DARLINGS & MONSTERS STATUS REPORT

​ 

The beast in its entirety will come in @ appr. 500 k.The opening is a bit challenging for those accustomed to the simple declarative, but i then eases off and spiral further and further into the reaches of memory. But Jim Krusoe can take a crack at simplifying it down, he did a fine job once with a long piece of mine on Handke/wender's WING'S OF DESIRE IN an issue of the St. Monica Review, around 1990,

feedback appreciated

----------------------------------

 

   The DARLINGS & MONSTER SPIRAL (once Quartet) dates to a huge encompassing Fellinesque screenplay from the mid-1980s whence I have derived quite a number of matters:

 

1] the play THE WOLVES OF WYOMING, based on a single scene of a near fight between half-brothers where I sought a way of dramatically finding a way where the mutual aggression neutralizes itself – silly thought! - not a point that a single of its readers and commentators got – that is, in that respect unsuccessful though I continue to cherish certain monologues and riffs on pool playing which these two guitar-playing brothers do incessantly. Tom Noonan dropped out of planned reading at Andreas “Ace” Nowara’s Raccoon Lodge on Warren Street; maybe such exposure would have led me to a better version of what I thought of as my THE ICE-MAN COMETH. I recall finding the dialogue first rate – it is jazzy  all right the patter I got going there and the long long riffs.

 

2] The highly formalist PALOMBE BLEU - three adults struggling over their child who is under the table where they are conducting the conversation, the child the precocious brat being the Palombe which they consume as she has a Palombe with her lover. Even Peter Handke liked it, so did Jim Krusoe who, however, then did not publish it at the St. Monica Review. I myself felt that it came out best as o.k. In retrospect I think it needed that one last formalist twist as you can find it so exquisitely in the text of Handke’s play without words MY FOOT MY TUTOR. - I started on the play in Fal 1984 in New York and finally finished it among some sequoias in the hills above St. Cruz while visiting friends at Stanford. I haven’t found the time to turn PALOMBE into electronic form.

 

3] At George Malko’s smart suggestion I developed the screenplay BIRTHDAY BOOGIE out of one sequence where George said I could accommodate the monster in miniaturized form. It took the year 1987 to write – I was living in exquisite circumstances in the St. Monica Mts. in the Ventura part of Malibu - and lots of friends including Paul Sylbert, who wanted to direct BOOGIE with me,

 

http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2013/10/precis-of-graduation-boogie-screenplay.html

 

said I ought to drop everything to get it made, which I did not. I did not even show it to his brother Dick who was despised among the folks I knew in the film industry in Los Angeles and who, the few times I saw him, had the radio tuned to the daily film box scores; had the wrong producer, who shall remain nameless for his generic name; who eventually wanted me to pay his rent when I returned broke from Mexico – I had taken a liking to him for deriving from the union film crews, so much for letting ideology influence such judgements – his girl friend Gail Fokelskmann {sp?] manifested the finest appreciation of this notion of making a film entirely through what the ears see – Wenders who did something along that line with his documentary of Lisbon never let me have word what he thought, if he even read the work. It can still be made, even though the WTC is no more whence the film’s “ears” , an Austro-American psychoanalyst as the Owl of Minerva alights early one morning to espy what is afoot one particular loft. My producer had been keen to do a film with music = BOOGIE with its eight variations on a basic “Green Onion” like R & B theme certainly qualifies. I then went to the Baja for three years; fell in love with a huge shaggy-dog story about a plane melding with an ancient Griffen d.n.a., did some work on my Handke project for the Spring visit to the Austrian shindig at U.C. Riverside; kept a minute daily diary of the events in Mulege, several million words; wrote Part One of THE DEVELOPING ACCOUNT OF TIME IN THE BAJA; and translated a few Erich Wolfgang Skwara novels – THE PLAGUE IN SIENNA is a great one; and if I my stipend had not been aborted and I run out of money, and having to return to the USSR, but gone deeper into Mexico – I was planning to live in a high sierra amongst the tribe that worships Monarch butterflies - the impulse to continue the Handke project and DARLINGS & MONSTERS – the chief reasons for leaving Manhattan and its many pleasures which militated - if that is the word - against long-term projects - would have vanished like rain in the Baja desert under those pleasant rural circumstances - and not even have a more succulent greener cactus to show for it.

That very upsetting play BLT or the LAST TIME IS THE BEST TIME derives from the BUA {Breakup under Analysis} section of D&M, once again Tom Noonan dropped out, this time in L.A. Guess whom I will never have anything to do with again!

D & M has become a spiral that contains excruciating pain and unmitigated evil, matters merely hinted at in the long opening memorializing sections. It begins in the autobiographical mode of my SCREEN MEMORIES memoir and then segues into what I pray will be equally convincing redemption of the novelistic, e.g. the venue referred to as “Heart-Ache” is a hybrid of the bars, the eateries, the dance and music clubs of downtown Manhattan of that period, and eventuates in a grim fairy tale.

Travaille, labora verimus I hope, on the Handke project

 

http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-hub-navel-to-todos-handke.html/ 

began to whelm in the 90s as the early genius turned into a major writer with his five epic novels, his mature plays and essay work – oh, what would I have done without Handke & Freud & Co. during the past politically so miserable 30 years! 

  

1] DARLINGS & MONSTERS PART I

REMEMBRANCE OF REMEMBERING THE RETURN OF THE RETURNS -

THE HEART-ACHE KID’S MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAMS & ITS BREAK-UP

IN A DARLINGS & MONSTERS WORLD

By

Michael Roloff

I shook my head, that is I recall shaking my head (shake your head in disbelief, reader!) to get the shock of the near crash out of my system, a near crash that occurred just as I was recalling my first near crash upon my first arrival by airplane in the Big Brightly Lighted Dark City twenty-five years earlier. Then, the pilot of the notoriously crash-prone Electra turbo-prop – a plane grabbed after a car broke down that Fall in mid-Kansas, near the Hill City of In Cold Blood fame and nearly at the same time - approached the airstrip at such an awkward angle, gravity pulling me to the left window as I beheld the tip of the plane’s left wing scrape as a flint, creating a spark shower in my mind, no, fortunately only nearly scrape the tarmac – gradually allaying, my worst fear subsiding of the plane exploding as its fuel tanks burst upon impact; the very same wing tip this time, too, as observed from nearly the same seat, but on the far more reliable and far larger Boeing 757 – the two events now – and what a now it is! - lying respectively 30 and 55 years in the past - both occasions fresh in a freshened mind, freshened not by a Billy Goat but by a course in Dr. Freud’s practice - overlapping, relivable, describable, distinguishable - as is the actual psychic dream crash of a Boing 747 (oh what a smash-up at age 47!), all these crashes and nearly crashing airplanes bringing to mind the mythic bird, the Griffin that nearly smashed into the reed-thatched house I was living in at age 7 – the fairy tale bird’s fore-shadowing huge shadow infusinf the idea of the bird as did its whoosh once it passed overhead  - a B-17 as I would find out - oh what a whooshing, oh what a  screech, a shadow that then materialized, its huge fuselage, exploding a quarter mile further off, kept exploding sporadically and caught fire, having strewn - as I rushing outside noticed - its innards all about during its descent and demise, what would it be like to be the captain of a bird of that kind? - Armadas in the sky at night and daytime, ack ack hitting one of these sky moths, downing them, making me wary, life-long, of planes, sirens: five years of that kind of mayhem at a young age inscribes itself ineradicably. Yet there I had entrusted myself once again, one last time I told myself who was never going to fly again, to a big bird, I had taken the “red eye” from LAX. I had broken the resolve never to take another flight if I could help it (airplanes crashing all over the world, especially in Alaska, bush-planes in ill-repair, ill-trained bush-pilots) but, evidently, I had no choice, I was in a rush, to close down a loft and I needed to return in good time to an idyll as I thought of it, and as most of my readers I expect would, too, a flower farmer’s shed, a bucolic loft, a pepper tree shedding pepper corns on its tin roof, Juniper sap dripping from a big Juniper tree, cousin to the Fir trees of my youth, and their resin, Jacarandas flowering, humming birds, windows three-quarters around and a view of the Pacific and the Channel Islands from 1500 feet, the mirror of the sea mirroring the forever brilliant sun, months after unrelenting months, at the end of an agave-lined dirt road; the surf – deriving, driving in from storms deep in far-off south seas - pounding a slow Cochimi Ma-Li-Bu rhythm back into my being as I walked the dusty chaparral paths and regarded the petroglyphs in the caves. - There I could finally, finally, after a series of attempts, take up what I called “my long-term scholarly pursuits,” consume my “egg of experience,” and what a big big egg it turned out to be! What an egg the Big Bright and Dark City had laid for me to hatch! Where I claimed and really had lacked for experience in my early twenties, I now really had a surfeit.

.........

 

-- 

 

--