Crowd Noises

Crowd Noises is a book that I wrote over 40 years ago. Hard to believe. Its just as fresh and believable today as... What does that mean? A book being fresh. It used to be that in the 50s and 60s they had these terrible cliche expressions for movies. Well in the late 20th and early 21st century books have adopted those tired and wearisome generalities. STOP. Back to the book. Crowd Noises was a chapbook put out by Killaley Press in Hamilton Canada. Its the only chapbook I ever had published. Many of my colleagues at the time had dozens published. It was cheap. And it made you feel that you had a career. I didn't feel that way. Maybe I should have published more. But I always thought the idea of writing was to be read. In the art scene at the time (I'm sure its the same today) there are more writers than readers. Its a scene that gives the impression of contributing to the general culture. It was just a lot of young sensitive and mostly talented people holding each other's hand in the dark. And frightened out of their minds.

Higg's Field

Higg's Field or Higg's Ocean is an idea that in the void of space things come in and out of existence. That something is created out of nothing. And disappears into nothing. Of course this contradicts one of Newton's Law. And as long as Newton doesn't find out about it, all is well.
Life itself is one of these things that pops in and out of existence. Where does life or when does life appear. And when one dies, what happens to one's soul, one's lifeness?
Perhaps nothing is the answer.

to thine own self be... my god he's got a knife

One of my most recent self-portraits. Scares the hell out of me.

Drop Shadow

Just finished this new piece. And I'm pretty pleased with it. It has a surreal quality about it that blends with the more mundane aspects of the room that it takes place in. It is about shadows, this idea I had that shadows existed. Existed apart from the objects that create them. As if we ourselves might be a shadow of something purer or diabolical. My first fascination with shadows was Plato's allegory of the cave, when the things of this world are seen to be the mere reflections/shadows of ideals. And those ideals find their source in an even greater absolute. Anyway, read Plato, not me.

Does Anyone Remember Marianne Johnston

A girl I knew. Don't we all wish we could find out about people in our past without actually getting involved in their lives, without disrupting their lives. Perhaps that is how spy agencies began. Finding out about people without their knowledge. Curiosity can be an insatiable drug.

The anti-That Girl

I like this notion of the bizarro world. I remember reading Superman comics when I was a kid and there was this bizarro world that was the exactly the same as ours but with fundamentals changed. For one thing Superman was ugly. It was a cube world which is where I think Star Trek got its idea for the Borg. So why not have an anti- That Girl. Perhaps... Madonna.

That Girl

I was never a fan of the TV comedy That Girl. But there was something about Marlo Thomas. She was the kind of young lady that every guy I knew wanted to meet. Pretty but mostly fun. It was as if her world existed on a different planet than Sartre, Camus, or all of us horny adolescent boys.