I sleep with

twenty-seven books on the floor next to me. Just in case. In case of what I am not sure. A moment without input, although I do not know about this as I spend long periods of time in the dark. Doing nothing, but that is not true as I journey here and meet many beings. Books are here too. Or rather notebooks about my head. A through X, they are filled with articles, mostly from newspapers, on murder, cults, forensics and neurology. And little tidbits of one thousand miles of frogs that occasionally manifest in China. These latter events create anxiety as they are outside my understanding and my rules of nature. The creation of books or at least characters occurs here in the dark. At least now. Before I’d pull the blinds, then the curtains, put in earplugs and listen to music playing on my CD as loud as I dared. Mostly the soundtrack to

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

. I have moved on to

Bela--A Tribute to Bauhaus

. Most go. That damnable cash and survival thing. Will tell more of the characters (or entities) here in the dark, but before you go, a little more on Bauhaus the architectual movement (from Wikipedia):

Berlin

Although neither the Nazi Party nor Hitler himself had a cohesive architectural 'policy' in the 1930s, Nazi writers like Wilhelm Frick and Alfred Rosenberg had labelled the Bauhaus "un-German" and criticized its modernist styles, deliberately generating public controversy over issues like flat roofs. Increasingly through the early 1930s, they characterized the Bauhaus as a front for Communists, Russian, and social liberals. Indeed, second director Hannes Meyer was an avowed Communist, and he and a number of loyal students moved to the Soviet Union in 1930.

Under political pressure the Bauhaus was closed on the orders of the Nazi regime on April 11 1933. The closure, and the response of Mies van der Rohe, is fully documented in Elaine Hochman's Architects of Fortune.
           

Wickie

The King is the Slave is the King.

Just got back from the

Morrissey

concert tonight. I don't know why I couldn't get wrapped up in it the way I could with the last show I went to,

Billy Bragg

, who you'd think would be much more cerebral, less visceral. Couple possibilities: Billy Bragg is _about_ combining with other people to change things. Maybe that's not right. But Morrissey is so much about a singularity and a missed connection with the universe, it sort of seems wrong to be singing along to him with so much of that universe, his love and self-love requited everywhere. It seems like you should be listening to Morrissey alone, on headphones, in high school, and barely surviving it. I do love him, of course. But maybe not when I'm in public.

Another possibility is that I'm such a cerebral fucker that Billy Bragg hits my emotional stripe perfectly. Not cerebral--abstract? Unable to contemplate art without vulgarly mixing in politics? So maybe it's my fault.

But there in my headiness and abstraction tonight I was, like it or not, thinking about

Coriolanus

and

Hegel

while I watched Morrissey and didn't fall into the music. I'm a director, for film and TV, and directing is a thing I love to do. I especially love it when I see a room full of people enacting words and schemes I've put down on paper myself.

I always think of actors as kind of the opposite of directors--they are there to be seen, we are there to see them. I think of something and they bring it into life in some beautiful fantastic way, with some whole other kind of need and intelligence than what I have.

But when Morrissey came out tonight and looked us all over, started up the first song and had the whole club singing his words, I realized he, the looked-at, was directing _us_. Hegel said the problem with being a master is you require a slave. Coriolanus, in the Shakespeare play, is disgusted with the idea that he has to show the mere people his battle scars to win their vote for Roman senator. Who rules who? Morrissey told the truth about his pain and weakness and ugliness over and over and over. He's a rich man now, happier, I think, and possibly now even minus a crippling personality disorder or two. He's up on the stage. Our hands are in the air, worshipping, or giving orders. The king is the slave is the king.

Jed

Here again.

In the dark. Without that cat as she became bored with me—or the dark. Who knows what lurks in the brains of cats. Scared of that. Sometimes, late at night when I wake, sometimes with a start other times as though drugged, she is there. Yellow eyes staring at me. I find it odd that while I sleep she wanders and stares.

Currently, I am reading

China Miéville

’s

Perdido Station

. Currently has spun out into about a year. Oh, do I hope that he is readying a film populated by his strange creatures and countries. As I write, I am listening to

City of Angels

sung by

Above the Law

. In a definite groove. Don’t know them beyond this song. “The devil plays the repo men, sucking up souls as fast as he can,” they sing. “LA is a crazy ass place to stay,” they assert. Can’t argue with either point. Gotta go try to earn some cash. So I can stay in the dark. And feed her. So she will leave me alone at night.

Wickie

Hiya!

Myself, I live in a sunlit world of brightly-colored, perpetually smiling two-dimensional animated creatures. But--barring that--Wickie and I share a sensibility. As the people in my life tell me, I need a platform for all the kvetching, ranting, theorizing, and aggrandizing (self- and otherwise) that I subject them to. So here we are! Welcome to Hello Kitty Noir.

Let's get things rolling with a beautiful pic of Perpetual Juror Laramie, Bailiff Elektra (Lynne Herman) and Judge Gallows (Pauli Gray) in action at the Rock Court Launch Party. Rock Court is a show that Wickie and I work on, along with many talented collaborators, including the peeps at d7tv.



Jed

Welcome to Heads Will Roll.

At last. A blog so that when I am in my darkened closet I can send a line or two out into the ether so that someone beside my feline(our as there are two of us who tend her) can know what is going on in my brain and in my life. It is not that...I was going to say she does not care...actually she doesn't. So I move on. As to the darkened room. I would say I was born in one. Wishful thinking or not as I am intrigued by the image of the bright surgical lights and draped green masks (as well as the sterile floors and implements) that were there at my arrival. And a mother, I assume. Although it may have been the only moment she was present. Forced by circumstances she was. A tendency I have carried forward. That this life requires a presence. That being mine. "So," I was asked by a very small person. "Under what circumstances are you willing to be here?" The answer is this: in a darkened, small room with very little stimulation, all relationships mediated by something--words, machines, images as well as other forms of manipulation. "Oh, so an artist, in other words," she said with that wry smile. (In her low lit room--with little outside stimulation). "Yes, I suppose," always intrigued as I am by her perspective on my existence. "An artist."

There are few I would take up with in this way of being. But Jed Bell, my collaborator, is one. We communicate through Heads Will Roll, its projects, its visions. I remain wary. Of him. Of her. Or perhaps tentative. Always ready to bolt. Back into my darkened room. With the visions. And that fucking cat.

Wickie