7.29.2012

RAT-HISTORY: Ben Jonson Says It To Yo Face

Ben Jonson.  The most erudite bad ass Briton ever had.  He survived execution for murdering another writer in a duel because of his literacy.  Ironically Ben Jonson's most famous line fronts the Shakespeare Folio 1, claiming William was not for his time, but for all time, and Jonson was more right than I'd wager he wanted to be.  It had to have been a pain on the heart to know his own work would survive on merit but thrive because he was connected to the Shake-Man.
Ben Jonson wrote like the smartest guy in the room.  Which is to say, he had little care for people as more than archetypes to score points off.  Ben Jonson called these archetypes "Humours" -- I don't know this as fact, because Aristophanes is beyond my speed, but Wikipedia says it's there; the work goes, Yeoman Steve, a farmer, is obsessed with the possibility that his wife is unfaithful to him; Doctor Milkmuff, a county physician, can not tell a lie.  Repeat synching these humours to your characters, and you have a cast of weirdos, the meeting of their traits make a great comedic play.  But these characters never change, they just walk on stage and rub a little of their sickness against the sickness of the other one.  
If Ben Jonson and Shakespeare were Disney characters, Ben would be a stubborn aggressive bulldog to Will's beautiful and devious cocker spaniel.  Shakespeare is so gorgeous, some of his dirtiest lines have become Jesus-inspirational completely out of context.  No one misreads Ben Jonson, he's so consistently hammering it down your throat.  But then Shakespeare never killed a dude.

7.26.2012

BRG/TNL/500: 9 Basement Tarragon


9. INSIDE THE CHURCH MEN MADE OF THEMSELVES FORGOTTEN ICONS: on cobbled ramparts mounted weapons poked through bashed out glass.  Three men lapped the improvised corridor they made from church to fire station.
The Lead Beard walked her to stone steps down.
This is the rectory.  He said.
I've never been in a church.
His eyes darker than the dark, his thin eyebrows furrowing under a moonbeam.  She came closer looking for the rest of his face, and he bumped into her as he pulled back on the door, and opened it.
THE TUNNEL they entered was strung with white Christmas lights.
Never been to a wedding?  He asked.
Not in a church.

7.22.2012

DEBUT: Rad Ricky

Rad Ricky is the self-proclaimed God of Script Doctors.  He's patched up every flailing dumb screenplay that later became a movie you didn't see in the theater, but did on Netflix.  Years of humping bad movies with his genius has left him bitter.  As such he wants to prove that hackwork is an art.  Below he stakes his claim with a REWRITE OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.

7.18.2012

AT WORK: Brockton Co-Lo

Where this empty spot of stone becomes an overdesigned and glorified equipment pad

7.05.2012

JOURNAL: Thanks For Reading And Why

+ Thank you for reading and looking at pictures.  Last month was the most viewed ever.  Blogs weren't around long before they became synonymous with failed artists and writers hoping to pump their inconsequential, amateur, and aborted works onto an unsuspecting and uninterested world of internet surfers.  There's good reason they are typecast this way.  But I found myself fascinated with them, and not so much for what purpose the bloggers themselves had for their posting, but for the workbooks grown gnarly over months and months, posts and posts.  It is one thing to take five years of work as an artist and organize it online, but quite another to have such a portfolio built organically day by day, trees before the forest.  And I felt like I wanted to do this; my thinking was that a few years of progressed work to parse through on this blog would be more enjoyable for me to work over than a stack of papers hidden in storage.  Had no one read it, I could still organize a magic shelf, particularly while on the road, with each idea, each location, time-stamped - each draft time-stamped.
+ I was at art school once.  And without irony I can say I was the worst photographer there.  Intimidated.  Insecure about the crappy camera I could afford to bring with me.  It is funny now, (and sad), that I can't, (now or then), walk twenty feet without being enamored of some image I could make out of angling power lines just so over a dilapidated building on the side of some country road, but when I look at the imagery on this blog, I know the reason for my progress is the desire to provide dynamic content for the book this blog is.  It's a fever to need to create, and the thing where this blog allowed me to resume some of that business, and to feel satisfaction, isn't in the images, or the stories, the scripts -- but the progress.  This is my workbook.  Imagining you reading it, whether you judge it good or bad, is fuel to me.  When a post goes up and dies there with little traffic coming in, like a roman consul I thumbs it down because of the crowd reaction.  But sometimes, months later, when without explanation that same post all of a sudden catches on, I'm re-fired.  Yeah!  I thought there was something there.
With readers, I can see my own mistakes, my shortcomings, in a way one can't see when one's burgeoning ideas are safely fortified by stacking up on a private hard drive.
So thank you.


7.01.2012

BRG/TNL/500: 8 The River Witch


HER FATHER was called Engel.  Engel the storyteller.  
8. HIS STORIES WERE TRICKS.
This she learned later.  Fairy tales to which he cast himself.  Always stories from before she remembered.  For a long time, too long, she believed his world stacked up.
He would say, Remember the farm, Maggie?  Remember how the old dirt road forked and to the left the road continued on along the river, and to the right rose up to our old farm?  Remember the rows of poplar that lined the road?  Remember the island in the middle of the river?  We could see it from your room.
And she would claim to remember this, and she meant it.  And none of it existed.
When he had her acknowledging the scene he painted was a true place, he made the leap:  And what lived on that island?
A Witch.