THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

Happy Halloween! Originally uploaded by daryldarko Shot this Saturday afternoon at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland after I finished my photoshoot with Lucie . I will make another blog entry shortly with some amazing news!

These are photos I took at the house that Eugene O'Neill lived in here in Danville, California. I visited the site the day after his birthday this year. He would have been 119 years old if he were still alive. Click the image to see the full set of photographs. (Soon, I will have some very exciting information to share with you!)

there will be things that you just can't get someone to help you with. case in point: my efforts over the past year to find someone that lives in the Boston area to visit Eugene O'Neill's gravesite in Jamaica Hills, and obtain a handfull of dirt for me. so today i found inspiration to improvise. i called the National Park Service on Monday to make a reservation for a tour of Eugene O'Neill's house, here in Danville. i wanted to go yesterday because it was his birthday yesterday, but they only give tours Wednesday through Sunday. today had to suffice. yesterday would have been a great day to go too because it rained yesterday. the forecast for today was sunny skies. oddly, it actually rained this morning and there were cloudy skies. i got a call at 10am from the park service confirming a spot in the 12:30 tour for me. i scrambled together my camera gear because i wanted to get lots of photos. i'm working on those now as we speak and they will be up on my flickr a...

I am much more familiar with the life and works of Eugene O'Neill. For one thing, he lived not more than 6 miles from where I live in Danville, California . He spent his last productive years here when he wrote his greatest works. Eugene Gladstone O'Neill (October 16, 1888 – November 27, 1953) was a Nobel-prize winning American playwright. More than any other dramatist, O'Neill introduced American drama to the dramatic realism pioneered by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg, and was the first to use true American vernacular in his speeches. His plays involve characters who inhabit the fringes of society, engaging in depraved behavior, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations but ultimately slide into disillusionment and despair. O'Neill wrote only one comedy (Ah, Wilderness!): all his other plays involve some degree of tragedy and personal pessimism. http://nobelprize.org/nobe...

October 16 I am very embarrassed to admit that I am not entirely familiar with the works or life of this brilliant Irish writer. Maybe I'll actually take time today to read some of his works, buck up a bit, eh? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_wilde http://www.cmgww.com/historic/wilde/ http://www.todayinliterature.com/biography/oscar.wilde.asp

it's ok. i'll just enjoy this fantasy... *sigh*

Here is my blog posting from 11 months ago, when this whole concert photography thing got started... Exactly 11 months to the day later I had my Spin Magazine gig. Thank you Robin Slick! If it were not for the friendship that I developed with Robin after she made this initial comment my career as a concert photographer would never have begun. ____________________________ November 9, 2006 last night fortune smiled upon me again and i won tickets to a show at Slim's in San Francisco. it was a show i would have been happy to purchase a ticket to attend, but finances and the fact that i should have been in class last night urged my better sense to not indulge. thank you fates for changing the course of my life, yet again. seeing Adrian perform last night was a phenomenal experience. there was one person between me and him i was that close to the stage. oh, and i am done using my phone cam to document concerts that i attend when i could very well have been using my "real camera...

Last week a very good friend of mine, Muhammad Asranur, a local concert photographer of increasing reknown, asked me if I would like to shoot a concert for Spin Magazine. I knew that he had done this gig for them before and asked why. He said that he was covering the concert for another magazine and that he couldn't submit the same photographs to both. So the door opened for me. I wrote to Spin a couple of months ago asking if I could shoot for them. At that time I didn't realize that they only gave assignments to one photographer in each of the cities that they do their "It Happened Last Night" feature for, and I never heard back from them. That wasn't until last Thursday when I got the following email: So, this is a perfect example of how "who you know" really works in the world. I met Muhammad at a concert at Slim's last November. We had both won "trivia contest" tickets to see a performer that neither of us were really interested in see...

here is the blessing that Clive wrote upon my working manuscript. i meditate on these thoughts every time i sit down to work on my novel. i told him that i would not come to see him at an event again until i had a copy of my novel to give him as a gift. alas, he will be signing his newest book in L.A. in two months and i so badly want to see him. i am not sure what i will do.

Next to Susan Henderson and Robin Slick, Clive Barker is the most important writer in the world to me. I first discovered his literature when I read EVERVILLE; THE SECOND BOOK OF THE ART in 1997 while I was a student at UCSC. A year later I met him in person in Berkeley. He is the only author that I have ever met or felt like meeting. Aside from Susan and Robin, he is probably the only author that I will go out of my way to meet again. I met him again in 2004 in San Francisco and went to extreme efforts to be the last person in line to speak with him. I needed to tell him the story of the discovery of the idea of, and the writing of my novel. I had brought my transcript (notes and research) with me and asked him to give me his blessing. He wrote an inscription on the inside cover of my notebook and posed for photos with me. Clive has also written and directed films, some of which are extremely scary ( Hellraiser , Lord Of Illusions , and Nightbreed ) and one of which is one of my all ...

the telling of this story is for a young friend of mine. rather than cram it into her Facebook wall, i thought it might be better to offer it up here where there is a little more room for expansion and who knows, others might find it of interest. i was a strange person in high school. i had two personas; star athlete and campus jesus freak. i also did not do well in my studies, never had a girl friend, and laid the foundations for being the loner that i am today. when i say "campus jesus freak" i mean that if you were to ask anyone that went to my high school during the years that i was there, i would be the person that people would remember the most as being a freak about jesus. i started a movement there within a month of becoming a student at Monte Vista High School in Danville, California. today i have regrets about how the fervor i experienced and spread infected the thinking and behavior of those i then tried to lead to believe what i believed. how many lost souls there...

a few days ago one of my parakeets (Draven) started to show signs of ill health and i became worried that she would quickly fall over dead, just like Merricat did several months ago. i was upset by the idea of her suffering and followed an instinct that i developed awhile ago. i've thought many times of opening the window of their room and just letting them fly away. when i used to let the birds fly freely in their room they were so happy. but the mess got unmanageable and now we have a second cat in the house - a creature i don't really like, or trust. so after watching Draven's condition worsen over about 3 days i took action. i caught her and opened the bathroom window and let her fly off. it was around 5pm and the sky was a lovely color and the air was warm. with the thick foliage outside though, i almost immediately lost sight of her. i went outside to see if i could see where she had gone. not that i had changed my mind and was going to catch her and bring her back in...

hahaha, that title may make you want to read more...!! ok, i read a book many, many years ago. it was written in the 70's (so i probably read it in the 80's). it was about experiments that psychics in Russia performed. the experiement that stuck in my mind was how, using their mental powers and registering a belief that "all things have happened before", or that future events are already established and that we are just living out our existences in a sort of déjà vu mode. like we are "remembering the future". so what they did was to go into quasi-meditative states of mind and found out what the next days winning lotto numbers were going to be. and it worked! they were repeatedly able to determine what the winning numbers were going to be. since it was a scientific, government funded study they stopped the experiment shortly after it succeeded. this has stuck in my mind all these years though. i've had plenty of other philosophies in my head about "w...