Martes Tuesday 9 Marzo March 2010
80 Winter 24 Moon 53 Space.Age

1.

WHAT DO YOU see when you look at a page? Or at a picture? Or at a movie/television screen?

Color? Lines? Movement?

Or words?

Both, and everything, alternating, combining.

2.

And so I write. And so I think. And so I manipulate images.

Artist of a small sort or another.

And I am getting old at this. I denied it for years. I wrote poetry but I was not a poet, I told myself. Or well, yes, that's not entirely true, because I did say it, I said to myself and to others, that yes I was a poet, but I was not able to advertise that I am, that I was, an artist.

Liar. Denying my inmost calling to chop up images and put them back together again. Like letters and words. Like bits of film or pictures. Hungry for collage. Melange. Montage. Damn.

To write words on paper, with a pen and then with a typewriter clickity clack whack (and now with computer screen and keyboard clickity klik hmmmmm). AND To Make movies.

One writing I have done for years, secretly and alone. Only the past ten years have I dared to publish. With some small success.

The other, filmmaking, I only dreamt of for years, until computers and youtube made it all possible to be done for cheap.

3.

I ponder the same questions always, and they boil down to two: What is a page? What is the screen?

This shape we call landscape, this shape we call portrait.

Wide, or tall.

The page, the screen.

So much has been said, so much has been written, that nothing I say or write will make much difference, to anyone but myself. But I ponder it nonetheless, and I ponder them nonetheless. This thing called art. This thing writing. Page, screen. Yes.

4.

In the end, as in the beginning, I am only a California fool. Jester. Bufón.

I remember a book I used to read over and over and over again when I was young, eight, nine, ten, eleven years old.

Some insurance company printed it, I think, some insurance company printed a popular, photographic, history of southern California.

All I remember was that one chapter was called something like “the giant arises” and of course was about Los Angeles.

I wonder if I could find it on the internet, based on nothing but that one small bit of data.

Or two.