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 | | From: | Marco McClean | | Subject: | Thanks For Stealing Everything. Rivals. The Indian Who Said Velvet. | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 03:40:40 -0800 |
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 | My dreams from Friday morning, 2005-01-21:
First dream. At the foot of a hedge on a road in peaceful
farm country I find someone's yellowed thank-you note to whoever
stole his big car and armoire and bags of trash for the dump and
also his wife. I love things like this. I save it to scan it
later and send it to foundmagazine.com
Now I'm riding on the tailgate of the stolen station wagon,
holding on by one arm over the peeling-veneer armoire that
sticks out the back beside me. In the trash I find childhood
notes to myself and save them; one is sealed in wrinkled vinyl
food wrap, as though someone was experimenting with laminating
art, probably by using layers of newspaper and a clothes iron;
that's the way I'd do it.
In a warehouse with a high ceiling I talk with Kay about
having to take the roof off a demonstration prefab house (inside
the warehouse) to get something I forgot out of the top room.
Kay finds it funny and typical of me to not acknowledge that she
warned me to take one last look before plastering shut and
roofing over the top room.
But I don't mind undoing and re-doing. I think of it as part
of the cost of doing anything worthwhile.
Next dream. In an Elizabethan-era town a red-haired woman
and Sherlock Holmes' daughter keep accidentally being near each
other, overhearing each other's conversations and just missing
crucial information on notes balled up and thrown away. So each
one /almost/ understands the situation, then the story goes
forward and the other one /almost/ understands, then it goes the
other way again. They're rivals in the way the two sides
searching for a dead poet's secret letters in the movie
/Possession/ are rivals.
One wadded-up note Sherlock Holmes' daughter tosses away
goes over a wall. A street urchin swings his hat around, bobbles
the note in the air, trying to catch it.
Next dream. I'm in an American-Indian/East-Indian village
that was transported to another planet a thousand years ago and
left to develop on its own. It's hard to communicate with the
people here, but I'm wearing dark-blue velvet pants and
eventually an Indian says, "Velvet." That's a start. Another in
my exploration crew rolls and smokes a joint. The Indian who
said /velvet/ steals my colleague's bag of dope and his pipe. I
prevent pursuit; it's not a big deal.
Later while I fill a normal sheetrock-finished room with
water for swimming I tell about how one time on a mission I
brought a bag of dope for Queen Elizabeth and it was stolen. The
spigot on the floor works perfectly, shuts off when I pull the
string I wound around it earlier, but the spigot in the laundry
sink won't shut off. There's nothing for it but to let all the
water out. I say, "I didn't even get to swim." And my velvet
pants are ruined.
An Indian woman sings a song in freshly-acquired English
about feeling used. I say, "Who feels used? You or me?" She
says, "I." Good. Jeezis, they're fast learners here.
I'm standing naked, cooking something in a wok. The language
prodigy woman says, "Marco." (She wants me to sing with her.)
No. I put on some torn jeans and go out walking through what
I think of as coin trees near a lake. The tree leaves and grass
and water all shimmer like sequins on the sign on the back of an
Alhambra water truck.
Next dream. In the banquet room of the restaurant of a
roadside motel, four unattractive, over-made-up women audition
together in a line to be 1950s-style strippers. They wander
away, sullenly complimenting and criticizing each other.
(My first choice was not /sullenly/ but /desultorily/, but I
felt a twinge of doubt, looked it up and was surprised to find
that all along I have been misusing that word. I thought
desultory meant /sullen/ but slightly less dark, less
adolescently angry. Desultory turns out to mean random-- there's
no negative connotation at all. If you go to
http://tinyurl.com/6p5ot you will find links to all dream posts
I ever made that use the words desultory or desultorily. I'd
like you to mentally replace those words with /sullen/ or
/sullenly/, whichever fits.)
Next dream. I reluctantly attend the daytime premiere of a
movie made in the visual style of /Sky Captain and the World of
Tomorrow/; it stars a Jimmy Stewart lookalike as the childless
Professor and Mendocino actress Savvy as the plucky little
math-whiz orphan girl who invents faster-than-light travel. I
wrote the screenplay for this movie. It's got a little /Blade
Runner/ in it, a little /Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf/.
A quiet, shy combination of former Fort Bragg (CA) librarian
Sylvia Kozak Budd and Hit & Run Theater's Kathy O'Grady chose
this old, dusty, small-town-but-grand movie palace for the
showing and media event. Juanita and I are in line for dinner
(there's a stand-up dinner); I'm pulled out of the line to pose
for a publicity photo with actress Gina O'Feral in front of a
poster that's blown up so the pixils are as big as my thumbnail.
Finally I get into the kitchen but they're not serving
anymore. Out in the theater the movie starts. I see Juanita
sitting down in front with a lot of children.
A big florid operatically stout know-it-all woman gets up
between the front seats and the low stage under the screen and
complains, "There are too many lights on." She picks up a table
lamp, turns it over and all around to find the switch, doesn't
find it and settles for yanking out the plug. She carries the
lamp to a fake teevee set that has a slide projector in it
flashing an ad for the movie on and off and she pulls its plug
out too. Kathy O'Grady, over by the inclined candy counter that
runs down the entire side of the theater, rolls her eyes. (The
know-it-all woman can be counted on to show up and interfere in
any event Kathy organizes.)
I move all around the theater trying to find a place to sit.
The empty rear seats are no good-- sunlight coming in through
the lobby from outdoors makes a blazing opaque wall of suspended
dust. I sit in a diner/soda-shop booth, but a greasy man slides
in after me, squeezing me between him and his date; this is /his
seat/.
I get out by going under the little table and try other
places. At one point I crawl down the aisle, tangled in a
bedsheet, to sit on the floor near Juanita. She reaches over the
children absentmindedly and pats me on the head. There's nothing
wrong with sitting here, but I move anyway.
I find a real seat close to the screen on the far right, but
from here I can only see a slice of the far-left part of the
screen, and that at a funny angle, tipped up.
Two men sit in a sleazy diner booth. The theater is now a
sepia-environment train-station waiting area. The man in a
fedora hat taps the hatless bald man on the shoulder and cocks
an eyebrow toward where Jimmy Stewart is sitting reading the
newspaper and eating bacon and eggs. The bald guy looks, says,
"Him?" and snickers. The men are in the story, in the movie;
they're picking Professor Jimmy Stewart at random from the crowd
to use him in their boss' scheme.
There's one more dream from this sleep period after
/Premiere/, but I did something unusual that screwed things up;
I typed the dream out fully when I got up rather than making a
note with the other notes I wrote when I woke earlier. Then I
forgot to email it to myself. So here I am now at Juanita's
house typing from my notes and I don't have anything on paper
from the end dream and can't remember anything about it. I'll
send it in a separate post when I get back home on Thursday or
Friday.
-end-
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