Tim Lane's Blog, page 3

Repost: A Blade Runner Poem

This poem seems relevant. I posted it on my blog after I wrote it quite a while ago. The blog page is one of the most visited pages on my website.

Two Novels by Tim Lane

 

January has been a great month for sales and I am very grateful.

You can read reviews of the novels here.

  Phil's Siren Song By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon

Busy in the Head: a New Painting

Finishing up 2024 like the stars in space, like the thoughts in my mind: busy all the time.

Busy in the Head (Birth of a Star), 2024

oil paintstick on paper

32”x21”

2024: New Work The Shop

A Teaser

One of the big moments in 2024 was when I began working on my third novel set in Flint, Michigan, during the second half of the 80s. This novel picks up where Phil’s Siren Song left off. This time, one of the central characters of this trilogy (Your Silent Face, Phil’s Siren Song…) yet to really weigh in, narrates the story. I’m talking about the enigmatic character, Karen. It’s her turn to play the hand of cards she’s been holding. Her turn to give us her spin on Nigel and Stuart and Phil and the downtown scene.

Here’s a teaser which appears early on in the novel. It has been established at this point that Karen is a student from the suburbs attending Flint’s own General Motors Institute, on the west side of downtown Flint, and that GMI students start school in the summer, almost right after their high school graduations, and, unbeknownst to Stuart (a Flint East-sider Karen has been close to since high school), she has already met the mysterious Nigel (in a premeditated, consensual fashion) who works at the front desk of the GMI student library.

There was a decent GMI student contingent at the Rusty Nail that night, thanks to Phil baby opening the shots bar in my dorm room before the poetry reading, although it would never happen again. The Nail would never become a GMI hang out like St. Elmo’s Bar in St. Elmo’s Fire.

Slouching at the microphone, Nigel seemed to be in control of a crowd he seemingly lacked any interest in controlling. His preliminary banter was self-effacing. Eye contact was minimal at best. The wry smile on his face was revealing. I got the impression that if he had been a guitarist in a band, like the Cure or New Order, he probably would have turned his back on his adoring fans throughout the whole show. Despite the apathetic pose, though, which could have been performative, the moment was his. There were lots of chuckles. Loud laughs piercing the bubble, all the disconnected and unchoreographed parts of a bar crowd suddenly syncing as everyone leaned in to listen.

Then, as the next discovery kicked in, I could feel my eyebrow involuntarily arching while Nigel continued reading his story into the sudden calm taking over the Nail. The story was all too familiar. My mind raced back to the exchange at the front desk of the GMI library which had become its inspiration, obvious only to me.

“What if you were reading a classic which you were heavily invested in like Moby Dick or Crime and Punishment or some shit. You’d been reading the damn thing for months. But when you finally got to the end something was wrong. The last page was missing. And you could tell somebody’d ripped the damn thing out.” I had punctuated the rhetorical summation by popping my gum.

He fumbled the stamp on his first attempt to pound the date onto the due date page of a book on economic fluctuations and unemployment.

“What?”

“Hunh? Hunh? What about that shit? Wouldn’t that be a hoot?”

“Uh, yeah. I guess.”

Clearly it had become more than a goddamn guess. Clearly my electrifying inquiry—a jolting opening better than any opening line he’d ever thought of, better than the best pick up line ever uttered in any fucking bar by any drunken goon boy—had captured his imagination.  Clearly the son of a bitch had stolen my dazzling idea which, in time, I might be able to use to my advantage.

I breathed hot breath on my glossy nails, shining them on my thrifted cashmere sweater.

In Nigel’s story, a rakish character went around to the local libraries, dressed in goth attire, tearing the last pages from all the classic tomes, some of which we’d had to face in high school, others which Stuart would tell me about after he arrived at college and enrolled in English classes he didn’t need: Lord of the Flies, Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby. Of course, Nigel was careful not to suggest any of the books I had mentioned.

The story went off like a hand grenade. First he pulled the pin and got a few nervous chuckles. Next, with some development, he held the bomb in his hand away from his body and the hilarity of some black-clad wraith slipping in and out of the stacks of a library to rip out the last pages of the classics became infectious. The rebellious stance of the situation was not lost on the local literati. When the hero was caught toward the end of the story, the bomb was lobbed into the laps of everyone present, the chuckles rumbled, the drunken laughter erupted.

The story was victorious. He was their unwilling champion. He couldn’t help himself. He was gifted. He could write. He was smart. He’d sketched out a humorous glimpse of a disgruntled anti-authoritarian streak within themselves which they couldn’t express, except in the mosh pit at Danver’s Hall.

It was sexy.

There were more readers after that, but Nigel had taken up all the air in the bar. They struggled to breathe. By the time Stu worked up the courage to step up to the mic, the crowd was restless. I’ll be damned, though, if he didn’t rise to the challenge. In spite of all of his lameness, he was competitive. Or was it sheer desperation?

“The only motherfuckers anybody ever remembers are the top dogs. Or the ones who fought them.” He and Nigel were still a year away from a summer of drinking more beer than he had ever seen anyone consume in his entire life. “And I’m not talking about the gangs. No, I’m talking about the downtown legends. The scenesters. It’s kick ass or disappear, man. Generally speaking, we’re all invisible.”

*

I remembered noticing as Stuart winced and hobbled up to the microphone, as if he were stepping on tacks, his unsteady approach influenced by pitchers of anxiety and fear which would later be replaced with beer, that Joe, who was leaning on a wall with Phil and Nigel near the front of the crowd, had an ass in perfect ratio to the absence of round cheek and skinny boy-in-faded Levi’s I often found appealing. More appealing than poetry, anyway.

Stuart squinted into the light like some old codger sitting on a stool at the counter at Thoma’s Coney Island. His voice was shaky. His hands were possessed by tremors. His voice caught in his throat at first until he cleared it. “This is called Existential Punch in the Balls,” he managed to croak on his second attempt to introduce the poem.

It was a terrible poem and nobody paid any goddamn attention whatsoever.

Next, he read an account of a gleaming emerald fly as it buzzed through the air in graceful scallops only to splatter on the windshield of a station wagon. This poem—obviously ripping off Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a fly buzz-when I died”—drew some sharp belly laughter, but not because it was funny. It was so damn cliché. Poor Stuart was bombing. Falling flat on his face. Dying. Gasping for air. But then he launched into a truly original poem in which the speaker was melting in bed like a popsicle in a kid’s fist on a sweltering summer night on the East Side, cataloguing the nighttime sounds of the neighborhood, the nearby parts plant, the expressway in the distance. The lines were long and elegiac, unlike the clipped lyrical bullshit which had been hollow and lifeless.

The damn thing worked. It wasn’t very noticeable at first, but a shift occurred, and I absorbed it all for Stuart’s sake because I knew he would pelt me with a million questions after the reading, rapid fire. In his mind, in place of his memorable break out, a void would spread like an oil spill, as if he had been blackout drunk. He might as well have been trashed.

“Did I have them? Were they with me? What did their faces look like? Did they pay as much attention to me as they did to Nigel? What about that one girl? What about Delores and Beth? Were they listening? Were they watching me? How did I sound? Did I sound too nasally? Did I read well? Oh, Christ, I bet I sucked.”

No longer leaning against the wall, Nigel and Joe stood at attention. Phil was making a comical face at some slut with a powdered-white moon face sitting in the middle of the crowd. More heads had turned in Stu’s direction. The jukebox launched into the guitar solo of “Hotel California” by the Eagles. Voices trailed off at the bar. Conversations disintegrated in the crowd, although laughter coming from the pool room still filtered in.

As he continued to read, the crowd began to lap up against him like waves on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Over the years, I have mentioned once or twice to deaf ears that the success of that moment in the bright light, on the microphone, in front of the U of M-Flint literati, which was palpable and unmistakable—Stu really did command everyone’s attention for a minute—gave Stuart the confidence to introduce himself to Nigel when the reading was over.

The lights came on. I stood beside him, smiling.

“Hey-y-y, man,” Stuart said, stammering. “I, uh, like, really liked your story. ‘Last Pages.’ Great title, man. It was brilliant.”

“Thanks,” Nigel replied. That was it, the son of a bitch. No reciprocal praise. Stuart launched into a ramble, as if nudged, about seeing Nigel walking up Leith Street on the East Side after seeing him sitting at a bus stop on the corner of Chevrolet and Third. There was telltale awe in his voice, and in his eyes, as I hovered at his elbow with both of my hands wrapped around his skinny tricep, brazenly smiling up at Nigel. Nigel was actually an inch or so taller than Stu. His eyes darted back and forth from Stuart’s to mine like a silver pinball stuck between bumpers. I don’t think Stu even realized I had taken his arm in my hands to steady him.

Phil and Joe joined us. The boys shook hands all around, injecting the moment with a feeling of camaraderie and familiarity which Stuart had been unconsciously pining for all summer.

It was the moment Stuart and Nigel discovered their whole childhoods had been separated by only a handful of blocks on the East Side. It was the moment their friendship took off.

It was the goddamn moment I reset my relationship to these boys and took back my command of the situation.

Your Silent Face By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon Phil's Siren Song By Lane, Tim Buy on Amazon

End of 2024 Reflections

The end of the year always invites personal reflection. Here is one personal favorite from most of my series from 2002 to the present.

Series (starting top left corner, left to right):

Fortune Cookie Series

Statue of Liberty Series

Muscle Men & Divers Series

Trio of Feet Series

Lamb Series

Ian Curtis Tribute

Soccer Players Series

People Enacting the Behaviors of Urban Animals

JOY N SHIT

Stars

Mohawk Series

Selfie Series

BLM

Double-Universe Topology

2022: Astronauts Angels Engines Roses Portals

2023: Astronauts Roses Black Holes Portals Space

2024: New Work

Digitizing the Art: Learning the Tools

I had a severe urge to draw the other day. So I got out the oil paintsticks and a large piece of paper. When I was done the proportions were off, so I decided to move over to a digital format. After taking a photo of the drawing, I uploaded the image to my iPad Pro and continued working on the piece with the drawing tools in Procreate. With sketch, drawing and paint strokes tools, I was able to maintain a lot of the original hand-drawn appearance.

Of course, I couldn’t stop there. Later, I pushed the original digital image in different directions in an effort to continue learning the Procreate tools. It is actually a lot of fun. There is a lot to learn. The results are below.

Original artwork can be found in the galleries and, of course, in the shop.

The Shop

Space Dust: A New Painting

Fascinated by the beauty of star formation and space dust.

Space Dust, 2024, 8"x8" $25.00

Art 2000-2024

Here’s a look at one piece from almost every series I worked on from 2000 to 2024.

2000: collage series, poster board

2001: Statue of Liberty series

2002: fortune cookie series

2003: muscle man series

2004: trio of feet seriers

2005: muscle man series continued

2006: lamb series

2007: tribute to Ian Curtis series

2008: presidents and soccer players series

2009: soccer players series

2010: joy n shit series

2011: stars series

2012: ( no piece)

2013: mohawk series

2014: selfie series

2015: pixelation series

2016: selfie series continued

2017: BLM series

2018: double-universe topography series

2019: the sublime series

2020: the sublime series continued

2021: the sublime series continued

2022: astronauts angels engines roses portals series

2023: astronauts roses black holes portals space series

2024: new work

You can see all the work in the galleries.

 

A Look at 2024, So Far

Nineteen works so far in 2024. Will I get to an even twenty paintings? I like odd numbers. Maybe twenty-one.

Here’s the 2024 gallery. All of these works are available in the shop.

No Escape (Intrusive Thoughts): a New Painting at Your Silent Face

It’s been a minute. You can’t escape some things. Here I am.

No Escape (Intrusive Thoughts), 2024, 24"x30" $325.00 The Shop Index Poetry