A Boy and Comet West – 1976

 

Check out my latest post on The Scientists' Retina about seeing Comet West.

A Boy and Comet West – 1976

Into the Desert - Intro

I've struggled a long time to tell stories, important stories. I keep coming back to the desert, both where I grew up and where I've worked, remote areas miles from any home. What is it that keeps drawing me back? I keep thinking I will discover it through different projects, but something always lacks. I don't know. I've long wanted to make a film and have made some shorts or have been the writer and general helper on a couple. I always felt limited in what I could do with the equipment and time that I had to dedicate to such a project. Plus there was always my lack of confidence that anyone would want to hear what I had to say or self-conscious about myself and ability as a filmmaker. But as I was watching a documentary about documentaries, Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary, Werner Herzog's words came back to me.

On Seeing Black on Dark Sienna on Purple, Rothko, 1960

The three dark colors, at first glance, stand as independent blocks. But stand and stare into the painting. Scan it as if looking for something you lost like your keys, your cellphone, or meaning in your life. The colors shift and fade and take on varying shapes as the mind tries to create order and glimpse images in the paint: a cloud, a wheel of a car, a face fading in the fog. Lines of color shift in the margins. What things rise from this color void? A death mask connected to an umbilical cord. What does the absence of light show us? The colors vibrate and colors that aren’t there emerge and shimmer. Stare at the block of black and it takes over. It spreads like falling night, enveloping the canvas in a single color that is none of them, but all of them combined in a color that isn’t possible unless they are all blended. The color dissolves and the blocks reappear, like approaching a house at nightfall as we walk through a drizzle and a fire-colored fog.

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“If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Nietzsche

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Author's photo taken at the MOCA in Los Angeles on 17 OCT 2021.

A Liquor Store in California

A poem for Robert Wrigley on his 70th birthday. Thanks, Kim Barnes, for putting up up to it.

Rasputina - The Female Highwayman

 

 Doing some research and found this awesome folk song. Anybody have a favorite American Civil War era folk song? It's for my re-imagining of Macbeth. #amwriting #screenwriter #shakespeare #adaptation #research #quarantinelife

Sinéad O'Connor - Nothing Compares 2 U (Live In Europe 1990)

I had a backpack
and a Euro-rail Pass
the year she performed
this. In Spain, I saw
women riding double
on Mopeds
in miniskirts riding over
cobblestones, over the memory
of fascism we Americans
thought we'd defeated.
My, how I loved her.

Patti Smith Interview: Advice to the Young