The kids like zombies and vampires. Why?

Zombies are the people of every day, up out of the grave and staggering around in all their droop-lip banality, threatening to infect them, to engulf them, to make them one of their own.  The zombie is the guy in the street, a cross-section, as it were, the people you pass every day and look down on. As Chekhov says, "There is nothing more vapid than a philistine petty bourgeois existence with its small change, provisions, vacuous conversations and useless conventional virtue."  The walking dead.

Both are diseases. If they break your skin you become one of them.

The kids fear the zombies—but they long to be vampires, to be artists, night people, exceptions, drinkers of blood.  H. L. Mencken: "The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. No virtuous man—that is, virtuous in the Y.M.C.A. sense—has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a book worth reading."

If there is romantic interest in a zombie, that means that he/she is overcoming his/her zombieness, his/her deadness. Zombies come out of death, until they rot and sink back into it. Vampires go into death, and live happily ever after. It's a class system.

March Weather

On amazon

Contain me, contain me, I

Would be publishable, I

Would be small and inky, I

Would plant here the seeds of a

Mode of being and become

Great. Start with death, that, though we

Grunt under it, happiest

Of facts (what other faith but

Cloys with your self pity?), then

Redescend the tunnel of

Sensation, quivering with

Spasms. You cannot pick up

An image and be it, it's

Maddening. (Love me for this,

I am brave: death is not the

Annihilation of the

Personality: life is.)

Lightly across smouldering

Memories hasten barefoot

Toward unconditional

Absolution for all that

Does not concur with this your

Straightjacket, your own arms bound

Against remissive gestures.

Strain toward ignorance of

Self, for that is your only

Dignity. Say what in my

Civilized naivety

I could lately not have said:

The solution to problems

Is to ignore them. Do I

Pirouette? Shall I be held

Still? And to what project? To

The psychiatrist I will

Give no ground, I will hold what

May not be mine, nor guess at

Its nature: reality

No longer really interests

Me, frustration's final grace.

Everything can be taken

Two ways: Up. Down. (Two keys in

This score:) Only decisions.

There are no decisions. The

Mind not a thing but an act,

Though "act", you see—Well. Quicksand.

I exonerate myself.

I exonerate myself.

Reduce the impact on me,

I would enjoy. Nothing is

Stable. Sex, impersonal,

Unidentifiable,

And when it comes knocking you

Can't quarrel with the shape it

Takes. Hold what ground? You know too

Much, you can't afford a

Personality. The whole

Effort takes more tact than that.

Tiger of wrath. Criminal.

They'll put you in a cage. I

Am in a cage! OK, think.

I worry about being

A less fortunate. How could

I bear the envy? Isn't,

Though, that other happiness

Accessible to all? Not

To you. Spring may yet destroy

You, wake your impatience with

Melancholy, so wait. Tear

Up your notes. Joy outstrips all

Formulae, and will recur.

In each of these, your phases,

Unsupported, you follow?

Clean. And then there's the moodless

Mood, backstage, in control. One's

Feelings on the john taken

Against one's feelings in the

Shower. You are a blot of

Mustard, an undigested

Crumb of cheese, your intestine

Plays you like a saxaphone

Until you are reduced to

Believing in miracles.

Hang in. The trouble starts when

You stop trusting your charm. Run

The whole bluff, go ahead. You

Don't want to know who you are

(What an intolerable

Burden that would be), for to

Know nothing is ecstasy,

Though granted not sustaining.

A gentle and erotic

Life, to speak tenderly, at

One with your trajectory,

Although to live is to be mad  

You do see that. A madness

Without glamour, an unrest,

An incapability

Of exhaustion. Unclean. Let

Us not transcend life, let us

Look into its mirror and

Go fucking nuts. Let us take

Life on its terms, if such can

Be deduced, like a poem.

The beyond but mirrors life,

The wonder, the completion

(Come on, now, bring it on), for

Is goodness not moving? Can

You help but betray it? No,

Forget that. Your being has

More import than your art. I

Can't keep track of what I am

Or what I feel. I squander.

On the other hand, no steps

Need be taken. Are you with

Me? Don't try to grab your soul,

If you like. Your body too

Knows more than you. Truth hard to

Come by, overrated. A

Low tolerance for crap is

The most you have. Between these

Epistemological

Horns, the charging beast's forehead

Bouncing back your shells of Faith!

Innocence! Joy! I will kill

You if I catch you. Come here.

Don't you trust me? I cannot

Contain myself but I can

Contain the world, in a way.

I can't get it right. Let slide.

Pleasure and amusement, the

Only discipline left. How

I spent my time on Earth. This

Is the Arc de Triomphe. The

Future is not as closed as

It looks. You were not meant to

Be prophetic. Forget your

Body's decay, your dramas

Of digestion, your dreary

Hypnosis. Walk another

Line. Dare to be shallow. Spurn

Especially the traps of

Sentimentality, the

Forsaken's arguments, the

Entertainer's ingenious

Ways of injuring you. Is

Not the naked spectacle

Sufficiently heartbreaking?

Speak gently. All suffices.

Something to believe in would

Compromise the perfection

Of your faith. Cultivate the

Principle of minimal

Effort. You can't become real

Anyway, you've tried that. And

Thank you. Your hysterical

Attempt has persuaded me.

You will never contain me.

The Salesman of Certain Eases: A Rude Rhyme

The salesman of certain eases

Does pretty much as he pleases

With whatever chances he seizes,

And the frivolous rhyme words he teases.

But if his honey-babe so much as sneezes

He freezes,

Embraces her tightly and squeezes

Till she wheezes,

Protects her from insolent breezes,

Does searches on several diseases,

And counts up the gods he appeases,

Even Jesus.

On youtube

In print

Cold comfort:

notes on canada

Robert MacLean is an independent filmmaker. His The Light Touch is on Amazon Prime, Tubi and Scanbox, and his 7-minute comedy is an out-loud laugh. He is also a novelist, a playwright, a blogger, a YouTuber, a film reviewer, a literary critic, and a stand-up comic poet. Born Toronto, PhD McGill, taught at Canadian universities, too cold, live Greece, Irish citizen. Committed to making movies that don't matter. No brains, but an intellectual snob.

Pleasure and amusement—one has to stand for something!

In Bed with the Girls

The Light Touch on Amazon Prime

Film review: Hillbilly Elegy

The Natural Wish to Be Robert MacLean

Also on YouTube:

Boccaccio’s "The Husband" 

Boccaccio's "The Horse Trade" 

Boccaccio's "The Stupid Friar" 

Chaucer’s "The Miller's Tale"

"Red Devil Rag"

"Attack of the Giant Feminists"

"But Is It Love? Or, The Destruction of West Los Angeles"

Pretentious Pictures Presents:

CHOCOLATE AND CHAMPAGNE

A comedy with a dark center

A Beverly Hills woman wakes up "older" and finds her life with a younger man undignified. The stage version was produced in at the Creative Place Theatre in NYC.

Attached: Bo Derek

Diana, the Hamlet at the heart of this comedy, is a clothes designer with a boutique on Rodeo Drive, a house in Beverly Hills, and a younger lover, Jim, her kept man for two years now. There’s nothing she can’t handle—except getting older.

She deals with a birthday by throwing him out. They're right for each other, she regrets it immediately, but she can't take him back, because her daughter Jackie, who idolizes and competes with her, tells her Jim has seduced her, and Diana believes it.

Proposed: Richard Dreyfuss

So she makes do with the respectable but empty life she'd thought she needed, with her lawyer Griff—more her age, and on her success level. Griff has been in love with her for years. Now’s his chance.

Proposed: Gael García Bernal

Jim is happy with a champagne-and-sports-car life, but he’s also a talented script-writer who’s postponing seriousness into a future that never comes. Together they’re fast company. They must have been brilliant at her birthday party last night.

This morning, though, even while he’s making love to her, she’s spooked. She tells him he has to go. She wants something more presentable, more—respectable—before it’s too late. Which shocks him. He takes life as it comes, but this is a bit violent.

Proposed: Jennifer Coolidge

Betsy, the suicidal widow of a husband she drove to suicide, is too scattered to pass a driving test, takes a lesson with Jim, spins the car onto a Mulholland Drive cliff and is ready to gun it and take him with her. He calms her down and she takes him home. But he can't forget Diana.

Proposed: Adelaide Clemens

Jackie, Diana’s daughter, idolizes her and so misses no chance to pick at and defy her. Inwardly shaky, she is outwardly impish and sexy. She thinks she’s in love with Jim; in fact what she needs is a father.

Proposed: Owen Teague

Betsy's son Dylan—eccentric hair, psychotic eyes, twitches constantly and rhythmically as if keeping time to music he doesn’t much enjoy—is in the same class at UCLA with Jackie, over whom he moans uncontrollably. He disgusts her.

Proposed: Rosie Perez 

Maria, Diana's housekeeper, is the deadpan foil to Diana's Hamlet, secret ally to Jim, and the one person Diana doesn't dare defy.

Proposed: Amy Brenneman

GWEN is Diana's mischievous best friend and alter-ego. She'll take Jim if Diana doesn't want him! Just kidding. In an attempt to bring them back together she throws a party and invites both of them, but it turns into a confrontation....

And the final character is Beverly Hills—the tone, the climate, the village size and ambiance that make it inevitable for these people to collide.

Pretentious pictures presents

a comedy with a dark center.