(Still) struggling fiction writer, film critic, video maker, seeker after "truth..."

Excerpts from my novel Madonna 666 (P. 189-198) published in the new issue of the transcendentally brilliant Paraphilia Magazine. Check it out.

http://issuu.com/paraphiliamagazine/docs/paraphilia_trasumanar

www.robsame.com was erected to promote my new horror novel Madonna 666, as well as several projected DIY no-budget video projects.

Madonna 666 now available as an e-book for Kindle:
http://www.amazon.com/Madonna-666-ebook/dp/B008AZQ87Q/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1339645402&sr=1-1&keywords=Madonna+666

My Psychological gothic novel Mother’s Got a Whip is also available on Kindle for just .99 (also accessible to I-pod and I-Phone download).

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004U6BHP2/ref=cm_sw_r_fa_alp_6Q3Knb051PR8Y

My new essay on underground filmmaker Bob Moricz.

Fractured Synthesis The Blender Aesthetic of Outsider filmmaker Bob Moricz

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/74/74bobmoricz_smart.php

My essay on Spanish underground film director now up at Bright Lights Film Journal

The Complete Exile The Films of Carlos Atanes

http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/72/72atanes_smart.php

END OF PR

Obsessive cinephile (Art films, Avant-garde-underground, 60's-70's European and Asian exploitation).

I had what I laughably refer to as a long "career" as an
un-produced screenwriter. I have written dozens of them over the years, several seemed close to getting financed but they all fell through. It seems possible that the subject matter I focused on, the tendency to court controversy and write lead characters that were outside the parameters of mainstream thrillers, melodramas and horror scripts contributed to my woes.

I am immersed in the arts and literature. Read widely in culture theory, psychology, and philosophy and so on. It can make for a dry profile but great correspondence or conversation if that's the kind of exchange you're looking for.

I have had enough time, enough experience, enough "input" to now see connections, parallels in all manner of supposedly disparate realms of knowledge. I get a kind of intellectual high taking in new ideas, or new works of art.

Open to the unconventional (GGG) but comfortable with the more tried and true as well. I am Reflective, artistic, and iconoclastic. And I am very left-wing/progressive politically.

Frustrated in my life goals thus far but never dissuaded from pursuing them.

I am tall (ish), thin, professorial. I can do everything I did in my thirties – only better, because I know so much more now.

Writing and surviving, occasionally shooting video when I can find willing subjects/collaborators.

Attempting to develop a workable hybrid of Performance Art and (No-Budget) narrative movie making.

I am agnostic and skeptical yet I suspect there may be more to this reality than meet the eye - I am just not at all certain this deeper something responds to human wishes about immortality etc. I have my most spiritual experiences while taking in various great works of art - and on those marvelous and rare occasions while undergoing some intense interaction with another person. And of course sometimes the natural world inspires that ineffable something. (both of the preceding perhaps examples of what Martin Buber called I-Thou experiences). Years ago I practiced zen mediation and experienced some moments of intense bliss but because I didn't go into it with a conceptual expectation as to what this experience might mean I never experienced it as a communion with divinity. Vincent van Gogh once wrote that "I have this terrible need of religion so every night I paint the stars." I do not perceive myself as needing religion but I do rather obsessively seek out works of art and other things that engender certain emotions and apprehensions - so perhaps that it is the equivalent for me.

Listening and remembering what was said to me in conversations.

Analysis, generating unique ideas, writing.

Dissecting screenplays, what works, what doesn’t, what the mainstream industry is looking for (anyone need a consultant?). Very strong at film analysis, understanding why the director chose a certain shot or why the scenes are cut together the way they are.

Encouraging and facilitating the creative goals of others. I seem to spend more time promoting other people's talents then I do my own sometimes.

I am reserved, shy, and take awhile to warm up. People assume due to appearance and demeanor that I am conservative: So far from the truth.

Jesus and Mary Chain, Velvet Underground, Pavement, The Clash, Sonic Youth, The Cramps, Butthole Surfers, Diamanda Galas, Nina Hagen, John Cale, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, The Damned, Pixes, Radiohead, U2, Leonard Cohen, Jimi Hendrix, Cream/Eric Clapton, Ten Years After, Lydia Lunch, Souixsie and the Banshees, The Dead Kennedy's, Primal Scream, The Dandy Warhols, Marilyn Manson, Sky Cries Mary, Johnny Cash, Bauhaus, Skinny Puppy, Dresden Dolls, Stolen Babies, etc.

Classical (too much to list); Jazz - Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Nina Simone).

The Obscene Bird of Night, Under the Volcano, The Man Without Qualities, Nabokov's Ada, The Sea Came in at Midnight, D.H Lawrence, Rilke, Woolf, Don Delillo, Donna Tartt (The Little Friend), Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jorge Borges, Jose Saramago, an amazing decadent French gender-twisting feminist novelist, Rachilde, and also Valery Bruisov's The Fiery Angel, a gothic novel written by a decadent-symbolist poet and occultist; Roberto Bolano, Steve Erickson (The Sea Came in at Midnight); J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock (The Cornelius Quartet; the Pyat series); John Banville, Neil Gaiman, Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow), Chris Kraus, I love Dick, Torpor etc.

As far as non-fiction goes The Invention of Hysteria; Madness and Modernism, Symptoms of Culture and Sex at Dawn as well as The Mind in the Cave by David Lewis-Williams and its two "sequels," The Neolithic Mind and Conceiving God, The "God" Part of the Brain, A Language Older than Words and Satyricon U.S.A.

Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Fellini, Oshima, Cassavetes, more recently Bela Tarr, Wong Kar-Wai (especially the film 2046), Chantal Akerman, Sion Sono (His amazing, outrageous film Love Exposure), Jia Zhangke, Ulrich Seidel, Radley Metzger, Russ Meyer, Tsai Ming-Liang, the delirious and deranged Andrzej Zulawsk, Asia Argentoi; Underground/Avant-garde filmmakers, Kenneth Anger, R.Kern...Maria Beatty... As a screenwriter I know I have mastered the Hollywood-style three-act restorative structure - except the films I most admire don't use that structure.

Performance art, burlesque...

Favorite Still Photographers: Ellen von Unswerth, Nan Goldin, Nobuyoshi Araki, Helmut Newton, Francesca Woodman, Cindy Sherman, R.Kern

Attractive Women
Films
Books
Music
Good conversations with unique and creative people.
My video camera.

My various and numerous obsessions.

How to shoot an entire video in one location with no money.

What my next novel will be.

Just trying to decompress from the rest of the week.

I'm very thin because of a chronic upper GI problem. I never eat out or share meals with others because of this, which is kind of downer since so many people socialize or cement relationships over food and drinks.

If you’re looking for a good time...

You should get in touch if you want to talk about your art, especially your film/videomaking or screenwriting, or fiction, but I would love to here from anybody doing anything; even if you’re a patron of the arts or otherwise involved.