17 January 2019

The lost intro for my infamous JAN-15 entry

Here is the next image from my book of Thousands upon Thousands of Drawing Prompts. (I shared the last one with my Nobel Prize interview, which you should read again if you haven’t yet — it’s pretty good.) The prompts for this current drawing were "Banjo" and "Bowling alley & pins".

dearest self,

forgive the low quality of these recent prayers; lately i've just been feeling useless meaningless overworked and undercompensated, so i've been trying to snap back onto the track of... (should i call the track 'art' or 'reality' or 'proper action' or 'religio-political power-plays' or 'dynamism' or 'christa consciousness' or what?) ...i say, i've been trying to blaze back into the fire of life by purposely allowing myself to talk about stupid things, wrong things: my assumption is that if i just keep blogging onward, my mood and thot-offerings will naturally oscillate back upwards, as is usually the case.

so i've never owned a subscription to the streaming service netflix, but i recently accepted their 30-day "free trial" proposal for a single reason only: it's the one way i could see the new film by orson welles. yes, you're right, welles has been long dead, so you might wonder how he could have released a new movie within this twelvemonth, well obviously it was either previously finished and suppressed, or lost and now found, or left unfinished but with instructions for its completion – let's leave the details aside and just say: it's magic. But i'll talk more about that film below. Right here at the beginning i just wanted to note a raw thot that sprang up on account of this latest streaming subscription:

since i have access to all these new shows, and since i was going to watch the welles film with my sweetheart later last night, and since my sweetheart was having dinner with friends and thus i was left all alone for a few sad lonely hours, i decided to check out some episodes of one of the 'netflix originals' (i am not getting paid to advertise for them, by the way: i hate netflix, fuck that shit: send the concept to hell), at least i THINK it is now considered a 'netflix original' – it's that 'comedy convo' show hosted by jerry seinfeld, where he picks up a fellow comedian in his car, and they talk in the car, and they drive to a coffee shop and continue their conversation. the reason it interested me to check it out is that i used to watch it when it was available free-with-ads, but now there was a whole recent season of conversations that i had not yet heard. And i love conversation: it's my favorite thing in the world: it's my favorite form of art, cuz it's the only one where both the artist and the spectator keep switching roles and inspiring each other in real-time. unlike most literature, which is my chosen realm: take for instance FINNEGANS WAKE: you have its author Joyce who writes his artwork for twenty years or more, and then he dies without knowing how his audience responded (or worse, he assumes his auience has ignored him, because they do not listen or answer while he is alive) and then when i give voice to my side of the conversation, Joyce does not answer me except via night-visions (with bad audio quality), and whoever wants to join the conversation will doubtlessly suffer a similar lag in their streaming speed. To be clear, i don't mean to knock the literary tradition; i still think it's the peak, there's nothing better: but face-to-face conversation between two living humans is by far the best. And when i say "two living humans" i mean anything FROM moses and yawheh chatting on a mountaintop TO jesus and moses chatting on a mountaintop.

anyway, so i'm interested in any show that contains talking heads, because i hold conversation as divine. So i watched a whole bunch of episodes of the 'conversing comedians' show, and it left me meditating on a common theme, which i'll state as a question: Are stand-up comedians what capitalism makes of those who might otherwise have been poets or prophets? For I have a suspicion that these funny-folks are would-be ISAIAHS EZEKIELS & JEREMIAHS who've responded instead to the merely financial incentive.

OK now let me tell you about the other stuff that i wanted to tell you about:

[A note from the author: I wrote the above on 15 January 2019, intending for it to precede the text of the entry I published on that day, but then I decided against combining the two compositions; that’s why the present text ends with a colon and seems to lack closure.]

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