Sunday, June 20, 2004

Response to Anonymous

After reviewing this post, over a year ago, and the one I was responding to, what I was trying to say was, how am I supposed to know these supposed men don't reveal themselves to me???

The first video I ever made was entitled "Margaret's Friends Speak Out". I shot it in the living room of the apartment in Baltmore where I was living at the time. A third floor walk-up that once hosted a "2nd Chance Prom Party" for us freakaziods who in high school had been unable to get a date, on suspension or too hip to go. It was the social event of the Hopkins Writing Sems/Balto Underground Artiste & Musician season. We slow danced to Stairway to Heaven, drank pink punch, skate-boarded up and down the hallway and cut loose to Dire Straits' Twisting by the Pool. Now, that was some fun, Daddy-O.

Anyway, in the video I make a brief appearance. I look at the camera and say something about believing I had been on television once but that I must have forgotten. It was heavy-handed but, hey, I was reading a whole lot of Raymond Carver at the time so I have to try to forgive myself.

I have a pretty high learning curve, which might explain some of this forgetfulness you refer to. As for owning the store in the dating department at Nordstroms (which is just about the sweetest thing anyone has said to me in a long time, BTW), part of the process of shopping generally involves asking to see something, no? One could go to Walmart and be gob-socked by the abundance of things they do not need or even desire in the slightest but what a waste of energy.

Your comments obviously fired a few neurons and I've been feeling nostalgic as it is. Writing just might be one of the loneliest and exhausting professions on earth. There is so much research involved, not to mention all the stuff you wnd up never using. In this respect, it's also a bit like shopping, I suppose. Poor, poor pitiful me. God, I do miss Zevon. There is a fine piece in the current issue of the New Yorker on the hell of this process and other possible attractive weaknesses, if you are interested. It's the one about writer's block. You can access it on line -- FREE.

Do I know you? My most quotable and down & dirty friend, Laura, is a wee bit bugged by this Mr. Mystery routine. She suspects it is proof that you are, in fact, intimidated. I'm not so sure but then again my friend, Peter, recently suggested I might try and find work as a dominatrix. Come to think of it, another friend suggested this, as well. I could never pull it off. The moral issues are ambiguous, at best, when money is involved and I suspect I would end up laughing the entire time. In other words, I'm not too sure of anything these days.

Listen up...THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY because I wrote a very bad folk song once. I mean bad. The first line went something like, "The chicken's in the road, gonna lay it on the line. The player's in the park, gonna make his music mine." I was 15 and all my friends called me "Mitchell" because I was such a Joni Mitchell fanatic, so I guess my "poetic nuances" at the time were pretty much a done deal. I did a small installation once entitled, "context is everything". In addition to all this fashionable rigmorale over Veganism and exotic strains of bacteria popping up on PETA's most endangered species list daily, chickens are way cool and seem to have to right idea.

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