detail/work in progress

what to wear

i decided i like to write in my nightgown--long, flowing, free...

untitled

can we stop?

can we stop?

if we don’t make it this way.

if we don’t insist

if we don’t resist

if we don’t desist

if we don’t exist.

can we stop?

mute

too late

In the distance a large crane like a giant insect moves across the Brooklyn waterfront near the site where Brian had developed the architectural design for sustainable living, a joke as far as he is concerned in a world that no longer deserves to exist, and for all intents and purposes would not, not in the same context no matter what measures are taken or how determined its inhabitants. Bottom line: it is too late, too little too late—an expression that whirs inside his head like the rotors of a helicopter that maintains position and altitude but cannot advance or land. Too little too late…too little too late.

art attack

the sound of color

autumn, auburn, audacious

slashing through canvas like the sharpened edge of a knife

so content to claim the space

and the right to preside

among others.

clean chartreuse

behind muted green of copper rising

top to bottom,

curving round chalky blue

and the endlessness of black

deep, dark

down and out,

longing the longing

and then…

a miracle

Tonight I have to say it's a miracle that artists (painters, photographers, dancers, writers, performers, actors, composers, every conceivable form) manage to survive with such little support. Have you noticed that those closest to you not only can't relate but can't even find something substantial to say about the work, that is if they even look, read, study (that's ambitious), focus or check it out at all?

geography of a disturbed mind

“That still doesn’t explain what you’re doing with my wife.” I’d like to wipe that shitty grin off her face, won’t leave until she talks, so I take a seat in a chair by a smallish TV. The sound is muted, the room silent. Images of war, mass graves, bones scattered, flash across the screen. It could be happening anywhere. Rwanda, Bosnia, Lebanon, Poland, the West Bank. The human need for destruction is eternal. All boundaries are elastic. They stretch back and forth with enough tension until they break and form new territory.

solitary confinement

I'll just have to paint my way out.......

anatomy of a serial killer

That's the title of the unfinished novel from yesterday's excerpt. What really fascinates me is not the gruesome details but the back story--the family in which the serial killer grows up.

Family is the thread in common that weaves throughout my work--whether it's a play, a screenplay, a short story or a novel. We're not talking 'family values' here; we're talking dysfunction, malfunction, inextricable love and all the complex issues that make family an endlessly fascinating subject to explore. The gay sibling, the straight daughter, the suicidal father, the psychopathic son, the intersex child, the bisexual mother, the adulterous grandparent. You name it. They come in all flavors and sizes.

excerpt from unfinished novel

You'll know why I never finished it when you read this excerpt:

I have a hot, white love. Hot because it burns right through me. White because it's blinding. Each time she walks into the room I turn away with disgust. I know what's going to happen next. Sometimes I imagine The Retaliation. I shove a rag into her mouth. Tape it shut. Tie her wrists and legs. It is fear I want to give her like wrapping paper on a birthday present. It is the fear.

My room is kind of ordinary I guess. Double bed, old bedspread of cowboys and Indians. Posters plastered to the wall. The Unabomber, Johnny Cash, BB King, Theresa Russell and Charles Manson with that nurse. Underneath my mattress are all the magazines and the knife I bought at a pawn shop last week. On my turquoise dresser there's my wallet on a chain I usually hook to my belt, my hair gel, a comb and a little bowl of hard candy my mother always fills. Without thinking I'll take a piece then spit it out because it's so disgusting it makes me want to puke. Shit, man, what's her problem?!

In the corner on my night table is The Shrine. A lock of hair. A piece of rotten fruit. And a fingernail. Infinity plus Wound equals Sacrifice. I'm waiting to take the belt she uses. I want to work that one in.

work-in-progress No.2

the lie he perpetrates

He looks up marveling at the light as it casts a hue over the neighboring high rise and notices how color is light, a kind of visual intelligence that is stratified and deepens in intensity when the physics are right. Could anyone possibly understand this, he wonders, then admits he doesn’t know fuck about anything, that his wish to be non-existent is not some self-fulfilling prophecy but a last resort. He finds himself down near World Trade, choking on the toxic stew of fried building materials and watching people stare through the holes in the large round cutouts of plywood surrounding the carnage. Tourists are taking snapshots of their loved ones with the devastation, like a famous ruin in the background, reduced to a roadside attraction as if the event had not really happened, the unthinkable, not in a neighborhood near you.

art don't forsake me

why don't writers have blogs?

You spend so much time writing, why would you want to have a blog? My suspicions were confirmed when I searched for blogs by some of my favorite writers: Stacey D'Erasmo, Philip Roth, Rupert Thomson, Mona Simpson, Dan Chaon... Nope! There's the other somewhat dubious issue of copyright protection. Maybe that's why the few fave writers with blogs I did find ended up writing about colonoscopies, summer retreats and dead relatives. Now that Margaret has invented the Long Pen remote book- signing device she might have a few extra minutes in the day to grace us with delicious morsels about her creative process. That's right, all you great writers out there... We don't want to know about your personal lives; we want to know about art!

my mentor

I was thinking back to when I first found out that
Mark Rothko spent some time out here and
was even buried a few miles from my studio.....
I couldn't believe it....Rothko painted here,
agonized over his work here - maybe even
contemplated suicide here.

the short of it

All this thought of food is utterly distracting but he can’t stop the cinematic progression. Artichokes drizzled with lemony olive oil. Savory goat cheese with ash. Mussels in Thai curry sauce. Escarole in vinaigrette. Food as sustenance, that and the lusty bottles of Bordeaux. He thinks of his inspiration—the provocative films of Fassbinder and Sheridan, the rigorous designs of Frank Gehry and Zoltan Pali, the powerful works of Smith and Iglesias, the literary feasts of Nabokov and Roth…all the motivating forces coming together, attesting to the inferiority of his work. Always something wrong when everything is right. Why can’t he jimmy the lock on the past when everything seemed so simple... There were people, the ones you saw every day who were genuinely happy and then there were the ones who wanted to be seen by you. He plays out these scenes loop after endless loop until he recognizes the drift.

detail new painting/day5

finished or abandoned?

Paul Valery once said that "a poem is never finished, only abandoned." That's how I feel every time I'm approaching the end of a work. I'm not talking about editing; I'm a brutal editor.

Toward the end the work takes on a life of its own and it's out of the writer's hands. Anything you attempt seems false and unworthy and you wait patiently, attentively, for your character to emerge.

Five novels later, the end is still an illusion and if I attempt to defy the process, like a convict I'm engaged in forced labor and it's painfully apparent.

still life No.2

I have started a new painting
I am in the big fat beginning of it all
with that weird feeling in my gut and
my hand shakes as I approach the canvas
the inexplicable need to go look for things
one fatal distraction after another
InArtWeTrust...........

bones of sand

bicycle, cooler, towel,

each and every shell on the beach.

whole palm trees, the village, they were there

swept in torrents

as the wall of water raced the ocean entire.

the indian ocean,

inky black nightmare, vanishing coasts,

whole continents, their ghost like appearance

haunting, the impact unfathomable like a trash compactor.

everything animate and inanimate pushed forward then

swept out to sea except for the arm in the tree and

the silver bracelet, shiny with foam.

i see…unimaginable thirst.

thirst after so much water,

death from survival,

no mercy

only more mercilessness.

my cat and my goat, the only company.

150,000 souls and still counting,

souls reincarnating simultaneously,

animal to man, man to woman, woman to

animal to lover.

you can't stop mother nature, father always warned.

what an understatement.

like a conch to the ear, rushing waters, the wall…and

then the roar, the roar so deafening and the dissonance, the

crack, the snap and then the silence.

new hands, some grains,

bones of sand, sand of bones.

with and without,

invincible. we perished

thirsty, still young, when that kernel

of hope was still alive.

studio404

the low down

Thinking about the open vortices he designed to cool the compound for the money changer, Brian misses the door to the Greek coffee shop and decides to catch the next one two blocks down. When he walks in, at the corner booth, he sees his sister Gracie, her disheveled hair an indication she’d been up all night.

"Remember ‘The United States of Euphoria: Life on the Edge of Time?’” Gracie, at age 15, doing hallucinogens with her best friend and recording it for posterity in the form of an essay she handed into English class. At the time he believed her fascination with drugs would pass but it was the beginning of a life long addiction for which she would pay, time and again. He reaches out and this time she lets him touch her hand before she withdraws it. Scrambled eggs save the day, that and a glass of orange juice.