Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - Book of Collage

I love love love the poem Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Elliot. I did this illustrated book of the poem in 1994.

 

 

 

2 and a Half Weeks Since the Surgery

"But Americans lacked something - perhaps the sense of human consciousness as tragedy."  E.L. Doctorow

Heart Full of Napalm

I had open heart surgery on monday June 8 at 7:30 am.

My Interview with a Bob Baker Marionette Theater Puppeteer

Alex Evans is a puppeteer with the Bob Baker Marionette Theater, a designated Los Angeles Historical-Cultural monument where the puppet shows attract families, couples on dates and various other creative, curious Angelenos.

Me:  Okay, I have to start off by saying that I remember my Kindergarten field trip to Bob Baker Marionette Theater in vivid detail, and that was in the early 80's.  A lot of my friends say the same type of thing about the place, yet I get the impression that, while the puppet shows provide special memories for a lot of my people, it's struggling financially.  Is that true?

AE:  Ha, that’s great you have such fond memories.  We get that all the time.  Grandparents who came as kids, who brought their kids and are now bringing their grandkids - all with similar vivid, fond memories.  There is a lot of financial struggle; it’s pretty complicated and has been going on for a while.  The bottom line is it’s hard to run theaters, period. We’ve struggled for a while and the fact that we are still going is testament to the quality and value of what we do.

Me:  Like, how?

AE:  Hmm, times have changed over the theater’s fifty year history and business fluctuates with school budgets, demand for puppet project, etc. and also creative people never make the best business people and Bob was the MOST creative person.

Me:  Ah, got it.

AE:  But we are hanging in there.

Me:  Maybe we need to do a Kickstarter page or something.

AE:  We've thought a lot about that and are having constant conversations about that we can do.  Presently, we are so tight belt as to just put on the daily shows it takes a lot to mount fundraising campaigns...and it really is very complicated and all of the people there are there for the love of it.  My philosophy is: we just did a show today and the audience loved it and are going home thinking about it, if we can do that and do that tomorrow then we are doing great. 

Me:  Is the theater run like a co-op?  Do the puppeteers come from all over the country/world to work there?  How does one become a puppeteer there, as far as --- does one have to apprentice for a long time? 

AE:  Kind of like a co-op; most of us just stumbled on the place, saw the show and got sucked in -- it’s not that formal in terms of hiring.  Some people we just throw in.  Some people start spotlight and move up.

Me:  How did you find out about the place?  How long have you been a puppeteer?

AE:  I went to school for film and photography in upstate New York.  They have semester internship programs in LA where you are supposed to work on film sets or in a production office, but I was looking into animatronics and special FX.  I googled “Los Angeles Puppets” and Bob Baker’s came up -- I went down to see the show and was blown away and convinced them to let me volunteer, and I did for a semester, fell more in love with it.  Then when I moved back to L.A., I started working there full time or whatever that is there.

Me:  Are the scripts very old, like did Bob himself write them?

AE:  All of the shows are down way before I was born.  Bob and a small team put them together -- now it kinda exists like oral traditions; the puppeteers who have done the shows before show the newer puppeteers how they go.

Me:  Neat.  That's what I was hoping.  Oral tradition is such a cool way of passing down histories.

AE:  Yeah, it’s beautiful.  It’s like working at Disney without any of the corporate doodling around.

Me:  Do you know any of the histories of the people who made the sets, scripts or puppets?  They were a team that worked with Bob, right?  Was this in .... the 60's?  I'm fuzzy on the time frame.  Anyway, are there stories about any of the original creators, etc?

AE:  The theater opened in 1961 -- I am constantly hearing variations of that date, I guess I should know it since I work there but I kinda of like the mystery and myth of it.  Bob had been doing puppet since he was a little kid, since the 30's.  He had a biz partner, Alton Wood, who used to be a classically trained pianist.  A lovely guy called John Leland did all the sets and helped with the writing, as did King Hall and Roy Ramond.  Motron Hack, who worked on the original Planet of the Apes, did a lot of the concept sketches. Ursula Hiene who is still with us does the costumes.

Me:  Are there any plans to write any new scripts?

AE:  There are a lot of plans of revive old shows that haven't been seen for decades, and there are unfinished Bob shows.  We are working on that.

Me:  I may never be lucky enough to get invited to a birthday party held at the theater ... could you describe it to me a bit? 

AE:  Well, we decorate the party room, fill the theaters with balloons, get a special cake from Hansen’s Cakes.  Before the show we call them on stage and Happy the Bday Dog gives them their own puppet and crown.  After the show they can take photos with the puppets.

The theater puppets on regular shows, weekdays @10:30 am and weekends @2:30pm

For Showtimes and Schedule:

www.bobbakermarionettes.com

(213) 250- 9995

And don’t forget to like them on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/BobBakerMarionetteTheater

 I took these photos at the show “Something to Crow About”

Wild and Free (keepsakes)

Throughout the years I've decorated and filled several keepsake boxes.  I keep them hidden away in raggedy cardboard boxes, and every few years, when I feel up to the headache of it all, I unearth some of these memory boxes.  Here's my "Wild and Free" box.

The Circle of Life -- Short Story

The Circle of Life

One day when I was driving on Los Angeles Avenue in Los Angeles the city, I saw 3 cop cars worth of cops tiredly swooping homeless peoples’ possessions into standard issue blue tarps they were trying to fold into portable bundles for the harassed indigents to take with them to some other street or park. One cop was shrugging off a homeless man like he wasn’t there, as he collapsed the man’s tent, and another cop ignored a woman repeating, “That’s my stuff.  That’s my stuff.”  There was a pick up truck full of grocery carts being reclaimed from the homeless camp, presumably to be taken back to the stores they came from.  One woman began to charge at a cop but once she got inches away, she realized there was nothing she could do, physically; she just hollered up close in the police man’s face.  She had the kind of Midland American accent that I usually hate to hear, but in this situation, the aggressively nasal vowels added to the sense of her being the mouthpiece for the impoverished people of this country; she had the righteous bearing of a Dust-Bowl farmer fighting back in vain. 

“Where are we supposed to live, huh?  No one wants us in their parks or on the sidewalk -- are we just supposed to disappear into thin air?   You’ll get your own goddamn karma back in your face for this, you wait and see.  What you’re doing to us is wrong.” 

I was at a long stoplight so I watched this scene for what felt like an hour but was probably only a few minutes.

I wanted to pick a side, but it was so all-around ugly, it put me in one of my blue moods.  I don’t know if you ever saw the animated movie “Lion King,” but it was a really popular movie when I was a kid, and I went to see it in the theatre with a group of friends and my mom.  The determinist moral of the movie is that life is a circle that can never be unbroken, even if you want to:  a person is born, has kids, dies, repeat ad infinitum.  Sitting there next to my mom with her soulful, doleful eyes already growing wrinkles around them, I felt sorry for her and for myself too (which was sort of a gift in the long run, as it kicked off a frank closeness between the two of us that a lot of my friends are jealous of).  If this is just all a circle, what did that make me and my mother, then, but a couple of sad-sacks dutifully carrying out a boring destiny?  This is still the main thought that plagues me when I get sad.  It’s that whole type of question Philosophy Majors’ parents’ waste their money on in college:  What is the Meaning of Life?

That is what I was thinking about when I was watching the LAPD force the relocation of the group of itinerants.  I was thinking about how, even though it must be so horrible to be homeless, I’d had so many irritating experiences with panhandlers, and honestly felt relieved when I walked down a street in downtown without encountering a homeless person. 

On the other side, there were the weary faces of the cops who seemed not to like this part of their job, like it was an unpleasant thing they’d rather not have to do.  But of course I couldn’t really drum up any empathy for them either.  Trying to put myself in one of the cops’ shoes for a minute, all I could think of is all the stories of cops killing unarmed black people all year.

Is this the circle of life?  Everyone just lives and then dies and I can’t even drum up much interest in such a sad tableaux, the desperate hunger and untended wounds of homeless people?  The often unwanted job of carrying out society’s ideas of right or wrong?  I was bored and blue for at least a month after that morning, and felt purposeless for a couple years afterward.

Eventually, I snapped out of worrying about the pointlessness of it all.  It happened when I went to my girlfriend Sam’s house for the first time, our first Thanksgiving together, and encountered one of those implausible coincidences; her brother was one of the cops I’d watched evict the homeless people from their tents and boxes not too long ago. 

That Thanksgiving night is one I don’t describe in detail.  It was Sam, her parents and her brother Joseph.  We just all drank too much, that was the mistake, and after a while, my lips numb and my equilibrium completely gone, I looked around at all of us at the table, my intelligent and beautiful girlfriend, her well-read mother, her honorable dad and the pleasantly quiet and unperturbed Joseph, who kept belching and then laughing at himself and saying “I’m sorry, mom!” 

Drunk, Sam’s mom didn’t bother to divide her love evenly between the two siblings, just letting Sam’s conversation starters clunk down awkwardly, while buoying each of her son’s short sentences with a charmed tinkle of laughter.  

I saw Sam and her dad flirt with each other a little, and Sam and I had a quick fuck in the bathroom, even though we knew everyone was probably hearing us and feeling angry or grossed out.  Even with Sam’s mom refusing to dote on her, it probably still made her feel wistful, or protective, to hear her having sex with me.  “We’re all just animals,” I remember saying out loud to my reflection in the bathroom mirror, when Sam’d just left and I was splashing cold water on my face.  Here we all were again, all us people stuck in this circle, the idea of wrong and right not mattering, when nothing really matters anyway.  Sam’s brother would have a kid and his own dad would die.  Then eventually he would die.  Then someday his son would die.  Then someday his son’s son would die. 

I left the bathroom and, while Sam was in the living room loudly teasing her mom for how underdone the turkey had been, I followed Sam’s brother to the rec room, where he was going to get the dart board, and I surprised him by pushing a kiss hard onto his lips with my own lips.  The instant look on his face was of guilt.  

“Oh my god,” I blurted out, immediately sorry and embarrassed, “you must think I’m such a bad person.” 

But he just said, and meant it, “No, it’s okay, it’s okay.  Don’t worry about it. I know you didn’t really mean it.” 

Now I just try to forgive everyone everything, all the time.  If life is meaningless, I forgive fate for its own cruelty.  I forgive everything for being itself, because we none of us can help it.

Nostalgia

I’ve long had this wish that it’d be possible to live inside the ground zero of nostalgia.  This is more of a daydream, along the lines of sci-fi and the idea of teleportation.  My more realistic version of trying to embody the bittersweet peter pan root of nostalgia is to imagine training myself to adapt my thinking to nostalgia, the way Buddhists train themselves to be zen or recovering alcoholics train themselves to be sober.  That’s what December is like for me.  I know that Christmas Day is at its most basic a few hours of exchanging gifts, a few hours of cleaning up afterwards, a couple hours of appreciating the gifts and then a festive dish for dinner; that is at least the make-up of my Christmas days.  There is no getting around the fact that Christmas ends.  Nonetheless, every December I plan which Christmas light displays we’re going to drive to and marvel at and which Christmas movies feel the most special to me and will be watched a million times all month.  When I’m looking at the beautiful light display on some house, or hearing those little asshole Peanuts kids finally yell “Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown,” making everything better, I wish to myself that there’d be some way to make the sentimentality last forever.  But there isn’t.  Also, nostalgia is a regressive state, and counter-productive to the present and even the future.  Still, I can’t help but wishing, just illogically, regressively wishing, time would freeze in the month of December, when most offices just let their co-workers fuck around all month, when neighborhoods are lovely with colored lights and animatronic reindeer, when I can still hope that the gifts I give are going to transform a life instead of ending up one more item to find a place for or maybe even to add to someone’s clutter.  I wish I could bring my son and husband with me into a state of matter comprised of childish abandon, that we could somehow comprise the delicate very filament of a Christmas light. 

holly jolly gloom

Santa Prayer

Santa hovered close and said,

“Why all the flies around your head?

Why all the thumbtacks ‘round your bed?

Your wishlist said you want a pony.”

“I got candy stuck among my hair

They pull it free and pluck me bare

The tacks are so intruders spare

This sparse and lonely thing.

The pony – so glad you got my list!

I prayed so hard I split my lip.

Is Snowflake waiting outside for me?

Or, maybe I’ll name her Cinnamon.”