inherited architectural dispossession

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

This post reviews imagery from this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.

In my second dream, there's a moment where I'm in a small desert town with some of my old friends. It's daytime, but everything looks really dark.

It's kind of funny, because I told myself yesterday that I was going to have a dream image like this. Yesterday I had been leafing through a 1983 book called Denver: America's Mile High Center of Enterprise.

I leafed through the book until the sun had almost completely set and there was no light in my house. Looking at some final images before getting up to turn on a light, I thought, Oh, now I'm going to imagine myself in some weirdly dark sort of area.

I also had a feeling I'd see myself in a desert. The book, written in 1983, i.e. 35 years ago as of this writing, documented a time when Denver was taking on some really interesting growth projects. But Denver was still a sort of desert town, as I think this photo, looking from Stapleton Airport toward downtown, illustrates very well.

This 1983 image struck me a lot, as it shows how downtown Denver used to be just this little up-sprouting of skyscrapers. But it also shows Stapleton airport, which no longer exists. In fact, all of the tree area in this photo would now be nothing but developed city sprawl, I'm pretty sure, if you looked at a photo today.

But I also looked at some other photos in the book, such as this image of the Johns Manville Corporation headquarters building.

As you can see, the building is surrounded by a desert mountain landscape. I honestly don't know whether the building still exists. And if it does, I wondered last night, is it still surrounded by desert? Or has the land around it been developed?

Another area the book talks about is Greenwood Village, which was just then becoming a center for Denver's tech industry. Nowadays Greenwood Village is so developed and overrun that -- I used to work there -- traffic into and out of the area is an absolute nightmare. It can take you an hour to get three exits down the highway on a bad day. But in this book, Greenwood Village was still a fresh, new, innovative, exciting, and pioneering idea.

As a side note, the little article in the image above discusses the John Madden company. When I worked in Greenwood Village in 2016, I was also involved with an art gallery in Denver. And through my interest in helping out the gallery, I reached out to the Madden Museum. In that way I ended up meeting some of the Madden family. Unfortunately I let those relationships die as my relationship with the art gallery died.

The Madden Museum, anyway, is a great museum, probably one of my favorite art spaces in the Denver metro area. Here's a link to their site. And here's an image from their website -- of this beautiful sculpture of a dancer. I love this work so much.

So this book got me thinking about desert imagery. But it also really impacted me emotionally for some family reasons.

Last year my step-grandma passed away. When she passed away I inherited about half of my grandparents' library. Over the past year I've been working my way slowly through the roughly 1,500 volumes I inherited.

As I work through the books from the 1970s and 1980s that are specifically related to Colorado history, however, I discover that my step-grandma actually had a hand in editing some of these works! This is something I did not know at all. My grandparents never discussed it, or if they did, I certainly don't remember. My mom would always mention, either bragging or as if annoyed, depending on her mood, that my step-grandma helped create a few Colorado-themed cookbooks. But she never mentioned her hand in editing some of these historical books.

And though he wasn't in the construction industry, my grandpa, through volunteer and community work, also had a hand in some construction projects in the Denver area, including Denver International Airport -- which, obviously, replaced Stapleton International Airport, the airport in the image above.

So my grandparents had a lot of connections in Denver and Colorado. But they never helped any of us grandkids out by leveraging these connections. I think that sort of stinks, honestly. But I also think it has to do with some emotional issues my grandpa had that prevented him from sort of thinking about his progeny in these terms.

Here's my thought on my grandpa and my family's emotional arc. My great grandma was a very strong woman. She grew up in the Colorado mountains in the 1910s. She survived a lot and was a brilliant person. But I think she ended up over-idealizing her husband, my great grandfather, who passed away before I was born.

I think my great grandma's over-idealization of my great grandpa led to my grandpa feeling maternally neglected, which, I think, led him to have an over-idealized conception of manliness (which he could never meet) and a sort of devalued conception of femininity.

My grandpa met my biological grandma, and, as far as I can tell, their having my mother led to my grandpa dropping out of university and marrying my grandma. My grandpa therefore -- it seems to me -- always devalued my biological grandma. But his only two children were also girls -- my mom and my aunt. And he just devalued women. So he didn't pass on any motivation for my mom and aunt -- both perfectly intelligent and capable human beings -- to make something out of their lives.

I think my mom resented this more than my aunt. And I feel like my mom has ended up having a number of anti-society complexes that are based on anti-father complexes because of all this. I think a lot of my mom's anti-society outlook has translated into my outlook. And I think that's partly why I tend to become extremely paranoid and belligerent as I detect myself finding any sort of foothold or success in the social world.

I have thought over and over this emotional dynamic over the past year as I've worked through the stuff I've inherited from my grandparents. But the emotional dynamic feels really painful when I look through the books that my step-grandma edited. I just think to myself -- couldn't my grandparents have helped me out in some way? I might never understand why they weren't able to open up this part of their life to me.

There's also a sense -- as I'm continually treated as a person who doesn't belong in Denver's business, art, and political realms -- that... I see all these connections my family has had to Denver -- ranging back decades, even before the 1970s. And I see how and where my family is connected. But I'm treated like a person who doesn't belong here. I'm treated like an upstart. But if my grandparents had put me in front of all these people they were friends with, I'd have the connections I needed. People would see me as someone who fit in. I wouldn't have the issues and problems I have today. But they didn't do that. And why? I just... don't understand...

I feel dispossessed. And I feel dispossessed... betrayed... by my own family...

So, getting back to my dream imagery, the place where this strange light occurred was a small desert town in Texas. That town is obviously Marfa, Texas, that strange town which a couple times each year serves as a gathering spot for some of the world's elite artists and celebrities. The Denver gallery owners I used to be friends with also have a gallery location in Marfa. I went to Marfa a couple times in 2016. And the place holds a lot of spiritual power for me.

Here's an image of Marfa's city limits, via Extreme Geographer.

And here's an image from an NPR article, the link is here, of the Chinati Foundation, Donald Judd's art institution that made Marfa a world-famous art locale.

The ramen place in my dream is like a typical Japanese ramen stand. But I think it actually comes from my memory of a phở shop in Marfa called Marphở. Here's an image of Marphở, from this article by the Mint Society -- though it sounds like Marphở is no longer in business.

Marphở I think connects the idea of a small desert town (what Denver honestly never was, though, among big cities, it's always been just that) with the image of Texas, but also to something else that's also resonated with me a lot over the past few days, the new MV for "Mou Setsunai to wa Iwasenai" by the J-pop group Gesu no Kiwami Otome.

In this MV, the band members play a group of four friends. It seems to me that the fourth friend, played by lead singer Enon Kawatani, has died. He was the boyfriend of the character played by drummer Hona Ikoka. The three remaining friends meet up and remember their old friend. At one point, the Hona Ikoka character, out biking like the Enon Kawatani character used to do, becomes very determined to carry out her boyfriend's beloved bike ride with a sense of happiness instead of sadness. This moment in the MV always makes me teary-eyed.

I seriously couldn't even paste the stills into this blog without becoming teary-eyed!!!

Hona Ikoka looks kind of unique in this video. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's her longer hair. But she reminds me of a girl I used to like when I lived in New Mexico. The girl liked me, too. And one night she even took me back home with her. But neither of us could get to the point she wanted to get to, which was us sleeping together. She wanted to be with me. At the party we were at, I overheard her talking with her friends about it. But when we got to her house, nothing happened. I ended up just saying goodnight and walking home.

I think the girl in my first dream relates back to my friend from New Mexico in this way. I've always personally had a really hard time initiating anything with girls -- simply because I've always had a horrible fear of doing anything to make girls feel like I think they're just sex objects. So a lot of my romantic relationships just die on the vine. And this one was no different.

But I always think... thankfully I don't think I impact anybody's life in such a strong way. But when I do, it's only in the bad ways. And I always think, what if I could just leave people with the happy moments only? And when they do things, they just think about me in a happy way? So when I see this moment in "Mou Setsunai to wa Iwasenai" I definitely wish I could only leave the people who care about me with the happy memories.

Since I first learned of Sigmund Freud, back in 1995, my life has been about trying to untangle the psychological past of my history, try and create some resolution to it, and move forward with my life in some functional way. Since about 1997, when I really started having dreams, my life has really been all about my dreams. And my dreams have related to all of this stuff -- trying to re-inherit where I've been disinherited and re-possess where I've been dispossessed -- trying to reclaim enough of my self-history as a foundation for my self-worth that I can stop self-sabotaging and stop allowing people to sabotage me; but also so I can expand and give to people, and so I can give in such a way that people want to take from me, from me fully, from me as I fully am.

But I'm not sure that will ever happen. I've recently felt like I'm pretty much washed up at this point.

Anyway, this all relates to my first two dreams. I only had a few images I wanted to discuss quickly from my third dream. I don't have any thoughts right now, honestly, about the fourth dream.

The third dream takes place in some sort of family fun center. When I was a kid, we had a place called Funplex, which was a combination of a huge arcade, a laser tag arena, a roller skating rink, a putt-putt golf course, and some other entertainment settings. I hardly ever went to this place -- maybe two times between my twelfth and eighteenth years -- because the place was so far away and so expensive. So there's always a sort of idealized feeling to the place.

Here's an image of the sign for the Funplex in Houston, Texas, via Fame City Waterworks. Even though this sign is from the Houston Funplex, it gives a good idea of the 1980s Funplex style.

I hadn't really paid attention to Funplex. But, according to this Denver Post article, the Denver Funplex went through a few name changes before finally closing down in 2015.

I think I thought of Funplex because of a couple images I saw in the Denver book I'd been reading last night. One is of Lakeside Amusement Park, the bottom photo in the image below. Unlike with Funplex, my family did go to Lakeside pretty often. We went at least once a year -- because my grandpa got free passes through his work once a year.

The other image is this image, of Aurora Mall.

I, like a lot of people nowadays, I think, look at malls with a lot of nostalgia. Malls are sort of in a transition phase right now. Many malls are dying, etc., which leads people to talk about the "dead mall" phenomena. But some malls are still successful. The Aurora Mall went through a transition in 2005, as can be seen from this photo from the website Labelscar, which looked at the dead mall phenomena before dead malls were cool.

However, the Aurora Mall became the Town Center Mall, an image of which is below. And I think it's doing pretty well.

Anyway, I'm not sure what to make of the imagery of the Aurora Mall translating into the imagery of a Funplex sort of place in my dream. I see the connection. But I'm not sure what it means.

naked alex jones and the #metoo movement

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

This post reviews imagery from this entry in my online dream journal, maboroshi no yume.

I might have skipped today's analysis, as I am kind of pushing up against my work hours. But I needed to reflect a little on this dream.

Part of this dream relates, of course, to the #MeToo movement -- the movement where women are taking strong action against sexual harassment. And it's gotten some great results so far.

So obviously it feels weird for me to wake up from a dream where my preconscious is sort of complaining about the movement. I almost didn't want to post the dream. But that would have been a disservice to my dreaming mind.

I want to deal with the most immediate influence on the dream from my dream day. Last night I went to a political volunteer meeting in a part of Denver I used to live in. As I was waiting at an intersection, there were two bicyclists, both women. One of the women made a point to bully me in a passive aggressive way as we waited for the light and then as we crossed the street.

I was annoyed by that. But I think the sense of annoyance was compounded by my feeling that I'd been bullied out of this neighborhood altogether about a year and a half ago. So that all stayed with me and ended up in my dream.

I was also dealing with some self-image issues. My washing machine needs a pretty simple part replacement. I'm waiting for it to come. But instead of taking my clothes to the laundry, I'm just waiting for the part to arrive. So all my clothes smell. So I'm terrified of any public situations right now.

At the political event I was at, two women sat next to me. And I was so freaked out by how bad I probably smelled that I was literally almost completely turned away from the women the entire time. I just wanted to shrink to the very back of the room, where nobody would be around me. I kind of embossed those two women in my mind because they stood for how I thought everybody in the meeting must really have thought I smelled so terrible. It's hard to express the level of mental anguish I was in, as funny and pathetic as that sounds.

So obviously the bicycle women and the two women at the political meeting found their way into my dream. But this same dynamic of being bullied and then feeling isolated in a political meeting come from a prior experience.

As political season was ramping up this year, I was thinking about helping out Faith Winter, a Colorado state representative who is running for Colorado's state Senate. Faith Winter has easily been Colorado's strongest proponent in the Me Too movement as it pertains to conduct by Colorado's politicians.

The big reason I wanted to volunteer for Winter was because she's in a really important swing district in the state. One of my political mentors also told me the most important thing I could do this year would be to volunteer my time for whoever ran in that district.

I started down the road of volunteering for Winter. But at her kickoff event, two women treated me mean before I even got inside the building where Winter's office is, then continued annoying me all the way into Winter's office. One woman thought she could just bully me because I was inconsequential. The other woman just went along with it. The main bullying woman ended up being an elected official.

Some other stuff happened after that that just made me feel that Winter's race was going to be pretty high-profile. There were going to be a lot of people around her who wanted to be involved in her high-profile race. Those folks would bully "inconsequential" people like me every chance they got. So I just decided not to be a part of Winter's race.

So there's this dynamic of being bullied by two women before heading into a political meeting a couple months ago that echoed into my experience from yesterday. I think this whole mental process says a lot more about me and my own inner life than it does about the women in my waking life that influenced my preconscious imagery.

The imagery of the naked women comes from a couple things. First, I was watching a Lazy Game Reviews video on YouTube yesterday. The review was for the PC video game Spore. One of the draws of the game is that you create your own creatures. So obviously a lot of people would just make creatures that had (or were) huge phalluses, etc.

Another image that I think influenced the imagery of the naked women was this image of Alex Jones that's been passed around the internet a lot recently. The image shows the controversial celebrity topless in a before and after photo which is supposedly touting the body-shaping effects of some product. But folks on the internet have basically claimed that the only thing the imagery shows is that Jones has gotten a tan.

For some reason, these photos of Alex Jones made me think of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver's Shadow of Men, a solo show of the work of Cleon Peterson.

So I think the two white women turning into two naked women, one of whom is white, while the other is dark brown, relates to the naked phallic creatures in Spore and the white and "brown" Alex Jones and the white and black characters in Cleon Peterson's paintings. The tapered down look of the women also comes from the weird way Jones's posture makes him look like the characters in Peterson's paintings: kind of really wide at the shoulders and tiny at the hips and bottom.

Why are these naked women based on imagery of men? I'm honestly not sure. I definitely would say at least in part it has to do with homoerotic desire. I'm turning the women into men to turn them into objects of homoerotic affection. My sexuality tends to go back and forth that way, especially in my dreams. So I could imagine that my preconscious may have been tired of looking at naked women for a bit and may just have wanted to see some naked men.

But I think the making equivalent of women's and men's bodies in my dream is also saying something about the philosophy lying behind a lot of the ways I think the Me Too movement is being exploited by people who don't care about women's rights at all and just want to make a society that's as sexually conservative and frigid as possible. Women are behind this movement as well. Women have been just as active as men in movements to desexualize society.

If there's anything that I think characterizes the charged nature of touch, it's relation to homophobia, and how a lot of the misuses of the Me Too movement are eventually related to a anti-LGBTQ agenda, it would be yet another episode that has gone around on the internet recently: Philadelphia's state representative Daryl Metcalfe basically going into a homophobic panic attack when simply touched on the arm by his colleague, Representative Matt Bradford.

So... it's hard to say what exactly my mind was getting at with this dream. Basically, I feel like there's an image of these two white women who are happy about a "no touching," maybe even a "no looking," law that was passed. They passed the law by having a black, male legislator "in their pocket." They're happy they can use the law against men. Then, holding hands and becoming naked, they take on bodies that obviously were influenced by imagery of male bodies from my waking life.

The imagery of the clean apartment complexes and row houses comes from -- basically what the neighborhood I was in yesterday has become. That neighborhood is gentrified. And it's highly Democratic and ostensibly liberal. But it's also full of white people who don't like having brown people around, as well as wealthy people who don't like having not wealthy people around. It's... the kind of liberalism that really isn't liberal. Hypocritical liberalism in a now almost completely gentrified neighborhood.

I personally feel like I was bullied out of that neighborhood and that even when I go back there, I experience "spook tactics" to keep me feeling unwelcome in the neighborhood. By liberals. And I feel like those same "spook tactics" are par for the course for white people in the arts, business, and politics in general in the Denver metro area.

The imagery of the crowded street comes from another episode of Lazy Game Reviews, a review of the PC Game Cities: Skylines. In this video, Clint talks a lot about some weak parts in the game that make traffic in the cities really bad, and how the bad traffic issues can lead to really bad effects on the rest of the game, including the destruction of buildings and the decay of entire neighborhoods.

the dramatic art of city planning

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

Today's post reviews imagery from this entry in my dream journal blog maboroshi no yume.

One of the strongest immediate images for me is the image of the bicyclists. This image definitely comes from the new MV for the song "Mou Setsunai to wa Iwasenai," by J-pop group Gesu no Kiami Otome. Here's the video.

The MV for Gesu no Kiwami Otome's "Mou Setsunai to wa Iwasenai" was very powerful to me because it's basically about a group of three friends who, upon reuniting, remember the life of their other friend, who has since disappeared.

It's very sad, as I think it is a not uncommon story in the world of art, but also in the world of pop music, that artists who are such beautiful creators and people will often disappear from the lives of people who care about them. Many times they disappear by dying -- of suicide, overdoses, accidents, etc.

Most recently I thought of this as some people (friends of friends, or friends of acquaintances, I'm not sure) were really upset on the day the death of Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison. I didn't know who Frightened Rabbit were until that day. But it suddenly became clear that Hutchison's beautiful art had impacted a lot of people's lives for the better. And there were a lot of people who were devastated by his passing.

To see friends of people I respect in Colorado's art & media community so upset about the death of an artist also reminded me of a Denver-based artist I was personally connected to, Colin Ward, who passed away on January 31st, 2018.

My involvement with Ward just began as my involvement with the art world was ending. Essentially, I was pushed out of the Denver art scene, by people who negatively influenced the people whom I most trusted. So, just about as soon as my relationship with Ward started, it basically dissolved. When I heard of Ward's death... it was just... so horrible.

Over the past couple days, some of the exact people who pushed me out of Denver's art scene also started popping up in some of the Denver media sources I trust. So this adds a whole other painful level to some of the emotions I've been experiencing.

The annoying deli man in my dream also comes from my life in Denver. On Friday, just as a concerned citizen, I attended a city planning meeting regarding Denver's new green roofs initiative.

Denver's new green roof ordinance was passed as one of the strictest in the nation. Since its passage in November of 2017 there's been a lot of pushback. Work has been done since then to propose changes to satisfy the parties pushing back. There have also been changes to the language of the ordinance, which was kind of shaky.

But overall, this initiative is pretty cool and pretty necessary. And the person who created it, Brandon Rietheimer, is a great guy.

Anyhow, at the planning meeting I attended on May 11th, there were some folks from construction companies specializing in 35-unit apartment buildings. Some said that being required to put green roofs on their buildings will make the construction of these buildings cost-prohibitive. One of those people described a lot of stuff about zoning requirements and his buildings at the meeting. And I think a lot of his descriptions informed the building in my dream. Probably a lot of the dramatic element of the conflict in this whole city planning issue informed my dream.

The teacher in my dream relates to the SM Entertainment celebration in honor of the 30th anniversary of the Michael Jackson song "Man in the Mirror," written by Siedah Garrett. Quincy Jones produced "Man in the Mirror." And he plays a big part in the stories told during the celebration. But he also plays a pretty strong role at the end of the celebration. It seems he expected K-pop star BoA to be onstage with Siedah Garrett during the final performance. And for some reason that expectation of his -- which was very big-hearted and inclusive -- has stuck with me ever since I watched the video. So I think that's why Quincy Jones appeared in my dream.

The writing project in my dream is related to my having felt inspired to get to writing on a novel I've been thinking of for a while. But the whole image of replacing a middle part to the story that I'd originally edited out probably comes from this Brown University lecture on risk that was given by Kara Keeling, an amazing theorist. She mentions how the ideas of finance capitalism relate back to the slave trade and how, in our thinking on American economics, we need to put the "middle passage," i.e. the history of the slave trade, back into the narrative.

This talk has been a key part of a lot of my thinking since I first saw it back in February. It also became a sort of cornerstone for the ideas I was trying to express in a Twitter thread I wrote around automation in society and our increasing dependence on easy indicators and sticking to consensus instead of practical observation and critical thinking in our decision making processes.

Also, coming back to the imagery of the bicyclists, that definitely has to do with another person whose work I've been researching: Veronica O. Davis. She's a big advocate for cycling, especially for creating more visibility for the people who bike in the black community.

I haven't really managed to pull all these images together to kind of give a theme to my dream. I can see how a lot of this stuff deals with my own social struggles over the past couple years, as well as some of my thoughts about social and political situations in Denver and elsewhere. But I don't have a solid answer to it all. Probably because I'm just starting to work a lot of this stuff out in my life.

rivalry of the golden children

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

Today's post reviews imagery from this entry in my dream journal Maboroshi no Yume.

The young drag queen in my second dream is a real person. He's an incredible performer. I'm just a little iffy on giving more detail, as I could see the whole "attraction" part of my dream being sort of uncomfortable and awkward.

The rich boy image comes from a few different places, I think. Probably the blonde boy that first came to my mind was Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy in the Harry Potter series.

Image from tattoos.fanshare.com via Pinterest

I really don't know much about Tom Felton. But he's been busy enough in the film world since Harry Potter that the whole "where are they now" thing in my dream doesn't seem to apply to him very well.

In fact, I had no idea that Tom Felton stars with Daisy Ridley in the new film Ophelia, a retelling of the Hamlet story through the heroine's eyes, directed by Claire McCarthy.

Here's a video where McCarthy, Felton, and Naomi Watts speak about Ophelia.

It's also interesting to see George MacKay in this vid. MacKay plays Hamlet in Ophelia and starred in the 2014 film Pride, which is probably one of my top ten favorite movies of this decade. Here's the trailer for Pride.

It sounds like Ophelia is still working on getting US distribution -- that is mind-boggling to me. Even if it's a so-so movie, it has huge star power and a pretty cool sounding story. Oh well...

But I think the young blonde boy in my dream is also inspired by other boys I've seen in other images in my waking life.

One blonde boy I've seen and adored recently is Radley Wright, who plays the four-year-old version of Tommy in the Denver Center for the Performing Arts' current production of the 1992 musical The Who's Tommy.

Here's one image of Radley Wright, on the left, with the other cast members who play Tommy (counter-clockwise, from bottom): Owen Zitek, Samuel Bird, and Andy Mientus.

Does it look in this picture like Samuel Bird got to click the shutter? Hilarious and cute.

Anyway, the DCPA's production of The Who's Tommy is really great. It runs through May 27th, 2018. If you're in the Denver area during that time, I highly recommend checking it out. Here's a trailer that really captures the magic of the show.

Another blonde boy who inspired the rich blonde boy in my dreams is Hunter Carson, who is probably one of the most beautiful human beings I've ever seen in my life in his role as Hunter Henderson in the film Paris, Texas.

The scene in Paris, Texas where Hunter reunites with his mother Jane, played by Nastassja Kinski, is also one of my favorite scenes in movie history.

Here is the trailer for Paris, Texas. I definitely recommend checking the film out.

So I do feel like there's a lot of stuff related to all these images that filters its way into my dream.

I think the real determinant, however, of the image of the blonde boy came from Nastassja Kinski as opposed to Hunter Carson.

I had seen the movie Carmen Jones on Sunday, after having gone to see a new production of Carmen by Cleo Parker Robinson Dance here in Denver.

I was so intrigued by the story changes made to Carmen by Cleo Parker Robinson that I wanted to see a more traditional version of it again so I could refresh my memory of the story. So I watched the Otto Preminger version of Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones, which is incredible. Here's the trailer.

Carmen Jones must be one of my favorite musicals. And yesterday, while I was thinking about the film again, I described it to myself as an old standard American musical redone with the film style of Werner Herzog. I was trying to think what the best Herzog film would be to compare it to. I settled on Aguirre: The Wrath of God, even though I think I really meant Woyzeck.

Here's the trailer for Herzog's Woyzeck.

Anyway, after watching Carmen Jones, I had been thinking about the style of drama that the Carmen story has. The drama is driven by character choice, which I always love. But it's also driven by the pitting against each other of two characters' ideals, choices, and desires. I felt like this type of drama was heavily inspired by Shakespeare, though it is a bit more academic and neoclassical, if you will (which probably smart people will not).

As I considered this, my mind went immediately to Georg Büchner's play of Woyzeck. Woyzeck was written in 1913, about forty years after Carmen. The two plays are very different in some ways. Some might argue that Woyzeck previsioned World War I in an already war-scarred Europe. The drama of Woyzeck may actually be seen as a midway point between dramas like Carmen and expressionist films like Murnau's Sunrise and Lang's Metropolis.

However, some of the key elements of the drama of Woyzeck are very much in common with those of Carmen and Carmen Jones -- such as, most easily recognized, the way in both dramas the heroine's new lover defeats her old lover and makes the old lover feel incompetent and inferior, and the way the old lover's inferiority complex leads him to murder the heroine.

What's odd to me is that -- I was thinking of all of this on Sunday. But on Monday, as I rethought Carmen Jones, Herzog's Woyzeck simply would not pop into my mind! Weird...

Anyway, all of these films by Herzog star Klaus Kinski, who is Nastassja Kinski's father. Nastassja Kinski would relate to Paris, Texas, in which  Kinski co-stars with Hunter Carson, the beautiful blonde boy who made me think of the other beautiful blonde boys who inspired my dream.

Carmen Jones inspired another image in my dreams -- the fence in my first dream. The fence appears in a kind of weird place -- inside a gigantic room that is part library and part political floor, and maybe part church sanctuary, but is also divided up into rooms in some way I probably never figured out in my dream. But the fence definitely comes from the fence which is so dramatically powerful in the first scene of Carmen Jones.

Image from 20th Century Fox, via my movie purchase from YouTube

The drama in my first dream is actually related to my trying to decide whether to have a girl on my team (probably some kind of athletic team) who is a star basically because she's so vocal and convinces everybody she's a good player, or to have a girl who is actually a good player but who nobody ever pays attention to.

This dream drama is a sort of echo of the dramatic conflict between Carmen and Cindy Lou in the film Carmen Jones.

But I think my dream has a different angle to that drama. I see myself sort of as Harry Belafonte's character Joe in Carmen Jones. But I have a different role from Joe that's related to my own life. I am set up in a managerial position, having to make a hiring decision. I go with the person I think will be the better performer. But the decision makes the people around me not like me. I have to justify myself. But I basically end up being even more disliked. The dream ends with me either kneeling and pleading or else crawling and groveling to the folks who are essentially the employees for whom I'm managing this project.

However, I honestly also think I see myself in the first dream as the Cindy Lou "good athlete" character in contest against the boisterous Carmen character. I have always wanted to offer the companies I've worked for top-level performance and haven't really wanted to be the flashy person who gets all the attention. But I've always ended up in a situation where, the better I perform, the more my coworkers hate me. And usually that hatred is driven by the loudmouthed people who don't perform well and want me out of the picture. But... with a couple exceptions... those loudmouthed people are usually men.

Really, I think these patterns in my professional life are based on my early life. I dealt with a lot of sibling rivalry as a kid. And I don't think I need to get into that very much right now. But I think unconsciously I kind of always put myself into professional situations where I'm facing the same kind of rivalry I faced with my siblings as a child. These rivalry situations are real situations. But in some ways I always manage to ignore the warning signs of these situations -- almost like I want to put myself into the situations.

I've also -- even though I dealt with years and years of appearance issues -- been called a pretty boy all my life. There are years -- decades -- of my life where I know I was not a pretty boy. But I was still called a pretty boy. In my professional life I've also constantly been called a golden boy and a boy wonder -- usually derisively, out of jealousy.

So I think a lot of this "golden boy" imagery in my dreams comes from this sense of myself. I project this sense of myself onto these actual golden children (blonde boys) from imagery in my waking life. And I set up a rivalry among golden children in both of my dreams. This professional rivalry of golden children in my dreams is based on the patterns of sibling rivalry in my early life.

And, I guess, as you can see, this dream continues to explore a lot of the conflicts that have been explored in many of my recent dreams. It really is a psychological problem that has been very strong over the past two months of my life. And I'm pretty sure I'll be morally paralyzed until I can find a provisional solution to this psychic conflict.

neon gentrification

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

Today's post reviews images from this entry in my dream journal blog Maboroshi no Yume.

My first dream addresses eviction. Just scraping by and barely escaping eviction has been an occasional theme of my life. The fact that I discuss being evicted with my mom also relates to some of my own psychological issues.

However, the idea of eviction also comes from a recent discussion I was a part of with a member of the City Council for my hometown of Denver. The City Council team put together a legal defense fund for low-income people facing eviction. They partially funded the effort out of their own budgets. They are now trying really hard to get the city to get the effort fully funded.

The pink neon space in my second dream definitely comes from an apartment I always see as I'm driving in Denver. There's a ton of neon in this apartment building on the corner of a busy arterial street just east of downtown Denver. It's a real point of curiosity. I don't know who it belongs to. I may try to find out. I will hopefully post a photo of the site soon.

But I think the neon space also comes from the work of Signe Pierce. Signe Pierce did an installation in 2017 called Virtual Normality at the Galerie Nathalie Hagland in Vienna. It's a really good example of her work, and I think it shows the powerful effects it can have on people's imagination.

Images from Signe Pierce's Twitter feed

Here's a link to information on the Virtual Normality installation.

And here's a link to a 2015 PAPER magazine article about Signe Pierce and Ali Coates.

Image from PAPER magazine

But there's another neon-heavy exhibition I for the life of me can't remember right now. And I really thought it was from 2016 -- where a woman was livestreaming herself from a bed in her installation while people walked through the installation. I felt like it was at a biennial. I may be totally confused about this.

In 2016 and the first part of 2017, neon art was a kind of big part of my life. I was helping an art gallery in Denver get back on its feet. An art collective from New York came through town. Through them I was introduced to a DIY space in Denver. I quite honestly did a horrible job of maintaining my relationship with the NYC group and the Denver DIY group. And my social awkwardness with those two groups just echoed in cacophony through the first part of 2017.

The final big success milestone for the art gallery in Denver that I was helping out, however, was a neon/multimedia show which ended up being a huge hit. But the entire process of making that show happen was also a process, involving a lot of people in the Denver art community, of kind of getting me shoved out the door of the gallery.

The way I got shoved out of Denver's art world is very similar to the way I'm constantly ostracized in the Colorado business world. And it's similar to the way I'm currently feeling about Denver's political world. There's a lot of people who don't want me around -- in all of these spaces. It's hard for me to stay active in any of them. I keep finding ways. But probably I eventually won't be able to. And I really don't know what will happen after that.

Given that I feel like a lot of these shoving-out tactics in Denver's art, business, and political realms are based on color, i.e. that people of color like I are the targets of a lot of this group ostracism, I can see my social anxiety expressed in the dream imagery of this blonde, white woman wanting to re-brand retail spaces to make money off of K-pop (i.e. non-white culture) while not wanting to actually put this culture on any public-facing imagery.

A lot of the imagery about retailing in my second dream comes from my daily life, as I've been thinking a lot about retail spaces and branding over the past few weeks.

But I think the idea of putting imagery onto retail items definitely also comes from a YouTube video I watched last night, where Kelsey Lewin discusses the Sharp Nintendo TV, a TV with a Nintendo built into it that was sold in Japan in the late 1980s. The TV was scheduled for American sales as well, though it's unclear whether it ever made it onto American shelves.

In her video, Kelsey Lewin shows some of the research into retail catalogs from the time period to prove her belief that the Sharp Nintendo TV never actually made it onto the shelves. I found this image of Nintendo-branded pajamas so hilarious and cheesy and wonderful.

Image from Kelsey Lewin's YouTube channel

The apartment complex imagery probably comes from a couple things. On May 4th (Star Wars Day) I was browsing through YouTube. I found this video by Matt Stuertz, which references the legendary Star Wars Kid video, illustrates why stormtrooper blasters suck, and has a nice little Indiana Jones reference at the end.

The Indy reference at the end actually takes place in a balcony-like hallway in an apartment complex. I think this is what sifted into my dreams.

I also feel like the apartment balcony imagery came from the movie The Florida Project, which I love quite a bit and probably floated into my unconscious for a few reasons yesterday.

But I strongly feel the balcony imagery also comes from the imagery of the balconies of the Denver Pavilions, a sort of shopping mall on downtown Denver's 16th street mall. I go to the space occasionally, usually to see a movie at the theater there. And I think the space helped make that connection in my mind between retail spaces and apartment complexes. The space is sort of set up like an outdoor apartment complex for retail spaces, obviously.

Image from Denver Business Journal

Image from Denver Post

Image from Google Maps

At the end of the day, I feel like these dreams have a lot to do with my own fears of being pushed out of my physical space and pushed out of my social space. I feel like I've dealt with that so much in my life. But I think they also deal with my anxiety over seeing gentrification in so many Colorado neighborhoods, as well as seeing what I feel is the pushing out of people of color in the arts, business, and politics in Colorado, but specifically in Denver.

I may be trying in my dream to connect my selfish side with my social side, in order to make sense out of or unify both of these situations so I can come up with a creative solution to the problems. But I really can't say for sure.

the sit 'n spin desert

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

Today's post reviews this entry from my dream journal blog, Maboroshi no Yume.

In last night's dream, the only image I could really place was the image of the strange bike. This bike definitely comes from the recently posted video by Kelsey Lewin on the Super Nintendo LifeCycle Exertainment Bike. Here's the video.

Of course, the "handlebars" for the bike in my dream were like a wheel that you would see on an old Sit 'n Spin toy.

Image from Buzz Feed Partner on Pinterest

Given that the bike had no wheels, was stuck on a pole, had a Sit 'n Spin wheel, and never got used throughout my entire dream (!!!), I would obviously say that this image has a lot to do with feeling like I'm going nowhere in my life.

I'm really not sure what else the imagery is related to.

In 2001 and 2002 I lived as a Volunteer-in-Parks in Wupatki National Monument, near Flagstaff, Arizona. Ever since that time, the desert has been a huge part of my dreams.

I live back in my hometown of Denver, Colorado, right now. I walk a lot of places to get around town. I've walked as much as possible all my life. I like walking. But I feel like it slows down my life a lot. I also have a lot of scary moments out walking when big trucks pass by me on thin sidewalks or shoulders of the road.

My relationship with my sister is shaky at best. And there are a lot of times that is really distressing to me. I want to be around my sister more. And I want to help my sister more. But I never seem to be able to connect with her.

footprints in the grass

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influence the images of my dreams.

Today's post relates to this entry in my dream journal maboroshi no yume.

I'm honestly not sure of where the actual imagery in the dreams comes from. However, a lot of the occurrences in the dreams remind me a lot of my daily life.

In the first dream I'm acting as a critic of a space. I actually play this role a lot in my waking life -- giving people my opinion about things. It's not usually a space, architecture, etc. It's usually more like art, business strategy, politics, etc.

In the second dream I meet up with one of my friends, an art dealer with whom I haven't spoken in about a year.

When I first met my art dealer friend, back in 2015, she had just started up her gallery after the previous owner passed away. The space the gallery in was small, kind of rundown. The front area lacked heating and air conditioning. And the storage area for the art was a mess.

I helped my friend create a business plan for her gallery. My friend and her team got really serious and in a pretty short time did a lot of incredible stuff to make their gallery successful. They moved to a much nicer space.

The strange "grocery store" in my first dream is probably the first location of that art gallery. The "groceries" are obviously works of art -- not in a bad way. Products are products sometimes. That's all that means.

I stopped talking with my gallerist friend because she treated me in a pretty shady and shaky way after I'd done a lot and devoted a lot of my time and effort toward helping her gallery. But I don't really want to talk about that.

Anyway -- this is kind of the story of my social life. Even in the business world, I've helped a lot of people build their careers, turn around their businesses, build the sales side of their business almost from scratch, and get their businesses sold. But it always seems like people find the most underhanded and passive-aggressive ways to kick me out the door once they've gotten what they want from me. I have a lot of things in life I can feel proud of. But a lot of people other than I have the money to show for it.

Nowadays I'm getting more and more involved in helping people in other social pursuits. And I think some specific things that have happened over the past couple days have seriously gotten me thinking about how involved I want to get in these things. I don't want to walk myself back down the path of helping people out and then getting screwed over in underhanded and passive-aggressive ways.

In the second dream, my gallerist friend carried me for a while over the field we were trying to cross quickly. Then my gallerist friend got tired, and I carried her the rest of the way. I feel like the wish-fulfillment component of my dream was sort of making my relationship with my gallerist friend into more of a give-and-take.

The patience and empathy component at the end of my dream is also something where I realize... a lot of people in the art world, even people who have a lot of fame, don't make a lot of money. And so, while they put on this act of being intelligent, smug, sophisticated -- whatever they think the situation calls for -- it's usually just an act, and there's a lot of struggle underneath it.

Sometimes it is good just to play along with people's acts. Play their game. Not because it helps you at all. But, first of all, because it just lifts them up and gives them hope. If you play their game, it makes them feel like other people will play their game -- i.e. that all of this struggle will end in success. But, second, you might not realize it, but they are probably already playing your game, too. They're buying into whatever your fantasies are. So you should reciprocate and buy into whatever their fantasies are.

Anyway -- these are all ideas I've been struggling with in my waking life. So it's no surprise that I see them pop up in my dreams, too.

The lifting each other up part of the dream definitely reminds me of the old Christian story of "Footprints in the Sand," which I think is ubiquitous nowadays.

Image from The Gospel Coalition

And while that's always been a key story for my psychic life, I think I've come to understand that it's more practical for me to think about how human relationships would work in this case. And I don't think it would be that one person would always carry one other person whenever that person has troubles. Instead, the two people have to work at carrying each other. If people don't give back to you, and you're doing all the heavy lifting, you're probably in a shitty relationship.

under the skin in the mirror

This blog reviews images from my waking life that influenced the imagery of my dreams.

Today's post relates to images in this entry of my dream journal, Maboroshi no Yume.

The image of the hospital gown was probably the most striking image for me.

The fact that I was undoing the gown to reveal more of the girl's body probably relates to this image from the music video for the song "I Feel You," by K-pop group Wonder Girls. At this moment, Wonder Girls member Sunmi undoes her jean shorts to reveal another scene where all the girls in the band are playing their instruments.

Here's the whole MV for "I Feel You," so you can see how things happen.

I personally never liked the song "I Feel You," so I never paid much attention to the video. But I ended up watching it again last night and thinking it was really sexy, even though I'm still not crazy about the song.

I watched the music video after having watched this video from the ReacttotheK YouTube channel, where university students majoring in classical music react to K-pop videos. In this video, they react to the Wonder Girls songs "I Feel You" and "Why So Lonely" (which is one of my favorite K-pop songs ever).

The ReacttotheK YouTube channel is pretty cool. The videos are a little too long. And it feels like sometimes the enthusiasm for the songs is a bit forced. But it's cool to hear a fresh perspective on the songs and to hear how classical musicians pull apart the inner workings of the songs.

Personally, I'd prefer to see fewer people reacting, shorter, more encapsulated react times, and then maybe a bit of a "challenge time" where the musicians try to reproduce some of the music they heard.

Anyway, I think the image of the color-changing floor in the restaurant in my third dream also comes from the Wonder Girls "I Feel You" MV. But I think it also comes from the music video for Michael Jackson's Billie Jean.

I do think my unconscious linked the ReacttotheK video and the "I Feel You" MV to "Billie Jean." I've been thinking about K-pop and J-pop a lot, especially about how each form grounds itself in the history of pop music. I wrote a Twitter thread about it here.

One thing I didn't mention in my Twitter thread -- and I might add this note -- is that K-pop really showed its devotion to the history of pop music recently when SMTOWN held a 30th anniversary celebration of the song -- one song! -- "Man in the Mirror" by Michael Jackson. There are, of course, nowadays, so many reasons for us to remember that song. But it's incredible that SMTOWN honored Michael Jackson, "Man in the Mirror" co-writer Siedah Garrett, and the history of pop music by celebrating the anniversary of one song.

So it was really cool to hear the ReacttotheK kids talking about K-pop songs from a classical music perspective. But it just reminded me that K-pop itself is always closely studying the history of pop music and working to fit itself into that history.

It's also definitely worth checking out this video from SMTOWN, where "Man in the Mirror" co-writer Siedah Garrett and K-pop singer BoA perform the song.

red dresses, dead malls, and local politics

This blog post is related to the imagery in my dream journal entry from this morning, which can be found here.

A lot of the imagery and atmosphere from last night's dreams still comes, I feel, from the Fred Astaire & Cyd Charisse movie The Band Wagon, which I watched a couple days ago.

The busy diner scene and the talk of the movie business in the third dream definitely come from The Band Wagon, as do the marble staircase and probably even the jewelry commercial (where the woman wears a red dress) in the dead mall in the first dream.

Image from Video City website.

But probably the weird scene in the lounge room in the third dream, where there's a fight scene put on and then repeated for the benefit of rich people, is also related to The Band Wagon, namely the part where Cordova is pitching the new play to the rich backers.

Image screen grab from YouTube, via Warner Bros.

But I also believe that the imagery of the jewelry commercial in my dead mall dream was likely related to my recent superficial study of 1990s adult entertainment star Alexis Christian. Adult entertainment from the 1990s that carries the glam of the 1990s, and maybe the 1980s, too.

Image from Listal

Obviously, dead malls are always on my mind, as they are, I'm sure, for a lot of YouTube junkies like me. The Dead Mall Series by Dan Bell is definitely worth checking out.

I feel like the imagery of the dead mall in my dream was also related to Grand Central Station, which likely would loop back to The Band Wagon.

Image from Wired New York

The strange deed in my dream likely comes from my recent reading of the 12th volume of the Nancy Drew mystery The Message in the Hollow Oak.

In that story, which I'm still reading, Nancy wins a radio contest and gets the deed to some land in Canada as a prize. The deed very quickly becomes a strong, yet really strangely played, element of suspense. So the strangeness of Nancy Drew's land title echoed into my dream.

The imagery of the rich woman in a flapper outfit in the third dream reminds me of The Band Wagon again. But the glasses the rich woman wears reminds me of a Rifftrax short released last night, riffing an educational film for young kids getting eyeglasses for the first time.

The strange martial arts performance relates to a video I saw last night on YouTube where San Francisco-based dance company ODC/Dance performed for San Francisco's city council at a pre-council ceremony honoring ODC's ruby anniversary.

And while the marble and stone surrounding in all three of my dreams relate partly to The Band Wagon, they also relate to my personal life. A lot of my "social life" is based on attending political events in Colorado as a spectator. I obviously see a lot of polished stone in government buildings, including Colorado's Capitol.

However, I've felt myself transitioning away from having any sort of personal goals as it relates to political life in Colorado. I think my fourth dream from two nights ago shows that. And a lot of the personal conflicts in last night's dreams, especially the second dream, show why I feel myself transitioning away from thinking about how I involve myself in Colorado's political life.

The discussion of Ron Paul, or The Ron Paul Show, in the second dream probably relates more to Bernie Sanders than to Ron Paul, as some of my favorite local political candidates in this year's election have been big supporters of Bernie Sanders and have as a consequence of that been shunned by Colorado's Democratic Party.

The big book I read in my second dream is also sort of related to my personal social life. The book is by Winston Churchill. But it's a huge book. I have a lot of books by Winston Churchill in my library. I inherited them from my grandparents after my grandmother passed away. And I'm aiming to read them soon. But the big book is definitely a reference to the Marquis de Sade's Juliette, which is enormous.

Winston Churchill gives some pretty important warnings against letting Nazism rise again, I believe. And we should probably pay attention to those warnings. But when brown people like me start talking about those warnings, even on a local level, we're thought of as speaking out of place or out of turn. We're looked at, in my opinion, as being as scandalous as the Marquis de Sade -- who, in my opinion, wasn't punished because of the sexuality of his writings, but because of their politics.