapped as I was 90% of the time, do me a favor; go down to V. Richards and buy a loaf of their in-store baked bread. Be warned that the rye is tasty but turns into a bag of mold as soon as it hits the hot, humid Birmingham air. Maybe it's cool enough to stay good a while, though. Also maybe get some baked dessert goods, (the seasonal cranberry walnut tarts are pricey but worth it. So were the cranberry walnut pies, when they did 'em) and some Jona Gold apples if they got 'em. Say hi to Melissa the cashier for me if she still works there.

* * *

I'm eagerly awaiting the Charlotte Creative Loafing review of our Turn of the Screw production. Just cuz, here's the same reviewer's 2001 review of a different production from the same script (published the day after 9/11. Probably no one felt like going to see Turn of the Screw after that, but it's actually a darn good homeopathic remedy for psychic horrors of all kinds).

* * *

Another request for you B'hamites: Laurie and I won't be able to attend the Solstice Party (You know the one: Becky and Judy's) so show up, stay all night, get pickled, and remember that Laurie and I connected at the 2007 edition of the party.

Review of the Screw.

Show's over, but we got a review on Arts a la Mode. Not sure what this website's impact factor is on the Charlotte Theatre Scene, but hey.

It was a joy to do such a rich show and I'm grateful to Actors Scene Unseen for giving me the opportunity! I had a blast with everyone involved. Laurie and I are trying to get them over for a Creepy Movie Night, to make up for our rather circumscribed Halloween. I'm not sure I can convey the delight I found in doing such a rich production with such fine people.

Minor observations:

I sweat quite a bit under the hot stagelights in my heavy costume. During one performance I kept hearing someone in the audience whisper "He's sweating." We all engage art according to our own idiosyncratic concerns.

The Blumenthal, our performance space, has showers in the dressing rooms, but no hot water.

Tip for actors: if you see that an elevated part of the set on which you are expected to stand is made of particleboard, loudly question its structural soundness in front of the youngest tech crew member. When he gung-hos his way up to demonstrate the platform's structural soundness by leaping on it, and crashes through it, you will have made your point without argument.

Do not park on the street in downtown Charlotte. Use a parking structure. A castmember's mom's car got broken into via the window smash technique. The police caught the perp, said he's been arrested dozens of times, and warned that he's HIV positive, so watch out for blood around the broken glass. So yeah, parking structure.

Teeth

For years I used to clench my jaw whenever I was stressed out; I often had a sore jaw. I also seem to have ground my teeth in my sleep.

Ever since I took up with Laurie, I've stopped all this. My jaw appreciates.

I feel a bit guilty. During a girlfriend-mandated apartment cleaning session this weekend I tossed out 4 beer bottles I'd been planning to recycle. Weariness overrode my eco-friendly intent. I'm a bit ambivalent about going green; mostly I want to save the biosphere, but part of me is attracted to the idea of letting the Earth join its barren peers in the Guild of Planets. Uh, anyway, I've decided to compensate by grabbing, rinsing and recycling every bottle I find in front of my apartment building from now on (sadly, there's usually a stray bottle or two out there...)

Another thing Laurie has done to bring me up to par with everybody else: she gave me a coffee machine. The distinction between my old coffee lifestyle (wake up, eat breakfast, clean and groom, drive to work, log in and THEN have some coffee) versus having coffee (made to my specifications) first thing, changes the entire chemistry of my day.

We saw Glengarry Glen Ross at Playhouse. Good stuff, and Mr. Goldstein was the standout (no, I'm not just saying that cuz he's a reader). My only quibbles are that some actors were playing with fine-grained naturalism while others were working a near-kabuki style, which made it a bit stylisticly uneven, and the jury-rigged seating made it hard to see a lot of the action. It was a bit like radio theatre for the first act, which I kind of enjoyed but I bet other folks didn't.

Laurie and I also tried out a card game called Once Upon A Time, which is a storytelling game. I suspect the mechanics of this game could be pillaged for improv formats. I'll have to try it out with my improv crew.

Anyway, Laurie is awesome. Every home should have one.

Play For Me...If You Ever Play

Laurie is sick, but she's gotta work anyway for reasons she's too weary to explain right now. To paraphrase Charlotte Haze, pray for her... if you ever pray.

Speaking of whom, I'm rereading Edward Albee's theatrical adaptation of Lolita, and I still think it's a mess. Sometimes two great tastes do not taste great together, and this blend of Nabokov with Albee (two of my most cherished creators) doesn't work at all. It might work if you forgot Nabokov and thought John Waters.

Here's an idea: Troublesome Theatre. Some theatre should do a season where all the plays are works that frustrate the directors, not necessarily by being outright bad, but in subtler ways. I think Albee's Lolita would make Nabokov ill, which would be okay if it were only a good Albee play. It's an interesting attempt at best. Still, I've read it over and over, trying to imagine a production that makes a solid night's theatre of it...

Item!

Item! I had a marvelous time in Kannapolis NC, Land of Splendour, this weekend. Laurie and I are really in a groove now. I've never enjoyed squeezing her more than I did this weekend; we're becoming a couple in earnest.

We got to hang out with her friend Jennifer, who is awesome and gave us wine that far surpasses the plunk I usually drink. Yay Jennifer!

Item! Stalker is a luminous movie. Like Alphaville and Tetsuo, this SF movie knows that the stuff you can find within a few miles of your home is more enigmatic and alien than any Hollywood wizardry (although in this case it may be more likely to give you cancer). Alexander Kaidanovsky as The Stalker gives one of the most extraordinary performances I've ever seen in a film. His awareness of the dangers around him, his frantic rant about what The Room means to him, and his final tirade about secular eggheads, make him my new thespian idol. And The Writer's revelation of why The Stalker's mentor hanged himself gave me pause for thought.

It's essential viewing for anyone who needs more slow-paced three-hour philosophical Russian SF movies in their lives. You probably know if this means you.

Cheep Sex

The painful thing about the post below is that I got it from a blog that was racking up five figures by posting about odd and obscure comics. Go fig.

Anyway, everybody's talking about prostitution in connection to Spitzer. One meme in the discussion confuses me. Several pundits (like Susan Estrich)put forward the idea that the awful thing about prostitution (which I think is wretched but should be legal) is that it involves using a person's body. Something about this assertion annoys me, and I can't quite figure out why. I think it's because I've spent some time as a manual laborin' service provider, and that certainly involved people paying for the use of my body. I suppose one could argue that sex is different because it's more intimate, but I dunno... I suspect some prostitutes are more comfortable having paid sex than I was getting filth out of peoples' carpet. Ask the average blue-collar laborer whether they'd rather spend twelve hours a day on the job for a bit more than minimum wage or an hour a day schtupping smug alpha-males for hundreds or thousands of dollars, and I suspect a lot of them would have to think it over.

When Estrich wonders why handsome powerful men pay for sex when they could get it for free, I want to answer with the old saying: hookers aren't paid to come, they're paid to go. The kind of alpha male who would join The Emperors' Club understands business and financial transactions better than emotional ones; with a hooker there's no "When will I see you again" or "When are you getting a divorce so I can be with you completely." They get out of the way so you can get on with your busy day. It's not nice, but handsome alpha-males don't have to be nice. Estrich gets it right when she says that prostitution is the cheapest sex. There's no emotional cost... so cheap.

Okay, so I'm a beta male with a chip on his shoulder. But I'm in love with a wonderful woman who's better than I ever expected, and I'm glad I'm not a hard driver; she wouldn't be with me if I were.

Synape Firings

A guy named Kevin Kelly has some interesting thoughts about making a living as a guerrilla creative artist. As I contemplate making a go as an actor/improvist in another city, I might want to keep this in mind...

Anyway, Laurie got me a Bluetooth so I can yack at her while I clean my apartment. Result: lots more cleaning. Some longstanding and seemingly intractable messes are vanishing. I've gotten more done by cleaning while chatting with Laurie in NC than I ever have on my own. Her unsentimental nature is scraping up against my sentimental packrattiness (She ordered me to throw out some sentimental mementos, particularly postcards from past loves... go figure! I didn't respond by ordering her to pitch her dozen photo binders of ex-boyfriend photos, because that's just the kind of sweet boyfriend I am.)

The downside is that by spending each night cleaning, I'm getting no movie watching done. I watched the first five minutes of Stalker (By Tarkovsky, an astonishing filmmaker) the other day... it was awesome, but it was only five minutes of a loooong movie. Maybe this weekend I'll dig into it.

Also this weekend I start work on Macbeth. I have a shall-we-say supporting role, but the director wants me to stop cutting my hair or shaving until the show's over, just to get that wild-man look. Yep, that's me, primal as all get-out.

Making the Connections

Back from North Carolina. Laurie and I had a great time (small towns can have large pleasures), but it fascinates me that being with her is changing the dynamics of my life in subtle ways that I don't fully understand. To a large extent the time, money and attention that I've long devoted to entertainment and diversion stands revealed as a substitute for having someone to love. But it's perplexing, this business of trying to reconfigure life from a solitary to a shared pursuit. In a way I feel like someone who's been a glutton for life but has recently discovered the pleasures of eating fine food in reasonable portions.

"Wow, this salmon is great! Where's the ketchup?"

Berries

Although Laurie makes awesome breakfasts, one day we went to breakfast at the diner in Kannapolis. She craved pancakes but had no mix. And (here's the key thing) she smuggled in blueberries.

I didn't notice if she used any syrup (Aunt Jemima... Laurie has been known to buy real high-octane maple syrup, but the diner just had Aunt Jemima), but with those berries who needs syrup?

I've always been nervous about sneaking one's own food into a restaraunt, fearing that the staff would take offence and give me the bum rush. What an absurd fear.

Then we walked around the block to the Memorial Park for Dale Ernhardt. Neither one of us care about NASCAR, but it's a lovely park, and Dale's big statue is quite appealing.

***

Saw some good theatre there. Saw some unappetizing theatre there. Really extreme. Really good or really not.

Duchess

Laurie just got an enormous government grant, enough to set up her own little fiefdom and keep it going for years. I used to play games like Civilization, where you create little kingdoms; well, she's doing it in real life. I'm intrigued; running a little kingdom is something I've only simulated (and always with virtually disastrous consequences) so I'll root for her from a safe distance. I feel a bit like a serf who's been adopted by a duchess.

I'm starting to smell a bit like her. It's cuz I'm using her soaps. I like to put my fingers to my nose and inhale aromas that I associate with her.

SPECIAL TO MY READERS

Yesterday was awful, so today I'm planning to compensate. There's a cute lady I met recently who allegedly hangs out at the Lakeview Yacht Club on Thursdays, so that's where I aim to be. Come by and I'll buy you a drink. If all my readers show up, we might be able to get our own table.

I lost weight over Thanksgiving weekend

Heaven knows I needed to. My family eats light and lean compared to me, so I kept the eating thing under control. Also the actual Thanksgiving dinner was an extended family potluck, and my extended family is a mixed bag on the cooking front. Half the desserts were from Sam's Club. C'mon, people.

The time with my nuclear family was time well spent, indeed.

Anything else? I'm reading the anthology Extreme Exposure, Ed. Jo Bonney, full of text excerpts of various performance artists. There's some tasty stuff in here. Future audition monologues, for sure, but also a source of inspiration. I may try my hand at writing and open-miking, just to see if B'ham wants performance monologues, and if I can help meet that need.

Look, I had all these lovely little observations over the weekend, but I came home to a Landlord Letter which banished all such thoughts from my head. Home Office thinks I haven't paid my rent. I have. They've promised to clear it all up, but even the suggestion that a Kafkaesque eviction nightmare might open up through no fault of my own changed all my pastel sunlit ruminations into dark inky stormclouds. All's well (probably) but never underestimate McFate's power to make a sow's ear of a silk purse.