04/10/2024
Script draft for Hollywood Fringe Fest, 2020
Just discovered in an archive on mobile
Here:
Almost like love
I.
CAN’T GET THERE FROM HERE opens with an audio montage
Pop music/Pomposity/In One Ended into a bell (In One End/ IOE is a building, tornadic sound collage/ cut-up, shifting pitches, beautifully confusing)
Backlit, db enters scatting “can’t get there from here” (her)/ chest beat-tempo
WHEN THE WORLD IS A MONSTER
Stage light drop, a console TV which the audience can’t see the front of issues varying lights and obvious vertical hold rolling effect
Pre recorded foley chatter, glasses clinking, dramatic laughing and sniffling
Db sits in front of the screen, making all the noises and pantomime as-if channeling all the shows
Sputtering, manic: serene… suicidal
Re-set
Creates with looper/live songs of nature in a glade: Crickets, wind, occasional fauna
“I’ve always been told that this is exactly where I needed to be.
Right here, right now. Endorsed by the endorphins of renegade shamans on wheels, authors who could trap the light in a jar before it attenuated, racing to the nothing realm
Girded by the surrealism of expectation, I had all these holy ghosts with their own agendas, tapping their feet in cells that i might get some language skills under my tongue that they might put down their hefted message. -unfinished business meets the intern-
This will be without fits, starts, pains, warts, and lassiez-faire convulsions
Bring on the croup, the choking games, the miles of laps swam underwater, where I could be alone with my cooler-womb echolocation of the lost or dying star of my will.”
I objectified my voice (as pan/dora’s)-box, exploring every form of mimesis. I dabbled with impressions, but decided early that I didn’t want to be pinned down.
I don’t start all my shares with “Drugs and Alcohol…”
But you know: drugs and alcohol can take the life out of anybody
LIGHT EFFECT ON WINDOW-BOX FRAMING OF CHRIS FARLEY POSTER
-I’ll get to that before we’re halfway through the story
SONG: Walk On (see if you can find a kaoss-like voice to light control effect)
Perhaps a montage of video samples of my utterances, played w/o sound)
But we’re not, nowhere, near: Nada Mas Aye (bows reverently)
I was Howard, I was a dartboard, an ashtray
The rear guard of at least three christamighty gin-soaked-triscuit bullies, there wasn’t much light behind the firestorm to assemble my tinker-toy IQ, I do-si-doed as a kind of Tiny Tim as marionette, swapping holograms with Marley’s ghost, but never at the wheel.
Music: Bar from “At Seventeen” -we all play the game when we dare, to cheat ourselves at solitaire-
I GOT rescued, at seventeen, by a rescuer introducing me to the art of rescue
Firefighter, EMT, no escaping that for me
I spent time between classes reading Naked Lunch in a wheelchair mothballed in the hallway, and while I enjoyed these fragments, engaged in education, I was really just passing time til i turned 18 and could work at the cemetery by my mom’s house; where drinking was mandatory on the clock by 10 o’clock every weekday morning, underage, with tacit approval from the pantheon of every prosaic spirit in concert
I had enough heart for anybody that wasn’t myself and I
LIGHTS DOWN
II.
Slideshow of Gale’s pics of she and sailor dad (B&W, but can i get the ‘motion-effect’ of iPhone to give it eerie creepiness?)
I’m scatting Glen Miller’s In The Mood…. Needle scratch
But let’s cut the s**t: The guy might have been the Zodiac Killer
SFX/recording cue Roger Tory Peterson’s guide to bird samples/ attempting to mimic/ catagorize
“As an example of how to build my database, I pulled a geographic and pursued a career in radio, rented a house from a tyrant with my daddy’s name, became a shepherd at a meat farm, joined my first band and got down to the primer and wadding of sticking my daddy issues right in his former pie-hole. All I had to do was conjure him from remnants and clouds with sulphur linings. All I had to use for heat was the cartoon buzz-saw of three angry artists trying to sound like 12 angry men with tube amps and tetany, and on weekdays I’d put my father’s and grandfather’s torch-tips to my trachea and anneal my throat as curious topiary. F**k the pain, as I hit the third and fourth overtones as hot metal by-products”
“Careful or you’ll get nodes, my friend!” I can always remember Ernie telling me.
One of my trips here in my thirties, Ernie picked me up at LAX. I’d brought a handful of my sophomore “1st” CD’s to hand out as demos in the hopes that some magic might meet me halfway and I could fine tune a career in the industry as my oyster.
Ascending the foothills, we stopped to do an unprecedented line of m**h, bolted towards the summit and paused for a spliff at Terry’s house
“Can I go sit on that retaining wall and sing to the mountain?” which I proceeded to do for the next hour.
A half dozen neighbors met us at the gate as we were leaving, to tell us how beautiful that sounded. I dropped some acid and pulled the rental car into the rush hour traffic going back into downtown. From deplaning to defenestration in a few short hours, I’d come with intention and derailed like an oil train in a bog (a metaphor I’m familiar with).
Terry called Ernie that night or a few days later and inquired “Is your fiend looking for work?”
“He’s his own weird bird, m**hinks.”
I have the luxury to have so many delicious privileges to take for granted: not as impoverished as my siblings’ iteration, not non-caucasian, dis-eased but not disabled, suicidal but not self murdering beyond uncountable chemical cardioversions, blackouts, faceplants (a veritable Luther Burbank of faceplants), sabotages and falls as-if repelled from graces
What I’m trying to push through a needle’s eye width of wiggle room is the universe that holds me up to reflect its esteem by punishing me, for example, with meteor hits and stradust trails to seed the world i’ll be incarnate to, as will you
When shamans pull you apart like a paper doll at a tomboy party, when they decode your manhood and throw it in the waste bin like skin tags or fatted tumors, your distortions get distorted until you don’t know if you’re a human centipede or a kaleidoscope or the offspring of that imperfect union.
IT TOOK ME FIVE DECADES, half of Marquez’s lonely hearts club sandwich to hit the mark of destiny, stick the landing, only now I look like a turducken as Olga Korbut.
An easily thousand souls have said “Ya need to be in Hollywood, brother,” the minute I open my music box
Pyramid of the moon teotehuacan
Ketu, Saturn as a midlife Cleveland Steamer. Born this way doesn’t begin to describe it
Smoky took my mouth for his f**k-hole and threatened my life
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