keep the wild inside

Of all the odd things to have happened during the yearlong presence of BadTV on youtube, perhaps nothing is stranger than the weird responses we got to our vid on drowning polar bears. In the vid our actress Mia Honeymoon starts to tear up as she performs her lines; it's a genuine and heartfelt show of emotion. We love her for it, and that's why we hired her for the part; she feels.

But the comments on the vid turned out to be viciously nasty. People questioning her sincerity, the lines, just hammering at us. Why? Is the concept of polar bears without ice too difficult to swallow? The apologists for global warming come out in force with their defenses of the status quo, and some of the respondents simply don't give a shit for the animal: Let it drown. Even the hunter, even the hummer driver, even the oil user . . . no compassion for a magnificent animal down on its luck? Whew, sometimes the redneck factor in American can give you a serious pause of discouragement.

But we press on, and will have versions of the vid and its lines on Spanish TV and German TV as well as Mandarin TV, so we're not cowed. More resolute than ever!

Hard to believe the revolt of the planet against its consuming parasite is not going to end. We're making a hell out of paradise. Just finished reading about the teenager who splashed around this summer in Laka Havasu, only to have amoeba travel up his nose and start eating his brain. He was dead in two weeks, dying in his father's arms. In Lebanon this summer: algae, blooming. Lake Winnebago in September: algae blooming. Everything is too hot, boiling into an accidental poison. Or is it accidental?

The story is here. 

In Minneapolis and in Oshkosh and then in the Imperial City over the course of about a week I hear three people lament about polar bears drowning in the Arctic ocean as they look for a floe to stand on. Forget David Beckham and his ex-Spice mate and their attendance at the ultra-weird Cruise-Holmes wedding; the people I know are outraged about these beautiful animals swimming to death looking for a place to land. The image is a stark one. I cannot help thinking about it as i take pix of two polar bears at the Como Park Zoo; a sister and a brother, with the brother repeatedly, insanely, surfacing, dancing and falling back into his grimy hole while his sis paces in a small well and looks up at him as if he's another planet. the animals are crazy. And now they're sinking below the waves with a bellyful of saltwater. This is the world I live in? My mother, meanwhile, thinks the weather is just fine in the Twin Cities; she cashed a quarterly dividend check from Exxon for two thousand seven hundred dollars, and I have to write her to warn her that I will burn that money if she puts any of it in my name. Not a penny, Mom. 

On December 13, 2006, three days ago, the Chinese government declared the Chinese River Dolphin to be extinct. The first marine mammal to be closed out of existence by humans. Too many boats, too many fishing nets, too much human excrement floating down the Yangtze River. And this particular dolphin is a pretty animal, with a bulbous head and piercing snout. It's not just another dolphin with similar lines to other subspecies. This animal is its own thing. Captured several times, each prisoner died fairly quickly. I wonder what the last few specimens were thinking, as they coursed the murky river looking for partners? When was the last baby born? 

How long can television suck?

What are the cable execs thinking as they watch the Internet explode with terrible and tiny morsels of programming to which millions flock? Isn't youtube exactly what cable TV should be? By floating along with the sitcom bloat, the networks are lurching to their graves; 700 people got canned by NBC a few weeks ago, and more dismissals are coming.

So why do I fly toward TV, a moth flirting with oblivion?

Pretty Monster, my ecocide video, briefly touched on hit status on youtube last weekend, and the story and format are suddenly so current, even if the piece was designed for a 42-inch LCD screen, and not the 320x240 scratchy QT display on your computer. (UPDATE: Pretty Monster was banned from Utoob because of the nudity it contained. We will send you a copy if you send us an address -- check out the link.)

But I'd be happy to have you check it out even on such a puny stage!

The image above links to the superfabulous Jonelle Vette, who as Johnnie Venus will show her talented self as BadTV's Nashville correspondent.

You come out here to build cabinets, and you end up writing a screenplay. Car salesmen, busboys, hairdressers, parking valets, pretty people, all of them writig screenplays. Even in Indiana and Arkansas everyone is writing a screenplay. They are easy to write. The people who read them are practically illiterate, and the formatting of a screenplay would get you censored in your third-grade English class. It is a sickness. And I cannot simply drive out toward Nevada to escape the insanity: two million screenplays looking for a home, and 28 sold last month in Hollywood.

So the time is ripe to hatch a plan. BadTV. Simmering for almost a decade, the shows could be a channel, self-surfing 24/7, offering nothing but relief from all the other shit on TV. Nudity, a sort of dreamcatcher for fratboys, and science, a salve for eco-yuppies, mixed just right in bite-size pieces to knock out the commercials for acid gas reflux relief and erectile dysfunction in the mainstream, which you have just abandoned to come here.

BadTV is almost open. If you're on our mailing lists, you'll get all of our episodes, forever, free.

She nods toward the branches above, and a single howler growls back. Blue realizes the monkeys are waiting for her to speak. They are her audience here in the jungle, among the ruined Mayan gods, stone faces long with the loss of entire civilizations, of intricate literatures of dreaming and despair. Charlie feels the moment electric on her skin, and Blue sees her stroke her arms with her fingertips, another gentle reminder to herself that she is living and breathing. She speaks softly to the howler above her who has growled:

"I wonder about the power of love. Can a kiss echo beyond the clouds, behind the sky, past Mars and Saturn, to the skin of existence, to the edge of being, where the first heat still travels away from the beginning of everything? Can the memory of such a kiss touch a faraway heart the way a star twinkles in the sky? Who can kiss me like this?"

Blue keeps the camera on her face, but cannot bring himself to look into her eyes. This is a new person, a new being he has not met before. He stays silent.

"The lips I need," whispers Charlie, and Blue gets closer to catch her faint words, "The lips I need must come with eyes in which I can see the whole universe, and I must see these eyes no matter where I look in the world, and these eyes, everywhere, will beg me for a kiss."

Charlie jumps to her feet, and the monkeys are startled. The howls, furious, begin. Charlie shouts at the leaves, at the faces hidden behind them. She has ambushed the howlers and they scream at her in protest at her trick. Where is the rest of her sermon on love? Why this attack?

"Who begs me for a kiss!" screams Charlie.

I am going to the flatlands of Oregon, to Bend, to shoot a movie. I write the director the following note when she writes to ask me about the creative process and how conscious one is of "building" a piece rather than simply allowing it to come to life on its own. It is a funny question, since it comes in the midst of two weeks of solid writing, none of which is "built." I feel rather autistic, scrambling for structure, and I write the director with my cautious advice:

"A movie such as the piece you are making seems to be very self-analytical, unless you try hard to make your story and images represent a reality (or a fantasy) in which other people are invited to participate. What makes this a difficult proposition is that it takes incredible concentration to distill your impulses into something comprehensible to other people.

"How many people will "understand" your movie? I doubt very many! But how many people might "appreciate" your movie? Quite a few, I think, especially people trying to formulate their own aesthetic identity. Certainly a lot of your viewers will appreciate this attempt, and will thus give you the courage and enthusiasm to make another movie, and then another movie or artwork, until the autistic urge you feel for self-expression sounds like the simplest concept possible to utter strangers. But you can't expect to be an autistic Yeats! The process of emergence is critical. You can document your own emergence, or you can objectify the process impersonally. I think art happens when strangers recognize something about themselves in your struggle. If a stranger sees nothing in your effort or is not moved by it, then it’s safe to say your piece is an autistic scribble: What you would like to express cannot be translated.

"I wouldn’t think about your movie any more. Neither about your intentions nor about the technical process. Let the movie define you and not the other way around. This is a great reward for trying to be an author of anything."

To read something from Blue's "two weeks of solid writing", click here.

The airplane screeches all of 50 feet down the runway before it stops. The Captain tells us we need to wait for a minute or two. For what? We take off and I swear I'll never get on another one of these metal coffins again. In the galley by the toilets I see a fishbowl view of the scars lacing New Mexico. Red, orange, white, tantalizing. I am in the fishbowl, trapped and limited, looking out. Escape is there beneath me. I must leave the Angels, get out there with the coyotes.

I write my sonic pal in Santa Fe, and propose a project in an absurd way. And then I research milk and how wicked it is to drink, and remember that I promised myself to set up this Ecocide link, to balance all the prettiness of the world with the sobering ruin brought by our needs for creature comfort.

My quilt in Lalaland is delicious. We are 65 degrees at night, while the rest of the country bakes in a shockwave. The desert is cooling me as well as calling me. How can I live with this tear of my mind: comfort for the skin and tongue, at the cost of what pain for whose soul and bones? I have to get closer to natural phenomena. Cactus collections in Laurel Canyon do not cut it. Taos continues its tug, unseen. I am already a hermit among angels. Can I possibly withdraw more?
 

I can sell a property on January 1st next year and not have to pay any taxes on the profit, and this windfall would mean Borneo, a return to the Kalahari, and possibly my long-threatened move out of Lalalandia to Taos and the drought. I am stuck waiting for a movie executive's schedule to clear in Manhattan, and then I can fly back to the coast and grapple my destiny. So I do what I always do when Forward looms, and that's to look back. What is this piece, tucked away in my journals?

"She’s got wings, huge gossamer dreams designed to lift her into the sky, and she’s got a dragon’s mouth, each tooth a cool story and a tongue full of imagination; what is she going to say? She does an agonizing dance, and I see her foot is caught and scratched. Her wings beat against the trees and bushes, and I watch her, fascinated, because I know she wants to break free to play, the way her body is designed to and the way her limbs try to deny gravity and the cozy comforts of a flat Earth."

Hmm. The winds push me, magnets pull me. Taos. The Arctic. And now the Amazon. Of course the Amazon, as my niece sends me this picture from outside Manaus:

Sandie Black shakes her head at every destination, but nods when I say the Amazon. Nicole told me to buy a piece of land in Alter do Chao if I still felt the need to exercise my yuppie disease, and perhaps I should explore this little town outside Santarem.

Now?

see the preview pictures from the Amazon gallery

Hollywood is in a mess. Movies with big names (Jim Carrey, Denzel) are being put on hold because the budgets scare the producers. Profits are down. And there are 8,000 screenwriters in town, waiting tables or saddled with day jobs, all planning to make a living as a writer or a director, and last month the major studios bought 18 pitches. Eighteen.

I want to set up a publishing agreement with a solar energy company. Form a new business paradigm; I'll make the art and the poetry as a way of introducing your photovoltaics to a new audience. We can both make news. I'm thinking about this when I buy a chai frap at Starbucks, that Yankee malignancy, and there in the rack for the customers to buy is the Beatles' Revolver. Don't these people have any imagination? Tell me something new.

Jake comes over with a few songs from a new singer he's producing. She's awesome. Jessica Somebody. Jake is worth more to me than Starbucks. But now he's looking at me. What? "Whaddaya got?" I don't have shit. Pictures, ideas, but nothing I can play. Jake shrugs. This is the city of angels. Every dream is constructed with broken promises.

"Okay," says Jake, "Show me some pictures."

click on the banner below for photos from the Americas 

The sky is clear over the City of Angels. I can see from my eagle's nest all the way to Malibu or in the other direction all the way to the mountains in front of the Mojave. The Hollywood sign is radiant. And the wind still billows from the Pacific, and I can stand on a rock in my driveway and look down at the hot nicety of Beverly Hills. I am the hillbilly on top of Hollywood.

But the wilderness beckons even here. Not just the hummingbirds or the coyotes who ate the neighbors' cat on Wonderland Avenue two nights ago, not even the pine cones rolling down the hill; I get no signal from these. The beckoning is deeper, perhaps rushed by the pains in my prostate and hips, other signals that life is coming to an end and how much more do I have to see?

The twinkling souls above the sands and scrub of the Kalahari have decided I should return. (This is me, fantasizing.) So I log onto Withoutabox and write the following entry under 'Job Postings':

NO MONEY - NO MONEY - NO MONEY - YET! 

Anyone want to go to the Kalahari and Namibia for a wildlife shoot?

I'd like to hook up with at least one, maybe two, image savants who can sit in a blind for three hours to film rhinos or cheetahs for three minutes. Camp, eat in the bush, maybe clean up once a week at a posh $100/night safari lodge. Also film kids and professors and laborers in the urban centers (Gaborone, Moremi, Swakopmund, maybe Joburg). I've been through the area before, but without the right equipment. Kalahari, Okavongo Delta, and the dunes of Namibia would be the spine of the travel, as well as hard-to-describe outposts of civilization, very cinematic. Ideally, two vehicles would share four or five persons, all of whom would have some production interest in the final result. Does not needto be collaborative intellectually; if somebody wants to make their own African experience and just share the vehicle costs, fine. Even thinking of shipping a 4-Runner to Capetown instead of to Iceland, where it is soon bound otherwise. 

Koyanisqaatsi and Baraka would be influences, of course, but the real purpose is to get a very nice piece done for blu-ray distribution.

I might be able to offer a little subsidisation to the right person, but you should be looking at a month and about $3000 out of your pocket. Will you get the cash back? Hm. I'll try, but I'd rather end up in a Gregory Colbert situation, sort of following in the footsteps of Peter Beard. Colbert's jaw-dropping art can be seen at

http://www.ashesandsnow.org/en/index.php

I'm thinking of trying to do this in the early spring next year, though with the right enthusiasm maybe as early as Nov/Dec this year. Interested in hearing from anybody that might be interested in this sort of collaboration. Thanks!

What kind of response do I think I'll get? 

Why not canvas my friends, and find some traveling companions from the usual suspects? Can the video technology be so important? 

I've been watching a movie made in 1973 about the painter David Hockney, except it's not really about him but rather the conditions he finds himself in while breaking up with his beautiful boyfriend, deciding to move to LA from London, and producing perhaps his most famous image of a young man swimming in the patterns of a bright SoCal pool while on the lip of the pool a young man in a red corduroy watches with a forlorn blankness or timelessness on his face. Genius movie. Art, arty, arty. The movie is about being in the moment and not rushing terribly to get to the next one, but to let the moments wash over you like a tide, pulling or pushing you toward your destiny. That's my interpretation of the movie, anyway, but it might be that I am trying to empathize with Hockney's moment in 1971, torn between flirting and his focus on his artistic impulses.

I ran down to LACMA on Friday to check out the Klimt paintings, of which one was stunning, the others ho-hum, and they had Hockney there, imcluding two pieces lifted directly from the movie. Nobody was as connected as me to those paintings, at that moment. I could just sense the privacy of identification. I knew this cat, and the haircutter, and the context of the rich woman on the lawn by the swimming pool. I felt so rewarded for studying, for bothering to chase this movie into my head rather than play in the mainstream. And this happened after editing together dozens of short movies onto five tapes to show as part of a film festival in West Hollywood, and let me tell you these are supposed to be the cream of the crop of the new homemade wave, and maybe three pieces lived up to the billing, leaving me smug, tardy, smitten. I am better than this! But what can I show you of my own? Do I have only ambiguous yearnings to share?

A band called Spottiswoode stayed in my place and the keyboardist is a mesmerising Lou Reed lookalike who is an actor in demand with a long history, and he looked around my place, read all the notes hanging on the wall and left me a sweet email saying don't worry about the SAG and fuck the Equity I'm into art and I'll do anything you want, and I felt doubly good. But what can I show you? What piece of concrete?

Your notes to me, these appreciations of aiming, are as important as any other dialogue between creative selves, and if anything solid accompanies them -- a video, a song, a chapbook, a website -- they become something miraculous, a signpost of the way an artist expresses herself or himself. That who you are right now might be the only work of art you are capable of expressing to anybody. That's how I feel. If I could explain to you, in a chart or in a matrix or in a wind tunnel, what my choices are and how I intend to choose, how I titled this very e-mail to you, for instance, you might not pay for admission but I don't think you'd stop watching or listening if I didn't drone on too long because you might find yourself identifying with a little or a lot of what I'm expressing. And it's always a thrill to connect with a mystery, and the choices I have to make are very, very much a swelling mystery. 

-- From correspondence "Land of Entrapment" with M----- M-----.

A small bird chases an eagle.
A puff of wind blows away a million dollars of gold dust,
a millimeter of rain on a hot road wrecks a caravan of dreams,
and the small fires I feel on my skin
can grill my heart to a crisp.

What small thing makes me feel so much?

-------------

Wrote this after a horrifying accident on the road to Palenque from San Cristobal Las Casas. The model Abbi Hendrix was driving, and when the truck started its skid she made a tiny correction, not more than an inch, to alter our spin so we crashed into the mountain rather than plunged off the side of the road and into the forest. She saved our lives. We drove in a car on fire to Palenque, 40 nerve-wracked kilometers. A week later we were in Calakmul, on our way to Caye Caulker, and on top of the tallest pyramid I saw a fox come out of the brush and sniff the world. The fox couldn't see me, since I was up in the Sun, nor could it taste me, since the winds were at his back. But he heard something: Abbi, walking over the stones, rehearsing these lines about the eagle and the bird, and the fox melted back into the scrub.

"What are you filming?"
"A red-tailed fox."
"I'm ready to shoot, Sean."
"Cool. Make sure to show with your fingers how small a millimeter is."
"A millimeter almost killed me. I know how small it is. Don't worry."

I filmed Abbi as she walked the edge of the pyramid top, speaking my lines about wrecked dreams and the surrender of eagles, and all I could sense were the millimeters, the tiny slivers of chance which brought me here, and not there, somewhere else, where Abbi does not cry as she thinks of her own broken dreams, and where my hip and knee do not throb from complications from the crash a week before, and where no fox comes out for a meal only to back away from a sound of strangers, two people scratching destiny to see how it bleeds in history's stone ruins.

What do turtles dream when they sally into the froth. I've got a baby Ridley's in one hand and a camera in the other, and I wonder what this little bugger is dreaming?

"Be safe, you little motherfucker," I whisper, and Abbi Hendrix crossly shouts my name and warns me not to give any other baby Ridley a complex with such a curseword. The little one I have in my hand bicycles wildly for freedom and I let him (her?) go.

Write me a note, let me know if you're one of the two percent who make it, I say. The baby turtle ignores me and heads for the ocean.