GETTING PREPARED

 
Photo taken by my housemate Hannah Bracken after she and her partner, my son Miles, and I moved in together in 2021. The lights have changed colors (all blue now) but remain up and lit year round, as does the message. 

SOME ARTIST FRIENDS

Woke up this morning with a new list brewing in my mind of artists I like who are, or once were, friends of mine. As it grew, I had to alphabetize to remember. I’m sure there are many more who didn’t immediately come to mind:

AHM AKRAM

DON BACHARDY

ALIX BAILEY

JENNIFER BAXANDALE

GLEN BAXTER

SUSAN BEE

JOE BRAINARD

RUDY BURCKHARDT

SUSAN CAMPBELL

MIGUEL CONDE

DONNA DENNIS

CHIO FLORES

JANE FREILICHER

LESLIE GREENE

DUNCANN HANNAH

JOAN HANOR

JOHN HANOR

PAUL HARRYN

ERIC HOLZMAN

CAITLIN LALLY HOTALING

WALTER HOYT

ALEX KATZ

MIKE KELLEY

PATRICIA LOUISIANNA KNOP

LEE LALLY

DIANNE LAWRENCE

DON MCLAUGHLIN

RITA STERN MILCH

PAULA NORTH

BRENDAN O’CONNELL 

DARRAGH PARK

RICK PARKER

JUDY RIFKA

ERIKA ROTHENBERG

SUSAN ROTHENBERG

ED RUSCHA 

GEORGE SCHNEEMAN

CAROLEE SCHNEEMANN

SYLVIA SCHUSTER

MINDY SEEGER

BILL SULLIVAN

MARY WORONOV

TREVOR WINKFIELD

GEOFFREY YOUNG

FRIENDS

A favorite of many photos of me and my dearest friend of forty years, Jamie Rose. This one taken in 2009 in the New York hospital where I was having a brain operation. She flew out from LA to be there for me, as she always has been. Happy birthday kid.

LALLYPALOOZA FILM

Here's the video of Lallypalooza, the event earlier this year where some family and friends read some of my poems (their choices). Some glitches and unflattering angles, but grateful to have a record of the evening. 

https://youtu.be/hYrREOCV7qc

JOHN BAILEY R.I.P.

 
Cinematographer John Bailey (Ordinary People, Groundhog Day et. al.) was one of the first  people I met and became friends with when I moved from NYC to LA in 1982. He was already well established in the movie business, along with his Oscar-winning film editor wife Carol Littleton. Both were movie aficionados like me, only calmer and more humble, less arrogant and self aggrandizing than I was.

Though a few months younger than me, I relied on John for advice and honest assessments of my various attempts to conquer Hollywood. He never made me feel anything but an equal. I had written my first screenplay back in New York based on my experiences in 1962 being stationed in the then last legally completely segregated state, South Carolina, when I was in love with a "black girl".

The script found lots of admirers who wanted me to write screenplays based on their ideas and projects, but no one would do a mixd-race lovers story then. So I tried to get it made myself, and John generously offered to shoot it for free. Others offered their services as well, and I was approached by the agents of the then little known Sean Penn and Kiefer Sutherland but didn't see them playing my 20-year-old self.

I never did get it made and became busy raising my two then only kids as a single parent and trying to make the rent and other life dramas and saw less of John over the years, but never forgot his kindness and gentleness with me. Unlike me, his artistic goal was to be invisible, for his work to serve the director's vision so seamlessly that you couldn't see a John Bailey signature style.

I can say though that he was most proud of his work on Paul Schrader's Mishima, the biopic about the controversial Japanese novelist that mixed day-of-his-death documentary style scenes with scenes from his earlier life and scenes from his fiction. John shot each of the three intersecting stories on three different film stocks and insisted I come to a screening of the film with the spliced film stocks before it all was distilled into one rendition. One of the greatest movie-going experiences of my life.

Condolences to Carol and all who knew and admired John.

VETERANS DAY

 
Me at 19 in February of 1962 with Murph, my buddy during basic training in Texas. I spent four years as a low rank enlisted man in the USAF (with one Court Martial and a ton of Article 15s (court martials without courts)). I write about it in my just about to be published new book: SAY IT AGAIN.

RANDOM TBT

 
Always liked this photo of Randolph Scott, who I had a boyhood crush on (and still do), and Cary  Grant in old Hollywood where they were roommates (and yes, there were rumors, still are).

NEW FAVORITE QUOTE

 "I think about the alternative lives of my characters all the time. But, as I did not live in fiction, I decided, soon after Vincent's death, to stop pondering the alternatives. What if belongs to fiction; what now, to this real life."     —Yiyun Li (The New Yorker 10/30/23)

HAPPY CELTIC NEW YEAR EVERYONE!