a bucket of blood [1959]

 

it's sweltering here!  we are having a heatwave.  an unseasonable trough of hot air parked itself over the west coast & man does it feel like summer.  today's high was in the high 80s F [31 C].  we even turned on the AC!  horrors!!!  so what does one do when it is hot hot hot?  open a couple of cold beers & watch movies of course.

this pic is a study of economy & scale.  shot in five days with a meager budget of about a buck & a quarter roger corman was tasked by American International Pictures to make a horor movie.  corman did, but he also created a brisk black comedy of manners, artistry, artists, & beatnik culture.  the great character actor dick miller plays walter paisley, a slow, goofy dude who works as a busboy at a beatnik coffeehouse called The Yellow Door.  paisley is enthralled by the bohemians that inhabit this place.  he wants to be part of their scene.  paisley is also crazyinsane over a fellow coworker at The Yellow Door, the lovely carla, played by barboura morris.  

but how to impress carla & these bohemians?  why, get a chunk of clay & make a sculpture.  but paisley doesn't know how to create a figure from clay.  after a dreadful night slopping coffee cups & emptying ashtrays paisley goes home to his flea-rotten SRO, takes out his slab of clay, & tries to make a face.  frustrated by his ineptitude paisley accidentally kills his landlady's cat, who found itself stuck between two walls.  hey now!  paisley comes up with the brilliant idea to hide the dead cat by covering it in clay.  but now, paisley has a sculpture he calls DEAD CAT.  with the knife he killed it with still stuck in it!

the beatniks, & carla, are gaga over DEAD CAT.  they surround paisley, call him a genius, & want more of his statues.  inspired paisley goes on a killing spree.  the artist as serial killer.  geez, what a trope!  at any rate, corman created one helluva morality tale peppered with moments of extreme black humor with a script by charles b. griffith.  corman wastes not a millimeter of film stock & gets maximum bang for his budget of a buck & a quarter.  the running time is a brisk 66 minutes.  morris is quite lovely & is excellent in this flick.  there's a bit more to the plot than this brief review notes.  such as a subtext of a demimonde drug world that is infiltrated by undercover cops.  or how art as a means of production is a mere commodity to by bought & sold.  or how fame will distort, pervert & make obscene the objects of adoration but also  the people upon who they adore.   clever for what was supposed to be a cheap drive-in horror movie.  

& then but still, the heatwave is still going.  tomorrow the high will be similar to today.  the first day of spring is tomorrow, friday, but man it seems, right now, we skipped spring on started on hard summer.  oh, i'm not complaining.  my walks have been extremely pleasurable.  i love it when i see people outside, at restaurants, walking their dogs, walking, jogging, skateboarding, the whole electric dynamism of living.  & summer, at least, should be hotter than the surface of the sun.  at least it is a dry heat!  

check out a bucket of blood!

bad poems

i have written many bad poems

i expect to write many many more bad poems before i am thru & can't do it no more

either because i died or incapacitated somehow 

like a stroke or something but then i think of old whitman living in his splendid squalor in camden, nj where he suffered several strokes & was still the great good grey poet

it is said that whitman's house was so messy with his papers everywhere it was an astonishing thing to experience & yet the poet was able to extract the exact item he needed when he needed it

great feats of whitmanic bravura he made his life into a poem

still, i am committed to my own minor domestic bohemia & i pledge to stay the course in writing bad poems

my only criteria are to not be boring or dull but create a poetics like a punk rock guitar solo where the damn notes go screechy & yet stay within the song & as another song goes lend me your ear & i'll sing you a song but i will most likely sing out of key

being the old punk i am odi et amo until all the goddamn wheels fall off

i will write bad poems

where the streets are paved with poems

 

quote unquote

 life in poetry

it's not what you say as a poet, it's how you live as a poet.

-tom clark

being a poet is not writing a poem but finding a new way to live.

-paul lafleur [thru eileen r. tabios]

i'm in deep

 

infra baudelaire

 

street poetics

 

landward ho!

 

sunset spring

 

dream diary

 what the hell do i make of this one

i arranged an interview with mike ness of social d except that he parried my attempts to meet so i found my self in a park with anna waiting for mike to appear he avoided our meet date & time & sent in his place a VHS tape of a local Sac band that had been grooving on i watched the tape & agreed that the band whose name escaped me now was kickass but still anna & i waited for mike in a public park 

when i saw me yes me across the park walking toward who knows what the me across the park looked at us & smiled as if he were caught in some clandestine affair 

when he reached the trees he was gone from sight

i know you saw that i said to anna to which she answered yes i did

so then i saw me myself in a public park we saw me across the way in a public park waiting for mike ness so i can interview the punk rocker

& i don't which me is writing this right now

stagediving

it is when you find yourself onstage

perhaps next to the guitarist

or the singer 

the marshall stacks like a brick wall behind you

& the crowd below stage

dilates into a single eye

such movement

beyond sound or dance

but a dance within dance

where you go

off the proscenium 

like crossing the event horizon

of a black hole

into the singularity