oscar lives to die another day

The Oscars ended one hour ago, and the show (and my predictions, some of which were right, but for all the wrong reasons) once again pounded home the fact that I should recuse myself from dealing with anything that has to do with gambling and popularity contests: politics, beauty pageants, talent shows, etc (meaning, Howard Dean, you are fucked, because we believe in many of the same things).

I never, never, never get these things right, because I am fundamentally out of lock-jack-boot-step with my fellow citizens, most of whom I think are all critically in-fucking-sane. But hey, I'm sure four out of five dentists' feel that most of their paying customers are completely "sane," so who the fuck am I to think differently?

Get Sideways

In a few hours the envelope will be opened and someone will say, "and the winner is..." and I hope the film Sideways walks away with a well-earned upset. I thought The Aviator was great and I highly recommend it, but aside from Before Sunset (a personal favorite and one up for best adapted screenplay - adapted from what I do not know - that is a strange category for it to be in, as opposed to original screenplay, which I thought it was in the first place), I think Sideways is probably the best film of the year (that is, a film which is up for a best picture Oscar).

So, even though the grand academy fucked over Paul Giamanti for his stellar, one of a kind role, which was probably the best performance of the year (sorry Mr. Foxx, loved Ray, but...), I do hope it wins.

sympathie

RTO 12-2-2001 - chicago - "sympathie" - floor tile & wax

Best HST "tribute" that I have found so far. I did not write this but wish I had.

Last Writes

This came over the mojo wire in the SF Weekly offices Monday morning -- the first part of a serialized dispatch, Fear and Loathing at the Pearly Gates: A Brutal Journey to the Doorstep of God. The transmission was interrupted after the first page, printed below.

Part 1

Bad Craziness & a Terrible Howling From the Compound ... Too Weird to Live ... The Shitstorm Lifts ... Lashing the Great Red Shark Along the Turnpike in the Sky ... Is This Trip Necessary? ... Black Hash, Wild Turkey, and Two Sheets of High-Powered Blotter Acid: A Twisted Hour With St. Peter ... A Brutal Interrogation With the Shithammer of God ... Weird Memories & Fascist Angels ... Where Is Steadman? ... Sneaking Into Heaven Through a Piss-Ridden Back Door ... A Drink With Zevon ... How'd Nixon Get in Here? ... "Get Off My Cloud"

I had been barreling toward the ball of light in the distance for 43 hours when my eyes glassed over and I began speaking gibberish.

"Get ahold of yourself," Sandra Dee shouted, jerking the wheel away from me. "You're starting to act weird."

She was right. I stomped violently on the accelerator, whipping the Great Red Shark into fifth gear. The Firmament was in sight and now was not the time for strange madness. Or was it? The Fear had gripped me for many desperate months at Owl Farm until a jolt of Real Power seized me one recent evening. "Cazart!" I roared and smashed my telephone on the floor, ending my conversation with Don Johnson. This feeling had come over me before, and I knew that I would soon be filled with a brute strength. It is wonderful to grow stronger and stronger and know that you cannot be stopped.

We pulled up to the Gates of Heaven, where I forced the Shark onto the curb, knocking over a pack of bloated cherubim. My arrival was not expected. I cracked open the trunk and fished out a steel suitcase containing seven vials of... (this is where it ended. RTO)

(Tommy Craggs, Luke O'Brien)

Mistah Thompson, he dead

9:05am: Goodbye Hunter, you saved my life. You were a giant, a fucking GIANT! More to come on this.

LATER @11-ish:

The wires around the world are humming - people are taking a moment to reflect on the the life and death of Hunter S. Thompson.

In my life there have been a few folks that have trod across the boards that I can say I owe a huge debt of gratitude to - some of these people are/were my friends, some of them are dead and gone, some I've lost touch with, and some I've fallen out with. All of them (and they know who they are) are still important to me.

Then there were some who came to me via their work and Hunter S. Thompson was one of these people.

My old pal John Johnson turned me on to Hunter back in the mid-eighties when I was a fresh faced punk running the gutters, looking for the keys to life and one night he handed me his dog-eared copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and said "Read this."

I did and I was never to think about my world the same way again.

It is that kind of a book.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was a watershed book for me, like Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer/Tropic of Capricorn, Charles Bukowski's Notes of a Dirty Old Man, William Burrough's Naked Lunch, J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man, Hemingway's The Sun also Rises and of course Jack Kerouac's On The Road - there are others of course, but these are the major league tomes that struck with major league force.

All of these books and their iconoclastic authors were pivotal in setting me loose on my crazy life course, for better or for worse, though I think primarily for the best. I have used these books as magnetic guideposts, even though some of them I haven't read in years and some I go back to again and again, to remind myself of a silent vow that I made to myself years ago, the one about actually living life, instead of only existing in it - tasting the meat as it were.

Hunter Stockton Thompson checked out the building yesterday, for his own very personal reasons, and it doesn't really matter why. I have felt for years that his best work was long behind him, and he knew that and it probably fucked with him. His work was important, his legacy to literature was important, he took it very seriously and that is obvious from the way he approached it, presented it and allowed it to breathe. Did he become a caricature? In some ways yes, but in some ways don't we all? His caricature was as original as they come.

America lost a part of its conscience yesterday - the part with the sense of humor and the gleam in its eye, the part that gave a damn abou the little guy and knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I am glad that I got to meet him once, at a bookstore in San Francisco in the Haight-Ashbury (appropriate locale) and I got to shake his hand, look him in the roving eye and talk to him about the South for a moment (where we are both from - In fact, I presented him with a Stone Lion Tavern bottle opener - he seemed to appreciate this token gift and he thanked me and said, "Chattanooga, fucking weird town." I agreed. I am sure he promptly lost the opener) He also endorsed my candidate for Congress I was managing, Caine Cortellino, last summer, on the basis of a letter that I wrote to him. So, I got that going for me.

Hunter, I'm glad you lived and I am sad you are dead but you were a smart boy and I'm sure you had your reasons. You came, you saw and you left a hell of a mark on the world of letters and culture. If only we could all be so blessed.

Selah!

This is the last paragraph in Hunter's book The Curse of Lono and it felt like the perfect epitaph to me:

"Over the side. Into the deep, blowing air like a porpoise as he slid away from the rocks and out to the open sea, disappearing into the ocean with the atavistic grace of some mammal finally remembering where it really wanted to be."

Miyazaki Spirit House

I love this house. It sits behind ours and it reminds me of something out of a Hayao Miyazaki film. It is entangled in a riot of vines and vegetation, and soon will be completely enveloped. No one, except the local ghosts, seems to call it home.

More notebook stuff (1998-1999)

Charlotte Rampling & John Glen go to Arizona for a drink with a moose. A finicky cat, a masked floating head and a sweet debutante all wonder, "why?"


guns + humans = not good


This one is special for a variety of reasons. It is from a Merit cigarette ad campaign I worked on for two weeks in Northern California (I did the props: note fake cig and rocking chair). I was paid a ton of cash to help promote smoking and make it look healthy & fun (I was smoking a lot myself at the time and thought nothing of selling the dream to you - side note: I will be four years free & clear of the foul things in two weeks and if you're still smoking and you are over 30 years of age, perhaps you too should think of a new hobby. Just a thought, it's your life) and this is the high-dollar shot that a room full of Leo Burnett agency and Philip Morris suits decided would grace the high-dollar pages of TIME magazine.

Nippon here I come!

Soon I shall be "lost in translation" as it were, as I am off to Japan.

This will be my first trip to the Far East. First soiree over the Pacific actually. I stared at that particular ocean for close to 9 years, even dipped my toe into it on occasion (it's cold), though the farthest west I ever went was over to Catalina Island and its wonderful Two Harbors area.

Why Japan? Well, I have some good friends who are over there teaching the Queen's tongue to the Japanese and as promised at their going away party at Jazz'd here in Savannah, when everyone say's to the departee's, "I can't wait to visit you," while quaffing copious amounts of booze, well, I am making good on it.

Stacy is a real student of Japan, primarily Japanese photography, and for a taste of what she has to say on the subject, go here to her excellent site (which has become a noted well of critical thought on Japanese photography):

the space in between

I am bummed that she won't be with me on this adventure - due to her work schedule - but I am sure I'll get my feet wet and come home and start plotting a return with her by my side. Our shelves are full of hulking books on Japanese photography, not to mention a lot of japanese literature (which I have yet to tear into) and I feel I have only scratched the surface of this world that is so amazing, yet so mis-understood in western minds - mine included.

My friends, Joe and Libby, have been over there since last August, living in the town of Yokkaichi, though they are moving to the town of Tsu, in Mie Prefecture, where Joe has taken a better english teaching gig (one that comes with a house and a car). Tsu is on the eastern side of Japan, between Nagoya and Osaka, on or very near Ise Bay and is in the Kansai part of Japan, which is where Kyoto and Nara are located (two treasure trove towns of Japanese history that are always listed as a "must see"). Anyway, Joe and Libby have a great blog that tracks their time in Japan, check it out here to get an idea of what life for a gaijin (gai = outside & jin = person) is like:

Nippon Notebooks

but I'm really going over there to look for this guy



There was no one cooler. Hiyata/Ultraman

Hello Kitty

Scratch say's, "hello human."

Notebooks (1999-2000)

Whilst tripping through my archives recently, I found this stretch of work that I was doing when I arrived back in Chattanooga Tennessee after vacating my world in California (needing a psychic break). This period was a very rich artisic (though sadly not on a financial level, oh well) time for me. I was writing a weekly column on whatever subject I felt like, hosting my successful pub quiz at a bar called The Attic (gone the way of the dodo) and filling my notebooks with all sorts of weirdness. This was due to the fact that I was re-aquainting and re-examining a very strange place, the city of Chattanooga and the South in general, that I had bolted from at the beginning of the '90s when I split for new adventures and new faces in California. Anyway, I've always liked my notebook art and I thought it was time to share - let the pieces out as it were. Some of the pieces actually predate my move back to the South but I figured I toss them in here. I'll be posting these sorts of things as I find them and take photos of them. Enjoy.



I literally found this picture of what I took to be a shadow that someone had tossed on the ground and I gave the shadow a new life of its own to contemplate.


These are individual stills from The Spy Who Came In From The Cold that I took off the TV one night - the text is a joural entry about Liz by Dick.


Santa and the Indian





Flower of Klum

Shit!

I feel vindicated: Howard Dean is now the chair of the Democratic National Committee. Gee, I wonder how that happened? Oh yeah, the Dems fucked him in the snows of Iowa, went on to shoot themselves in the foot with a Kerry candidacy, handed the nuthouse competely over to the GOP and the trad dems crawled under rocks due to the shame.

Now, two things will happen: Either the Democratic party FINDS its voice, re-focuses its efforts and connects with those 3-4 million (or more) voters who shut us out this time, or the whole party is going down in flames anyway and the smart crowd thought they'd just hand the keys of a burning house over to the lefties who made up the Deaniac wing of the Democratic party and let um have at it.

Howard Dean is a scrapper and I have a fair amount of faith in him BUT, and this weighs heavily on my mind, since politics is a numbers game, maybe, just maybe the louts who make up the GOP's base and the rest of their general supporters OUTNUMBER us and Liberals will NEVER win again. The Social Security fight, which is OUR fight to WIN as the Right wants to essentially dismantle FDR's New Deal. If we lose this fight, it's over.

The thought has crossed my mind recently that the vast majority of Americans really are just selfish/me-first/pseudo-Christian/war-loving/fuck-the-little-guy/intolerant queer-hating/shit-eyed/myopic/support-the-troops-yellow-ribbon-magnet-Bush'04 stickered SUV loving/Tree/Kyoto Accord hating/Fox News-Talk Radio spoon-fed dunderfucks and that the dream may actually be dead.

Please color me wrong.