BILL AND JOANNE

 


My first two friends in Atlanta.....We are still in touch and I see JoAnne almost every week......

THE BUNNIE FOU FOU CONTINUUM

it's been over a week since Bunnie's last "developmental" photo was posted........She has been overjoyed, since the temperature drop....and the consequent demise of the mosquito empire that has kept her, for the most part....and against her will....., restrained from her favorite outdoor activities........presently, she spends many hours each day, stalking the creatures that reside in the tall bamboo forest.....she is always a crowd gatherer, for even on the coldest day, all the creatures keep her in their sights and chatter their distain for her presence.

PHONY RELICS

20 years ago, i buried many pieces of broken pottery that had accumulated in my collecting heyday........in a boxwood garden in the courtyard of the plaza in which my antique store resided......It became a regular routine to dump broken and irreparable items into the earth there.........I wonder if, when the site is excavated....many decades from now, the "diggers" will notice the chards and bits and think that it is a "ruin".......an aztec ruin.....in Atlanta~! As a young child, I was always intriqued by the concept of "secret treasure" and read TREASURE ISLAND and THE BOMBA BOOKS and anything that dealt with undersea, underground, hidden crypts or extra-terrestrial treasure.......this pre-occupation probably led to my becoming an antique dealer.......digging through worthless junk to find treasures.....later, the game moved up to digging through pricey stuff to find expensive treasure........now that I've retired from "practice", I am again digging through junk to find treasures.......and the unwanted remains are buried at various sites......for future prospectors........or, of course, dumped into the aquarium.........

THE ENDLESS SEARCH

for the perfect "system".........I've had hundreds of pieces of electronic equipment for the reproduction of sound and vision.........














beginning with a philco monaural system with lift-up top and optional spindel for 45's, which replaced a late 40's enamelled steel phono which only played 78's........then Eico and Heathkits, speakers with detachable octave equalizers, Marantz 4-channel amps from 1970.........I have a wonderful system now.......but then I see the newest tech......and better!
I love the idea of a server that stores 5 terabits of music or video and which can locate any of tens of thousands of entries in seconds........sending the digital stream to immense screens with a million to one contrast ratio and to speakers like these Wilson Specialties Monoliths that sing with perfection, the music that is fed to them...........

THE PUBLIC IMAGE

is always at variance with self'-conscious awareness.



















The irony is that when one claims his personal
self-identification, that usually has not so much
congruency with others' picture, that person is
punished by those who are made aware of their
own insecurities and self-doubts and who need
to punish those who present themselves just as
they are.........the more sophisticated the observer,
the less willing that observer is to bare the truth...

THE FACTORY

I went to N.Y. in 1969 to visit the famous "Factory".......and met Candy, Viva, Paul, Taylor, Brigit, and Joe.......then, upon my return to Atlanta, met Warhol at Hartsville Airport.........the experience was very liberating for a young man who was raised in North Alabama, Educated in Nashville, and was currently living in Hotlanta.......

THE CROWN

 


25 or 30 years ago i sold an important piece of jewelry for a friend, who...in lieu of paying the standard commission of $8000...agreed to fabricate a crown of silver, paper, iron....it didn't really matter....in place of my commission.....I waited 15 years, then decided that there was not even a folded paper crown forthcoming.....another good friend, Rebecca, gave me this French tiara and I was happy as Punch......I have several crepe paper crowns, of course...in different colors....and a leather diadem with an art noveau ornament affixed to its front......as a young boy i played historical fantasy games with cousins in my grandparent's yard.....it was a hard call between Robin of Locksley's fetching cap with feather and Richard's crown.......now, the cap makes me look like a progerian child, whereas the crown seems right at home....

a brief, detailed diary entry

thursday: 3:23 a.m. the nitelight behind the tv detains my attentions in the shadows,

until the diversions of small indicators on other electronic components, thermostats, cellphone...smoke alarm...become a host of stars--36 tiny green, yellow and blue attentioning distractions from deep sleep....then there is the blood rushing through my veins, tinnitus, thirst, the bladder's demand, the cat's report on the moth floating in her waterbowl. yet, all these things that call me from slumber may serve to divert my anxiety from unknown terrors hidden in my unconscious.....but this is the more frequent path taken in early morning,and preferred to an abrupt awakening to the continuum of temporality.....then i am asleep again, or have never awakened....yes, i am dreaming of these little lights, for i have awakend in a dark room....no, wait.....as i turn my head, a plasma light appears from behind a treetrunk, and i am sucked into some vast fractal universe that was created by morgan, and in whose beauty i am lost.....it seems a perfect mathematical expression of my essense....and i am in love with the expression of this equation. as i fall through space and in and out of countless fields of numbers which, ever-changing, create the night sky of my imagination and upon which i project my emotions into fractal chaos, i do not think to grasp the ring that comes around to remind me that it has come around a million times before and that my grasping for it will crush my hope for perfection.

3:23.001 a.m. i realize that this dream is a vehicle...and going behind a small dot of glitter, fallen from an old carnival mask, and pressing the metallic mirror to the world of dreams in my tiny hands, to capture the light from the blue flying saucer button of the media-center pc, i am returned a mllionth time to this reminder from earthworld yet fly away before the mind's interpolation back into my bedroom world, to emerge in another mysterious world,seen, more detailed than before....and so minute that it's evolution, vast as it seems, does not fill even a fraction of the new space in which it has appeared.




    Ambitronika L1 by Petar Alargic

WHAT DO YOU MEAN.....THERE ARE NO ROLE MODELS FOR GAYS!

shamans and artists sojourning the edge of reason, who, upon gazing with clear eyes into the mindless abyss of madness and confusion, return, fearless, to see with eyes of love into the soul of man: John Abbott, Nick Adams, Adrian, Edward Albee, Ondrej Nepela, Chad Allen, Pedro Almadovar, Hans Christian Andersen, Helen Keller, Judith Anderson, Mitchell Anderson, Maxene Andrews, Kenneth Anger, Gregg Araki, Alexis Arquette, Jean Arthur, Dorothy Arzner, Howard Ashman, Nils Asther, Christopher Atkins, Don Bachardy, Tallulah Bankhead, Clive Barker, Paul Bartel, George Baxt, Amanda Bearse, Cecil Beaton, Thomas Beck, E.F. Benson, Helmut Berger, James Bernard, Sandra Bernhardt, Leonard Bernstein, Don Bluth, Dirk Bogarde, Marlon Brando, Jeremy Brett, James Bridges, Benjamin Britten, Coral Browne, Raymond Burr, William Burroughs, Dan Butler, Merritt Butrick, Simon Callow, Truman Capote, Carleton Carpenter, Jack Cassidy, Richard Chamberlain, Graham Chapman, Ian Charleson, Craig Chester, Dennis Christopher, Arthur C. Clarke, Montgomery Clift, Colin Clive, James Coco, Jean Cocteau, Colette, Bill Condon, Aaron Copland, John Colton, Ellen Corby, Noel Coward, Swedenborg, Joan Crawford, Laird Cregar, Quentin Crisp, Richard Cromwell, Joel Crothers, Mart Crowley, Wilson Cruz, George Cukor, John Dall, Joe Dallesandro, Brad Davis, Jaye Davison, James Dean, David DeCoteau, Paul Dehn, Alain Delon, Patrick Dennis, Sandy Dennis, Johnny Depp, Brandon DeWilde, Marlene Dietrich, Anton Diffring, Barry Diller, Divine, Arthur Dong, Robert Downey, Jr., Marie Dressler, Robert Drivas, Sergei Eisenstein, Sandor Eles, Denholm Elliot, Brian Epstein, Maurice Evans, Rex Evans, Peter Evans, Rupert Everett, Charles Farrell, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Nigel Finch, E.M. Forster, David Frankham, Brendan Fraser, Leonard Frey, Stephen Fry, Christopher Gable, Janet Gaynor, Will Geer, David Geffen, Stephen Geoffreys, David Gerrold, John Gielgud, Thomas Gomez, Edmund Goulding, Tom Graeff, Farley Granger, Cary Grant, William Haines, Christopher Hampton, Joseph Hanson, Curtis Harrington, Larry Hart, Moss Hart, Laurence Harvey, Ed Harris, Hurd Hatfield, Nigel Hawthorne, Charles Hawtrey, Todd Haynes, Edith Head, William Hickey, Colin Higgins, Patricia Highsmith, David Hockney, Edward Everett Horton, Rock Hudson, Tom Hulce, Ross Hunter, Tab Hunter, Christopher Isherwood, James Ivory, Derek Jarman, Michael Jeter, Van Johnson, Neil Jordan, Danny Kaye, Udo Keir, Patsy Kelly, Tommy Kirk, Randal Kleiser, Martin Kosleck, Larry Kramer, Berry Kroeger, Nancy Kulp, Hanif Kureishi, Burt Lancaster, Jack Larson, Charles Laughton, Arthur Laurents, Mitchell Leisen, David Lewis, Mitchell Lichtenstein, Beatrice Lillie, David Love, Arthur Lubin, Paul Lynde, George Macready, Marjorie Main, George Maharis, David Manners, Jean Marais, Alexander Marchand, Mary Martin, Akihiro Maruyama, Kerwin Mathews, Armistead Maupin, Lon McCallister, Roddy McDowall, Sir Ian McKellen, Ismail Merchant, Andy Milligan, Sal Mineo, Yukio Mishima, John Cameron Mitchell, Thomas Mitchell, Agnes Moorehead, John Morghen (aka Giovanni Radice), Jack Morrissey, Paul Morrissey, F.W. Murnau, George Nader, Ramon Navarro, Alla Nazimova, Graham Norton, Ivor Novello, Rudolf Nureyev, Ron Nyswaner, Raul O'Connell, Rosie O'Donnell, Orry-Kelly, Joe Orton, Peter Paige, Franklin Pangborn, Pier Paolo Pasolini, David Peel, Anthony Perkins, Brock Peters, Wolfgang Peterson, Brock Pierce, David Hyde Pierce, Danny Pintauro, Lenny Pollack, Cole Porter, Tyrone Power, Vincent Price, Soren Kierkegaard: Michael Redgrave, Robert Reed, Keanu Reeves, Michael Reeves, Christopher Rice, Tony Richardson, Cesar Romero, Ned Rorem, George Rose, Craig Russell, Saki, Barry Sandler, Dick Sargent, John Schlesinger, Joel Schumacher, Randolph Scott, Antony Sher, Vladek Sheybal, John Wesley Shipp, Gale Sondergaard, Stephen Sondheim, Barbara Stanwyck, Bram Stoker, Ray Stricklyn, George Takei, Robert Taylor, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Ernest Thesiger, Brian Thomson, Scott Thompson, Lily Tomlin, John Travolta, Tom Tryon, Gus Van Sant, Gore Vidal, Leslie Vincent, Luchino Visconti, Jane Wagner, Robert Wagner, David Warbeck, H.B. Warner, John Waters, Clifton Webb, Bruce Weber, James Whale, Ian Whittaker, Henry Wilcoxon, Oscar Wilde, Thornton Wilder, Kenneth Williams, Tennessee Williams, Kevin Williamson, Noel Willman, Estelle Winwood, B.D. Wong, Holly Woodlawn, Monty Woolley, Cornell Woolrich; and more--Alvin Ailey, Nestor Almendros, Marc Almond, Lindsay Anderson, Anthony Asquith, Kevin Aucoin, W.H. Auden, Francis Bacon, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Alan Ball, Samuel Barber, Andy Bell, Bill Brochtrup, Louise Brooks, Rita Mae Brown, John Cage, Marcel Carne; Alan Carr, Leslie Cheung, John Corigliano, Stephen Daldry, Ellen DeGeneres, Donna Deitch, Andreas Dejas, Troy Donahue, Robert Epstein, Melissa Etheridge, William Eythe, Michael Feinstein, Jeffrey Friedman, Richard Ganoung, Stephen Gately, Boy George, Nickolas Grace, Randy Harrison, Don Ho, Nicholas Hytner, Holly Johnson, Tony Kushner, Gavin Lambert, Nathan Lane, k.d. lang, Liberace, Limahl, Lance Loud, Charles Ludlam, Cameron Mackintosh, Johnny Mathis, David McAlmont, Rod McKuen, Gian Carlo Menotti, Freddie Mercury, John Cameron Mitchell, Kathy Najimy, Tommy Tune, Gypsy Rose Lee; Rosa von Praunheim, Terence Rattigan, Marlon Riggs, Don Roos, Paul Rudnick, RuPaul, Franklyn Seales, Marc Shaiman, Bill Sherwood, Bessie Smith, Jimmy Somerville, Stewart Stern, Ziggie Stardust, Mauritz Stiller, Michael Stipe, Terry Sweeney, Michael Tilson Thomas, Virgil Thomson, Tommy Tune, Katherine Hepburn, Reginald Vel Johnson, Bruce Vilanch, Alice Walker, Andy Warhol, Emlyn Williams, Paul Winfield, Veristes, and Franco Zeffirelli

Who's is this famous crotch shot?

I always thought it was Mick Jagger.....but no......it's Joe Dallesandro,

who hung out at the Factory with his brother--who was, incidentally, Andy Warhol's chauffeur...while their mother was in prison for auto theft.......small world, isn't it? Incidentally, Dallesandro did not pose for the white underpants shot beneath the "jeans" shot......that was Warhol's lover-of-the-moment.....Jed Johnson!

FAVORITE FOOD.......Chocolate Iced Cream with almonds and marischino cherries, but.........

 

i never seem to abandon this fixation on BLT's....here, featured with cilantro......

the first pic is deadly delicious! A BLT made on Sharp Chedder Bread with pepperoni cooked inside the bread.....

THE EVOLUTION OF TERROR

 
 


watching parts of old "horror" films from the 40's-60's on the many channels that made them available for halloween,
i began to review my evolving pespectives on fear......as a very young child, i assiduously avoided fearful situations and was terrified of ferris wheels, carousels, even escalator and elevators, all of which made me nausous and provoked vomiting and general malaise.....but later, around age ten, i began an obsession with horror films....my Grandmother would attend the RKO films and rerun MGM 40's films with me....and later the 3-D shockfests, William Castle Shockers and rather scary Film Noir at the Grand Theatre.....I was too young to understand the plots or the characters' motivations, but was able to displace my interiorized fears with exhaustion......the tears always relaxed my hypervigilant persona....at ten, i began to watch Shock Theater on friday nights....always alone.....and i think this pre-occupation with fear and terror must have masked the REAL feelings that i had suppressed......as the mechanisms of repression and suppression grew to monstrous proportions, my real-life persona remained agreeable, even non-chalant and calm.....eventually my disney-like external world was increasingly interrupted by awakenings from terrifying nightmares that i instantly forgot.......eventually, i remembered the dreams.....and began to view Life from a more realistic perspective, from which a more balanced personality eventually evolved.......even now, however, i sometimes awaken from dreams that seem like set pieces from old horror films or psychological films like those of Val Lewton.......but now, i analyze these events with my adult brain......have I again suppressed the frightened child?