Two New Books

In the morning yesterday, when I left my apartment in Jersey City to work in the city, it was humid, hot and sultry; if you were a mold who likes wet and hot spaces, complete sex (like my kitchen sink). By the early evening it was cooler, I would say the light was like the inside of an oyster shell, silver and smooth.

In New York, nice days, pretty days are kind of rare as of late. The winter was unrelenting, an onslaught of heartless cold, relentless rain and a cruel arctic wind, enough to make one cry. "Spring" seemed to be still born and til the last day of June....this chaos has been continuing.

Yes, its warmer now, but the weather suffers us with bipolar bitchiness. 82 and sunny to suddenly 66 and a rainstorm.

So when it's nice outside, I prefer to stay outside. Roaming around, seeking treasures and inspirations. I stopped at Borders with a hungry need to pillage the bargain aisles. You always find a few of the same books there: King Arther, Van Goph, Horses, Irish Castles, and Origami Kits.

Mostly shit people buy as gifts for coworkers they hardly know.

But yesterday, I actually spent some time rifling and found two great books:

The Drawings of Gustave Dore : Illustrations to the Great Classics

Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies, Russ Kick

Gustave Dore (1832-1883) did illustrations for Paradise Lost, Don Quixote, The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen, Aesop's Fables, fairy tales, The Raven, The Divine Comedy, and others. Dore was a paid artist at the age of 17 in France. His work is pretty meticulous and gorgeous, what's even more exciting is that the text that accompanies the images are also here.

This book is really a great find for many reasons. The essays are written by a plethora of different people with varied view points. The information in the book isn't singing the same old tune, it's not trying to be smart, cute, or stylish. They are serious informative essays written by serious minds. Also the paper its printed on is sweet. Ignore the pop cover.

I think it already has inspired me with the idea to write an essay "in response too". As I read the essays, I will write my thoughts here and see if that goes anywhere.

You can go to the authors site here: disinfo.org

And for the record, its now pouring outside and overcast...again.

Lazy Sunday Pencil Doodle

skull, morels, pansy, and caterpillar. eternity.

Waiting Lions in Jersey City

I was walking down Erie St, when I saw this magical vision.

New Painting - THE GATE

This was a Birthday gift. The painted scene is recreated in oil paints from the Birthday-ee's first demo cd cover art.

Oil painted clouds on reclaimed fashion magazine print paper. Hand drawn "Phooka" figure on shrinky dink paper, baked in ink.

The "phooka" is a character created by Brian Froud. An illustration I have loved since I was very small. I redrew it freehand for this.

"Phooka", Brian Froud









White painted wood frame, vintage hardware found in the Adirondacks, vintage key found in Los Angeles.

Title: The Gate

Part I : The Mark - Short Fiction by Mers

This is the start of a novella. No title yet. I'm thinking 5 parts.


Part I : The Mark

There was a loud darkness to my right, a vacuum filling my ears with space, time, and other things I didn't understand. I closed my eyes.

When I opened them the tv was on but the images I was starring at became slow moving, unfamiliar shapes and sounds. I looked down at my knees, they appeared strange, amputated, dough colored twin rolls of flesh with tiny blond hairs. I couldn't feel my feet or the ground beneath them, or even remember what the rug beneath my feet looked like. The sunlight on my legs appeared solid enough to physically touch it.

I swallowed and the vacuum released my ears. I turned to the right, where the deafening grew out of. I realized there was someone to my left as well, but they didn't matter right now.

In front of me, the hallway was dark, a cold air was radiating with a musky dry smell, like stale earth from under a house. A memory pricked my mind. I was small, opening the tiny door that led under the house, under the porch, the dirt was dry, caked, webs, the smell of stagnation, boxes filled with my baby toys and clothes, half buried brass shot gun shells in the grey earth, DTD containers...

A hard clacking in the hallway began. Slowly I understood it was something walking, but the hardness of the steps on the wood I had never heard before. I waited, sweating.

A shadow came forth, only slightly lighter than the dark, a large head like a water buffalo with silver eyes floated above thin, hairless, dark skinned shoulders and chest of a thin man. Hot air was climbing in thick shrouds from its large glistening nose and the room became cold.

My body stood up from the couch it took slow steps forward. I started to panic, but I couldn't breathe, I couldn't scream, I watched in morbid ecstasy as it got closer and closer. Wake up! Wake up! I shouted in my head.

"This, is not sleep". A low voice said.

I cringed. The lips of the animal did not move.

It extended its arm and in it's human hand was a small coin. It pressed it against my chest, where the heart lives. For a few seconds nothing happened, but then a painful pressure went through my flesh, in between my ribs as if the fingers were growing inside me.

A strange gurgling scream crawled up my throat and finally I was screaming, my mouth open in a awkward slack then everything became black. I heard a dull thud.


"What happened? Are you ok? Hey!" The person to my left had been Frederick, he was touching my shoulder. I remembered now. I thought about having sex with him. I thought about waiting on the subway platform together late at night, they way he put on deodorant. "Hey! Say something!"

I realized I was supine on the floor. "Bed."

He picked me up, and put me on my bed. I rubbed my face slowly. After awhile I said, "I think I had a weird dream."

"But you weren't asleep, you mean a day dream? You looked really strange."

This, is not sleep. I shivered. "No, I mean, maybe it was a hallucination." I explained what I saw, what I felt, what I heard and then when I talked about the coin, I hastily opened my buttoned up shirt.

There on my left breast, was a discolored disc of purple with faint flecks of red. I got up and went to the mirror on the closet door. I started to feel light headed.

"What? So then what happened? What is that?" He looked pale and worried.

I explained.

"Do you think, I mean its fucking crazy..."

We stood there and debated whether or not the coin could be there, inside my organ, squeezed in between valves and folds. No, of course not. That's stupid. Then, we debated the reality of my daydream, where the bruise could have came from until we were exhausted, and laid down on the bed together.

I've known Frederick for a few years. We had met in an alley, both trying to find solace from the drinks we had consumed and from the people we had arrived with. People who made us act and feel who we were not so we drank and drank to get to that hot point where it didn't matter, and everyone was our brother, and we were just animals, living. But that night, we had both drank too much, we both had acid reflux and we both drank whiskey and cheap beer, something not soothing to burning acids and internal sick flesh.

He had came with coworkers, and I had come with a guy I had met on the subway and his friends.

I was trying to puke inside a small recess in the tall brick building, but it was all dry heaving and dribbles of foamy bile. I gave up and leaned on the wall, in the dark, trying to imagine how I was going to get home without Darren coming with me while my vision bounced around.

I heard the door of the bar slam, and slow footsteps came towards me.

Someone blurry, tall and in black clothing. He stopped in front of me and unzipped his pants.

I jumped up as the realization someone was going to piss on me sobered me up. He screamed and grab his pants and tumbled back onto the cobbled alley. He stared at me, groaned with embarrassment then started to moan, holding his head.

"There was no lock on the bathroom." he slurred.

I kneeled down almost falling over. "Are you ok?"

He laid there silently for a few minutes.

"Dija see that girl? She was hidin' there in the...in the...bathroom...no light either" He writhed around slowly.

"Yeah shes gone." I laid down next to him closing my eyes. I remember the cold of the cobble stones felt so good on my sweating body. "I could lay here forever."

"I know, we should."

"This bar sucks."

"This bar sucks! It does, they arranged it stupid, its like a fancy garage my dog would poop in."

I didn't understand but it was funny and I laughed. "I'd rather drink in a dumpster. I wish I had a coffee."

He dry heaved, wiped his mouth. "You want coffee? I'll buy you a coffee, if you help me up and find me a bathroom." He dry heaved again.

And I did, we walked to a diner and drank coffee, and after while, after the whiskey thinned, we shared bad memories, private secrets and politically incorrect feelings. Like when dogs sniff each others butts, its all they need to know about the other dog to get along. The rest of the world was swallowed up by a gentle shadow, as if we were in a tunnel. There wasn't judgment, shock or apathy, just a common acceptance. We never spent a day a part since then.

That was the stability of our relationship that we didn't joke or lie about feelings or experiences, so when I told Frederick about the Buffalo Man, he soulfully contemplated everything I said. I would never admit a thing like that to anyone else.

We fell asleep on the bed, in our clothes and woke up around 7pm. The mark was gone and I sighed, relieved. I took off my shirt to take a shower and walked to the bathroom. Frederick was still laying in bed.

"Hey come here."

I walked back, about to lay on top of him, but he turned me around so my back was facing him.

"You have a bruise here too." He poked my back and I cried out. It was tender. I ran to the mirror and saw that a bruise was now on the other side of my body, directly across from where the other was.

"It looks like the other one."

He stared at me through the mirror. "Maybe it's something else." He didn't want me to be scared.

I didn't either. "Yeah, possibly, most likely." I walked away to take a shower and I could feel Frederick starring after me, and something else watching as if it was outside the window curiously peering in. I wondered if Frederick felt it too.

Part II to follow.

Antique Apple Peeler

Bought this at an antique store in the Adirondacks called Raven and Ring Antiques. Its a beautiful mechanism. There is something magical about devices like these, they can work forever, they can be repaired, they can be dismantled and created into something else, its tangible - you can hold it and bring it to life with your participation.

John Fante - 1909-2009 A Hundred Years

My friend Brian C. forwarded these links to me which celebrates John Fante as this Wed was 100 years since his birth. Thank you!

There is not a day that goes by the Fante is not in my mind, in my soul, in my hands when I touch or my eyes when I seek to understand; he is a kind of amulet for me.

John Fante's great gift to Los Angeles
The long love affair between a city and the author of "Ask the Dust," who would have turned 100 this week.
By Stephen Cooper

JACKET COPY
John Fante's 100th birthday
Carolyn Kellogg for LA Times

John Fante's 'Ask the Dust' grows with time
The 1939 novel is finding its way into college classrooms at the 100th anniversary of the author's birth. Tonight, Zócalo hosts a panel on him at the Hammer Museum.
By Carolyn Kellogg for LA Times

Zocalo at Hammer Museum Video Podcast about John Fante with Stephen Cooper and Fante's children Victora Fante Cohen and Jim Fante

The Self-Important Jackass

The Self-Important Jackass or "Epitomizing everything that I fucking hate about the human race"
by Marcus Vidaurri

He will approach you as the initial intention to prepare your first meal of the day crosses your mind, on a workday. To his credit, he will not know this is your first priority, as there are no obvious signs, but his unintentional courtesy ends there. He will, however, see that while you talk on one phone line, another blinks, awaiting your attention. This is the manner in which business is generally conducted in your particular line of work, and he knows this well. He does not need to follow these basic guidelines. He is entitled.

He has come for someone else, but upon discovering their absence will "deal" with you. He will decline help offered from others as he awaits for you to finish your current task at hand. He vaguely describes some extremely detailed thing that he wants, while being perfectly capable of describing it to a T, and providing you with it's corresponding numerical identification code, thereby helping you in some small, but significant manner. He will wander around your workspace, asking ambivalent questions, in and of themselves, to no one, and answering them himself. As if asking his memory; "Memory, do you know anything about this combination of words, and their location? Do they make sense to you?" and his memory responds, "Yes. But not specifically, nor in any way that relates to the current situation".

He will pose these banal questions about something that was obviously your choosing, but not relative to anything that he wishes you to accomplish at the moment. Do not be fooled into answering them! No matter how much he coaxes you with blank looks and silence! He wishes you to speak only so that he may speak over you, and prove that not only does his memory now what certain things mean, his memory also knows what YOUR memory remembers, and is capable of attaining this knowledge whether or not you attempt to answer him (or even succeed in doing so).

He is omnipotent. He is his own best friend. He is his one true love. He can do no wrong. He loves his voice, and uses it loudly, but rarely says anything. Your misery gives him an erection. He loves that you cannot stand him, but must. I know many like him. He is the worst. He comes by most days.

The Beau-Traps - Whose Got the Fear?!

Hear our song "WHOSE GOT THE FEAR?!" on
www.wearedreamers.com

Also check out:

thegalactica.com
sundrysullen.com

xo -mers

Trully Uninspired - by Marcus Vidaurri

Marcus is a good friend of mine who lives in LA and wears sailor hats. He sent this to me and I really always adore nihilist writing when it's poignant.

Trully Uninspired
by Marcus Vidaurri

Everything irritates me. People and politics. Those concerned with the world's well-being and the further survival of the parasitic human animal. The death-fearing. The life-hating. The poets and their muses. Those longing for love, and the people who could care less about them. The walking genitalia. The eagerly inebriated. The abstinent. The pathetic stench of true poverty, and the vomit-inducing optimism of false wealth. They who haven't any faith, and the pious alike. They who build their homes and make their clothes of the bitterness they cannot let go, and they who drool through their grins at the prospect of another breaking dawn. The unemployed. The corporate ladders and the erect train of flesh that climb them. The elderly and infantile.

The crowds where they all gather and the isolation of your sixth lonely beer with only the unblinking eye of basic cable television. I hate the way it is and the way it used to be, when I can remember it. The shame of a weekend past, and the embarrassment of a couple years ago. The longing, and the desire to finally detach from it all. The know it all. The oblivious. The timid. The foolhardy. The singers and the songs. The movies and the actors. The novels and the authors. But most of all, the fact that I'll be every single one of them until the day you die.

Attempt at the Flemish Technique - Hand Study

I have been painting for a few months. Well, more than a few. I started with acrylics. I found them brittle, aggravating and unforgiving. I created three pieces with acrylics:

Artificial Love - The Devil is in the Details
acrylic/handmade frame

Artificial Soul - The Devil is in the Details
acrylic/handmade frame

The Dark Mennonite
acrylic, charcoal pencil

"Artificial Love" and "Artificial Soul" are Riddles. The human organs are fluorescent (in an unnatural state), the thorns represent the painful confines of Christianity, the smaller geometric shapes (triangle and circle) which glow in the dark "revelation in Darkness", equal a verse from the bible mathematically. The Frames were assemblages. "Artificial Love" has a skull flanked by flowers on the crux of nails on the top, on the bottom is death laying a lute riding a winged crucifix. "Artificial Soul" has a zombie lamb with songs birds swooping down, chained to an altar and below a crucifix at the crux of nails.

"The Dark Mennonite" was a project with Joshua Petker. The concept was to do a portrait of each other but as abstract.

My latest project was been to delve into oil paints. I am in love with Van Goph and Caravaggio and oil paints seem to richer, denser, more organic and luscious. Below is my latest progress at a study of my own hand. I need to add my tattoos and i think I want to add some modern elements like pin striping. You can see the layer by layer here.


Next projects are portraits of myself and friends, and then on to something more complex in concept like my The Devil is in the Details project.

MANTIGERS RETURN - Martys Escape - by Mers

Marty relinquished the behaviors that cracked his knees and made his fists bleed. He felt tired, unable to build up the want of more destruction. He felt at an end, what he knew, what he was, was over. This city was a tomb now, built with the dead of his skin and hair and nails, refuse of biology and time, the shit stained toilet paper traveling through the pipes to the wide, wide, wide ocean. Even ass paper sought a wide expanse...

Searching for hope, for meaning in a desert was such a futile idea!? All his efforts, his bed, his food, his choices in clothes and shoes, all of this was wrong. So wrong! Los Angeles was a dreamland, intangible heaven, as empty and full of lies, a lost paradise, an evil Eden - His life was wasted here. Marty could not, would not be, the heart of LA anymore. He would leave, to a place that could hold and love him, free him with real things, real people, real weather, real struggle.

The eyes that helped Marty see the abandon now sitting in his room were the same eyes that saw the same room flushed with amber's and golds; entering inside him that familiar disquiet of perfect illusion. But now, the place was dead, and the scrapes, and peelings of the floor and walls and furniture, the dirt, the quiet the ghosts....

He jumped up, grabbed a canvas bag and with spit flying, he frantically stuffed it full of blurry shapes and ran out of the door, down the empty hallway, down the spiraling stairs, into the horribly lighted lobby and out...out into the wide, wide, wide ocean.

The Request - new short fiction

"Don't you corrupt that boy."

He was over six feet tall, but he seemed smaller, humble...as if kneeling with his gentle request.

She smiled, barring her teeth but then closed the lips around them. The hunger and appetite gleamed on the teeth, that feral dark seething through the cracks. A bruised hand wiped the clenched lips, and then reached up and over his shoulders to encircle his neck and whisper, "I'll talk to you later".

On the train she examined her swollen knuckles and hypnotically thought about her legs, her thin shoulders, her cut-out rectangular eyes and chewed on the bottom lip while she imagined every part of her body fighting to escape from her. When a stark string of words entered into her head; the flourecent light of the train wobbled brighter.

What holds you together is dark matter.

The white hands with blushes of red, blue and green covered her face. There is no normalcy for someone like me. NO. NO. No. What should hold me together is meaning, not an abyss?

She shouldn't have done it. But everything she did was reckless, vibrant, passionate and destructive. It started with blinding words, spitting disregard for lesser virtues, barred teeth, clenched fists, which then led to ferocious acts of a Viking-like taste for truth, so brutal and addicting her body was laced with attempts at healing. No one was safe from the probing of her marble tongue. But, she didn't corrupt. Grace, Virtue, Kindness, Forgiveness, good and bad, light and dark were all pathetic ideologies that corrupted man. Because man can't be those things all the time, he must always be pushing his humanity, his mind, his soul into the abyss...

She looked at her dark leather shoes.

In the dark orange horizon in her mind, there was an angry mob waiting for her, accusing curses vibrating as ignorant as a church bell. Why? She manifested her daydreams into reality - she lived, she had too, it was the only respectable thing she could do for herself, the only salvation . She threw her fist down onto the hard orange seat of the train and shouted: " Esto perpetua!"

LAST DAY ON EARTH - Short Fiction 2003

The sun shone behind the city, filling the horizon like a tequila sunrise, the cherry just peeking through the blinds, flushing my face with pink bars.

I sat on my bed, leaning my chin in my hand and adjusted my head so the rose light went straight into my eyes. I kept them open until they began to feel dry. Lights radiated inside my lids. I sat there for a long while and when I opened them, it was black inside the apartment.

I got up and turned on the red lamp, lit a cigarette and opened the bottle of cheap champagne. I had found it in front of Perkies door. I had replaced it with a dirty key. I threw the attached note out, unread.

I doubt this was from your boyfriend.

I finished the bottle while getting ready. In the bathroom, my reflection looked more ghastly than it felt. My top lip was still swollen and my gums purple. Every once in a while a taste like iron seeped onto my tongue. I spit brown into the sink. One tooth was loose; I wondered if it would turn black.

I grabbed my jacket and left.

Outside was shiny and wet. A yellow puddle of vomit covered the last step of the landing. Leftovers from last night. The rain had reactivated it like sea-monkeys…I stepped on some and slid a bit.

Undaunted, I walked down the boulevard and headed towards Highland.

When I returned home, Perkie was outside her door. Her orange-ish hair fried and stiff, was a mane around her moon face. She looked pissed. Her robe was stained.
“Where did you get this key?”
“The balcony.” I kept on walking. As I passed her, her body leaned on the other side of the door frame.
“Where?!”
“On the third floor.” I walked faster.
“You’re lying!”
I turned to face her as her voice turned ugly.
“What the fuck are you talking about?!”
Her eyes stared at my mouth, my bleeding gums. I closed my mouth. She ignored it.
”THIS key ISN’T for this building!” She hissed.
“So what?”
She stared at me with saucer like eyes. They were red and glassy. She rotated the key back and forth in her right palm.

I turned my back to her and was about to round the corner when something hit the wall and then clinked me on the head. It was the key.

“You fucken little faggot! Tell me where you got that key!”
“Perkie, I don’t know what this key is for; I told you I found it.” I picked up the key and walked towards my door.
“Where did you get it!?”
“Your fucked! Why don’t you sober up! I told you I found it!”
I heard a loud SLAM! I went inside, locking the door.
In the bathroom I rinsed out my mouth. I thought about ways of avoiding Perkie as I placed my fingers inside my mouth lifting the cheeks from my teeth making a skull face. One tooth was sure to come out.

Johnny said he would meet me at Café 101 around 10pm.
I got there late; I had been pacing in my room, biting my nails, smoking, running scenarios through my head. I finally forced myself to leave by 10:33. When I walked into the diner Johnny wasn’t inside. As I looked around the couples and friends that spotted the tables stared at my face. One young girl with long fake nails gasped, and then looked away. I wanted to run out.
“Want to sit at the bar?” A waitress said behind the counter. She had black hair and white skin. I could see her veins.
“Yeah, can I have a coffee?”
She nodded as she jerked a C on the pad, and then brought me one. As she poured she spoke, her eyes were down on the coffee: “Who did that to your face?”
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Tell me.”
I imagined sucking the blood from my raw gums and spitting it in her face. Right between those jaded eyes.
“Two people stand in front of each other, when someone blinks they get a swing to the face unless they can dodge it.” I felt uncomfortable as I saw my reflection in the spoon.
“I hope it’s not a hobby.” She leaned in closer.
“Not anymore. I think I’m over it”
“Tired of losing?” She snickered.
“No. ” I glared at her.
She walked away to help another customer. Johnny walked in, did a double take at my bruised and swollen face and sat down.
“Damn! Can you feel that?!”
“What do you think, you uncouth bastard.” I felt embarrassed as heads turned.
“Damn masochist.” He smiled.
His hair had been cut, it was short and close, the devil lock was gone. Now his hairline seemed really high. He didn’t have one mark on his face.
“I kinda fucked up.” I tried to say it lighthearted but my uneasiness was heavy.
His eyes lifted from the carnage on my face to my eyes.
I sipped my coffee. I couldn’t taste it.
“With what?”
“Last night I left this at Perkies door.” I took the key out of my pocket and placed it on the counter. My hand shook.
His face shifted, and when it settled I remembered that look he had on the roof.
“Is that what I think it is?”
I didn’t answer.
Why.” He said tightly. “Why would you do that?”
“I took a bottle of champagne that was sitting outside her door. I was a little fucked and just left it there, I thought I was funny, I didn’t think she would recognize it…but she got pissed, wanted to know where I got it, I said I found it...”
“Did she say anything about Jesse?”
“No.”
There was a long pause as we just stared at each other.
I heard the sound of our feet on the roof as we ran to the ground floor. I remembered the red glow of the apartment sign on Johnny’s heaving and sweating face, the adrenaline fading and the fear eating all the meat and guts from his frame.
“But it’s gone right?”
I shook my head. “It’s still there.”
“I thought you took care of it like we talked about!?”
“I was going to but after you left… I couldn’t do it Johnny! I was going to do it but I couldn’t! So I locked up the dumpster hoping you could help me but you’ve been avoiding me!” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “It’s been almost a fucking week, they come this Monday, if I pull it out now…what if it someone sees? What if it just falls apart? I can’t do this ALONE. ” I felt my throat closing.
Johnny gagged.
He took out $3.00 and threw it on the counter and dragged me out by my coat collar. He threw me into his car.
When we arrived at my apartment building police and an ambulance were outside. We didn’t stop but drove passed. I saw the dumpster unlocked, gaping open. I felt the world and everything that was good turn against us. I looked at Johnny.
He began to scream: “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”
I sank in my seat and began to cry.