Circus Days On The Hudson
Of course the guys have fond memories of that weekend. It was a generational triumph and it's good that those two in particular really bonded. I spent some time with Howard in the year or two afterward . . . to introject myself a little into the continuity from outside and give you something to look at while the campaign picks up speed, this was still only a few years after a failed sci fi project with vampire ringmaster Mark Rein Hagen that drew heavily on his memetic model of personality while a graphic designer I'd worked with elsewhere had somehow been one of Howard's apprentices or proteges so I needed to complete the circuit there. You are all quite the tale but Howard is quite the "quite the tale."
Click to viewAnd the Laffoley was of course a completely unique experience. I was still a little too young to appreciate the man in the whole but I never really learned to read a wiring diagram either. I guess what we need now is all on the front side of the paintings, the rest is inaccessible without some seriously aggressive new decor choices. I might've met the Alderick or at least spotted them in the audience but you can see how much of an impact that precious weekend made on people. The "right" impact? "Enough" impact? I hope you're not even asking these questions. It should look a little stupid and crass for me to even bring it up, so I'm using this bit to banish the questions + the thoughts behind them. I spent a year studying with a psychoanalyst who was big into Donald Winnicott, who I recommend as the biggest pragmatist in the field because he chose to work almost exclusively with preverbal children and so didn't have time to sweat the small stuff. People worry about whether they're doing "enough." It's usually enough. All that heaven allows and a little more.
But enough about that! The important part is that I have a scribble book of notes on all the guys but your pages were the best. Not to hurt their feelings (I figure that everything here is public, the gesture we are having here means opening myself up to the entire pack of you as though I'd gone to the Omega party instead of crashing back at the cabin) but getting a bit of the autohagiography of the diabolical Metzger was powerful stuff. The infamous eyebrow slips for a moment. There was a sociology conference once where all the great scientists came up and read their research, then one of them decided that instead of maintaining all the performance that they were a real academic discipline with a proud and noble lineage (future of an illusion) he finds the colleague on stage in a wheelchair whose work is all about exclusion and gives him a big ole hug. Wish I could remember which was which, they're in the notebooks somewhere and the story might not even be accurate in all details. The heart is in the right place though.
That was your gift to that Omega baby, the egregoreous rex. No idea if anyone has ever complimented you on it or come up and say your life story changed their life story. It's tough to be the ringmaster running rings full of interesting monsters, which is why I can't help but arc an eyebrow of my own that you don't mention whether you enjoyed that particular circus. A lot of work, a lot of detail, a lot of project management in a pre-cloud environment and a somewhat "different" crowd for that venue to absorb. Also you are usually the interviewer waving the prop microphone in someone else's face to draw the sight lines that direction. I get it. I think that's one reason I am worming my way here now to watch a little of this circus from something closer to your point of view, what's going on under that big hypnotic hat, in that dangerous mind.
Blazer know blazer as it were. Or at least blazer intrigue blazer. Every man and every woman is a star blazer.
But I remember fumbling up from the company holiday party at a restaurant like Nobu (campari sugar in the coffee) to the Coral Room PTV show in what became 2-3 feet of snow to watch the mermaids swim oblivious in their heated tanks, which could become a horrendous Lucien Carr sort of phrase tailored for Tokyo collectors if examined too closely, but actually started out an innocent bit of second-star-on-the-right plumage. I dimly recall being bombed out of my mind by the bar cheering when the band "played the single." Arcadia was a real standout. Look how happy Doug looks, true rock star. Then the next morning I went all the way up to the Cloisters early to regroup and it was empty, all it took to keep the tourists out was those 2-3 feet of fresh powder.
The wife has plenty of her own encounters with the P'orridge and the Bloom circle and so forth around this time. What Dr. Winnicott might call a transitional period, a holding period, an egg of sorts or incubator. I am not a big blazer, having made all the wrong choices to ever end up with more than a genteel place in the Maine lake country and a fantastic book collection once it burst the aluminum-wired plasters of our last NYC apartment and they tell me I popped a lung, suddenly it was '08, the year of the crash and who among us is young enough to want to do that again. We are still doing things in the market but they're gestural.
There's that word again like a whiff of rain on miles of sagebrush, Castanedan in its mystery. I spent a lot of formative years in New Mexico. When I came east I would explain it as being "from the edge of the ghost country," which used to be a Navaho thing. Now at this late date doing all the gardening I want in the mythic shadow of that stack of Stephen King paperbacks I realize the ghosts came from the east and that was the farthest they could go at that point. Now the classic rock stations are everywhere streaming from the cell towers in full digital fidelity.
The market is open! Just something for you to repay YOUR bit at Omega and your adventures after that . . . and to come off as a little less of a weird Black Lodge At Santa Cruz style "entity" flapping up into your light to commemorate what you're doing here. Or at least a different one. Maybe it's all just entities at first like the awful moth in the Quay Brothers Gilgamesh. The rest is the lost art of conversation, so thanks again and the adventure continues.