Category Archives: dream

A Night Out With The Whores

by

nhboots.jpgThe pretty young one has the idea first, but the ugly and the old and the plain all go along with it. “Let’s have a dinner party,” she says. “Just a few friends at a restaurant some place downtown; away from the little bar and all the beds.” She’s so cute as she says it and so full of naive vitality that it convinces the whole bitter group and they set about making lists and reservations and raiding closets to find the right outfit; something classy, something that doesn’t scream “Whore!”

I get talked into going. I don’t know why. I never could afford the brothel, but I know the pretty young one from when she was an “art student” and I had wanted her then and I suppose I still want her now, or I’m at least fascinated that she has capitalized on what I felt was MY desire. I had wanted her. Now everyone wants her. She’s the star of the whole whore house and it makes me feel strange. Do I have common taste, or was I simply ahead of my time? It’s like a song you love until it becomes a hit and then everyone likes it and you pretend you never liked that song but still you tap your toes when you hear it.

She had on a purple short shorts number when I saw her and she made the night sound like an erotic dream. I told the wife I had some dumb thing to do at the gallery and she barely listened because she had some dumb thing to do with her idiot friends and I wasn’t even invited and it pissed me off to the point where I nearly announced: “I’m off to dinner with the whores. Don’t wait up!”

I smiled to myself and beat it down to the back room of the restaurant where some of the girls were setting up decorations; streamers like it was a child’s birthday and I take a seat next to the large brunette with the curly hair and she jabbers away asking me all sorts of questions about what I do and how are the paintings coming along and frankly I feel at a loss. It puts all the onus on me and I can’t turn the conversation around because I know what she does and I can’t very well ask her how’s the fellatio going and how are the johns coming…..along. At least I can’t sober. I order a whiskey and slip out of excitement into irritation.

Not only my mind, but my bowels. I Never should’ve had Indian food for lunch. Gurggle gurggle. Then the “boyfriends” arrive. They wear little leather jackets like toughs do in the movies and they sport elaborate, ugly tattoos and speak in dees dem and doze. I can’t imagine what the hell any of us will have to talk about all night. Why had I agreed to come? SHE isn’t even here yet. I drink down the whiskey and resolve to get drunk when my stomach constricts and I quickly run off to the toilet.

A whole gaggle of men and women fall out of restroom door, laughing. “Now this is interesting,” I think. “Some sort of cocaine orgy right here in the bathroom.” Pity I missed all the fun. Pity I’m about to shit myself and I rush through the door only to find that It’s one of those gender neutral restrooms they have now, with one common sink area and separate stalls for both men and women. No orgy, no cocaine, just too cheap to put in separate bathrooms. They’ve spent the money instead on an elaborate decor where you have to climb a sort of pyramid of box shapes to get to the toilet. It’s way up there near the ceiling. It looks wonderful, but not when you actually need to crap. It’s a god damned obstacle. I get to the top and drop trow and let out a symphony of shit just as I hear HER laugh down by the sinks. Suddenly I realize that this will not be a night of erotic heights, but rather an evening of humiliation and embarrassment… but still I love her laughter. It makes me nostalgic for the days when I thought that I alone wanted her that she was my own mystery; back when I thought I loved her, back before I was a hack and she was a whore. Then the whole room starts moving, like a train leaving the station and I’m clinging to the toilet; terrified that I’ll be the thrown from the throne and topple down the pyramid of useless decor, shitting myself at her boot clad feet. Then I wake up.
nighwhores.jpg

Conversations With Myself

by

fragile.gif portmap.jpgRecently, I’ve had cause to want to point out the documentary bits out of my last couple of shows in Portland and New York. They were extruded onto the blog in bits and pieces several months back. I thought it might be nice to have them all together in one entry so that I could just forward that link to people. It becomes something like a four channel video piece if you can play them all at the same time, or a story if you play them in order. The box gif is new.

Tales of Brave Horsecookies

by

workingclasshero.jpg

horfragile.jpghands.jpghorse-cookies.jpg
When I finally get back to my loft, I find an enormous box at the foot of the stairs. It is addressed to me and of course the elevator can’t be found. I wrestle the thing up several flights and I feel like Buster Keaton, when I notice someone filming my progress. My whole building has been invaded by a company of film players. The actors are all over the building pretending that they live there. They are even pretending to live in my studio where I push the box and ask someone what’s going on. The Camera then comes through the corridors and up the stairs in one long continuous shot as the drama unfolds in real time. There are intimate acts and gunshots and people I know and people I don’t and everywhere is the set, everyone are the players. Reality and fiction are completely blurred and I end up with a fairly large scene in the movie. Apparently the climax of the picture is a big wedding party on the outskirts of town and the whole company and I are loaded up into coach buses and taken off to the location/wedding/reception. When we get there it looks like an Italy I know from the movies of the early sixties: a few new modern housing blocks in a field of brick rubble and tall grass. They’ve set up a tent and strings of holiday lights and a fashionable band that I don’t know, but I think I’ve heard of starts to play and we all eat and drink and dance in the intermittent showers that cast a cinematic sheen on all the edges of brick. I am no longer sure if I’m an actor, or a person; did someone get married, or make a film… anyway it’s a pretty good party.
hfeet.jpg

Teach Reach

by

teach.jpg
I am on the campus of a modern university; so modern in fact, that it has a satellite campus…literally. They have built an enormous space station that serves as a quiet library to study in, etc. I’ve gotten it into my head to spend the night up there and watch one of the Star Wars films. When I get to the quadrangle with the space elevator, I find a pavilion displaying an exact replica of a soviet era atomic bomb. It’s all there, but the plutonium. I’m curious to see this once top secret object. An artist/engineer has set up an elaborate machine to render the bomb in various shades of molten silver. The silver is applied by a complex robotic arm with an old flibert head paint brush clamped to the end of it. I start talking to the artist and he convinces me to go get my video camera and document the process of painting the atom bomb in shades of silver and tarnish. As I head back to my room, a terrific storm blows up and all the students scramble. I take my shoes off and walk home in the puddles. I won’t take my camera out in the rain and I’m certainly not riding up to space in eighty mph winds. I’ll just watch Star Wars at home, or better yet get blown around the campus and wade in the puddles.
reachrobot.jpg

From a Whimper to a Scream

by

nightmare.jpg
The killer is beneath me – maybe coming through the floor, maybe the mattress. I am being tossed around like a coin and the killer’s hands keep coming at me and I fend them off until I scream at the top of my lungs and awake. She says, “What was that strange noise you made?” and she imitates it and it sounds like a little blurp… a whimper… a small animal in distress, or as she puts it: “a little girl.”

“A Monster,” I say, still too asleep to explain that it’s a serial killer with a whole back story that is already fading in my consciousness. She starts to laugh at me and mock my mouse like sound that made it all the way from the terror of my unconscious to the comfort my waking bed… albeit without the volume. Hidden in that little whimper somewhere is the all the horror of life and death… or someone else’s idea of a joke.nightlaugh.jpg

Istanbullshit

by

istanbul.jpg
Somewhere in Istanbul there is a wall around the ancient part of the city. The houses in the city were made of wood and have all rotted away. I suppose it was dry rot as Istanbul looks like the desert and the thing of it is that with out all the little wood houses against the ancient stone walls, the walls have started to lean perilously inward. We are part of a group that go to see the walls before they fall. I think how funny it is to care about the walls, when the city they once protected has already turned to dry rot. I invent a cocktail with milk and some strange exotic yellow liquor. You pour the liquor into the milk and it just gathers in the center of the milk like the yolk of an egg. I call the drink a Humpty Dumpty in honor of the walls of Istanbul.

Campus Taurus

by

thinkdreamer.jpg
I am visiting the campus of some university and I go to the art department, which is in a large modern building. The ground floor is a well lighted, airy, white wall gallery. It is full of people coming and going to classes and studios upstairs. As an art show, someone has put an enormous real live black bull in the lobby. I know its art because it’s dressed in a well tailored orange suit. Someone asks me if I’d like to ride the bull. It’s very tame I’m told, but when I get on it of course starts bucking all around the lobby. Everyone scatters and I dismount. They apologize and ask me if I’d like to join a tour of the campus. I say, “I’ve already joined a taurus of the kick ass” No one thinks it’s that funny, but I’m self amused and I go walk my dog around the park-like university. I turn my head for a minute and she gets off leash and I run around for hours looking for the old dog. Seems there is a lake in the center of things and she’s gone swimming.bull.jpg

Camera Club

by

I’m at a meet up of Flickr, or Vimeo types: camera people. We are running around some strange, beautiful city shooting pictures and films and video. I use a strange digital camera with a pencil long lens shaft. It’s fairly small, but you can shoot thousands of pictures.strangecamera.jpgstanders.jpgredcamera.jpg

In Hospital

by

springthoughts.jpgspringthoughtshead.jpg
I am allowed to use the studio of a collector’s son who has gone off to Berlin. The studio is a two room cottage behind a hospital. It has a good wall for painting on, but I spend a day just being quiet in the space. Later I find all the drawings the collector ever bought from me in a stack in the closet mixed up with some pages of notes and sketches from the kid in Berlin.