Heads Will Roll

Fugue State update and Homemade Superheros

2008-07-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

Jed and I have been madly (and I don't use the word loosely) producing Fugue State, my work-in-progress. A staged reading which Jed directed, this project just premiered to sold-out audiences here in San Francisco. Now, we're at it again, doing a two-night run at The Garage aka 975 Howard (ttp://www.975howard.com/) here in SF. The dates for our encore run are Weds. and Thurs. July 30 and 31st at 8 p.m. If you're in the 'hood check us out especially since the more people we get to show up the more we can pay everyone! Tix are cheap: $15 and $10 at the door. We'll also be showcasing parts of Fugue State at the SF Fringe Festival in September. So check out their website once we're closer to that date: http://www.sffringe.org/.

Jed was also busy working with Rocco a.k.a. Katastrophe (http://www.katastropherap.com/bio.html) on Homemade Superheroes (http://www.sfstation.com/home-made-super-hero-e346071). An amazing one-time show, according to SFStation.com Homemade Superheroes "draws a parallel between the double life of a super hero to the experience of a transperson." Jed did an incredible job on the animation for the project which was synced to Rocco's styling lyrics.

That'll do it for now.

Head Wound Podcast #6 - Flashpoint

2008-07-23T16:09:00.000-07:00

We final did it! In Head Wound podcast #6 we discuss the TV pilot episode of Flashpoint, a SWAT-team style show. Flashpoint is set and shot in Canada and stars Enrico Colantoni as the head of the Strategic Response Unit (SRU). Despite being filled with a few too many buff boys, we both agree that Flashpoint has some real surprises that make it a show to keep an eye on. We further discussed the chatter that Flashpoint, written by Canadian authors, may have emerged in response to the US Writers Guild strike. Given the success of this first episode (8.23 million viewers in the U.S. and 1.11 million in Canada), CBS is lurking around looking for more imported shows. Yet more outsourcing and potential union-busting tactics? For more information on Flashpoint:
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sniper_(TV_series); IMDb: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059475/; IMBd News: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059475/news#ni0264599.

The project

2008-05-12T10:02:00.000-07:00

Last summer I applied for a grant through the Queer Cultural Center (http://queerculturalcenter.org). Per usual, I need money. My project was to bring to life some of my characters from Fugue State my novel-in-progress. The impetus behind my application was lack of funds, the usual artist/writers state of affairs. I hadn't really thought about the project much. Actually, I heard someone at the required grant meeting, say that's what they were going to do. Sounded good and fundable. So I submitted my grant thinking that if I got the money, I'd pull something together for Queer Fest which was the venue for the grant. Well, in lieu of a grant, I was offered AIRspace, an artist-in-residency. On that day, last November, when I said yes I had no idea I'd be entering the writer's fifth circle of hell...

Watching

2008-05-11T12:53:00.000-07:00

Back in the dark and muffled sounds. Am practicing what was suggested: a period of stillness that has a length of about a half hour, then directly to writing. I am usually anchored in a tiredness that I am more familiar with than any other person, place of thing in my life. Oh well. It is as though I have to be plugged into because in there somewhere is the sourcing for my work. Speed in every machination you can apply here: methedrine, caffeine, excessive work, adrenalized relationships have merely postponed or rather suspended my return to...this. Perhaps I am just in a long, deep lifelong droop. Answer seems to be surrender into it which is like a giving way to quicksand. Perhaps this is why, as a kid, I was obsessed with and terrified by movie and TV scenes in which characters stumbled into quicksand. I'd study how they got out (not that they ever did or at least rarely). Holding onto branches, desperately grasping at ropes thrown to them. "Don't struggle, don't fight it," I heard someone or something tell me. So, except for two pots of black tea a day, I don't. I just sink. Into the still, heavy, thickness. Eyes barely open. I am half there in the dark. A pair of eyes, in a body. Staring out. Like all the other creatures in here. Some friendly, most not. Predatory, but still. Half dimmed. Until something or someone of interest enters into our range of vision. Then, we'll see.

A Good Anarchist Podcast is Hard to Find

2008-03-29T02:05:00.000-07:00

Yo. To mention the hour is unnecessary as it is late, late, late. I'm downloading any podcast that is even close to being anarchist. Want to get Under the Pavement, a UK radio station with a podcast, but no luck with the download. I always get seduced into thinking that this time, things will be different, that I'll get ahead. Usually it is some grant or something that Ive applied for and didn't get, but really it is just that ridiculous and evil American myth of class mobility that I've looped into. My partner always says that it it such a big myth in this country, the idea of class mobility that in Europe people have a very different idea about it. Basically, most Europeans have a clearer understanding that whatever class you're in, that's the one you'll stay in. I am lucky because, so far, I've remain pretty broke which keeps me searching for radical podcasts at 3 a.m. so that I can listen to them and feel sane. My favorite podcast right now (other than Veganfreak Radio) is The Angry Hippie podcast. You can find him on iTunes. As I was downloading random radical political podcasts, ones I am new to, I suddenly noticed that little yellow ball spinning next to the Angry Hippie podcast. I was signaling that he has a new one out. Thank fucking god. Now I can lay in bed and listen to him rant-and drag my fevered brain out of some stupid American myth.

Head Wound Podcast #5

2008-03-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

Well, we finally recorded and posted Head Wound #5. We hope you notice that we are getting more of a grip on what we're up to: crime, true and otherwise. In this podcast we discuss borderline personality disorders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder), the use of human hair in gifts to your exs, check-cashing corpses and milkshake-slurping snakes. We used Semi-Detached a Law and Order: Criminal Intent episode as an example of borderline personality disorder. We then chatted about the true crime story in Hell's Kitchen where two guys dragged around their pal's corpse in a wheelchair as they tried to cash his check. Gnarly even for Hell's Kitchen! Jed and I then wandered onto our creepy things section of our show. I was, per usual, a vat of misinformation about my thirsty snakes invading urban areas in such of sustenance. Turns out it wasn't in India, but Australia. Given how much rain we're having where we are, I wouldn't be surprised is I saw a few water moccasins moseying by. I am sure there are other things we rattled on about, but this will do for now.

What the Fuck

2008-03-25T03:00:00.000-07:00

With this insomnia thing I can only say "What the fuck." Grisly, most grisly of grislies. It's like being on the Posiedon, the 1972 movie in which a ship turned completely upside down. But unlike the awesome actor Shelley Winters who, with her lungs of steel, swam an amazing distance, I have weak lungs for insomnia. Good God almighty, it wreaks havoc with my creative life. Rare as it is nowadays, my entire life still gets tipped upside down and I am dumped into that ocean of night known so well to us insomniacs. No pleasant warm swim, no nice drifting in friendly waters, insomnia nights are cold, shark-infested seas fraught with frustrations, remorse as well as the compulsion to get a "real" job (you can imagine how dafted I must be to even be considering that last one). Ms. Static (that pesky feline who loves to disrupt my life in the darkened closet) is thrilled at my insomnia as she, being a nocturnal thing, is happy for the company. At least, being up, I don't have to worry about what she is doing while I am sleeping. This later point always bothers me: that I live with a creature who has sharp teeth, long nails and well, questionable motives. Afterall, how do I know that she doesn't consider me meat? Did I mention that paranoia is my legacy and that insomnia is it's cure? I mean, if I'm always up, then I can be alert to whatever I need to be alert to. Not that I know what that is, but hay I'm prone to paranoia that fear of whatever the fuck might be going on without my knowledge.

Last night, the insomnia moved on to God only knows where. I will not curse it as I am, well, paranoid that is will come back and get me. And it always does. What the fuck.

Onward into the fray...

Broke-ass writer reporting in

2008-03-12T13:36:00.000-07:00

Hay,

Since my last blog much has evolved. I've gotten out of the closet. I do not mean the metaphorical one as in coming out as oddly queer. That I did LONG time ago. I'm talking about my actual darkened closet, the one I've been I was writing in. I don't know when I started writing in there again or when I stopped. I am sure that the relentless desperation, morose feelings and fear of failure that hound my creative impulses had something to do with going in there. Whether or not they were culpable in my falling out of there...well, let us assume until further notice, that they did. I take no responsibility for the ebbs and flows of my writing patterns. Well, actually I do, but I should know better. Because no matter how much I create writing schedules they all crash into me. We roll around on the floor, get swept into depression, slither into God only knows what rat-hole of my personality and...then here I am again. "Where have you been?," a queer-punk girl once asked me when I wandered into San Francisco's only girl punk cafe. "Have I been somewhere?" I asked. I looked at her through the fog of my brain. And that's the way it goes. I do my creative work with rigor and a discipline then I slip away into the void where we artists go. Sometimes I know I've fallen in or out, I never know which. When I know I'm gone, I don't like it in there. I even try to get out. But can't. And then. Bam. I'm back, might even know that I've been gone. And I get a little more work done. Right now, I'm sitting in our new office ("Our" is Heads Will Roll Films). There is more light in here, but fortunately, there are shades I can pull and a door I can close. So that the next time I slide into the void and am "gone missing" at least I won't have to answer anymore awkward questions about where was I because no one will hopefully notice I was here in the first place.

My external obsessions: at 3 a.m. they are peanut butter on bananas of right off the spoon, handfuls of raisins and anything else sweet which, in my place, is very little. I remain obsessed with the all things Needles and Pens (http://www.needles-pens.com). I want to get a copy of "My Penguin" Dracula (http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141033471,00.html) which has a blank cover, one that you can draw or paint on. Ryan Adams, the musician, did an awesome splotchy-type painting of Dracula's castle on his copy. I want that too.

Dislocations

2008-01-08T13:48:00.001-08:00

I have begun to worry and thought I'd put my concerns out into the darkness of the internet. For isn't a problem shared a problem cut in half?

So here's my trouble: you know when you suddenly enter darkness or are thrown into pitch black, that, all you can see is blackness? But, if you wait, and shapes begin to appear? You begin to see the outlines of things—chairs, lamps, bookshelves or, if coutside, garbage bins or the boats by the water. This return of vision, night vision I suppose it is, calms your pounding heart. It gives you a sense of orientation, control and power that you can now negotiate your way through the area.

But lately, when I am in my own darkened rooms or other inky places, I've noticed flickers, shapes of things that are not apart of the normal landscape. They do not evolve out of the darkness into chairs, garbage cans even rats. In fact, they do not evolve at all. No matter how much I blink my eyes or command them to focus, my orbs refuse to bring me clarity. As if this wasn't fretful enough. But what I find even more worrisome is that lately even in the bright of day I am seeing flickers of forms, movements of some things dark, unclearly shapened, things that should not be there in my rooms or even in the questionable environs I find myself in.

I will be honest. I am heavily medicated. I've wondered if this visual aberration wasn't a side effect of one of the various neurological drugs I must take. But the seeing of things not there is not listed in the copious side effects on the small-print inserts that come with my prescriptions. When I mentioned my concern to Dr. Panchek, he barely glanced up from my chart. He merely snapped it shut and moved the conversation on to how I liked my new abode.

"Rats," I said. "There are rats in the alley outside my window."

"And how do you know they are there?" Dr. Panchek asked. I knew what he meant. How could I tell the difference between real and imagined was what he was getting at.

"By the bites," I said and left it at that.

to be continued...
Wickie

Threatening artists

2008-01-04T23:54:00.001-08:00

Insomnia. Runs in the family. As do other maladies.

Currently I am doing what artists do, trying to cover the bills. This need has lead me or rather driven me to every conceivable kind of work. I've cleaned alligator meat as well as toilets, washed dishes, cleaned toilets again, then houses, cat sat and did I mention cleaning toilets? There are all these theories of the artist as a cultural threat, a subversive. I don't know what I think about that. Perhaps I am too busy like most artists just trying to pay my bills and not get evicted. The occasional wealthy lover helps, but then that brings its own can of worms (those I've never cleaned. Not yet.) Maybe this notion of being a social threat has to do with too many of us sucking up all the food stamps, as though we were able to even get them. I got them when I was in Boston. They gave me about $40 a month. In San Francisco, I had to stand in about a block-long line, then go through a metal detector, then wait with hundreds of other indigents for about eight hours, be treated like scum by the worker and finally get rejected. Or maybe artists are a threat to society because we are draining the free health clinics (the ones that are left) of all their services. I've used them in Boulder, Colorado, Boston, Massachusetts, North of Boston and San Francisco,California. I sat for hours in crowded waiting rooms. When finally called, it was not unusual for the staff to talk to me (it always seemed incredibly loudly) right in the waiting room about very private health matters. Privacy really is a privilege. Or maybe this idea of the artist as a social threat comes from the times when they cut off my electricity (or when I couldn't pay for heating oil) and I used candles to light my room or I kept the gas jets going on my stove to stay warm. Maybe us artists have caught too many places on fire so that's why we're considered dangerous. We're pyromaniacs. So, the next time you see what looks like an artist —some broke-ass, worn-down-shoed motherfucker—slouching your way, you better run. Because we might rob you because we've just been rejected for food stamps, take a chunk out of you because we're hungry or we just might burn down your place to try to get warm.
Wickie

The importance of accents over E's.

2007-12-11T13:31:00.001-08:00

My apologies for the delay in getting this up. I got bogged down writing a blog on ergodic literature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergodic_literature). Hope to get that to you later.

These are my recent radio meanders: since my iBook stopped accessing Pirate Cat Radio (http://www.piratecatradio.com/), I've been listening to Vegan Freak Radio (http://veganfreakradio.com/). Simultaneously, I been trying to find an anarchist podcast /radio show. I found Under the Pavement (http://www.underthepavement.org/) out of Manchester, England. But, so far, I've not heard any news from them, only some music some of which horrified me as it was bad almost American disco. In fact, I think it was both American and disco although they did have some good stuff in there too. No news or interviews yet. I can't say this is their fault as they are only every other week and 8 hours later than my time zone. Am currently listening to Radical Radio (http://radicalradio.org/). I can already feel my eyes (and my mind) glazing over. Even though I was once a member of Line of March, a Marxist-Leninist organization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Communist_Movement), even then (the 1980's), I was never really able to understand what the fuck people were talking about or keep my attention away from just wanting just slit my throat, get high, or just generally kill myself. Not that I have self-destructive tendencies. I just turned off Radical Radio and will turn back to Vegan Freak. I can listen to it (and do) for hours on end. I can actually do this since I am a latecomer to the podcast and have lots of back episodes to cycle through. Because of their podcast as well as some zine I seem to have recycled (FUCK!), I am aiming my brain towards the SHAC 7 (shac7.com/index.htm). What the hell is that mess all about?

On the book front, I have Thirteen Stories by Eudora Welty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_Welty) on my chair (not that I've read them). "Why I Live at the P.O.," comes highly recommended. I have managed to eke my way through a few more pages of China Miéville's (http://wwwhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Mieville) Perdido Station. That brings me up to page 313, leaving me only approximately 400 pages to go. At this rate, I'll finish it in about five years. ARGH!!!! But a greater accomplishment than completing Perdido is my ability to place an accent over the "e" in China's last name. This is no small feat, especially since I have now launched Monstre Sacré my "handyman to the damned" service. More will be revealed on this at a later date.

My recent music interests have veered into The Residents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Residents) then stumbled across Lou Reed's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Reed) newest release (I think) Hudson River Wind Meditations. This last one, a huge departure for Reed, is great to listen to late at night. It started to feel like the soundtrack to some crazed slasher movie, although I might be a rarity in making this connection to this "new age" effort of Reed's as I find most things menacing.

There are many more things I could dive into, as I suffer from obsessions, but I have to get this fucking up.
Wickie

Spiders and flies

2007-10-22T12:00:00.001-07:00

"I was brought here by flies," I said in my sleep. This was not a mere assertion from a demented mind. (We'll skip that discussion for now.) It was a demonstrative statement of fact. Periodically, I come up with these announcements—and frequently in the company of my boyfriend. These notions (or pronouncement as my partner likes to call them) come in the space between waking and sleeping. Grisly and spooky, this business of sleeping.

There were a couple of things I mentioned on our podcast

Head Wound

that I said I'd put on our blog. One was the website for my pal Patrick who is the dad of Magenta, the tarantula and also a writer (not Magenta, but Patrick. I don't think Magenta can write. Although if she could, I would be quite interested to hear what she has to say.) Patrick's website is:

www.patrickletellier.com

. Currently, Magenta has no website, although she should. Patrick says he'll forward me a picture of Miss M. When he does, I'll give you the link. I also mentioned a cool zine that I liked. Called

Bug

, it is written by Bryan Kring. (

http://www.kringdesign.com/books

) He's got some really interesting zines on his website—

Peephole

Wart

and

Specimen

—that I plan on getting. When I do, I'll let you know what I think. But definitely pick up

Bug

. It's cool, creepy and well done. I bought

Bug

at Pens and Needles, here in SF (

http://www.needles-pens.com/home.html

). Pens and Needles

has DIY goods, great zines and magazines and a great gallery.

Wickie

In the dark

2007-10-01T14:59:00.000-07:00

per usual. Working to increase my time in here creating. Nasty business this practice of tale telling. Certainly not my agenda as I would be content catching and snacking on the random fly that wanders by. But work I must. We bleak children need to tell our tales. So. First, get out of bed. (Or drag your computer or pens into the bed.) And just do five minutes. None of this carrot on a stick. It is flies, kiddy kiddies that we seek. Oh, I forgot. I don’t eat flies anymore. Or only here and there. For I am a wounded thing and meat tires me. So it is the fake fly on a stick that awaits me. I leave the live ones to...her.
Wickie

I sleep with

2007-09-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-09-24T23:24:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-09-24T12:18:00.000-07:00

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!

2007-09-23T17:18:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-09-23T17:01:00.000-07:00

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