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Another Batshit Birthday
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Stormy
- Hits: 1813
On the way to the East Shore with M**, the waitress at work who's been turning up some very interesting rocks, we're going rockhounding together.
Waiting, in line at the Ferry, and who should saunter up but my good friend Batshit, grizzled, sunglasses, he pops his head through the window to inform us that it's his birthday...
"But you just had your birthday last week" I exclaim, and remind him of the pack of cigarettes and bottle of Fireball, and he smiles slyly, changes the conversation to his art in progress, he's been dropping off random pieces at the restaurant for me, and can he have a couple of cigarettes?...
His got his tales, anecdotes, the time he smuggled Mick Jagger into a Stones concert, tales about his designs for the Black Panthers, how the Cosa Nostra in Palermo funded DeVito's movie "Get Shorty", about how the Birdman of Alcatraz always made sure he had the best India Inks, how Marilyn really died of Graves's disease...
...and he's promised me a wonderful painting of Sophia Loren from when she posed naked for him when she was 38, it'll be dropped off soon, and it's keeping me on the hook...
His art, the latest batches, an page torn from "The Jumpstart Recipes", another frontpiece from an old book, Jane Austin, only he's colored over her and made it into something else, cryptic mirror-writing statements that have to be read in reverse, puzzles - maps, - Kokanee Creek Park - fantastically ornamented with instructions and directions, any piece of paper he finds he turns somehow into something he can give me and pass for art, rocks, wood, even, and there are more references to his personal mythology, "The Man from La Mancha" - he himself as Don Quixote, all of it combines as a personal map of his eccentricity, I say eccentric because I'm not entirely sure he's crazy...
Journey to Ixtlan
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 1728
Picked it up in a free bin at the dump, needed some easy reading to get back in the habit of novels and longer reads.
Good, after it's fashion - while I'm wary of Castaneda - most of his writings, passed off as true, were later called into some question (amazing they weren't questioned at the time) - but, like a lot of writers his fiction is a means of expressing a deeper metaphysical or metaphorical truth. And despite the queer circumstances of his later life (read the Wiki here and The NY Times and Salon on his legacy), it was worth giving him the chance - don't judge the book by it's author, as it were. Vaguely inspiring.
Batshit's Birthday
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Stormy
- Hits: 1999
It's Batshit's birthday, and he's outside the restaurant waiting for the Ferry. I sit down to talk with him, he's still working on my nude - not the one I requested, but another he thinks just as good, a couple, and he's showing me pictures. And we're talking and he lets me know that it's Sophia Loren's birthday coming up, and he'll be going away to visit her for it, and he had a little leather purse made for her to honor the occasion...
And I admire it, because it's proof, in his mind, of their acquaintance, and a lot of money to spend on somebody if you don't know them to honor their birthday...
I've googled him, his real name ("Batshit"'s mine), and found no references. It's unique enough that somewhere, somehow, he should exist online. But he doesn't.
The next day he drops off the paintings (drawings) - and I would post them here, but for this disclaimer I discovered in the corner of one page:
So I'm bound. Damn. Because his stuff - it's good, great, in that outsider/mental-health sort of way. In future I'll content myself with describing it - large breasted women, photocopies, collages, found objects (posters, cards, flyers, etc), pencil-crayon, felt marker, mixed media. Absolutely nuts.
But there's something curious about them I'd like to share - and that's the reference to Baron Munchhausen. It's made again in these artworks, and - for those who don't know, Baron Munchhausen was famous for telling elaborate lies and exaggerations about his supposed adventures. Which hints to me that he's got self-knowledge, you only need the education and similar points of reference to make sense of it - he knows, and he's telling me - and without it I knew, but in this we're probably on the same page...
I will support him further, I'm his newest and favorite admirer - for the moment - and, should I collect enough of them I'd love to arrange a gallery showing - with the artist in attendance. This is Nelson, after all, and This is Fantastic.
A shimmering blue carpet in my fathers room
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1684
Strange dreams...
I'm on a pier above a muddy pool filled with people, children, I fall (or jump) off, somehow the people all part, I land in it, 5 feet deep, up to my chest, enough to break my fall, and there's some things on me that I shouldn't have gotten wet...
...on my father's front step with the children, disabled, street kids, people, all from the neighborhood, didn't know he knew so many people...
...and now, up several flights of stairs, a wooden rail on the side, top floor of the house, my father's room, a shimmering blue carpet, warmly furnished and lit, in the bedroom but there are passages leading off from it to I don't know where. I'm blocked from entering by the railing, but one of the street kids has crawled over and somebody is passing him instruments, a banjo, a fine old guitar, other instruments that are being put away in it, I didn't know he played...
***
I'm in an empty restaurant in the middle of the Playa, more a corporate boardroom, I have a single table, we're joking about how empty the place is, and I offer them entertainment, perhaps we can arrange something outside (everywhere outside there is only desert...), my son, daughter, some other children are out in the desert, they oblige, in the middle of the Playa there is a hole, an opening into an underground bunker, down the center of which runs a metal pipe affixed to which is a ladder hung by a small metal hook, taking a set of shears (the same the homeless man was advertising to the people at the bus stop) he reaches into the hole with them to snip the wire...
"NOOO" I tell him, looking into the bunker, it's hundreds of feet deep with unrailed levels every few meters, I can see my daughter beneath in the bunker, walking too close to the edge on one of the levels, around the rubbish and boxes, always on the bottomless edge side, and I'm yelling down the hole to her not to walk too close to the edge and trying to stop the boy from snipping her only means of escape...
(***Note: Weird dreams, and I've only remembered a few of the images...)
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