I am slowly but surely leaving my current employment situation so I will have more time to add and devote to my ideas as I begin to contemplate what the next step is in my entire life. I'll be working for three days a week from here on out and that will give me plenty of time to focus on my posts here and bring you better quality for your half-assed browsing and clicks. I'm just kidding, everything is full throttle. I know that the people who look at this blog are seriously devoted to browsing and interpretative arts and writing.
Progress is being made, though. Last weekend, the first video footage for the sketch series I have been talking about was shot. The sketches are going to be broken up by themes and then delivered in approximately 15 minute episodes a piece. The first episode is food themed. Some more footage for the second sketch in the episode will be shot this weekend. I think you will all be pleased with what you see. I am taking all kinds of suggestions, so please feel free to give a shout.
Progress is also being made. If you look on the side of my blog, where it has links, I have added two blogs by the names of Postres de Abuela y Torres De Caramelo and Gas Tank is Full. These are the blogs of two friends of mine from college. I recommend checking them out and following the exploits. That is if you are interested in interesting people and I mean you are looking at the blog of The World's Coolest Dude - 2007, so you gotta know your stuff.
Yet, again, the progression of progress. Additionally, on my sidebar of links, you may have seen an old link to the myspace page of The Sights. This is a gem of a band that has been defunct since their last album in 2005. They are releasing a new album in 2010 and are one of my favorites. They have some new tracks up on their myspace and will be touring the New York area in February. I will be there, most patiently, progressively, certainly waiting.
Concurrently, the presentation of progress:
1. 2010 NBA All-Star Roster Breakdown (1/28/10)
2. Review of the Gene Clark Album "No Other" (1/30 or 1/31)
3. Play by Play of the 1992 NBA All-Star Game (2/1)
4. Mid-Week Update of Projects both Stupid and Sincere (2/3)
5. Rant on the style of Thomas Wolfe and his first novel "Look Homeward Angel" (2/4 or 2/5)
6. Further: Reviews of the novels "Fan's Notes" and "Family Album" and review of The Sights' last album "The Sights" (Week of 2/8)
Finally, progress was prevented.
Now, the next installment of "From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt":
Maggie
My sister is a pretty girl. She really is. Prettier than I ever was, then I ever hoped to be when I tried to make a statement by chopping my hair short in high school. She has this blondish hair that seems like it appeared out of nowhere. But there was a grandma or an aunt in there who had it. She wasn’t as beautiful as Liza. She steps alongside me. Her hands rise and fall in rhythm with her feet. Is that grace? Is grace in a motion or is it in her moving with this light? With the reflection that a still wet – drying – road can have. If I had my camera, is that picture graceful or is it grace? Where did Mary get off anyway?
That’s right, she didn’t. That was the whole thing. Is that where grace comes from? That little garden that’s supposed to grow between my legs?
“Are you still a virgin?” I ask. I ‘m tempted.
Liza turns towards me, a few strands of her hair streak across her face. She has to brush them.
“What?”
“You know the question?”
“I know it, but since when – you’ve never asked me something like that before.”
I saw her born. I saw them wipe the blood off her. The afterbirth is the word for the nasty stuff, but for a poetic and meaningful word it still sounds pretty disgusting. I remember being embarassed of her. “Your parents still have sex?” But that look I saw in mom. I was old enough to see the change of face that a woman can have when she has a child. I was changing then too. I was starting to feel wombish, like we used to call it in college – like I feel now. But I was also changing in the fact that when I saw mom I wanted to do something that I couldn’t describe. I wanted to rage at the beauty of her look, of the beauty of the fact that my mother, who was mine, who I’d known so well, could look like that over another little girl. That want, that feeling turned into me and my lens.
Mom was full of grace and she spat out four kids.
“I think it’s overdue,” I say to her.
“Come on, Maggie.”
“Ah, that’s disgusting!”
She laughs as she says it. So I know she doesn’t care.
“We’re both adults here,” I say. I take a poke at her. She dodges.
“Fine.” We stop. We’re right at the corner of Ridgeway and our slope. I can feel the curve beginning under my feet.
“I’m not,” she says.
I smile. “Good for you.”
“I don’t regret it.”
“Neither do I.”
She nods, taking my abstract meaning. I only realize after the fact that its not pointed in the exact direction I want it to go, but who cares. I’ve never explained myself before. I let my pictures say what they had to say. I hope they will speak for themselves.
“No,” a beard was starting to grow in. He was unbuttoning his white shirt for work. “I really love them. I mean they are so humanistic.”
“Humanistic? Gross.”
He laughed barechested. I liked the way his spare chest hair shaped his muscles. “There’s a pity in them. Look at the lines on the hands in that one. What I like is that these aren’t from some third world country, that they’re from a city that people hear about in the south of France being so glamorous, but at heart its really an ancient and medieval fishing city and these are our eternal signifiers of time never changing.”
I’m sprawled behind my photos on the bed. I had one hand propping me up.
“You know, some say pictures evoking pity are weak. That a good photo shouldn’t make the viewer feel a simple emotion like that, a base emotion.”
“Is pity base?”
“It’s pretty base.”
He laughed.
“Will you shave before we fuck?” I asked him.
He kept them coming as he pulled on his sweatshirt. He was becoming the boxer.
“Must you call it fucking, lover?”
I fell into the pillow. We’d just gotten over colds so the pillows were in two different cases. We had to change our germs. I fell into a faded purple flower pattern.
“You know I hate that.”
“Why, though?”
I looked up, my face feeling pillow flattened.
“You know why.”
He shook his head and leant over the photos. One hand touched my leg, petting it, the other fingers stretched out, their tips kissing the gloss. That was a picture, zoom and focus.
“No, I know about the lovers. Why about the pity?”
“Because it attaches you to the subject instead of removing you, instead of taking in the entire shape, the form, the light. High emotion comes from distance.”
He shook his head again. His hand stopped petting.
“I like pity. I like attachment. I like dirty hands.”
“Me too.’
He looked up from the photos. He gave me his look of intent: lines above his nose between his eyebrows, his mouth straight, maybe upturned a bit but not as much as Mona Lisa’s. His cheekbones strong, standing on the sides of his face like satellites in space. They did mark out his face.
“I’ll shave.”
“There’s a light on,” Liza says as we come up to the house.
“I think James and Eve are feeling frisky.”
“Gross,” she says.
“What? I’ve heard them fuck.”
“Do you have to say it like that.”
“Yes.”
We walk quietly through the gate. I enjoy the darkness of the lawn. Part of me wishes that we could sit out in this darkness forever. My sister and I. So far apart but made of the same stuff really. But just opening that door means that tomorrow will begin. How is that?
Liza leads the way up the front stones. She opens it. I can’t see her hand but I hear the doorpetal – that’s right! That’s what she used to call it! – click and light shed onto the dark of us. Eve happens to pass by.
“Ben’s dead drunk.”
“One of my old favorites,” I say. “Right up there with ‘Captain Jack.’”
Eve doesn’t react. She’s mad maybe at James. Good for her, she should be. I know she’s deep. I almost smile thinking of her anger. Dead drunk. Considering the circumstances, that’s pretty funny.
“What’s he doing?” Liza asks.
Eve steps back and starts touching the bannister. She hooks her model arms around one of the thin and sculpted posts.
“James found him asleep on the floor in his office. He tried to bring him upstairs, but he won’t budge. He keeps mumbling, ‘Let me stay and roll.’”
I shake my head.
“Where’s James?” Liza sounds concerned.
“He’s upstairs. He’s taking a break from trying to pull him up.”
“Is he drunk?” I say.
“Yes.”
She bows a little – almost curtsies – and cuts in front of both of us. She goes up the stairs. Right before the ceiling I see her stoop down a little and use her hands to walk up.
“Come on, lover.” I walked on all fours up the stairs.
“I thought you hated that.”
“Not now when I’m in love with my lover.”
Jake laughed and followed me up. I sat on the top step. The bathroom door behind me was open and a wet breeze blew through. It was warm and not cool on my neck. One thing is not the other. Jake leaned over me. He was wearing a long sleeve shirt but I sould sense his muscles tighten as he held himself up in front of my face, just slightly above my nose.
“How come we came when everyone was away?”
“Just kiss me.”
Eve disappears. I look at Liza.
“Well, non-virgin sister. Let’s give the old man a pick-me-up. We’ve got a big terrible day tomorrow.”
Liza touches my hand. With her other she strokes the ends of her hair a little bit. Her whisps of hair that curl up and around her ear. Mine doesn’t do that.
“I love you," she says. "But there’s nothing funny about all this.”
“It’s not sad either.”
“It isn’t?”
“No.”
She pauses and takes her hand off of mine. Now she’s cross armed. I put my arm around her and start her walking down the hall.
“C'mon," I say. "He’s still alive.”
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