THIS Rhett Butler Will Never Die

not sure where to start, where to start, not sure, start, where, not... too many things, bit of a manic flood of emotions; fatigue, desire, boredom, whiplash, cracked mirror, muddy footsteps, lost cat, lost cat, lost cat... too many voices in my ears but none of them are saying anything that grabs me. it's all a buzz of whispers, crisp yet faint, misunderstanding what should have been said in exactitude. the moon is shining brightly, full somewhere in the spacedom tonight, but it's shine is sterile because the moon is dead vacant. there is no light in the moon. it's all a myth. our whole perception of reality is nothing more than myths that can't even blow in the wind because there is no air on the surface of the frozen moon. what good is that? we love to look at the moon, but she is nothing more than a frigid bitch. anyway, something pissed me off yesterday but it took until today to really fester and come up with a reason to want to rant. i really hate the comodific...

Some ideas about the influence of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on my Cemetery Girls photography project and story telling. The roots of my ideas of Cemetery Girls genuinely were buried in my subconscious, going back to memories of visits to cemeteries with my mother and grandmother during summer vacations in Ohio when I was a young boy. That is the very first place this idea came from. During the years of my deepest depression suffering from the troubles of being treated for bipolar disorder I spent 5 years in a cocoon of hibernation (it was really agoraphobia mixed with being over medicated and mis-medicated). That is when I became a devotee of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. During the years of first run episodes and when reruns went into syndication I watched a minimum of 4 hours of Buffy episodes every weekday. My schedule rotated around being awake in time to watch Buffy. This seriously went on for at least 5 years. I loved the story. I loved the characters. I loved the mythology. The s...

woke up just a short while ago, and not even coming out of a dream the very first conscious thought to surface in my mind was memory of a young woman that i briefly encountered when I was a student at UCSC back in 1998. her name was unusual, Guru Inder , given to her by hippie parents that had raised her while living on a Sufi ashram somewhere in the Santa Cruz mountains. she was one of those people that stick out in your mind, the first week of classes, as someone that is attractive and seemingly intelligent and you throw out a hope that somehow you'll get into a class that she's taking and that maybe you can become friends. well, two years after i had first seen her during the beginning events at the anthropology board to get all the students and professors acquainted, she faded into the mist of the student body and we never had a class together. not until my very last quarter. i had taken one other class by this professor, Steven Feld, a class in ethnomusicology and he h...

I've been wanting to write a bit of a formal paper explaining the influences that Buffy the Vampire Slayer (BtVS) has had on my Cemetery Girls project for some time now, but have floundered every time I've tried to start it. Part of where the desire to write this "paper" comes from was in wanting to offer an explanation to Juliet Landau (Drusilla, from BtVS) in my attempts to attract her into becoming a participant in the project. I probably misfired some of my ideas to her though in my personal communications because I vaguely referred to "her" as a subconscious influence on where my original inspiration for this photo project came from, when in reality, it is the "many girls" of BtVS that float around in my subconscious inspirational playgrounds and drawing boards. I would like to have an opportunity to photograph, not only Juliet but also any of the other actresses that were involved in Joss Whedon's masterpiece of pop-cultural reflections o...

Baudelaire, Block, and Bjork... Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

i did not have much determination stirred up to make today, Valentine's Day a miserable experience for myself. i am not in any sort of fresh heartbreak that could malaise up my day, and really, if it weren't for the inept platitudes that shallow minded Facebookers float out wishing every one of their contacts happiness today, i might have entirely forgotten that today was February 14th. fact is, i am a lover. i thrive on romance, whether it is my own or simply a lust for romance. and by my own i mainly refer to past experiences where i've felt affectations for another human. currently i am devoid of any emotions for any other physical being that lives in my realm of reality. a year ago, this wasn't so much the truth. last year i lusted for romance with a writer. long story and if you are a longtime reader of my blog, you probably know that i had "a thing" for Francesca Lia Block. i could write my own romance novel about all of the things that happened (and...

i think i'm finally starting to calm down a little bit from all of the angst of the past fortnight. doing the photo shoot with Keira on Thursday brought the recent strivings to a bit of a culmination. and that did not go anything like i had expected that it would, oh say one month ago when we finalized this shooting date. a month ago i was so much more serious and ambitious than i am right now. tonight, i don't care about what's going to happen next week. for that matter, i don't really care either that the photo shoot with Keira, the most expensive model i've ever worked with, was a flop. i think though that my ideas about hiring models has definitely changed. Mairead, from November made me think that hiring models was the ONLY way to go, she was so professional, spontaneous and energetic. a real delight to work with. Keira, well she felt cautious and a bit reheated to me. anyway, i could have given 3 lesser experienced models $50 a piece, gotten more time and prob...

And sometimes they are published in da newspaper! (San Francisco Chronicle, February 9, 2011) Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

ARTBEAT Newsletter - February 2011 click on link to view the newsletter! I was discovered by the editor of this newsletter after I submitted some of my Cemetery Girl photographs to the commission for their upcoming quarterly art display. Apparently they were overwhelmed by the amount of submissions made by Contra Costa County artists and I did not make the cut (only 6 slots were open). But this was the first time I have ever submitted my work to be displayed in an art show anywhere. So I'm pretty happy about being picked to be included in their monthly newsletter!

so i was hoping that after writing that vague description of what is fogging up my head and my heart and feet and hands (in that last post) i'd be able to write a very clear letter to one of these "new ghosts" that are churning up all this confusion in me. i've been trying to find the courage to write "her" this letter for months now actually, but every time i sit down and try to bring out my honest voice and say what it is i really want to say, i choke up. i know part of it is fear of hurting this person's feelings. another part of it is that the words i write to her will be received in total indifference, like she'll say to herself, "WTF, Darko... get on with your life and you get out of MY head too." That's the worse thing I fear, that if I write a 3,000 word letter getting all of my emotions out in explicit detail that she'll just go on with life as normal and STILL not respond to me. this is what makes me think this whole thing...

i really feel a need to shout. not necessarily to break something, nor to make waves of a tidal magnitude, but when i stomp my feet today some things may crumble. i'm hearing a lot of voices in my head lately and they are voices that are becoming stale because they say things but they don't act. they call my name and tease me but the faces that the voices belong to don't show up. contrarily, there are faces in my head who's voices i cannot hear any longer and yet their visages dance across the walls of my memories like shadows of the dead fading with the setting sun. i want both of these haunts to leave me alone. but how do i make them go away? the memory-people i think i have figured out. i write stories about them. since they refuse to interact with me as real people, in friendships (or even enemyships) as humans are wont to do, i have to find means to bring our unfinished business to a conclusion. it's a spiritual activity. spiritist, perhaps. maybe it's so...

Its a strange season in the world of people. If I were to call it by the name of one of earth's seasons I don't think I could. I'd have to come up with a new name for this season for it is a season where there are hopes for new friendships to spring to birth but it is also a season where hopes are dashed because old friendships fall and die. Really though, this is just the season of my lifetime. I am always going through this state of flux where I hope that today I will meet a new stranger that will dispel all of my old heartbreaks. I don't use the word heartbreak lightly, either. Loss of a friend, to me, is as miserable an experience as the loss of a lover. Worse though is the loss of hope that new friendships may be discovered. Each year it seems this is the growing drama of my life. I'm less able to maintain freindships and I'm less able to make new friends. This is not a fast and hard rule, because there are some spring blades in my life that ressurect, resu...