THE STRANGE ENGRAVED 'HARPIE QUEEN' SERVER.........

....I received this, with a copy of Max Beerbohm's "ZULIEKA DOBSON".........

this seemed so oddly coincidental.......... After I initiated my collection of unusual silver serving objects, i read Huysmanns' "AGAINST THE GRAIN".........which confirmed my acceptance of 'eccentric' as a flattering nomenclature....... I have always preferred the bizarre and unusual to more accepted aesthetic sensibilities that have the designation by conservative thinkers as objects, events or ideas whose envisioned end has determined the appropriate means for their realization. Perceived Beauty is the advancement of yesterday into tomorrow, with an instinctual regard to proportion, meaningfulness and philosophical ideology, in such manner as the highest expression of pure mathematics is manifest, perhaps...........

I HAD TOO MUCH TO DREAM LAST NIGHT

Feeling very 'abstract' this afternoon.......after a night of 'experimental dreaming'......Since I did not make notes or write about these energetic cinematic dreams......they are, now, almost completely forgotten......I'm 'on empty', nevertheless, today......

beneath a GemScope Microscope, with Leica compound-element magnifying lenses....silver nitrate images just resemble the components of simple organic materials.....disassocated from the 'larger picture'......confounding one's attempt to get to the source material that becomes the constructs upon which we manufacture  Reality.......The vast Labyrinths of Memory are contained in infitessimally tiny electrical circuitry....with 'room to spare'....within the soft tissues cramming our craniums.......

TYROS, STEPPING FROM THE SILVER EAGLE TO THE HOT SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK

50 years ago, today, I stepped from a Greyhound Bus, walked to Washington Square with a new friend and future lover, Joe Kelly, whom I had just met during the bus ride from Atlanta, via Richmond, to NYC, not giving a '20-somethingish' thought about the events that were soon to make our 'play-pretend' 'Happenings' in Atlanta seem like 'minor' skirmishes, compared to what was to ensue on Christopher Street, just days away........The 'seed' had been planted, even before I was aware of what would germinate from it......in 1962-3, when, as a then-naive teenager, I had stepped from a Silver Eagle to the hot New York Pavement, quickly separating from my classmates ....on our 'Senior Class Trip'....and sought out the possibilities that there were 'people like me'....somewhere, outside French Art Films.........well, the two or three that I had watched, after walking backward through the exit door of the Lyric Theater..... Shirtless men in warpaint, bohemian 'artistes' wearing berets and sandals, crowded shops....full of counter-cultural paraphernalia, women in heavy eye make-up, drag queens & gender-challenging 'fags'.....challenged my preconceptions of 'normality'....as that very word came to represent the 'aliens' who posed as the representatives of what American Society had become before the windows were shattered, as our own burgeoning Police Gestapo desperately moved 'in' to establish Control and Conformity.......again......I brought a new set of eyes to the World that I had dwelt uncomfortably within, only weeks before......and drove to Lee Optical to get a pair of glasses to facilitate better focus on what I was 'seeing'...... For a while......no more technicolored, wide-screen MGM Versions.......only the coarse-grained Black and White countercultural 'stuff' was even 'believable', now..........I was afraid of American propaganda , not of Virginia Woolf's license! Now....for a good microscope, and the tools to dissect the cadaver that had posed as 'Reality'.......