- Any movie with Vincent Price in it. (And why can’t we have knighthood for artists of this caliber in the United States?)
- Also, any movie with Peter Cushing in it. He was never so honored, either, during his career.
- Christopher Lee, however, was.
- I still have the copy of a little (4¼” × 5½”) side-stapled book I wrote when I was 9 or 10 called The Java Man, which was like the movie The Neanderthal Man only set in Java, and the transformation came when a volcano exploded and parts of ancient Java Man bones got stuck inside the modern man. When the transformation comes, I announce it in all caps with squiggles: “He had become THE JAVA MAN!!!” In the story, the sufferer dies when he falls from the top of a building, not a new idea at the time. I taped a little green plastic toy of a caveman to the cover of this creation to make it an exceptional attraction. Only the one copy, however, exists.
- The first fiction books I recall writing for my own amusement constituted a series about a little cave boy and his pet dinosaur, influenced, I think, by Roy Rockwood’s Bomba the Jungle Boy. I had at least three or four of these cave boy books, now long gone. Still have the Rockwoods. Java Man…Jungle Boy…. I sense a theme….
- But one of my favorite stories by my own hand was “The Man of the Golden Atom,” in which a scientist finds a glowing meteorite in the forest near his home/laboratory and because of its rays is diminished in size like the incredible shrinking man from the Richard Matheson story and movie. The title I borrowed from the old Ray Cummings sf story, which I had heard of—maybe in Famous Monsters of Filmland?—but had not read. At the end, in trying to escape a spider, the shrunken man, now reduced to a primitive, Bomba-like state, crawls under a slightly open window but is pelted by raindrops and falls into the garden outside, where he is caught in, and his life is ended by, a Venus flytrap. (There’s that theme again.)
- Another writing project for junior high school was an idea I borrowed from Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, in which four men, the last survivors of a nuclear war, journey to the center of the earth and find a lost world, where they can possibly survive. One of my friends in the eighth grade, maybe Sheldon, read it and asked me, “Why isn’t there a woman? There has to be a woman for people to survive.” True. I had been aware of this fact for some time, but I was a shy guy. That written theme was so lengthy that our teacher wrote a note at the top with my earned grade (I forget what I got), saying, “I didn’t expect a chapter from your forthcoming novel.” Prescient of her! No spiders or Java Men, though.
- Aerosmith, “Dream On.”
- We are living now in the Bardo.
- Autumn, for me, is the best season of the year. Things cool down, at least most things. Colors come out before going away for a while. We can go within. Quieter. Easier to go within, without the distractions and noise and light of a long summer and the people it brings out. (I don’t do well with crowds but have learned to desensitize myself.) Breathe. Enjoy what comes without being forced to participate in nonsense. Here is the world. I see it now.
- Something I enjoy very much, even vicariously, is sitting in with artists talking shop or loosening up about how they get into what they do. Just musicians jamming, actors talking about what they find what they’re exploring a role, writers getting excited about the craft. The best. Pure illumination. I could sit in on such sessions for hours because true creativity is the most mystical and enlightening thing in the world. We know this. Think about all the mythological creation stories we have, all so human. I am taken away by our imagination and vastness and boldness. On the other hand….
- Not everyone has a soul.
Thoughts at Random: My Brain Goes Everywhere. 1.
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