The Boys of Winter - SIU Reunion 1992

Okay, I know I seem to be getting nostalgic of late, what with posts about old Super Bowl commercials, That Embarrassing 70s Show and Has Beens and whatever, but what it truly is, is an attack of my own Vanity Fair in the fact that I just looked a whole lot damn cuter in those days than I do today. I mean, look at me now. Who wants a cute 52 year-old man? Nobody, that's for sure.

What people do want however, is a chance to page through your old photo album and tell you how cute you used to be, fully well knowing that it will make you feel like positive shit now and thus thus reinforcing their own fragile belief that they look like shit now too, but at least they've got company. The pains we all endure for having been attractive youngsters.

And so with that rather dour introduction I harken you all back to the days of yesteryear - the days when men were men and woman were, well, women. The accompanying photo comes from 17 years ago and was shot on the roof of my wife's and my apartment building, the Belden Stratford, on Lincoln Park West in Chicago. The occasion was the first ever Every-Thirteen-Year college roommate reunion. By whatever serendipity that caused us all to be in the same city at the same time for the first time in thirteen years, we had all planned to go out for a 5-star meal at a first class joint and dressed the part - except for the guy in the middle with the yellow trench coat. I am reminded now, that that was my coat and I had loaned it to him for the shoot because is was just blinding fucking cold outside and it was all I had, aside from what I was wearing.

From left to right, are myself, Tom Kirkhart, Steve Lind and Kevin O. Mooney. You can find us all on Facebook - Kevin has more Facebook friends than the rest of us combined so he's the only nice guy in the lot apparently. Over the course of two years at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Illinois, we all lived in the same flat and shared house duties, cooking and at more than one time, girlfriends - and we all still got along. Feeling fairly sure that none of us will be running for President, pretty much ever, I can also say that there was some marijuana involved. Oh those college boyz. Now professional athletes call it "poor judgement" while being released from their cornflake endorsements.

Tom is currently Chief Marketing Officer at CRM Studios, a video and TV production studio in Fort Worth, Texas. Steve is a National Sales Rep for CBS Outdoor Advertising in Seattle and Kevin is Assistant Professor of Photography at Indiana University as well as running his own studio at Kevin O. Mooney Photography. Along with myself at university we were a self contained advertising agency in our tiny Lewis Park apartment with me handling creative duties as a Graphic Design major, Tom in Radio and Television production, and both Steve and Kevin as Photography majors. Steve and I once threatened to be on the cover of Soldier of Fortune magazine with a shoot we had done for a local businessman, Ricky, who kept and trained attack dogs along with a small hashish trade on the side. Failing to collect the money which Ricky owed to my boss, a sign painter, we escaped with our lives and the negatives, never to see fame in the business of black-ops. Ricky reportedly did a fair amount of jail time later for his turned-out-not-to-be-so-small sideline.

And then there was the time that a lawyer from San Francisco paraded into my office at Student Center Graphics and proclaimed that he needed a bunch of creative advertising guys to run his father, a Democrat, for a high county office - his (the lawyer's) only problem being that he didn't have any money, but would happily pay us in pot, he claimed he had procured for the Jefferson Airplane, to be downgraded that year to Starship. We took that job.

Upon moving into our shared apartment, Steve and Kevin wasted no time in converting the downstairs bathroom into a darkroom with the benefit that Tom and I could look at all the female photography students and aspiring models they had managed to convince to disrobe for the camera in the name of art. Amazing how many girls bought that shit. And then there was the time Tom and I spent an entire afternoon painstakingly drilling holes in the wall, before a huge house party and wiring Steve's room for sound, with a microphone - TV announcer style - placed under Steve's bed, and Tom and I, set up in his room next door with a huge reel-to-reel TEAC tapedeck to record Steve's horribly rehearsed advances to yet another young lady with the line, "Do you wanna come to my room and see my portfolio?" Unfuckingbelievable. The latter tape from the house party that evening, that ended in Steve's room, would provide us all humour for months - squeaking springs and all - nearly as funny as the reverse sound piping we did later to pump the Todd Rundgren song "Can We Still Be Friends" into Tom's room during the absolutely tearful dumping he was giving his latent hippy girlfriend duJour. Her name was Sunshine. Gimme a fucking break.

All this from a disparate bunch of young men just hungry for knowledge and feeding at the trough of academia in the pursuit of the creative arts. The only one of us who never had any bad shit done to him was Kevin. I froze his underwear once along with the other guy's by disguising it as ground beef, soaked and wrapped in aluminum foil, and stacking all of it in the freezer and telling them all that I was storing it for a friend. Dumbshits. They bought this for days while the stench of unwashed Jockeys and the minute-by-minute desire to just piss myself laughing finally brought me to surrender. The boyz had earned this unholy prank after throwing me out the front door in the snow one night - buck-assed naked- and flashing the porchlight on and off for all the neigbors to see, while I danced and froze my skinny little butt off.

Who needs enemys.

The photo and stories today were all inspired by a one Wayne Borg, a friend of ours from the dormitory days who just popped up on FaceBook last week and started dragging up 30 year old muck after that long of an absence. Thank you Wayne. You asshole.

But mostly, thanks to all these boys of winter. A few days ago I was lamenting the fact that my Super Bowl commercial didn't make me rich and famous or some other silly-assed shit and the guy said to me, "But Dave, you've got the stories. You've got great stories". Thanks everyone. The stories come from you. To quote Henry Miller, "Life becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show." I just write em' down.

Henry Miler II - Perspective VIII : The Little Things III.1

More from observation, cranial crevaces and the cracks in the sidewalk. Henry Miller continues in the coloured type. - The castaways continue with a man who has only been to Vietnam twice and been injured twice, both times in the same leg. His first visit, courtesy of Uncle Sam, landed him in the MASH unit with a shrapnel wound - his second, brought a busted heal after drinking to much on a tourist bus and misjudging his exit drop. But he dutifully plods down from his room everyday to shuffle to the string of low-rent bars on my street and ingratiate himself to the older ladies who long for the days when the Yankee boys were here in ernest. And he has a following. Learning that wounded trick in the war taught him something. - "What I had begun, in brief, was a book of the hours, of the tedium and monotony of my life in the midst of ferocious activity." - And the dog beneath my table pick away at the fishbones and such as I plow my way through a deep fried porkfat morsel of uncertain title. - "the skyscrapers gleaming like phosphorescent cadavers" - "David Bowie!", the Frenchman bellows and I know that that's my cue to turn around as a table of 30-sumthing Australian women smile and nod in approval at my passing resemblance. Nobody wants to talk to a look-a-like. They just want to look. And what am I supposed to do? Break into a rousing chorus of "China Girl" My China guh-hu-herl! - "The Bull frog eyes were trained on me like two collar buttons stuck in cold fat:" - And Rico the German nods in disapproval of me again. He wants to do all the talking this night. - "It was always a source of amazement to me how easily people could become riled at me just listening to me talk." Bullshit. - "Perhaps my speech was somewhat extravagant, though often it happened when I was holding myself in with main force. The turn of a phrase, the choice of an unfortunate adjective, the facility with which the words came to my lips, the allusions to subjects which were taboo" - And Paolo crawls behind the bar and unplugs the computer. And he is not a small man. Crawling is not easy. But he moves easily and unplugs it anyway. Minutes go. An then he plugs it in again. Blogger saves. - "And yet I was able to amuse, to instruct, to nourish. But never be accepted, in a genuine way." - Abledegoopdeedoop. Rubbish. Power out. Sometimes a person. Mostly the city. Land of legislated brownouts. But they will never tell me. I am a foreigner. - "Persona non grata! I had to know what what was to hand and learn to like it. I had to live with the scum, to swim like a sewer-rat or be drowned. If you elect to join the herd you are immune. To be accepted and appreciated you must nullify yourself, make yourself indistinguishable from the herd. " - Tomorrow. Day-off but never off. - "The moment you have a 'different' thought you cease to be an American. And the moment you become something different you find yourself in Alaska or Easter Island or Iceland." - Korea. Vietnam. I knew what I had bought. A billion dollar company had given me a six figure ticket to the future of something way off Broadway, only they didn't even know what was on the playbill. - "What is a fanatic? One who believes passionately and acts desperately upon what he believes." - Only reason I took that ticket. First - class. That ticket out of mediocrity. - "Instead of being punished you are undermined, hollowed out, the grounds taken out from under your feet. It isn't even treachery, what I have in mind. Treachery is understandable and combatable. No, it is something worse, something less than treachery. It's a negativism that causes you to overreach yourself. You are perpetually spending your energy in the act of balancing yourself. You are seized with a sort of spiritual vertigo, you totter on the brink, your hair stands on end, you can't believe that beneath your feet lies an immeasurable abyss. It comes about through excess of enthusiasm, through a passionate desire to embrace people, to show them your love. The more you reach out towards the world the more the world retreats." - Vietnamese chatter fills the joint. Paolo has gone home, inebriated enough to thoroughly piss off his wife. Smells of French cooking from the throroughly Vietnamese. Vietnamese men have an almost nasal quality to their speech. Like dogs talking. No bottom end. I've learned to make it all wallpaper. The Korean. The Viet. - "If one isn't crucified, like Christ, if one manages to survive, to go on living above and beyond the desperation and futility, then another curious thing happens. It's as though one had actually died and been resurrected again; one lives a super normal life, like the Chinese." - The cue of Americans snakes up at the email window every week, wanting me to tell them just a little more about how their old college buddy, or working parner or past adversary is getting on in the land of the Cu Chi tunnel. - "Lifes becomes a spectacle and, if you happen to be an artist, you record the passing show." For Freya.

For more on the "Perspective" or "Little Things" series, click below:

My Morning Wake-Up Call - Perspective XX: The Little Things XII
We'll Have A Gay Old Time - Perspective XIX: The Little Things XII
"Rolled Foggy Disposed Ricepaper" - Perspective XVIII: The Little Things XI
Joyeux Noel - Perspective XVII: The Little Things X
Lunch With Obama - Perspective XVI: The Little Things IX
One Motley Crue On The Bus Today - Perspective XV: The Little Things VIII
Attraction vs. Conversion: How To Power Your Blog - Perspective XIV: The Little Things VII
A glass box full of deep fried chicken heads - Perspective XIII: The Little Things VI
Seoul Searching - Perspective XII
He Would Have Shot Me 40 Years Ago - Perspective XI: The Little Things V
Chomsky on Colour & Sleep - Perspective X: The Little Things IV.2
Running With Scizzors - Perspective IX: The Little Things IV
Henry Miler II - Perspective VIII : The Little Things III.1
Henry Miller - Perspective VII: The Little Things III
Big Brother - Perspective VI: The Little Things II
This Carnival of Life! - Perspective V
The Art Walk - Perspective IV: The Little Things
Bentley #5 - Perspective III.2
Bentley vs. Vespa - Perspective III.1
Bentleys Invade Vietnam - Perspective III
Death Of A Colleague - Perspective II
Perspective

Henry Miller - Perspective VII: The Little Things III

I'm gonna rant a bit and the quotes in colour are from Henry Miller's "Tropic of Capricorn". - Dream: Hugh Kwon from Leo Burnett in Korea works at Nintendo and is my boss. (only in this dream) Is reviewing my expense reports and instructing me how to cheat more effectively - old contract story from the "Wild Wild East" (not in a dream) . - Kevin and Charlie and Robbie and crew are all at the Lan Anh club today. Fracas in the pool. Cool. I'm reading Henry Miller. - "In America they're constantly running amok. What they need is an outlet for their energy, for their bloodlust. Europe is bled regularly by war. America is pacivisistic and canabalistic. Outwardly it seems to be a beautiful honeycomb, with all the drones crawling over each other in a frenzy of work; inwardly it's a slaughterhouse, each man killing off his neighbor and sucking the juice from his bones. Superficially it looks like a bold, masculine world; actually it's a whorehouse run by women, with native sons acting as pimps and the bloody foreigners selling their flesh. Nobody knows what it's like to sit on his ass and be content. That happens only in the films where everything is faked, even the fires of hell. The whole continent is sound asleep and in that sleep a grand nightmare is taking place." - I'm writing in Paolo's, the French cafe below my home. I can't have the details of the past in my writing - Forget the little things. Smells, and such. Bugs. A blur. Story about the roach on the wall of the bar and men behaving like roaches while it crawls. Li-Li bar. Finished. - There's a Saigon kiss on my leg in the sunshine. A fading burn on my calf from touching a motorbike tailpipe parked to shortly and no room for a man to walk in between. - And Paolo's bar breaks into a barwide chorus of "Stand By Me" when it shows up on the stereo and then a French song, even f%4#*ng louder. It's Sunday night. 8:45. - These are not the clouds of Chicago - The South Pacific only. They don't move. - "And I was just a Brooklyn boy, too, which is to say one of the last and the least of men." - A raindrop in the sunlight. - "Confusion is a word we have invented for an order that is not understood." - Long hairs growing from a mole. Beautiful for Vietnamese men. You see it all the time. No pictures for you today. Imagine. - "Most of us live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open my eyes wide and full and clear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was only because I had renounced America, renounced my past." - I have a large Philly cheese steak sandwich waiting. Over and out.

For more on the "Perspective" or "Little Things" series, click below:

My Morning Wake-Up Call - Perspective XX: The Little Things XII
We'll Have A Gay Old Time - Perspective XIX: The Little Things XII
"Rolled Foggy Disposed Ricepaper" - Perspective XVIII: The Little Things XI
Joyeux Noel - Perspective XVII: The Little Things X
Lunch With Obama - Perspective XVI: The Little Things IX
One Motley Crue On The Bus Today - Perspective XV: The Little Things VIII
Attraction vs. Conversion: How To Power Your Blog - Perspective XIV: The Little Things VII
A glass box full of deep fried chicken heads - Perspective XIII: The Little Things VI
Seoul Searching - Perspective XII
He Would Have Shot Me 40 Years Ago - Perspective XI: The Little Things V
Chomsky on Colour & Sleep - Perspective X: The Little Things IV.2
Running With Scizzors - Perspective IX: The Little Things IV
Henry Miler II - Perspective VIII : The Little Things III.1
Henry Miller - Perspective VII: The Little Things III
Big Brother - Perspective VI: The Little Things II
This Carnival of Life! - Perspective V
The Art Walk - Perspective IV: The Little Things
Bentley #5 - Perspective III.2
Bentley vs. Vespa - Perspective III.1
Bentleys Invade Vietnam - Perspective III
Death Of A Colleague - Perspective II
Perspective

Paris in the 30s – Saigon today?

For all those who romanticize about the Paris of the 30s, the time of Picasso, Hemingway, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Man Ray sipping Pernod in Montparnasse, you should have been in my corner of the world last night – a snippet of heaven.

On an otherwise ubiquitous Saigon street named Do Quang Dau, I live above a French bistro named K Cafe, hosted by Paulo, a big booming voiced Frenchman and his Vietnamese wife Ka, and had the unexpected pleasure of not only enjoying a meal of exquisitely prepared Coq Au Vin last evening, but the experience of seeing the French Navy dance to a jazz trio of accordion and two guitars opening with a Django Reinhardt tune. What were the odds?

The scene at this small cafe moved from the quaint to the surreal when a tall and strikingly beautiful, porceline Chinese woman pulled her brilliant blue accordion from a backpack and was joined on stools by two accompanying guitarists, an American and a Frenchman. A man nearing his 70s immediately took the hand of the one female navy officer and began to dance and twirl as the room applauded and ordered more Pernod. My friend Soren, whom I had not seen in a year, smiled and said to me, "David, this is your life", knowing that the ceiling above the performers was also the floor of my apartment. I reflected and thought, "Yeah, it is." Nice.

As a sidebar, the performers had come from Beijing as refugees from the summer Olympics and the political controls of the Chinese government. According to them, visa renewals have been halted and basically China is keeping the world out of what they are calling the "One World, One Dream" Olympics. A visit to a number of Olympic ticket sales sites indicates that sales have been finished and are no longer available to foreigners. So much for the One World idea – or it's a Chinese world and that's the going propaganda. Since the international journalists have been such pussies about Iraq, maybe they'll have a field day with the Chinese for this staged sham – no way, the Chinese will get the same pass Hitler got on this affair.

The two accordion shots you see here are courtesy of Bui Doi. You can visit his blog and see more of Saigon, and read it in French by clicking above.

For what it's worth, Vietnam now seems to have become a haven for disenfranchised expatriates in Asia. With visa laws reasonably negotiable and plenty of business to go around, it's not as if we are all getting rich but we are certainly getting by – and happy not to be putting up with the BS in our home, arguably, "first world" countries. Artists, musicians, writers and a plethora of wanna-be's populate the streets and pubs of old-becoming-new, Saigon and make this a petrie dish of the lost or rejected. Myself included, this group of societal misfits carry their heads high, yet still below the radar of the PC bullshit they have, at least temporarily evaded, in their home countries. Talk pervades that we have a year, or maybe two. before the WTO kicks in and the Commies are forced to start playing by a world of rules for which this society has not been designed. I heard Kenya last night and often Cambodia as "the next" places for our group of white elephants to go. This blog is getting hits from Sri Lanka recently. In a way, we're the hippies of this era - well educated quasi-intellectuals who have eschewed the crap nationalistic propaganda of our own lands to find more freedom in an only "branded" Communist society that, at least currently, offers more personal freedoms than we all might find back home. Very interesting indeed, this Wild Wild East.

Dear Anonymous;

Dear Anonymous;

Thank you. Thank you for helping me get a bit of the lead out.








David

Following is a comment left on my Wild Wild East post, "Go East Young Man". This is the post that deals with the first 70 or so pages of the book Wild Wild East . I think it's best to just read it as is and let my comments follow.

From Wild Wild East comments by Anonymous:

"A good show putting this up, an interesting thing to watch its refinement through feedback and edits. Kindly, I have to admit your intros had left me looking for something a bit more brazen. And again, purely with best intents I'd just like to note I actually got a tad annoyed the sixth or seventh "[Ii]magine", especially when it was put in the imperative.

Also maybe worth noting, I could more passionately relate to an attitude that seems to keep seeping out of this whole system of works, just one part of which is the book. I keep seeing a Rum Diary-esque posture apparently pushed out by an angst to tell it all, like it was, no more, no less, damn both the politic and politically correct.

And, maybe sadistically, maybe masochistically, I'm looking for that no-compromise seed to unleash itself and rule omniscient, knowing full well it could kill you just as fast as it could set you or I free."

Back in November of 07 I put a few pages of the book up on Wild Wild East . 15 to start and a full 70 or so by the end of January. This was not the sort of thing I was particularly interested in promoting – more it was a post, edit and review exercise with only close friends and trusted writers as initial recipients. Almost immediately, in as friendly a way as possible, the people who knew me best sent a collective but no less clear, missive to "take the gloves off!" One guy went so far as to say it just bored the living fuck out of him. Oh, he was nicer than that but I got it. More pointedly, Patrick Scullin , a very old friend and writing partner of mine imparted a George Seldes quote, "Tell the truth and run". This was what I needed – and maybe a bit more. I'm not Hunter S. and certainly not Henry Miller . And this is reality, not reality masquerading as fiction – because honestly, I have little to lose by telling a real story. And the real story, I think, is a whole lot more compelling if I don't shroud it in fictitious circumstances as if it were all some sort of psychedelic misconception (that's why I keep saying "imagine"). – or I'm sheltering a job I don't want to loose (Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company).

That bit of art can rest on perspective and the way of telling – the distance – the change in personage from first to second to third – depending on whether I need to regard myself as a past avatar, a current thinking, functioning mammal or a complete glyph. It's my prerogative.

At Pat's original urging, I was able to get to a point about my past relationship with my wife that had eluded me before. I couldn't see it, but over twelve years since our parting and 7 years after divorce I probably had not confronted the subject much. I tried to rectify it and re-write it with two other women since but those situations didn't work out either. Duh. What part of "duh" didn't I understand?

So what? This is now my confessional? Not fucking hardly. How poor for readers. In the book, I have time. I don't have to give away too much too soon. A story can build and a character can reveal himself with subtleties and back-stories over time – so you get his thinking. But this is a whole lot more like advertising or lesser journalism. I've got a short window in which to sell – or charm – or just say whatever advances the plot.

So thanks Anonymous, and just tonight to Dick Johnson and Abbe and Inkslinger . You're "da men", or "da womens" who help me work. I need to shout-out a bit to Freya, Rhona, Kenneth, fallen agents and anyone else who gives a shit or just gives me shit.

In the end I now understand that this blogging thing is a collaborative effort. No pain, no rain. Like being on a stage and feeding off the vibe. Or falling. Nice trip methinks.