A high pitched drama seemingly unraveling off a piano roll. Reading from the top to the bottom as if an scroll, a modern element of composition transitioning the graphic representations drawn in the style of cartoons horizontally as well as vertically. The effect being one of a graphic novel transliterated to a more ancient convention. The story running seamlessly but in different directions without disturbing the narrative.
The story that he had conjured as a biography within the dead of night within his own bed chamber was as demented as his own twisted frame. An artifact of an impure coupling compounded by protracted periods of starvation of both soul and body. How indelicate to tell his habits of perpetual self-abuse performed in abstinence of the outer world to anyone which convoluted his physical being even further. The flow of what might have been a natural and healthy development defaulted by abhorrent practices into nagging cysts and festering pockets of pus and a variety of other unclean substances. The constant daily constrictions of the threat of intestinal knots and its ultimate product fostered a mental obsession to stay hidden and keep to himself. The story that ensued from this experience of suffering was, in being all too much like himself, one of having too many twists and turns for any sane person to accommodate. The possibility of reading straight through an initial chapter being marginal at best. The eventual destination of his work’s plot line inevitably leading to a narrative projection of utmost horror in suffering an inescapable doom caught unflinchingly within the bowels of a sinking ship as it slowly plied its way through unlit waters towards the bottom of the ocean’s floor. The dark Stygian world some fourteen miles below offering no hope but endless terrors as a realm of unimaginable monsters. How foolish he had been to be lacking in resolve to address his shortcomings at an earlier age when there might have been some possibility of their remission. Those few wrong turns of fate that served up disaster possibly avoided be a more conservative view of the world’s hidden pitfalls. The result of being thus transfixed by them possibly avoided by a more conventional mindset over one blindly adventurous. His body possibly spared the torment of the byproducts of vengeance and terror that combined to dement his very soul. His physical form complying obediently to a incessantly mounting degree of uncontrollable anger turning him into the type of monster that he feared the most.
Deep within him a festering rage had matured over the years finding him taking up the practices of torture and abuse of others. A borreau looking for the next victim to torment and mangle like a fiend. What ever trace amount of propriety remaining suggesting to him the fact that he himself was also an enemy of these impulses. They demanding that the worst of these base excesses be enacted only upon himself alone. Thus he became enslaved to his own twisted leanings to inflict pain upon his own physical being. Always searching out and exploring to discover some new means of mischief to apply to turn and twist himself into something even darker. The end results of these twisted experiments seeming conventional by his own standards but Hellish to any light from the outside world that might pierce the veil of his regimen of secrecy. The sum total of his efforts over the years proving that he turned himself away from God in a wandering quest to make peace with his own inner demon. This graven idol of his own making to worship instead. One that offered only further pain and the promise of unending future torments in return for the sacrifice of himself as its homage.
Each night he retired to his own bedchamber alone attired in tattered rags that should have rightfully been long discarded. But in his case were meticulously re-laundered to serve as remind of his own worthlessness. Ceremonial trappings worn specifically to be soon torn off in order to amplify the fact of his own vulnerability to those inner desires demanding torment by his nakedness to cruelty through unremitting cold over reasonable comfort. A strange form of Satanic animal stimulation then coming to pass within his softer parts. A predicate to rites employing the inventory of odd objects kept at the ready upon the bed. Some fully capable of offering a quick form of efficient self destruction. The rites he held almost presupposing an unseen audience in his own imagined dark chamber of horrors. The suffering produced encompassing all manner of lethal mayhems the audience that he imagined there to see him cowering like a dog before its menace. There before them bereft of nourishment or hope of being saved from his own malevolent desires. Something one might have expected to see in a dungeon somewhere safely sequestered behind steel bars or a stout iron clad wooden door. A lurking contradiction within him hoping all the while that life might reawaken and save him. That some unexpected savior would magically appear and pick him up like a mother cuddling her own infant fresh from its cradle. The mother conjured up from within however no longer existent. The wretched thing in her place someone only to be feared rather than to reveal one’s self to. Bereft of any possibilities sought over many years of looking for a soul mate to share this angst with. Too locked in obsession with that other half of his nature that embraced a perpetrator that relished endless enjoyment of its continuation. Pleasure twisted into a self-generating tale only offering a desire for a vile oblivion.
The more that he wended this sort of tale to himself the more it became physical reality. Playing out the fallacious role play of a magician who could take whimsy and turn it into gold using the lead of his twisted apprehension of himself. Those many incidents where in early life others were unkind by perverting his previous desire for acceptance by these fellows into ready hateful scorn. He would take control! And never again allow any degree of permeability to allow others to violate those once too vulnerable boundaries to ever be successfully assaulted again. Being that he had built within an impregnable redoubt to deflect the rest of mankind. The gulf of understanding between others and himself now transformed into a moat that provided solace through distance. But that also erased any possibility of discovering a significant other. Too occupied in relishing his own disgust of all things human. A story so putrid that the more that he devised it the more it signified the fact of his coming doom that would one day all too soon send him tumbling down into the eternal fiery pit of perdition. Falling like a burned out ember to an endless limbo of emptiness. And so richly deserved of same as proscribed by his own demented creation that had left him too far beyond reconciling the remnants of these passing nights and the hopefulness of a new day.
Traveling through a gap into the high mountains and the wilderness beyond, I encountered a man traveling in the company of two white tigers. To my pleasant surprise a display of fearlessness on my part by holding out my hand towards it like a common house cat seemed to work some magic with one of them. It took the bait and allowed me to pet it after it had come up to sniff me. Its human companion somewhat amazed that it took to me so quickly.
After decades of harboring a desire to direct a full length motion picture I was abruptly called out to Hollywood to work on a shitty B grade picture and locked in a studio with a crew of other want-a-be’s and misfits. We sat there with somebody else’s script. The meandering plot slogging through cliche banalities of intended action. The damned thing a rote copy of some other fat cat B grade directors’s sense of scenes that he may have ever wanted to emulate from so many other inestimably much better plots. It was destined to be going nowhere as the fruitless imaginings of someone’s distant cousin who had most probably called in a family favor. Though it had been green lighted, it would never even end up on drugstore DVD counters as its loss always intended to be scribbled on the ledger of profit and loss to counterbalance a few others that had unexpectedly achieved a degree of success. At a point of futility in plodding up to the point of halfway through the shooting it became painfully obvious that it had sapped the energy of us all. The effect not dissimilar to a play by Samuel Beckett where the characters find themselves caught in an endless lethargy with no hope in sight. And out of frustration I started what became an attack plan to enact a mutiny by the crew to take over the studio and guarding all the gates rewrite its flagging script into something viable. Discarding through the endless train of scenes recounting stolen segments that had been presented to audiences a million times before in ersatz knock off based on versions of lesser Star Wars movies. I summoning the ghost of Syd Fields demanding that we ask the basic questions of ‘what is this damn thing was about’ and ‘how do we put some life in these characters’? Get rid of names like ‘Schulman’ that was only their to soft soap someone’s rich Jewish uncle. The bottom line being to change the fate of what would otherwise be just another career killing piece of shit.
The problems was that this was obviously a bad exercise in filmmaking that had been specifically designed to follow all the wrong steps and keep alive some undisclosed client’s vision, which of course, was no vision at all. It was a just a result of a ‘let’s make a movie’ type of impulse where its creator had just penciled in a bunch of scenes purloined in real time from their DVD collection. A compendium of an amateur wish list from the ‘if you made that film what would you would definitely change’ sort of mentality. The dialogue capable of making a George Lucas blush with its cartoon Saturday morning endless lack of intellectual non-observations. Nothing clever or that funny! Dead beat boring! It was impossible to imagine any audience able to survive two minutes of viewing it without getting up to leave after demanding their money back. So how could anyone deliver ninety minutes of torturous nonsense like what was on these pages in good conscience?
What was so wrong about attempting to craft an inventive entertaining storyline that the audience could find empathy enough to stick with? Something novel to fill out those eighty minutes of what otherwise lead to disenchantment. That invocation of grabbing them in the first five or ten minutes completely lost upon this garbage script’s original author! That bilious pretender who composed this piece of shit and called it a script who by rights should have never been let near within two blocks of a film studio in the first place. Schulman? What were we, in a Stetl somewhere in the middle of nineteenth century Poland a hundred and fifty years previous celebrating some tired downtrodden Ashkenazi myth of being downtrodden by the Tsar’s Cossacks? Or were we really going to be creating the framework of an underlying tale that was contemporary to the present miseries of current day generations? There had to be some way of inoculating one’s self from all this mediocrity! Finding some way of injecting creativity based on inspiration. Wasn’t that the whole idea of movies after all? Not a walkthrough but a source of inspiration that one could take tot he bank and build into a series?
It was obvious that my sentiments were shared by the lower ranks. A wide variety of life’s experiences taken directly from life’s purposes as well as aesthetics borrowed from distant sources. Looking back on former childhood events as well as early adulthood, our uprising would have to take over the studio almost as if we were starring in a remake of the old film, “The Bounty“. My Fletcher Christian against their tyrannical Captain Bligh. It would involve much craft and underground organization. Luckily the disenchantment among us was universal so there would be no objections or lack of motivations to concern anyone. The worst situation being that if our coup was unsuccessful being that we would never work in this insular town again. The prospective production at hand if not rerouted assuring us all of that probability if it were completed as originally intended. Back to momma’s basement with a remote job as a part time accountant, wedding photographer, or bagging groceries at the local supermarket.
I somehow ended up alone in the outskirts of Paris with no idea of getting back. My command of the French language insufficient to properly communicate a need to return to my hotel. I had walked out without any proper address or printed material that could be handed over to indicate where I was going. The last hope of catching a Metro squelched by the late hour that had led me to the street. An SCNF? Unfortunately a nonstarter. So here I was marooned on a dark street on a cold night having been kicked out of the bar at closing time. What a nightmare!