Recent News

Kara and I recently went out to see Panos Cosmatos' wonderfully campy genre-busting-bustled Beyond the Black Rainbow at the Texas Theater. So exquisitely lucid was the film's confusion, that I must admit, the frisson I received was fairly rare for a cinema experience these days, and the fact that the Texas theater had thrown this as a premier with the band Pinkish Black starting its set as the film concluded, when we were filing out,  really kicked it off.  It sounded something like a cross-brotween Black Sabbath, and slowed down Bulgarian chants, and really served to heighten the ironico-humourous lugubria. The huge faux comic book cover paintings which look like they were painted by a local artist called 'Wooly Bully' really set off the lobby where the bands and the bar were. The lobby itself looked like someone had blown part of the set of Logan's Run out of a nozzle, ie sci-fi as blown stucco. The movie, if it had a serious theme, and it seemed to, might be best summarized as an dream-expansion of Edouard Roditi's foreward to Baudelaire's _Artificial Paradise_. A skinny long-haired stoner kid cut in front of me at the bar stinking of green bud and cigarettes. O Please Monsieur Nihilist Youth, but you are so thirsty for the Pearl Light.. Mmm. Oh, I dug it all! In fact, the whole movie might be seen as a metaphor of the eighties situated in that narrative of the 60's whereby its trippy enlightenment is followed by the hyper-decadence of the 70's, ending in this completely black, insane, fetish finish joke called the 80's. Which isn't so far wrong, in my case. I literally ended my 1980's in a straight-jacket and a padded cell. There was a straight jacket scene even, but probably the strangest one in cinema history. Anyway so much for writing movie reviews. We had fun. The next night we went to an art opening, but I forget the details of the venue, but there was an ambiguous photo of a tiny man naked in bed with an enormous woman, such that their individuality was visually impugned. There was a huge cut-through-the-wall multi-motor wheel and cam set with shafts that made a giant blank painting on the other side of the wall flop like an insane white bacon rectangle, but the unairconditioned space was so hot, humid and oppressive, we were standing next it, so that universally there was an awareness of the continuity of artifice and utility. Art, Thy name is swamp-cooler. There were some hacked electronic small screens playing loops, a big sloppily painted piece of flotsam wood that said I think, WRITER STYLE. It just leaned up against the wall. There were some big cut branches of rosemary, an old can with some water in it, and random bits of trash. Oh yeah, there were two photos, both the the same subject, but with different color tones, and each photo was on one side of a single corner. It was more or less, two steaks standing on end, and meeting in a corner. I guess that's the first pun. Meating in a corner. I was talking to another person in the gallery, and I said do you think it might mean something like "a foolish heart"? Huh? Well, in French coeur means heart, and narr in German means fool, Corner being a punnish cognate of Coeur-Narr. But, as we chuckled, another more likely association poppled up, CORONER, and this made more sense. The artist has become a sort of coroner attending the death of art. The word STYLE so stylelessly turned on end and painted on savaged board, and the way the light on the unprimed canvas was slightly yellow, gave the whole thing a kind of wax museum feel to it. I think I just want to remember it all as a conspiracy. I know I should if I were a critic, go to the trouble, but, I think my version of criticism here neatly echoes what I saw. And beside the gallery which was too small for anyone to stay in, so everyone was outside, there was a huge fenced in compound where an old guy and his guard dogs eyed us suspiciously. Then, about the time we left, and we left alongside beautiful girls, and fashionably dressed gentleman, along came a sort of apocalyptic street thug. Wearing black jack boots, the yellow safety vest of a cross-walk guard, and carrying literally a black rod studded with chrome dome headed nails, this was a vissage of a strolling ghetto-dandy-thug. Amazing! It's starting to feel a little like the old Dallas again. I was here in the 80's and it was never tame.

I guess my only other news, and really it is my favorite, is that my beloved Kara and I have been blissfully married today for 18 years. I would probably be dead if it weren't for her, and since the magnitude of my gratitude for her is simply too vast for words, I will say only, Thank you my love!