Definitive

Sunday, February 18th)  Saw Black Panther last night.  I've seen some coverage of the movie off antenna-based TV, and one thing I've yet to hear mentioned is how gender-positive the film is.  The movie is wall-to-wall with women and almost every one of them has a position of power and honor.  I really enjoyed that.  On a personal note, I've never seen a movie before with so many gorgeous women (and I adore those sexy shaved heads!).

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Oh, missed opportunity.  I posted a review of 'Taste the Blood of Dracula' with only one screencap (due to a problem getting decent screencaps, don't know the right software).  This is the movie with the awful dialog for Chris Lee, wandering through England counting his victims.  "The fuhhst...", "The second...", "The thuhhd..."  I should have included a picture of The Count from Sesame Street.

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Feb. 19th
Watching the news.  One of the Florida student activists just said "We plan to be so brazen...".    Hear fucking hear.  It's funny, I have always known the word yet I never run across it - no one uses it.  Ever since seeing Dana's painting, though, I keep running across it.  Really, I've become very fond of "brazen".  If I were online I'd grab a dictionary definition and quote it, but the Florida students have put it in proper context quite nicely.  And, yes, I do admire Dana for embodying the spirit of it whatever her problem is with reaching out to me.  Dana, you out there?  McNamee.  Yes, you're brazen.  I take it from your painting that you embrace it.  You should, you should be proud of it.  If you've ever wondered what I'm talking about when I say I'm proud of you...that's a lot of it.  It's not any particular thing, it's just you.  I've always wished I were more like you in some ways.  And in other ways, I think I have always been more like you than you have the courage to know.

Why can't you be brazen with me and just talk??  Is it only me you have no bravery for?  : (     What scares you about talking to me, Dana?  I've always been on your side.  Why wouldn't I be now?
I love you, Dana.  You can talk with me. 

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Tuesday, 20th.  Had a couple of dreams, Dana wasn't in them but they could be interpreted as her reaching out.  Okay, but I've had those before so I have to assume that it's not true this time either.  She still can, it's in her hands.  I'm here and I don't see how she could doubt that I want this.  If I had even a clue what she was afraid of I might know how to help.  I'm not going to scoff at whatever it is...I just don't know what it could be.  There's gotta be something or it wouldn't be that big a deal to her to just talk to me as a friend.  Could she really be so cold to hurt me this cruelly by choice?  The person who would do that isn't the person who tried to reassure me last October.  I just don't understand.  This is fucking cruel.

I wrote a letter to Jesseca a few days ago.  Addressed the envelope and realized I will never again write this address as the return.  : ( 

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Wednesday, 21st.  Mood is especially low and mournful today.  Few days left in the house, this weekend and a day or so more are it.  My home.  Mom's home.

Listening to the scores for Futureworld and Westworld, Fred Karlin synth and orchestra.

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(edit, interjection to say that last night I wasted an evening on a bad idea that, as bad ideas go, was an idea that was not good.  Now I'm tempted to excise everything I wrote below.  Instead I'm rearranging, cutting, editing.  That's how these things take me, the urge to create something.  I was watching Oregon Art Beat on PBS.)

Thursday, Feb. 22nd, 8:55 PM.  Relatively speaking this was one of the better days I've had lately but is quickly becoming a Reverse Midas (in which everything I touch turns into a substance recognizably not gold).  The bleeding beneath the bandage has slowed down (I was making dinner), the fire in the woodstove is finally catching, and the soup has stopped exploding.  I shall endeavor not to push my luck. 

This may have been the universe's way of warning that the idea that just in the last half hour  has fevered me is an extraordinarily bad one, which...eh, I already kinda knew,  thanksverymuch.  (pausing to crumble some crackers).  You see what I've done here, I've utilized humor to...er, cushion against...umm.  Something.  So I'm not a bad writer provided my work remains within the confines of the strictly unpublished.  No worries there, so the cosmic caution is a little unwarranted.  Besides, I'm writing about it here now, anyway, thus sublimating the creative energy that would have been needed to follow through.  I'm thinking of fiction, but fiction that's highly personal.

I wrote a story once about a character named Beth.  Really bad short story, weakly conceived and worsely composed though it had two or three worthy components.  I'd had Dana in mind but more the way you'd write a role someone, nothing to do with her factually.  I also came up with a science fiction story for her (astronaut Mariel Andrejevski, named after a part Dana wanted in Time of Your Life) about  tentative contact with an alien race and involving an android in love with her

(unrequited),  and I tried a treatment of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein where I imagined her playing a more progressive Elizabeth who learned Victors work at his side.  Had a nice twist at the end, that one, never been done before in a Frankenstein movie as far as I know.  You see by their absence how far those progressed.  Was never a strong suit, coming up with stories and characters.  I'll be too busy pursuing projects that have a chance of getting somewhere.  This current brainstorm is one of those 'what-ifs' that all artists have lists of, the things they never do.  But it would be a hell of a story, and I think there are people out there like me who would have an "Oh wow" moment or two relating to it.
This time Beth would be a lot more like the Dana I have invented in my mind over the last thirty years.  (Damn, it really has been thirty years almost to the day that I first wrote to her.   Somewhere in March 1988, that's when she wrote back to me.)

A few weeks ago I rewatched Henry & June, a fine and unfairly forgotten movie by Phillip Kauffman about the relationships between authors Anais Nin, Henry Miller, and their shared love June.  This is not a review, so I'll limit my comments to a simple aside that June is a singularly unlovable narcissist and her being the center of artistic, romantic, and sexual obsession dampens a movie I'd otherwise watch much more often.  Maybe everyone else felt the same way and that's  why it's forgotten.  Then again, I was out of the loop on the whole Uma Thurman infatuation thing.  She's good, I just don't get the allure.

Henry & June is based on a true story as journaled by Anais Nin, although June would argue the point.  I say 'true story' but truth is a matter of perception.  June was already Henry Miller's muse when Anais met the pair, and June soon became the same for Anais.  Both authors wrote about June, but June was incapable of seeing herself in their work.  What's revealing and beautiful is that the two portraits themselves were not in agreement:  each author had their own voice and vision.  June, meanwhile, had her own vision of her self.  Not allowed in that self-reflection was her nature to torment and damage the people she inspired. 

(My interest in the film was Anais Nin.  Her place as a pioneer in literature comes not just  as an important female voice in what was considered a man's realm but for her emphasis on the essence of experience over the mechanics of plot.  She was a sensualist, after my own heart.)

June did not fear being written about.  Far from it, she was desperate to be the subject of everyone else's conversation and art provided she was recognized by all as a humble, selfless, unflawed human being worthy of being hailed as a natural goddess.  Henry & Anais failed at the task, being more concerned with the integrity of their work and honesty in their art, and so for June their writings sullied her own truth.  Not big on the artist's voice, June.

Authors - artists - have an overwhelming need to express.  It's how they define themselves.  I am feeling that keenly tonight, though not necessarily over the subject I'm on about at the mo'. 

Thing is, communication is kind of a Holy Grail with me.  I have failed with Dana.  I can't think how else to put out there the things that are at issue for me, the particular wounds at heart or the things I value.  On my blogs I have to self-censor.  The loss, the tragedy I see in our friendship even if my brain conjured it from nothing but dreams and miscues...there's a humanity at stake in this tale involving issues vital to who I am, and I've no way else to address it.  I suppose I'd have to publish under a pseudonym.  Maybe by then I wouldn't care about her as a real person anymore, she'd have passed into the invention of memory.

The story would end as it has in real life (so far, anyway).  The man who loves Beth writes her a letter revealing that there is nothing for him to learn about her.  She burns it unread because she is too afraid of what he has to say to face reading it.  So great is her fear that they are irreconcilably different that she never learns how alike they are.  I'd rather the ending be a happy one but I can think of no other way to end the story that is honest.

My cut has healed.  The blood beneath the bandage's central padding stopped in a pattern suggesting a beehive of maroon wax, with only two hexagons complete.  The mind completes the pattern from the evidence given.

9:58.  I could go watch a movie but maybe I'll try to begin a simple sculpt based on some small figures I have before me.  I watched a Sion Sono movie (Suicide Club) last night with an eye to writing it up, won't be immediate as part of it still escapes me.  Watched Catherine Breillat's Romance which didn't inspire much in the way of a review, I'm lukewarm to this fairly cold and mistitled movie but the bit with a BDSM master is fascinating for defying cultural bias.  Working on a review of Kolchak: The Night Stalker (Horror in the Heights, maybe the best ep of the series).  I gave John the finished biker/Nazi skull, he was happy with the job I did on it.  The helmet has a high-gloss hammered metal look in sable brown metallic, not where I expected to take it but it looks wicked cool.

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3:58 Feb. 24th, Just took some stuff to Kathy's.  Lore was here yesterday, I totally forgot to use her net connection to post the Kolchak review.  Will have to register a change of address on Monday, put that off too long too but I never get mail anyway.  Still haven't packed the last minute stuff like my coffee maker, some of my clothes.  Should have done it last night but I had to take a break and make something.  Using the last paper model I still have, and some small figures to copy, I have sculpted a small female torso and legs in Premo Sculpey and got it baked.  It's at Kathy's now with what supplies I didn't box up and store already, and that's where I hope to progress on it.  I have some wire for fingers, hope it's not too flimsy and that I have a wirecutter in my toolbox.  It's the best attempt I've made so far.  Have so many choices if it gets that far - what if anything to clothe her in, what hair, face, expression, attitude, colors to paint (that last will wait 'til NY as I gave away all my primer).  Pumps or boots?  See, I have to learn musculature first.  If that doesn't look so hot then I'll definitely hide my lack of skill under clothing.  I want to learn to sculpt feet, but the figures I'm using for reference have high heels and it's easiest to copy that shape until I get the hang of this.  Simple wire frame wrapped in tissue hardened with Mod Podge, small so it doesn't need bulking up.  I could have just flat-out used Milliput.   I really want to do figural work, always have.  I believe Jesseca can help me with the practical side which has always escaped me.  The talent I have (not to brag), it's the materials and processes I never learned.  Never could find a class.  Oh - hell, already packed the camera-to-computer cable.  Damn.  Got pics I can't load.  Wonder how much one costs?

My last few days here haven't even happened yet and they're already full.  : /    Scott should get a  video of me at the airport leaving Portland.  He wants to get one of me leaving this house, and that's the one that I don't wanna do.  Way more painful.
I wonder if Dana has done more artwork.  I hope so. 

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