Last summer I applied for a grant through the Queer Cultural Center (http://queerculturalcenter.org). Per usual, I need money. My project was to bring to life some of my characters from Fugue State my novel-in-progress. The impetus behind my application was lack of funds, the usual artist/writers state of affairs. I hadn’t really thought about the project much. Actually, I heard someone at the required grant meeting, say that’s what they were going to do. Sounded good and fundable. So I submitted my grant thinking that if I got the money, I’d pull something together for Queer Fest which was the venue for the grant. Well, in lieu of a grant, I was offered AIRspace, an artist-in-residency. On that day, last November, when I said yes I had no idea I’d be entering the writer’s fifth circle of hell…
Back in the dark and muffled sounds. Am practicing what was suggested: a period of stillness that has a length of about a half hour, then directly to writing. I am usually anchored in a tiredness that I am more familiar with than any other person, place of thing in my life. Oh well. It is as though I have to be plugged into because in there somewhere is the sourcing for my work. Speed in every machination you can apply here: methedrine, caffeine, excessive work, adrenalized relationships have merely postponed or rather suspended my return to…this. Perhaps I am just in a long, deep lifelong droop. Answer seems to be surrender into it which is like a giving way to quicksand. Perhaps this is why, as a kid, I was obsessed with and terrified by movie and TV scenes in which characters stumbled into quicksand. I’d study how they got out (not that they ever did or at least rarely). Holding onto branches, desperately grasping at ropes thrown to them. “Don’t struggle, don’t fight it,” I heard someone or something tell me. So, except for two pots of black tea a day, I don’t. I just sink. Into the still, heavy, thickness. Eyes barely open. I am half there in the dark. A pair of eyes, in a body. Staring out. Like all the other creatures in here. Some friendly, most not. Predatory, but still. Half dimmed. Until something or someone of interest enters into our range of vision. Then, we’ll see.
Yo. To mention the hour is unnecessary as it is late, late, late. I’m downloading any podcast that is even close to being anarchist. Want to get Under the Pavement, a UK radio station with a podcast, but no luck with the download. I always get seduced into thinking that this time, things will be different, that I’ll get ahead. Usually it is some grant or something that Ive applied for and didn’t get, but really it is just that ridiculous and evil American myth of class mobility that I’ve looped into. My partner always says that it it such a big myth in this country, the idea of class mobility that in Europe people have a very different idea about it. Basically, most Europeans have a clearer understanding that whatever class you’re in, that’s the one you’ll stay in. I am lucky because, so far, I’ve remain pretty broke which keeps me searching for radical podcasts at 3 a.m. so that I can listen to them and feel sane. My favorite podcast right now (other than Veganfreak Radio) is The Angry Hippie podcast. You can find him on iTunes. As I was downloading random radical political podcasts, ones I am new to, I suddenly noticed that little yellow ball spinning next to the Angry Hippie podcast. I was signaling that he has a new one out. Thank fucking god. Now I can lay in bed and listen to him rant-and drag my fevered brain out of some stupid American myth.
With this insomnia thing I can only say “What the fuck.” Grisly, most grisly of grislies. It’s like being on the Posiedon, the 1972 movie in which a ship turned completely upside down. But unlike the awesome actor Shelley Winters who, with her lungs of steel, swam an amazing distance, I have weak lungs for insomnia. Good God almighty, it wreaks havoc with my creative life. Rare as it is nowadays, my entire life still gets tipped upside down and I am dumped into that ocean of night known so well to us insomniacs. No pleasant warm swim, no nice drifting in friendly waters, insomnia nights are cold, shark-infested seas fraught with frustrations, remorse as well as the compulsion to get a “real” job (you can imagine how dafted I must be to even be considering that last one). Ms. Static (that pesky feline who loves to disrupt my life in the darkened closet) is thrilled at my insomnia as she, being a nocturnal thing, is happy for the company. At least, being up, I don’t have to worry about what she is doing while I am sleeping. This later point always bothers me: that I live with a creature who has sharp teeth, long nails and well, questionable motives. Afterall, how do I know that she doesn’t consider me meat? Did I mention that paranoia is my legacy and that insomnia is it’s cure? I mean, if I’m always up, then I can be alert to whatever I need to be alert to. Not that I know what that is, but hay I’m prone to paranoia that fear of whatever the fuck might be going on without my knowledge.
Last night, the insomnia moved on to God only knows where. I will not curse it as I am, well, paranoid that is will come back and get me. And it always does. What the fuck.
Onward into the fray…
Hay,
Since my last blog much has evolved. I’ve gotten out of the closet. I do not mean the metaphorical one as in coming out as oddly queer. That I did a LONG time ago. I’m talking about my actual darkened closet, the one I’ve been I was writing in. I don’t know when I started writing in there again or when I stopped. I am sure that the relentless desperation, morose feelings and fear of failure that hound my creative impulses had something to do with going in there. Whether or not they were culpable in my falling out of there…well, let us assume until further notice, that they did. I take no responsibility for the ebbs and flows of my writing patterns. Well, actually I do, but I should know better. Because no matter how much I create writing schedules they all crash into me. We roll around on the floor, get swept into depression, slither into God only knows what rat-hole of my personality and…then here I am again. “Where have you been?,” a queer-punk girl once asked me when I wandered into San Francisco’s only girl punk cafe. “Have I been somewhere?” I asked. I looked at her through the fog of my brain. And that’s the way it goes. I do my creative work with rigor and a discipline then I slip away into the void where we artists go. Sometimes I know I’ve fallen in or out, I never know which. When I know I’m gone, I don’t like it in there. I even try to get out. But can’t. And then. Bam. I’m back, might even know that I’ve been gone. And I get a little more work done. Right now, I’m sitting in our new office (“Our” is Heads Will Roll Films). There is more light in here, but fortunately, there are shades I can pull and a door I can close. So that the next time I slide into the void and am “gone missing” at least I won’t have to answer anymore awkward questions about where was I because no one will hopefully notice I was here in the first place.
My external obsessions: at 3 a.m. they are peanut butter on bananas of right off the spoon, handfuls of raisins and anything else sweet which, in my place, is very little. I remain obsessed with the all things Needles and Pens (http://www.needles-pens.com). I want to get a copy of “My Penguin” Dracula (http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141033471,00.html) which has a blank cover, one that you can draw or paint on. Ryan Adams, the musician, did an awesome splotchy-type painting of Dracula’s castle on his copy. I want that too.
I left Dr. Tieck’s in good shape. He was pleased by my progress and my tolerance of the medications he thinks I’m on.
It’s not very hard to get doctor’s to think you’re doing what they say. No harder than anyone else I guess.
(Fiction; work in progress.)
“I was brought here by flies,” I said in my sleep. This was not a mere assertion from a demented mind. (We’ll skip that discussion for now.) It was a demonstrative statement of fact. Periodically, I come up with these announcements—and frequently in the company of my boyfriend. These notions (or pronouncement as my partner likes to call them) come in the space between waking and sleeping. Grisly and spooky, this business of sleeping.
There were a couple of things I mentioned on our podcast Head Wound that I said I’d put on our blog. One was the website for my pal Patrick who is the dad of Magenta, the tarantula and also a writer (not Magenta, but Patrick. I don’t think Magenta can write. Although if she could, I would be quite interested to hear what she has to say.) Patrick’s website is: www.patrickletellier.com. Currently, Magenta has no website, although she should. Patrick says he’ll forward me a picture of Miss M. When he does, I’ll give you the link. I also mentioned a cool zine that I liked. Called Bug, it is written by Bryan Kring. (http://www.kringdesign.com/books) He’s got some really interesting zines on his website—Peephole, Wart and Specimen—that I plan on getting. When I do, I’ll let you know what I think. But definitely pick up Bug. It’s cool, creepy and well done. I bought Bug at Pens and Needles, here in SF (http://www.needles-pens.com/home.html). Pens and Needles has DIY goods, great zines and magazines and a great gallery.
Wickie
per usual. Working to increase my time in here creating. Nasty business this practice of tale telling. Certainly not my agenda as I would be content catching and snacking on the random fly that wanders by. But work I must. We bleak children need to tell our tales. So. First, get out of bed. (Or drag your computer or pens into the bed.) And just do five minutes. None of this carrot on a stick. It is flies, kiddy kiddies that we seek. Oh, I forgot. I don’t eat flies anymore. Or only here and there. For I am a wounded thing and meat tires me. So it is the fake fly on a stick that awaits me. I leave the live ones to…her.
Wickie
twenty-seven books on the floor next to me. Just in case. In case of what I am not sure. A moment without input, although I do not know about this as I spend long periods of time in the dark. Doing nothing, but that is not true as I journey here and meet many beings. Books are here too. Or rather notebooks about my head. A through X, they are filled with articles, mostly from newspapers, on murder, cults, forensics and neurology. And little tidbits of one thousand miles of frogs that occasionally manifest in China. These latter events create anxiety as they are outside my understanding and my rules of nature. The creation of books or at least characters occurs here in the dark. At least now. Before I’d pull the blinds, then the curtains, put in earplugs and listen to music playing on my CD as loud as I dared. Mostly the soundtrack to
. I have moved on to
. Most go. That damnable cash and survival thing. Will tell more of the characters (or entities) here in the dark, but before you go, a little more on Bauhaus the architectual movement (from Wikipedia):
Berlin
Although neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler himself had a cohesive architectural ‘policy’ in the 1930s, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had labelled the Bauhaus “un-German” and criticized its modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues like flat roofs. Increasingly through the early 1930s, they characterized the Bauhaus as a front for Communists, Russian, and social liberals. Indeed, second director Hannes Meyer was an avowed Communist, and he and a number of loyal students moved to the Soviet Union in 1930.
Under political pressure the Bauhaus was closed on the orders of the Nazi regime on April 11 1933. The closure, and the response of Mies van der Rohe, is fully documented in Elaine Hochman’s Architects of Fortune.
Wickie
At last. A blog so that when I am in my darkened closet I can send a line or two out into the ether so that someone beside my feline (our, as there are two of us who tend her) can know what is going on in my brain and in my life. It is not that…I was going to say she does not care…actually she doesn’t. So I move on. As to the darkened room. I would say I was born in one. Wishful thinking or not as I am intrigued by the image of the bright surgical lights and draped green masks (as well as the sterile floors and implements) that were there at my arrival. And a mother, I assume. Although it may have been the only moment she was present. Forced by circumstances she was. A tendency I have carried forward. That this life requires a presence. That being mine. “So,” I was asked by a very small person. “Under what circumstances are you willing to be here?” The answer is this: in a darkened, small room with very little stimulation, all relationships mediated by something–words, machines, images as well as other forms of manipulation. “Oh, so an artist, in other words,” she said with that wry smile. (In her low lit room–with little outside stimulation). “Yes, I suppose,” always intrigued as I am by her perspective on my existence. “An artist.”
There are few I would take up with in this way of being. But Jed Bell, my collaborator, is one. We communicate through Heads Will Roll, its projects, its visions. I remain wary. Of him. Of her. Or perhaps tentative. Always ready to bolt. Back into my darkened room. With the visions. And that fucking cat.
Wickie