Indulging a Fantasy

This:

would be best played by which of the following?









It's funny how actresses look so much more like normal people when they're acting, not when they're being famous. I like Claire Danes because she was really ugly when she used to cry on My So-Called Life.

I think I need a better make-up artist. I'm firing Dierdre tomorrow!

Money-Making Scheme

I'm thinking of writing a screenplay, or a novel maybe, about a smart girl who ends up working at a near-truckstop diner with a bunch of nice uneducated people and who writes poems, and who learns to be happy there or who escapes to...well, she doesn't want to escape, but Hollywood might make her have to escape. The third or fourth re-writer will see to that. I would like Zooey Deschanel or Claire Danes to play me, er, the speaker, I mean, the main character. Or Scarlett Johannsen. She's pretty! The goal of all this is, of course, to boost sales, in the world of normal humans who don't read poetry, of my poetry book, which will obviously have been published to great acclaim in the poetry world by the time my verse is coming out of Scarlett's mouth. Ooh! KIRSTEN DUNST! I love her.

I am kind of serious about this actually. When I used to take driving vacations with my family, would would come through all these desert towns and I would wander why anyone would live here. It is beautiful, but it was always summer, and hot and dry, and everything is brown, but now I can see how it's interesting, especially living in a place like Tucson, which is hovering between big town and small city, plus the university, which mostly means there's a lot of drunk girls in short skirts over on 4th Avenue, plus all the snowbirds (a description I love). There's a good mix of people, though, from different classes and backgrounds, but not too much of anyone. Maybe too many people with "America: Love it or Leave It!" bumperstickers; it is a red state. But you have to make do with getting to know the people around you. It's harder to make cliques of just the people you really want to be around, so you have to do your best to appreciate what's good in people you might ignore in a place like LA. I like it, and I want to write about it. I don't know how to do it in a poem. I hate writing autobiographical poems. It feels like cheating and it's too hard to break things up, to get away from narrative and go lyrical when I know how things really happened, but if I'm writing prose, I can manage things better, I think. I'll start writing it soon, and let you all know how it progresses. I know you are all fascinated to see.

Linkage

I linked my friend David Cook's blog to mine awhile ago (it's Hats for Bats there in the sidebar) and on his blog recently he wrote that someone named Kathleen who he didn't know e-mailed him to tell him how much she enjoyed his blog. Dave assumed that she must have come through my blog, which is the only place his blog is listed for the public. I only know one person named Kathleen, and I didn't know she knew about my blog, and if it is the Kathleen I know, rather than some Kathleen who has wandered through via someone else's blog, it makes me worry about the relative obscurity of some of the aliases that were created for people that are spoken about on our blogs, though I suppose They must know, with the powers of toast and piercyness, that we talk about them, even if they hadn't imagined we would be doing it in public. Though a bloggy conversation isn't really all that much more public than a conversation one might have in any public place, a park, or a bar, or the balcony of the HIB. I mean, who but us really cares what we think of anybody. Also, I'm sad, because Kathleen wasn't compelled to tell me how great my blog is. But I do realize now how powerful this little soapbox is, and I'm going to use that power. Kathleen, get ready to see another awesome blog.

I mentioned this one when it first came into existence, and mention it now only because it's got some new awesome stuff on it. My good friend Roland (to whom I apologize for my recent neglect), is a visual artist, a graduate of fancy conceptual art school CalArts and an all-around interesting guy. He's working for artist Richard Jackson right now and he also has a big piece in a group show in October at the Armory in Pasadena. It might be the Armory Northwest, and I'm sure Roland will comment below with exact location if need be. On his blog, Cataclysmic Convertor, he has pictures of the polar bears with soda bottle penises and urinal heads that he helped Richard Jackson make, and also pictures of his new piece for the Armory, which is called Fingerboredom. He made a giant scale model skateboard park and painted it pretty colors and he made a video featuring our friend Drew, who is fingerboard champion of the world. Well, maybe not of the world, but he did get to go to England once and sign autographs based purely on his fingerboarding skills. A fingerboard, in case you don't know, is a skateboard for the fingers, and Drew is brilliant at its use. When we worked together at a coffeehouse, he would use the register, counter and pastry case as a skate park and I would watch him for hours, trying to figure out how he did it. As Roland says on his blog, the pictures don't quite do Drew's skills justice, but it still looks pretty cool. He does jumps and everything.

(I just looked up Drew Gale on Google, and couldn't find him, though there is another Drew Gale in Washington state who plays bass and sings in a band called Car Scars. My Drew plays guitar and was (is?) in a punk band in addition to being a fingerboarder/ex-barista. Which is wierd somehow. Google, huh?)

Also, Chris Peters, Roland's friend from CalArts, filmed the video, which means nothing to most of you, but I helped on one of Chris's big movie projects once (I did the clapper/"take-one" thing and my hand was in one of the shots, just like Mel Gibson's hammering the nail into Christ in The Passion, except I wasn't hammering, and my hand may have ended up "on the cutting room floor" as they say) and I just wanted to brag about my experience helping with Art.

Anyway, go look at Roland's blog now, cause it's neat.

I always liked fingerboarding because my brother was a skater when he was in in high school, and I did everything he did to a lesser extent, and was therefore kind of a skater when I was in junior high school, which means, really, that I knew who Tony Hawk was before there were the X-Games and I knew who Stacy Peralta was before Dog Town and Z-Boys came out. Actually, what it really meant was that when I was in junior high, I thought skaters were cute and I got in trouble in English class once with this super-cute scratchy-voiced boy named James Testa for playing with fingerboards. We were seperated. I was so proud.