August 2011

Marilyn was my first girlfriend, and perhaps the love of my life. We were sixteen and seventeen when we met. She looked like one of Renoir’s models, as if she stepped out of a painting rendered in nineteenth century France. She wore black tights with her turquoise dress. She was any artists dream. She was…

“The child plays. The toy boat sails across the pond. The work is just begun. Oh child, look what you have done!” The love for my childhood friend, Bill Arnold, is the most profound love of my life, for two very young artists, found each, after coming to believe no one on earth would ever…

“A lot of that sectarian mix that existed in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq doesn’t exist here in Libya,” Feltman said. He also said that “the overwhelming vision that we are hearing” from people across Libya is that “they want a Libya that is moderate, that is secular.” When George W. Bush got clean and sober, some…

When Sarah Palin came to Eugene Oregon, I appeared under her hotel window as Merlin ‘The Red’ of the Evil Empire of Old’. Merlin is a candidate for the coming Anti-Christ. “Several decades later the poet Robert de Boron retold this material in his poem Merlin. Only a few lines of the poem have survived,…

While Bryan Maclean and Love were living in a castle in LA, I and the Loading Zone were living in a ten bedroom Victorian in West Oakland. The photo above was taken at the front door of that huge old house. Peter Shapiro and I were roommates in a Victorian in Alameda California later on,…

Above is a photograph taken outside the Glen’s church in Topanga Canyon. I have just got married to Maryanne Thoraldson. Bryan Maclean, my best friend at University High School, sang during the ceremony. We are singing Amazing grace. Bryan and I have given up alcohol and drugs when this picture was taken. This is my…

Chapter One Our Step-Father Who Art In Vietnam In the thousand hours of conversations I had with my sister Vicki since we buried the axe, and the paint brush of our malcontents, alas I had to hang up the phone so I could cry. We had been talking about Robbie, the Vietnam Veteran who met…

When I saw the opening scene from the movie ‘Sexy Beast’ I knew it was now possible to make a movie about the insanity that was unloosed in my family – daily! Being an infrequent guest, my coming to visit my kin, was an event! They always saved their best for me – it seems!…

Above is the secret headquarters of One World Enterprise, OWE, whose founder, Bruce Perlowin, is titled ‘King of Pot’. After getting out of the Fed lockup – where he married a infamous Russian spy – Bruce came to live with my surrogate family, in the basement of the home where I spent Easter, Christmas, and…