Big Long Open Gash: BLOG

“I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don’t want to buy things they don’t need to impress people they dislike.”

– Emile Henry Gauvreau

“You make what seems a simple choice: choose a man or a job or a neighborhood — and what you have chosen is not a man or a job or a neighborhood, but a life.”

– Jessamyn West

“Poverty is in separatism. Abundance is in unity.” — Torkom Saraydarian

Hello friends and fellow readers. I’m sorry for the absence of late – I’ve had so many things on my plate it is taking time to digest it all. Ventures are moving, book covers are growing in directions hitherto unseen and exciting, articles are being honed and spectacularly edited by lovely editors who are not at all like Fembots nor Praying Mantises, and I’m reading and rewriting lots of excitingly rad work. PLUS I am rather in love with Los Angeles, which I think is rather strange, but rather amazing. It is here that there is an incredible writing surge in me, and wherever I turn, I am met by the most concentrated ream of personal friends, more than anywhere else in the world. I enjoy the nature, the four directions of adventure and exploration, the nooks and crannies in the hillsides, oases, private beaches, raw kombucha drinks and sun chlorella. I am so LA and so not LA, its embarrassing.

"World's First Psychedelic Accordionist" 1971

But after the surface is scratched, and Hollywoodland is scene/ seen for all it is, there is an underbelly of wicked stuff. Also, I guess you need to be with the right group of people, in the right corner of the industry. And for me, that means finding a house up in the hillside somewhere, in a canyon, close to the beach or to Griffith Park so I can hike to the Observatory. Who knows, but I do know that after Jon’s tick-scare, I am not in a million years moving to the country-side thickets in NY state. It has been a very worrying journey into the unknown and although I have lost sleep and spent like a tornado in Wholefoods to combat the immediate exhaustion and pro-biotic depletion, this whole thing has in a funny way shown me the direction I’ve always lent towards. The all-encompassing health knowledge I’ve absorbed has been invaluable, even just for myself, and, I’ve been able to confirm without doubts that I intend to move here next year.

Because I am someone who ‘needs to think about everything before I do it,’ as a fellow worker/ Chinese Astrologer told me at the kitchen table one lunch, I needed to think and talk about this a lot. Apparently Leo’s are like that. Especially Leo’s like me. Now I can say Y.E.S., my twin brothers will have dual residences on both sides of the country to dwell in. My sister wants to act, so hello LA, Gemma? It may just be all falling into place, for everyone.

As for Paper Castle Press. Well my friends, my book is so very nearly ready and I think you might love the cover I have made. You see, I am a watercolour-lover, and I made a kind of 3D postcard out of watercolours and an image of New York City. I won’t tell you anything more, but that it is whimsical, and me. I have decided that all of Paper Castle’s future books will have original artwork on their covers, much like The New Yorker magazine has perpetually produced, since 1925. All you artists out there, submit, submit! I have an eagle eye for the next artists, and a bevvy of loyal and hard-working co-workers at Paper Castle Round Table; which is covered in cut-away paper and scissors, glue and drawings and sketches (a few blue-prints, but that’s for my future house) who also have their eagle eyes trained on the windows and doors of our Castle, watching for the Paper Planes that do fly in.

Send more paper planes! We are turning the leaves over. Time isn’t moving things, people are. Slowly slowly, as I cross this crazy globe, stuff is becoming un-stuffed, and I am becoming very, very content in the whole whirlwind of creation. (Aside from Jon being sick. Yes, send paper planes, AND get well soon notes, please.) Am going to go exploring in Topanga Canyon soon, and drink copious amounts of a strange organic elixir (made from secret ingredients) called JUN. It is a powerful probiotic and metabolic support, as well as a liver tonic and energy supplement. It will make me live forever, I tell you, Forever!!!!! (Forgive the crazed health-mind talk. Don’t worry, I’m embarrassed for myself. But it’s totally happening, man. Peace is on the Coast. Go organic. Live easy. Enjoy freedom from the shackles of the mainstream!) *Disclaimer: Subject is inclined to radically change direction at whim, often depending on new adventures and explorations.

Come on the journey with me. Oh wait!! You already are.

I don’t know
anymore
where the trees are growing
or whether life is snowing or just not dry,
a desert land of chasm heart, screwed in by the nails of
Hollywood godmothers, bitten by the pain of mustard blood.

I don’t know
anymore
why my head is so tired
and there are ashtrays under eyes
have I been working or is it playing, too much?
Don’t come in here dear, I don’t want a closer look at you.

I am werewolf sickness, mad mermaid, rabbit child perpetual since
I eat ceviche and salad and write happy stories to make me fun,
alas, to transpire amidst colour – not publicists, dames of duty, like hellish card carriers.

I don’t want that and I don’t know what, and I don’t know when and how or where –
I am werewolf madness, sad dog in day, sick like puppy hot, night is an ocean I can breathe in.
Eyes hurt with sunshine, and computer screens. I need typewriter, printer, house to build.

I will perform only for my own happiness, my own future, my own dance. Go away hellish card carrier,
and leave me to write in my own land, which you can’t touch, because you have never known, true glee.

I used to love sticky soft-serve that feigned health benefits, mainly because my mother never let me attack the ice-cream truck, but also because I became a model. Arriving in New York a few years ago I was introduced to Tasti-D-Lite, apparently free of everything except the charge to your wallet. Dairy-free, sugar-free, lactose-free, gluten-free, low fat AND flavourful. But now that I think about it, what is really in that stuff? My favourite flavours were peanut-butter and pistachio.  I always went for the nuts.

Now I’ve been introduced to a new form of nuts. I have recently been exploring Los Angeles, where a frozen yogurt craze has been sweeping the dusty land of studios, gas stations and fly-by-night burger joints. The starlets/ toucans flock to these pink berries, and red mangoes, and I understand why. Unless you look beneath the facade of happy fruit pictures adorning the windows and the industrial size self-serve machines, you would be forgiven for thinking that somewhere like Yogurtland was good for you. Happy! Yogurt! A land promising all that lactobacillus and acidophilus, casein and calcium goodness. Berries! Toucans!

Many a lush La Brea evening I have wandered in dusky sunsets to forage the Yogurt Land. Until recently (*cue nasty-surprise music*)… Last week, I entered the establishment that had been my second home to find it had obviously gained notoriety, (most likely due to my glowing reviews and global praise of said establishment). Word had spread, but now I was in trouble. I joined a queue that spilled out on the sidewalk and waited patiently with tense elbows and shoulders while toucans and jaguars fought tooth and beak for Yogurt. I sensed via my animal  instincts that this land was in danger!!

A pair of hyenas in front, males, were self-serving their yogurts into pots already melting and sticky. I shuddered to realize that they were purposefully overflowing their coconut husks (Yogurt pots) so that they might “taste” each flavour before they reached the check-out, effectively filling their scavenger bellies, but only having to pay for half of what they had truly consumed. I was onto them faster than a lioness chasing lame zebra. I knew what they were up to. We stood in line for many painful minutes as I watched this homeless child-man and friend fondle yogurts with their tongues, before piling all and every topping upon their raped and pillaged mountain of Yogurt and Fruit flesh.

But, this is not the point of my detectivey work as Sleuth. After this experience, I returned home with an elegant sufficiency of sustenance, and proceeded to make plans for accosting the secret-recipe of Yogurtland from Google’s database. Meanwhile, my Lion King, Jon Ramos, noted that he felt the rush of sugar coursing through his noble veins. Hence, I delved deeper. I typed ‘ingredients of Yogurtland’ into a telegram to Google, and they responded immediately, as any good Spy Headquarters should.

*Gasp!* I was aptly horrified. As I scrolled through the document they had sent me, I began to be informed as to what was sending the hungry hordes to insanity. It wasn’t the nuts at all!  I read that Yogurt Land HQ was really being manned or womanned by nasty computer chefs, or factory mafioso, who were adding poisons from their skull & cross bone imprinted TOXIC sacks of raw ingredients. I brought a hand to my cheek as I read on. (Disclosure Notice: The following ingredients arranged for drama, and not all appearing in one flavour, but nonetheless, this is the truth.) “E477 Propane 1.2-diol Esters?” and “Sodium Aluminosilicate”? Just because you put a fancy name on it, doesn’t mean I can’t see that this is a derivative of Aluminium, Yogurtland Mafioso Maestro Chef!!! Wank Off and Die, yes DIE!!

“Allura Red AC (FD&C Red #40) and Brilliant Blue FCF Erythrosine?” What is this madness you are feeding the L.A hoopla?  High Fructose Corn Syrup, Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil, Corn Syrup Solids, Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Sodium Caseinate, Dipotassium Phosphate, Mono & Diglycerides? Do you not understand Yogurt is simply milk, sometimes skim milk powder and live cultures of happy bacteria? I am appalled that toucans and hyenas alike are feeding on such a toxic lake!! I must DOOO something!!!

Until that day comes, I simply admonish from afar those evil purveyors of conveyors belts who are sending boxes of powdered yogurt, chopped nuts, and Reese’s pieces, under the happy guise of Yogurt Land… I admonish them with my sugar-fuelled fist, waving it manically from the balcony just down the road from this toucan oasis that I so despise, and yet still have strange cravings for… Evil drug of fake-health!! DIE!  The cruel memories of ice-cream trucks tinkling down the street arrest my vision, and my angel-mother appears backed by a doctor for a husband, as she tells me, surrounded by a glowing light, “Child. I forbid you eat Soft Serve.”

Alas. I have made up for the drought of my childhood, but am paying the consequences by being bitch-slapped by aluminosilicate.  I haven’t broken out into sweats or hives in the middle of the night yet, which is a good sign so far. But. I would like to say, in my weakened, sorry state; that whoever created this toxic, vile and steady stream of a substance that hooks Hollywood toucans and hyenas alike, ought to take a good moment to think about what he or she has created (*A MMMONSTER!!* says an echoey booming voice with European accent) and  – whilst pondering their apparent good intentions should, really, Wank Off, and then DIE!!!!!!!!! Because, you see, there’s only so far a toucan can fly before something’s gotta give (such as the intestinal weight of aluminosilicate).

Besides, as a dude called Sailor says, “If ever something doesn’t feel right to you, remember what Pancho said to the Cisco Kid: “Let’s win, before we’re dancing at the end of a rope, without music.”

[Quote and pictures from 'Wild at Heart', written by David Lynch;  incidentally the second movie we played at the Hotel Roosevelt last night for outdoor movie madness.]

Ah! I’m so glad you are all loving Summer, Fall, Summer. So I scribe on furiously bent mad over my manuscript in a flurry of computer keys and pauses… Because as any artist knows:

“She was in the tradition of the artist, and artists seldom operate on Eastern Standard Time. Sometimes the well is full; oftentimes it is dry. An artist can seldom sit down and produce on demand, nor are the productions of genius always of a uniformly high quality. Michelangelo ruined plenty of marble. No one knows what gives rise to artistic creativity, nonr why an artist cannot always be creative. This is just as much an inexplicable mystery to the artist as it is to anyone else. In Dorothy Parker’s case, the problems of creativity were complicated by her incessant search for perfection.” (John Keats writing about Dorothy Parker in You Might as Well Live: The Life and Times of Dorothy Parker (1970, Penguin))

Nevertheless, I suppose it doesn’t help when one has huge credit card debts to pay, because my bus fare is so large to get here;  not to mention all the other stresses that arise when one decides to move country. I also have approximately four different characters, all from different books and stories I have written, all whispering in my ear at different points in the day, telling me to follow them. Do I follow Prince Henri and co. to Russia via the direction of a Butler Ghost? Or, do I listen to the poetic laments of Jonathan and his Siren beauty, their tragic love on the black rocks by waves crashing and boat horns?

Hence the reason I crave no internet and no twitter (why? Why!!!!!!!!!!!!! As Conan once said, “In the year 3000, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter will combine to form one giant time-wasting site:  You Twit Face!!”) and anyway, why are these supposed to save my time/ heighten connectivity in the first place? I am coming to despise the very medium of my writing, just like the aforementioned Parker who threw her typewriter at Ernest Hemingway off the side of a cruise ship to New York “There goes my only means of livelihood,” she said. I get urges to do the same. By choice. Not because I owe Ernest Hemingway my MacBookPro. (As I think Parker did her typewriter, for one reason or another…)

Gah! I will ruin plenty of marble as I hack away methodically at labours of love, wrestling in the dark with my demons and angels.

“If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark. And that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too. This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs but the violent jolt of the Capital. That is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness. But if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death.” (Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman, in The Hours, 2002)

While I’ve been in Los Angeles, biding my time working and loving my man – I’ve been reminiscing a lot about my last road trip, especially since part of it was taken with one of the directors here at The Masses, who soaked with Gem and I in the cliffside hot springs of Esalen, while I conjured my man from above. Last night my friend reflected on that moment; how we had swam in the sulfur rich water that Thompson and Kerouac had once guarded in Big Sur, while I spread my naked arms to the sea side night time under that heavy darkness of hot stars. “I remember you creating that” he said. “And look who came to me!” I replied about Jon. I am so happy, it is ridiculous. The flow has never been flowier. (Life is so flowy that tonight I found my way home with a wreath of flowers around my head.)

We went to an outdoor summer-solstice screening in Mt. Washington tonight, where we saw psychedelic short films from the 60s and 70s, some that hadn’t been shown to an audience in 32 years, apparently. The silhouettes of women in flower wreaths were in shadow on the screen while we lay 100 deep in a back-yard garden, straight out of Woodstock, but still purely ours. We had such fun.

This is from the novel I’m working on, and still what I am calling, ‘Summer, Fall, Summer.’

“Lou and I rode on through crazy towns, just women, not needing men. We were being followed by ghosts of lovers, but not interested. We were more interested in the bear that was going to potentially slaughter us in the Trinidad Best Western in Colorado. That town was oddly just like Paris. I am not kidding. Some towns were pretty flat, in all aspects. Most towns my sister and I drove through when we were just getting to know America – like this new town we had temporarily found ourselves living in, were all just freeways converging on freeways, and burger joints.

Not only burger joints though. Pancakes, Tacos, Chilli Fries, which in fact were not plain fries tasting like chilli (or cayenne) – which is what I thought – but fries slaughtered with a kind of Tex Mex bean mix. Like Mama’s Chili Con Carne, and it’s only now that I realize what Carne is. We are not big meat eaters, not for any fact that is political, more just because we grew up on flour, eggs and sugar. Nevertheless (we eat the fruits of the sea too, having come from the edge of the world where there is no civilization), when we left Wyoming after a rest stop there for 3 days, a rest that was pilfered with the footprints of Elk in the snow, and marijuana cigarettes in a pot-belly warmed cabin on couches, we visited The Silver Dollar Inn.

At this Inn, we sat at the bar and tried to blend in, which is difficult to do when you’re 6 foot tall and lanky, and your sister is blonde and trying to be as much like an old farmer cow herder, which just doesn’t work. We moved to tables, and talked about beautiful things. My god, we were great. By that stage, relationships sync and flow and idioms are born. We were telling all and sundry to Wank Off & Die by then, which was something my sister spurted once when I was mad at her for something I don’t remember. I guess it was do with the map, which I think we ended up throwing out the window.

She was teasing me about the young man who was trying to court me with his New Yorker Magazines. “My god, why don’t you write a poem, read it, dig a hole, lay in it, wank off & then DIE!” It was horrendous. It was obsence. It was hilarious and I could hardly hold the wheel straight. I think at this stage we were driving through the Rocky Mountains in Colorado in broad daylight, in late April. We had no idea really where we were going, which I find amazing. I’m sure we were following some kind of numbered highway, but in essence, we stopped when we needed to refuel (or worried in petrification whether the tank would last to the next stop, whether we would be empty and lonesome on some desolate middle American mountain road, in sunshine, with each other, spouting new forms of the Wank Off & Die craze). But no, that never happened, and we simply went where we could and did what we wanted.

“The Hotel from The Shining. Let’s go there” she’d say. That was the extent of our compassed planning. “Reno. I’ve heard that in a movie before. Let’s go there.” Ah yes, Reno. The town of which it seemed impossible to enter. We passed border control three times, no joke. The wirey coot must have thought we were high, which actually, come to think of it, we were. How did we manage that? I just remember the creepy town on the border, so aptly named ‘Border Town’ and the Boo Radley visions in the derelict grass houses that dotted the gray hillsides of gravel. They were empty as halls, and the yards full of dying, faded toys in the dusk. Not a soul about. Everything was gray as if it had been a town of nuclear testing, or a volcano had hit it. But there was no fire nor lava, just the ashy colours of dead spinifex tumbleweed, lit dimly by the red-fluoro lights at the only gas station for miles.

Where is Reno? “You gals better stay in Reno tonight. Don’t stay out here. Ain’t nothin’ fer miles.” We know this. We saw it. We’re trying. She threw the map out the window. The GPS lady is a bitch and I’m annoyed. We’re also hungry. And I interjected that I refuse to eat Twinky Rolls, or whatever other lard infused foaming-agent filled styrofoamesque piece of fluff you call food, that is laying o’er there in that darned gas station that smells like bad coffee. Come to think of it, we grew attached to that bad coffee. Reno grew like a tumour of some ulterior world, out of the desert. We finally found it. It blossomed like cactus flowers at the end of the freeway of the night. The moon never stopped being full. We rolled in and stayed at the only place we could remember the policeman had recommended. It was called Peppers, I seem to recall. I was still reeling with shock from Boo Radley visions. This place was even more arresting. And infinitely amazing because of it.”

You’ll have to wait for me to finish writing it now – because this is where I’m up to… and where it gets INTERESTING. VERRRRY INTERESTING….. Yes. Peppers, Reno, April 16 last year (or so) was an experience to die for (which was actually what we came very close, metaphorically, to doing. There was a rebirth.  Alternate universes. Satanic number 13….) Next week I’m going back to old-school, internet-less, typewriter-esque library writing, so will be explaining it all then. I hope you’re all enjoying things so far though?)