poetic impulseshttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/en-US2010-07-30T11:21:03ZSquarespace Site Server v5.11.5 (http://www.squarespace.com/)Canceled plans always hurthttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2010/1/21/canceled-plans-always-hurt.htmlblue2010-01-21T07:36:00ZAt the edge of everything, I seem to find the fullness of self. One more step leads into a fall or a drift which will break me to pieces. This balancing act, of leaning out over an empty drop, while still aware of orbits and anchors, is a path I’ve followed all my life. Like a trapeze flier, or walker of high wires, the attention I attract is not usually due to fond familiarity but to the possibility of failure. And of failure with consequence. Extinction, scars or exhaustion. But here at the edge there is energy and treasure to grasp and collect, not just from being in places without people, but from being forced by planetary grandeur to admit that in the end I am a person without a place.

]]>killer for lovehttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2009/7/18/killer-for-love.htmlblue2009-07-18T06:16:14ZLove comes without invitation or warning, and leaves the same way. So why would anyone spend a minute waiting for it? And why chase it? Except how can you deny how elemental love is, especially as you value solitude and knowledge more and more with age? The more you study, the more you know you don't know, the more love shines as something to admire or celebrate but not to possess or clutch. Letting love go is the best way to find out who you are, and how capable you may be in making love or rescuing it when it calls out for help, and asks that only lovers respond to its troubles. But here I am, putting a human sense onto an emotion that has evolved to help society survive and procreate. And I do this because I am impressed into creating a piece of literature that explains love and defends it only when it is capable of destruction, because to feel it as a comfort is an insult to what loving means: love kills you, if you are very lucky and very brave. Who expresses this? Why?

]]>writing with leopardshttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2009/5/16/writing-with-leopards.htmlblue2009-05-16T20:39:11ZI was writing beautiful shit. I mean, pretty. And then a deadline moved into the movie, and the four scenes I have left (which explain everything) are suddenly shy as snow leopards. I washed the dishes, sang in the shower for an hour, called everybody and said nothing, read Camus and watched Monica Vitti, flirted and threatened and made people cry and laugh and curse me upside down, and still the writing hides . . .

]]>small note for the you wish girlhttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2009/2/28/small-note-for-the-you-wish-girl.htmlblue2009-02-28T04:37:54Z"It's probably the best way," her voice says, as she breaks up over the line.

She will always be going where the reception is in danger of failing, so she can be herself, in her own universe. And in that place, there is no room for me. I do not fit. Because I come attached to a million dreams, huge balloons that carry me in unknown directions. She falls in love, or she fights with a friend, or she just wants to dance, and she will not notice if she punctures a balloon of mine. But then her universe is quiet, and her imagination starts working without schoolwork in her head or a boy in her pants, and she remembers what happens when we are trying to make something, how thrilled she was to be the center of my attentions.

How far she swam to leave her universe and come into mine! She can't stay long, because that is not my nature, and she learns to fly, because escape will always be her desire. Other people will see us flying and shout "Look at those people in the sky!"

But can this ever happen outside of her dreams? Will she ever broadcast herself again to me? Because now she won't hear me. She no longer trusts me. Because she cannot listen to her own impulses nor trust herself, so how can she do these things with me?

"I am just like you," says me.

"No, no, nobody is," says she, and the reception breaks completely, leaving me in shocking silence, with her all alone in her dreams. She will drink and dance and get laid and maybe think of me in the middle of the night with a burst of anger or frustration, and think again that it is not her who has changed but me, and I cannot call her then and say: "I still want to watch you being you, and I am still looking for you, waiting for you to show me who you wish to be, so I can make a picture and say,

'Look, Maya, do you see?'"

Oh, she thinks, that person does not look like me!

But, Seanie, I love your picture. 

Do you have more? Of me?

]]>potential nightmares on paperhttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2009/2/14/potential-nightmares-on-paper.htmlblue2009-02-14T08:35:00Z________________________________

If the circumstances turn out a certain way,

this is every woman's nightmare.

I come in to her small ranch outside Vegas and find her in an empty hot tub, huddled and in tears. Daddy is bleeding from his eyes. She doesn't look at me or acknowledge me and my camera. "Daddy's bleeding from his eyes, like tears, dark, burgundy." I can't say anything, you never can, but I sit on the edge of the tub and she reaches up her hand to touch. "I know it's impossible, Blue, since it's only been two months, but I can feel it kicking."

The baby.

No way. She says she can feel it trying to come out. Daddy is dying, and she is pregnant, giving birth. "It's like a race. I have to win," she says, and she repeats this a dozen times. I can see her belly and thighs straining, and I tell her to relax, that she will win the race only if she relaxes, and this gets her out of the tub and into bed, where she's asleep seconds after lying down. She sleeps until the next dawn, when the caw of some bird wakes her up in fright. I smile, she smiles, and the fright flies out the window.

Daddy will be happy to see you, she says. Maybe, thinks me.

+++++

This little passage opens a novel publicly written by Blue in 2009. You can catch it in action right here. And for more of the Raindancer in images and some small words, go here.

 

]]>A Note From the Brink of Disasterhttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2009/1/8/a-note-from-the-brink-of-disaster.htmlblue2009-01-08T10:58:00ZThe think tank is spooky at night, and the hairstylist wants to know if I am afraid of ghosts. There is not a spirit who I wouldn’t be happy to meet, I tell her, and if there are any in this building they will certainly come looking for me. Because my creative impulses are finding similar beats in people ready to make some noise. Thieves are in charge, more here in Iceland than anywhere else in the world, and they are using the national values of family to keep the citizenry in the dark. So people fed up with being ripped off by a handful of redneck aristocrats find my quixotic campaigns either amusing or inspiring, and new friends seem to be everywhere, tuned to the possibilities of revolt. It makes for an interesting new year, when anything can happen and probably will.

]]>Diane Arbus Could Tie Her Shoelaces, At Leasthttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2008/11/13/diane-arbus-could-tie-her-shoelaces-at-least.htmlblue2008-11-13T08:46:20ZPhotography is the province of the privileged. There is a wide discourse current on the Net which asks us if the proliferation of cameras is a good thing for photography. Aren't there too many people taking pictures? Hasn't the medium turned mediocre, with any impulse for creativity instantly gratified for a few hundred dollars and 12 megapixels? The people who make this argument tend to be the amateurs who once shot with actual 35 millimeter film, and they are aghast at the arrivistes passing them by with 3,000 shots a month. For a blue collar stiff like me, improperly self-educated, the situation is wonderful: anyone (almost) can shoot and document their own barrios and inner souls without suffering the interpretations and infatuations of the rich. And Diane Arbus, bless her soul, was rich, the daughter of a man who sold furs in Manhattan. Arbus studied under Lisette Model, who was so well-off she had a maid to tie her shoes; Lisette as a teenager still did not know how to tie shoelaces. No wonder it is tempting to say now that Arbus was mining the veins of poverty for her own profit as she stalked transvestites and circus freaks. She put in her sweat, after all (working with her husband on fashion shoots), and the equity allowed her to capture faces and places the rich rarely encountered. But what did she say about these people? What did she think? Does Diane Arbus still influence how we shoot? Or did she know, somehow, how shallow her lifetime of images would become? Was it that despair that drove her to suicide? Because in the end, what is a photographer left with, if the only impulse to shoot is to record what you see? Which photographer can you say has recorded what he or she felt about themselves? Well, actually, Arbus: How many times did she admit the freaks she shot were simply her mirrors? Her weird photographs actually seem to say more about her than they do about her subjects. That realization alone would be enough to drive her to the pills and overdose. It's tempting to read that possibility into her thoughts, but she left us with too little to mull. Like other well-heeled photographers who made their names by wandering among the poor, all Diane Arbus really left us was a bunch of arresting images with very little explanation for not only their existence but why she made them.

]]>in the cemetery, the night before the day of the deadhttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2008/11/1/in-the-cemetery-the-night-before-the-day-of-the-dead.htmlblue2008-11-01T05:10:00Z

the breeze brings memories of the dead, chats and chortles, but work is done until daylight puffs out because there are tombstones to clean and faces to paint, children to decorate in halloween, in skulls or flowers, so let the men debate sports and politics while the engines keep churning to keep traditions from falling out of favor, where most traditions would go if it wasn't for a mother to protect them, unless they have to do with killing or medals, at which time a man is only too glad to snap to attention; but for making the cemetery into a flowery display, fuck that, the males congregate around the results from the futbol or the scandals in the Mayor's office, unless it is their woman, their mother maybe, or hopefully Heaven forbids it their daughter, lying in memory beneath the stones, under the dusty soils and broken shreds of last year's celebrations of the day of the dead, in which case the man turns poet and bends to the task, choking tears and coughing for breath . . .

]]>Did U go to U.?http://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2008/10/4/did-u-go-to-u.htmlblue2008-10-04T00:56:17ZThe college recruiter is 32, and is in the basement of the convention center in Portland, where he gets the attention of my niece Aisha. He's trying to sell her American University, even though his own alma mater is UNC. He feels guilty when potential students are turned away because they can't afford the $20K in annual tuition, but it's his job to recruit, so he's fishing for dollars anyway. He's still paying off his own college loans. Aisha asks him if he could be doing something better with his money than paying back loans, and of course he can think of a million things to do with the cash.

How do you feel about an innocent 12th grader getting dragged into a lifetime of debt, asks Aisha of the college recruiter. He wishes that schools are a lot cheaper, and he indeed borrowed to go to school and has a few years to go, and here he is trying to pay his nut by getting other fools to pay up and go to American U. So now he's got a degree and is working in college admissions, although he admits he hopes this won't be his job in another ten years, because he's afraid it will make him hardened. But it's not me who designed the system, he keeps saying, to which Aisha keeps replying: Yeah, but you're the messenger.

]]>A Mother Without Familyhttp://www.seanieblue.com/poetic-impulses/2008/8/15/a-mother-without-family.htmlblue2008-08-15T00:06:00ZI arrive two days before she dies. With my father, it was a handful of hours. My mother went to the doctor and was told he wanted to remove her leg. She asked for a taxi and split. She would die with all limbs intact. They set her up in a bed in her living room, where her family could come for uncomfortable reminders of what is coming in all our futures. Hospice came and played Mozart, which she hated. Force fed her until she couldn't go to the bathroom any more because of the state of her leg. She didn't eat another bite, and didn't go to the bathroom again. No more potty, no more norurishment. Men with a funeral car came and zipped her up into a body bag. I helped them carry her out to the car and they drove away. I helped my aunt write a laughable obit for the newspapers. Seems like my mother founded the Sorbonne and brought peace to the Middle East and I didn't even know it. Controversy started soon afterward, and my brother-in-law came up with the best quip: "This is her way of getting more attention from her family." I have to admit I thought she would take a lot longer, and drag everyone with her, but I was wrong. I apologise. She left the world the same way she came in, with no grand plans and not at all eager to make the place any better than she found it. But I suppose we can say this about most parents if we stop to think about it. My parents were both humorous, extravagant people, but not heroic in the slightest. Mikey Cormier calls me and says I can join his Orphans Club, and from the sound of it, a few beers on his tongue and sadness in his tone -- he and my mother respected each other quite a bit -- he is calling me from that Club. I will have to go and see what it's like.

]]>