the oldest friends

 

My Aunt Louise, on the left, Helena, who died in infancy, and Mother, Hazel as I called her when I felt that familiar...
Louise and Hazel remained closest friends until their eighties, when they each subsequently, died....of our family killer.....Kahler's disease.

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?

recursive self similarity

I read Gulliver's three voyages, as a child, and added to my still-unconscious reservoir of information about scale and infinitude....Always intrigued, as a young boy, by the Disney TRUE LIFE ADVENTURES, it was another dozen years before the coalescing ideas surfaced into conscious thinking and virtual manipulation of heretofore incomprehensible mutating mathematical visualizations from the Matma.

Dildano: The password will be: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch OR 0100101011010010100010010001001000010011100010000100101000101, shifting to a new paradigm.



So, Nat'ralists observe, a Flea
Hath smaller Fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas to bit 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Johnathan Swift 1733

Each sunrise brings another day.....

 


Belatedly, I finally saw the last chapter of Six Feet Under....At 63, I am old enough to feel the chill of death, hovering near my heart.......At first, the effect of the entire series was that of my reaction to the final sequence
of characters ageing and dying......"Life goes on, within you and without you" This morning I awakened to thoughts of
destiny, fate and free-will.....As the sun came up behind the bamboo forest, bringing the white clouds to life in the pale blue sky and the frosty air warming the winter birds to chatter and the squirrels to make their runs to gather acorns, I was lifted from my morose obsessions with death and dying....although we are but puppets of Fate and products of the interactions of our decisions and those of those with whom we share our destinies, we have the power to affect the meaning and significance of our presence in this world that is home.

voyage from a pink camellia

I discovered this old thing behind a cabinet in the garage......It began as a painting by Ellen Gentry....... pink camellias......the painting didn't go anywhere, so she placed it in her "reject" stack......During our tenure as waiters at an artsy restaurant, Sidney's Second Act......our manager Ron Cohen, a non-practicing attorney, decided to hire Cathy Baker, a relatively unknown singer at the time, to appear with pianist Robert Ray, hoping that the nightclubby atmosphere would bring business to the lackluster Hungarian restaurant.....so......Ellen reworked the flower painting, copying an old photo that I had taken of a total stranger who ran a second-hand clothing store in Brookhaven......she didn't look much like Cathy Baker, but, then, we had not yet met Ms. Baker.....When this act didn't really give us gang-busters business, we resorted to singing the menus, dancing in.. attired with colorful costumes, bearing flaming filets and veal paprikash......the entire staff were friends and we all encouraged our other friends to make "costumey" appearances to liven up the place......Ron even employed portions of The Atlanta Boy Choir to sing madrigals as we served our flavorful, flaming fare on rollerskates! A fashionable decorator, Penny Goldwasser, refurbished the odd little restaurant in traditional Hungarian traveling caboose decor, in primary colors; and Ron, always attired in long dashikis, continued to interview artists and hired a socialite, Timmy Silver, as our bartender.......This was all just way too much over the top for the conservative Buckhead clientele at the time, who were more accustomed to dinner at the Cherokee Country Club and, after church services, dining on turkey and dressing at Morrison's cafeteria, however.......This old, tattered painting, a bakelite 'tip tray', and an old ceramic vase are all that remain of this venture............

FORGETTING THE FORGOTTEN AND REMEMBERING TO REMEMBER

 

the abandonment of conscious thought and considerations that had, prior to the thought's manifestation in cortex, been completely out of mind and within the caverns of oblivion, returns one to the reactive behaviors, wired into the old gizzard brain at the center of energy.....the jumping off point, continually forgotten, remembered by imagination and ever changing, vanishing every second and replaced by entire constructs of thought and motivation.....and then, the next second brings a new, and custom modification of the second's past, still cloaked in tomorrow, leaning into tomorrow's tomorrows.........now my hair is long and gray, yet tomorrow is another day, emptying the continuous realization of impermanence and filling with the potentializations both of organized processes and the disorganization of chaos.....

Live At Bliss Gardens by Kourosh Dini

Aus dem Leben des Marionetten

"We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing."
Tell a Friend-R. D. Laing,

ON MY 40th BIRTHDAY, EXACTLY......

a gallery director, in Cincinnati, took it upon himself to mount a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition funded, in part, by the NEA....after the commotion, the National Endowment For the Arts was reduced by $80 Million a year..........

"Darkness settles on roofs and walls,
But the sea, the sea in darkness calls;
The little waves, with their soft, white hands
Efface the footprints in the sands,
And the tide rises, the tide falls." W.W. Wordsworth

Shepard's Call

This old lithograph hung across from my bed, when i lived at my grandparents as a young child....gazing at it gave me a sense of security and well-being.....I keep a smaller version of it, still; and the effect is the same.....Yet, although i still have the chair in which i was breast-fed, sentimental pictures that reinforce feelings of security and even "little golden records", i still suffer the fears of a child, abandoned by forces that it cannot comprehend.....

Last night I had a very detailed dream, much of which I can still remember, as I have made it a practice to develop the discipline to do so, in hopes that my dreams may facilitate the deciphering of my emotional being in this difficult world....

The Dream, or that which I am conscious of: I am in the old Lyric Theatre, seated with my parents.....a stage show, like the "Asi Nisi Masa" magician's show in "8 1/2", is being enacted before us....I do not understand it at all, for I am a child, however....and begin to squirm about.....Mother asks if I had eaten before we came.....When I murmur that I had not, I am sent out, alone, to find a restaurant......So, I journey into an exact replica of my hometown as it existed at the time depicted in the dream....except...instead of the white, black and chrome Krystal that operated across from the Court House, there is a duplicate of a northern Italian restaurant, Nino's, which exists now.....I enter the restaurant, ask for take-out, and am handed a covered dish of food, which I take to the Lyric, and having misplaced my ticket, fumbling for it in my pant's pocket, discover a peculiar, large postage stamp with a depictment of myself, as an adult, upon it....I present the stamp to the ticket-taker who, not even glancing at it, waves me into the theatre, which has become more like the Fox, in Atlanta....only far more immense and foreboding, yet full of beauty and wondrous sounds and scents of delicate flowers.....after a long "Veristes In Wonderland" type journey, in which the theatre is filled with trees, the carpets becoming mossy knolls and small creatures scramble from behind theatre seats that mysteriously appear.... until I am suddenly at the curtained arches which admit one into the great auditorium, from which thousands of people are exiting.....I see my parents, still seated, waiting for my return....Then I realize that I have misplaced the food! I am an adult, suddenly, as I am now....I see my parents looking about anxiously for me, but cannot recognize me! They leave.....the Theatre begins to de-materialize, and I am overwhelmed with anxiety and fear, awakening with a racing heart and tears in my eyes.....my cat is sleeping, soundly across my immobilized ankles......I think about our Collie, Cindy, gather my senses and make some French toast with bananas and peach preserves.....I awaken, the room is still and dark.....the cat is watching the moon, through the window...........

out of the nutshell

How much exact information can one load into a painting before suggestion takes over from fact? Total reality is unrepresentable, because it is infinite. One can make approximations in expression which produce this or that illusion, but below a certain scale the approximations turn into shorthand; microscopic reality cannot be rendered with a pasty, sloppy, granular substance like powdered minerals mixed in oil or words from the babelhouse of thinking. the poet is but a channel for thoughts unknown before expression and forgotten thereafter....poetry is the leavings on the beaches of infinity from which we extrapolate reality from dreams of it, which exist only in evanescent expressions from the depths of without....

STEFAN, SWIMMING AND FISHING

 

A PHOTOGRAPH  OF STEFAN AT A FALLS NEAR THE CABIN..... AND ONE OF HIM IN HIS LATEST, OF MANY, FISHING VESTS.......I THINK OF HIM SO OFTEN......... STEFAN TOLD ME HOW MUCH HE LOVED ME....THE MORNING OF HIS DEATH, BY MURDER.......THAT MADE THE DISCOVERY OF THIS TRAGEDY, JUST HOURS LATER.....ALL THE MORE DEVASTATING.......

Reisel Reject Photo

a corner of an old photo, discarded by Reis...
I've always liked this self-portrait of him..........

SAN FRANCISCO

snapshots taken with my old Pentax Spotmatic........

REIS AND A RAINBOW

New Zealand....there were rainbows everywhere.......