SKIPPING A BEAT IN THE BUCKET LIST SONG

Art by Clip, captions by George

Christmas is about to blow your budgets into town on the hooves of Credit Card and Debit. Following that, New Years Evening enters and closes the year under a lampshade chapeau in the carriages of drunken drivers. Probably all the book agents whose ears I seek will be drunk on those ears and worrying about next years shrinking list of publishing houses, so I've decided to stop sending query letters until a new year enters in a stinky diaper. It's been a long time since I've had to dangle a soiled diaper between my fingers while I pee. However, I'll continue to work away at the untitled film script. Even plan to work some on Christmas Eve day tomorrow. 

Just finished reading Japanese author Haruki Murakami's novel, After Dark. That novel, following Craig Lesley's Winterkill, made quite a collision of styles in my literary senses. Now embarking on a 2nd read of Steven Hawking's A Brief History of Time.

If I have any resolutions for the New Year, I'll try to be kinder to troubled people, trying to recall how I felt during those years when suicide was always in my thoughts, and I wished that people would be kinder to me.  It's a rough world for tender consciences.

BOOMER BEATNIK LOSES ANOTHER FRIEND AND WRITER: PHYLLIS JANOWITZ

"Friends and colleagues of Phyllis Janowitz plan to remember her life with a gathering Friday, April 17 at 11:30 a.m. in the English Department Lounge. Janowitz, poet and professor emerita, died Aug. 17, 2015 at Seneca View Skilled Nursing Facility in Montour Falls, New York. She was 84. Janowitz taught creative writing and poetry at Cornell for nearly 30 years and served as director of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English twice, from 1980-83 and 1986-91. She retired as a full professor in 2009."

Currently, as I've mentioned before, I'm putting together a list of writers Mertie and I published in our tiny microzine, George & Mertie's Place, from 1995 thru 2000. I look some of them up to see how they're doing. Recently, you'll recall, I was surprised to see that Madeline DeFrees died in November of this year. Tonight, I came across the obituary of Phyllis Janowitz. In 1975, she was a visiting poet at the first two week poetry workshop I ever attended a few weeks after I arrived in Cheney, Washington to commence graduate work in Creative Writing. Smart, clever and eccentric, I loved her poetry. She was a joy. We danced one night at a local tavern, a country western bar. Those days I dressed in steel toed boots, Levis and dungaree shirts. She told me, laughing, that I was the first man who ever sang in her ear while she danced with him. I told her she was the first dancing partner into whose ear I ever sang as we danced. We talked of meeting someday in Biloxi, Miss and writing together down there. I was in love with her the whole two weeks, then she returned to NYC and my fickle heart went elsewhere. Very saddened to read of her death. The poem of hers we published follows:

Losing
   1
Little
but it has a
sharp tongue which wounds. Even
so, anything it cuts ends up
lighter. 
   2
In the
error of an
asphyxiation, she
sees a bit late that air's weight may be
required.
   3
Wanting
and waxing are
two exercises she
is good at. And right now waning's
waxing.
   4
He tells 
her she's obese.
She says all she needs to
lose is whatever she most needs
to love. 

THE KIGGINS AND I WERE MEANT FOR EACH OTHER

Appeared in Vancouver Vector (Feb. 3, 2014)

 
When Robert Mitchum died July 1^st, 1997, my current wife and I were living in Spokane, Washington. After Mitchum’s death, I hurried to the Spokane library to find a Mitchum film. I wanted to experience the actor’s craggy, dimple-chinned, celluloid likeness one more time, to pretend, for a moment, he still lived and worked in Hollywood. The only Mitchum film on the shelves was “River Of No Return”, a western. Released in 1954, “River” came out a year before the original Kiggins closed its doors in Vancouver and I graduated high school in Dayton, Ohio and set off for a hitch in the Navy. Also, the Kiggins opened its doors in 1936, only one year before I was born more than half a continent away in Ohio. Our life lines have crossed from the beginning.

Mitchum made “River of No Return” with Marilyn Monroe and Rory Calhoun and a child actor named Tommy Rettig. Every Hollywood cliché and shallowness was packed into that film! It’s a spiritless, good guy versus bad guy contraption, two men fighting over a powerless woman, and not much to differentiate one from the other—some marauding “hostiles” thrown in for good measure. Mitchum, whose star was brightest, was designated the good guy. Rory Calhoun of lesser fame was cast as the bad guy. Monroe acted herself—a helpless female in need of Joe Dimaggio’s protection. Rettig was her child.

Otto Preminger directed the effort and fought with Monroe’s interfering acting coach and with Mitchum’s heavy drinking from start to finish. The acting of all three older actors was about as bad as they could do. Rettig, more stable than his older costars, immediately disappeared from studio films to become Lassie’s supporting actor, Jeff Miller, on TV from 1954-1957. He went on to become a software engineer who died in 1996 at age 54, only a year before Robert Mitchum passed away.

As I watched “River” again in 1997, the film revealed itself to be the sort of villain that seduced and ruined movie theaters like the Kiggins all across the nation in the 1950s. Theirs was a loveless match to begin with—a dying studio system’s formula film and a fading theater. Embarrassed by recollecting my early taste in films, I wondered what I’d seen, as a 17 year old, in Robert Mitchum. Other of his films are much better like "The Night of the Hunter".

The “River of No Return” was no different than your average formula film today. The major difference between a bad film in the 50s and a bad film today is that the special effects weren’t computerized in 1954 and the bad guys these days are rotting people rather than rotten characters, fairy tale ogres and demons, popular villains from comic books and animated fish while the good guys are little people, fairy tale spirits, comic book heroes, cartoon autos and toys…and animated fish.

Watching “River of No Return”, I was forced to remember why I’d grown tired of Hollywood films and what led me to seek out claustrophobic, seedy art houses and shadowy black and white foreign films in the 60s to take their place. I remembered, with a touch of bittersweet nostalgia, falling out of love with Doris Day next door only to fall head over heels in love with dames like the Kiggins in every gyp joint and fog-shrouded port on the Atlantic Coast from Key West, Florida to Nantucket, Massachusetts. I recalled why my heart pounded for the prostitutes who frequented the dark dives that lined the narrow, cobbled streets of Old San Juan in Puerto Rico where I was a lonely gob, and why my psyche chased Eurydice through the Carnival streets of Rio de Janeiro in Marcel Camus’s 1959 film, “Black Orpheus”.

Had I foresight, I’d have known from the first time I entered an art house and got my initial whiff of the exotic and smoky perfumes of ambiguity and ambivalence how my insatiable curiosity and my taste for something different guaranteed that the Kiggins and I were fated to meet and fall in love on the streets of Vancouver. It’s too late for passion now. The refurbished Kiggins, with a face lift and wearing new shades of lipstick and eye shadow, is a real vamp and seducer while my exterior resembles a faded shirt left overnight in the dryer. Still … if the physical attraction is missing, we can be soul mates. Can’t we?

e.e. cummings AND BEATNIK BOOMER FEEL A LOT

Today is a disturbing day. A day of dizziness, and I can't get started on my science fiction screenplay, plus fecal incontinence threatens. Instead of sturm und drang, I'm suffering from shite and stress. Ah, well, it's a good excuse to put this writing day in the can (double meaning there) and unwind, maybe finish reading Craig Lesley's Winterkill. He lives in Portland, you know, just across the river from where I type this. He was born in 1945 and is 8 years younger than me. Makes him 70 or approaching 70 or leaving 70 for 71, depending upon the month.  

Plotting my science fiction movie has been giving me fits. I want certain things to happen and certain feelings to be aroused, but I can't quite focus on the necessary steps. I'm trying to imagine, instead of writing toward (as in fiction) certain frightening moments, but I can't grasp them imaginatively. A blank. It's old age and a failing imagination, or a case of plain old writer's block. 

Speaking of feelings, a friend of mine put the e.e. Cummings' photo and screed on my Facebook page, and I'm sharing it here. Feelings are wonderful. Younger, I suffered for many years with the near absence of emotions. Severe depression. A cold dead sensation. Without emotional guidance, a man makes awful mistakes, tries to make decisions based on rational premises. Only sociopaths are successful at that.

BEATNIK ENTERS A MOVIE THEATER WITH JAMES CAMERON

Only four days between last entry and this entry. Still waiting for an intelligent agent to seize on one of my novels and sail with it... when next to me on a long bench at the Starbucks in Kelso someone across the bench from me knocks over their coffee cup and a tsunami of coffee heads toward computer to the left of my own—commotion, confusion, lights, camera, action—as someone experiences one of their most embarrassing moments while another feels pure terror...but, as noted earlier, I'm now onto a film script for a scifi movie, having decided it might be more fun, because novel, than writing another novel. Enjoy the use of the word novel in two of its historically connected forms. 

Having usual steep learning curve when attacking a new procedure...script writing. Long ago, in the 60s, I did have a TV script agent-forwarded to the Bob Hope Chrysler Theater. The script was returned for being too short. As I rewrote it, the Chrysler Theater's lights went dark. Missed again, have another drink—my reaction in those days.

In order to proceed with a semblance of professionalism, I Googled "script writing" and came up with far too many suggestions about how to write a script, some of them frankly contradictory. Then I Googled "horror film scripts" and found James Cameron's first draft (May 28, 1985) for Aliens. How better to learn than to read a pro's script, eh? I read it through yesterday afternoon and this morning. I recognized he followed roughly the form most experts recommend, but, at times, as his excitement mounted, he'd slip out of form and go for the gusto, he'd forget about camera directions and write prose. Typos sprinkle the script. Then I noticed a comforting thing about his "scene description" elements. Many of them were cliched emotional directions. I could see the child in James Cameron, getting carried away and appealing to the child in his viewers, in some cases, appealing to the youths who are drawn to his movies. This was comforting to me, to see a great movie maker and how his sometimes immature emotions are laid bare by the script he's writing. Fingers crossed, emotions tingling, I embark on the script writing ocean. And, he's a vegan.

BOOMING ALONG WITH A BEATNIK IN MY HEART

I'm not making the suggested every other day entries in my blog. That pace is supposed to keep people interested in my bucket list quest to get someone other than myself to publish one of several novels I've written over the decades and recently rewritten... before I die. I'm still sending out queries while I continue to work on a nameless, so far, science fiction screenplay. Looking into buying software for script writing, but some appear to be so loaded with goodies they'll create a slowdown while I learn yet another software program. Slugline is quite simple, but it must be downloaded into a more complex script writing program to prepare it for electronic submission. Frustration, then I came across a simple macro-enabled format that will give me what I need to create a script for electronic submission... I hope. I'll have to become more familiar with macros. I've used them in the past, but not recently. I've had some really powerful internal moments lately that feel like the attitudes of a successful writer. Now... will that come true?
 
Reading: just finished Yukio Mishima's  Confessions of a Mask and have commenced to read a change of pace novel, Craig Lesley's Winterkill. Mask is a first person interior monologue while Winterkill is presented by a third person narrator. The first is full of confessional abstractions, the other full of concrete details. Thank you for checking in on my progress whoever you are, and if you're on the same quest as I am, good luck to you.