The list

Very boring, not worth reading, honest. I wanted to park it somewhere for the record, a historical thing. All the stuff that wouldn't fit in a 5-min video. I had a busy life.

COMPANIES FORMED
Duck Diversified  boutique fashions, shop decor
Cinemation  film production
Studio on The Square  commercial art
Altendorf Media  public affairs
Backyard Productions  film
Nocturnes Ltd  series production
Baxter Von Altendorf Ltd  film
Diamond Sound  pro audio in difficult environments
Polvo Mining Company  teak deck recliners, living room furniture
CWSX LLC   geology and geophysics, hydrocarbon exploration
Golden Critical Research  commodity & critical elements data
Crone Software  digital graphics technology
Global Cooling Corp  flare ice invention

MULTIMEDIA SHOWS
No More War  slides/16mm for avant garde rock shows
Troubled Teens  slide rack for a United Way agency
Meetingplace  sync slide show
Macondo  compilation of ROV screenshots
Crone Software  investor presentation

RADIO & RECORDING
Underground Switchboard  jingle
Dorothy Fudpucker  series producer, sketch writer, voice talent
Soglin For Mayor  broadcast spot producer
Allenwood Jazz Ensemble  keyboards
Legitimate Bizness  sound mixer, post supervisor
The Koala Bears  single
Nightingale-Conant: 'Power Vision'  writer, studio coach
All Things Considered  interview guest
Patriots Lament  3-hr live radio talk show interviews

FILMS
Melodrama  16mm experimental
Factory Dance  camera, editor
Prelude  camera
Zooty Brisko  director
The Oval Door  rerecording Foley engineer
Eye-Tracking Demo  (for Lucasfilm)
The Starlets  recut for European release
The Marionette  director
Lifers  director, camera operator

TELEVISION
WITI-TV6  freelance 16mm news stringer
The Soglin Debates  campaign media director
What's The Action?  pilot segment director, post supervisor
Click  cowriter, pilot director, segment editor
The Golden Girls  NABET backstage flunky
ORF Austria  camera at NATO Summit, news package editor
YLE Finland  news package editor
ITN / Channel Four  news package editor
London By Night  director
Women Mean Business  director
New Age TV  director
Cindy's Hit Factory  director

DOCUMENTARIES
The Mister Man Competition  director
What Is Capitalism?  man on the street video
Exile In Paradise  camera, editor
Inside Wolf DeVoon  featured personality, director
A Life  clips and photos

MUSIC VIDEOS
Chelsea Brown: 'Nice Dream' and 'Living For You'   director
Coco York: 'Fever'  director
Terry Disley Ensemble: 'Who's The Dancer?'  director
Mystic Theater  concert video 'A' camera
Carry Walker: 'I Said So'  studio set, sound design, video
Big Fun  director
Quest  director
Deadlock  live show 'A' camera

INDUSTRIAL & EDUCATIONAL
IBM 'Taking Off'  editor, montage sequence
LA Dept of Water & Power  offline editor
Massage for The Elderly  director
Technique of Video Editing  writer, director, animator, editor
Bodega Bay  director
People Helping People  director
British Telecom  shareholders venue video
Fed Ex Airspeed 'Time'  writer
Scottish Electricity  offline editor
Marketing & Merchandising Co sales video  director
Western Nevada College 'Join The Team'  director
George W. Bush VIP event   photo research, video script
Scene Cards  on-camera tutorial, computer graphics

PRINT PROJECTS
WLVE  newsletter design, production
Clicker  logo, posters
Soglin For Mayor  print production
Alvah Bushnell Company  photography, design, direct mail
The Luxury Living Show  key art
Western Intl Offshore  art direction, page composition
Nature's Own  art direction, direct mail
Electro-Rent BV  research and marketing plan
Cthonia Institute  booklet composition, web design
Oil and Gas Investor  media kit design

UNION STAGEHAND
Pioneer Auditorium  audio mixer, electrics
Caesar's Tahoe  audio tech, grip
Horizon Hotel & Casino  film crew grip
Reno Convention Center  electrician
Reno Hilton  lighting, AV set-up
Denver Convention Center  trade exhibitors, sound

STAFF JOBS
Klau Van Pietersom Dunlap  graphic artist
Comcor Communications  instructional media designer
3-D Television Inc  general manager
Electro-Tech/ETI Systems  installation tech
Crown Business Communications  writer
International  Multimedia Group  art director
Studio E   manager, director
Buena Vista Home Video  technical coordinator
Don's Oil & Gas News  editor, feature articles
Hart Energy  writer/editor, industry conference videos

R&D
Polytron Research  video microscope styling, components
Stereorama Corp  autostereoscopic projector redesign
Lockheed Aircraft  examine L-1011 windscreen defect
Cinema Equity Sales Corp  custom lenses for Rank Cintel scan
Jones Prods  RGB anaglyph encoder
London Underground  video system design, proposal team lead
Crone Software  widescreen multitouch workstation

TECH DESIGN & INSTALLATION
Roosevelt Hotel  sound
Authorized Video BV  control room and duplication plant design
Grand Duchy of Luxembourg  movie studio design, financials
University of Nevada Reno  audio/video/projection in 22 classrooms
BHP Diamonds  perimeter surveillance, card entry
Nevada Attorney General  card entry, intercom
Comstock Hotel & Casino  design, refurbish zoned audio/public address
Delta Casino  audio upgrade
Waterpik  upgrade factory public address system

PUBLISHED ARTICLES
Kaleidoscope
The Milwaukee Sentinel  (quoted)
Media + Methods
The Comstock Chronicle
Laissez Faire City Times  (featured writer)
G21 World Magazine
Strike The Root
Sunni's Salon  (book review)
The Free Liberal
The Plug Nickel Times
Alrroya Abu Dhabi (weekly column)
Seeking Alpha
Objectivist Living

BOOKS and PAPERS - NONFICTION
The Record Company Handbook of Video
Glossary of Professional Video Terminology
ISMs: A Compendium of Concepts, Doctrines, Traits & Beliefs
All-Purpose Guide to Female Women and What To Do With Them
Walking To Ayrshire (booklet)
Laissez Faire Law
An Eggshell Armed With Sledgehammers
The Tragedy of 21 Darts
BHP's $15 Billion Lotto Ticket
Screenplay Form and Structure
The Constitution of Government in Galt's Gulch
Abbreviated Wolf DeVoon (Lulu pdf)
Recent Work
More Recent Work
The Last Book, includes 'Rube' autobiography
Film School In One Lesson
Authors Exist to Please and Flatter Readers
A to Z

FICTION
First Feature: A Rake's Progress in Downtown Gomorrah
Mars Shall Thunder
The Good Walk Alone
Dreamland (web published, reprinted in Eggshell)
A Portrait of Valor
The Tar Pit
Charity
Finding Flopsie
Partners

ANTHOLOGIES
Wolf DeVoon Reader (out of print)
Chris & Peachy
The Case Files of Cable & Blount (ebook)
Eight Ruthless Novels by Wolf DeVoon
White: The Collected Hate Speech of Wolf DeVoon

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAYS
Guardian Angel
Maya Samurai
Cry Justice (treatment)
The Guitar Player From The Black Lagoon
Nice Girl (rewrite)
Governor Mike
The Marionette  (co-writer)
Pelada Red
The Case of The Empty Case
This  (comic teen space opera adaptation)
Mars Shall Thunder audio drama

.

All the shit I've done to people

I've been watching a video I made yesterday, a compilation of film footage and still photos, highlights of my career as a showman. I should say sadistic lunatic. A truly incredible list of crimes. I threw pies in people's faces, dumped buckets of paint on their heads, made them slip and fall, set them on fire, had a dwarf use a slingshot to shoot a marble at a showgirl's butt on stage. I forced a perfectly respectable, capable cinematographer to use a single bare lightbulb in a ceiling fixture. I bellowed at a dignified senior producer in a swish West End restaurant and demanded a four man crew, two cameras instead of one, and when I got to the concert, I bullied and berated the group's manager to let my people walk on stage with the headliner. I've told people to their faces that they had no talent, give it up, don't even try. The number and depth of my egregious financial sins were too many to count or weigh.

I've been incredibly cruel to women in intimate circumstances, demanded pregnancy, threw away their innocence and dignity, sent them through studio gates to deliver a screenplay, dress for maximum pleasure, watch me flirt with another chick.

Some of my stunts were preposterously vain, challenging top executives who had the power to crush me. I routinely manipulated friends and colleagues, family members, decent folks who admired me and wished me success. I think I drove my father insane with distress and shame. I was snotty with a Federal district judge and forced his hand two or three times. I told a distinguished, well known philosopher that he was full of shit in front of other guests on my patio. "I've written twenty-two books!" he bellowed in rage. I laughed him.

Worse, much worse -- I think that some hundreds of people, maybe thousands were moved by ideas that I promulgated. I put my hand on the lever of history. No sense of humility.

I hope and trust that I'm nearing the end of life, alone and shunned for ample cause, which is more or less fair and square. You know what I learned? I'm a fucking idiot, not to be trusted with a bag of chocolate donuts and cheese and onion sandwiches. No sense of restraint. We get exactly what we deserve in the bathroom at 4 o'clock in the morning.

OMFG, I just remembered! -- in a 1982 filmed comedy sketch, I had a bad tempered dinner patron at a fake restaurant berate a young black waiter, grab him by the necktie and shove his face in a bowl of cold noodle soup. "Okay, I'll heat it up right away, sir," he begged contritely with noodles hanging off his fake mustache. The title of the sketch was Winning Through Viciousness. I didn't write it, but I staged it and directed it. The black kid did a brilliant job, and I was astounded, exclaimed to my cast and crew how brave an actor he was.

People always did as I asked, high and low, around the world. I've called doctors to come in the middle of the night to sew up an attempted suicide off the record, Russian bodyguards to assault a village at dawn. I persuaded traffic cops to let me go after chasing me for miles.

Jeez. What a long strange trip it's been, made a million mistakes, published a million words, took a million liberties in the name of art, the highest form of pleasure known to man. I faced killers and aristocrats and people who were eleven times smarter than I was, held my own, bent them to my purpose or told them to fuck off.

Why? -- because we live but once. I lived.

An awkward situation

If you don't hear from me via Blogger or Facebook or email periodically, I probably died.

No reason not to die. I wrote to Brigid a couple weeks ago and said that I don't have anything further to reach for or achieve, not after Partners, which is true. I settled a trust, made a will and a full disclosure in print if my daughter cares to re-examine who her father was. It would be nice to pay off my account at the general store, but frankly it won't be much of a crisis for anyone if I die a pauper. My brother Roger will frown that I owe him $60, but Chase and Wells Fargo can go climb a rope, for all I care. An executive at Gulf + Western once told me not to worry about debt, after which it was easier to move forward as a film director.

The world has had multiple opportunities to advance my creative career, fifty years worth of movies and books and essays. I got nada. I'd rather not talk about the bullshit they preferred. We each take a turn at the spinning wheel. What goes up must come down. Of all the music I loved, Blood Sweat & Tears moved me like no other. Sorry, Frank.

Ooo. Since I'm talking about death, here's my playlist for a memorial:

21st Century Schizoid Man, King Crimson
Talk To Me Darling, The Pretenders
In The Light, Led Zeppelin
Nights On Broadway, The Bee Gees
My Little Suzy, Styx
Spinning Wheel, Blood Sweat & Tears
Sofa #2, Zappa

It's on my mind because I fainted and fell down flat on my face in broad daylight, rearranged some ribs and bruised a number of muscle groups, had to use pain pills for 10 days, couldn't cough or sneeze without howling. Better now, but vulnerable, no longer strong enough to do serious labor. My brain still works, although 400,000 cigarettes and family history make me a good candidate for stroke or heart attack. Occasionally I wish to die. Impossible to kill myself, because it would hurt my daughter, which I cannot entertain, absolutely verboten. I have to die from natural causes. So I wait patiently. Doo bee doo bee doo.

My favorite images

Becker

In the novel Partners, there are three principal characters: Kyle, Karen, and Becker. The story could not have been told without Becker -- no transformative challenge for Kyle, no romantic crusade for Karen. Although the story is told from Kyle's perspective and his love affair with Karen is both superlatively sweet and often terrible, the mysterious gunslinger Jimmy Becker is the fulcrum of every scene, whether he's in foreground or not.

I painted Becker's family, a trio of sharply drawn personalities, father, mother, sister, and a dead twin brother, to show that everyone descends from a chain of life and circumstance. I also indicated that Becker served as a U.S. Marine Corps officer in Germany. That's all I dared to explain, in drips and drabs, because I detest exposition, cardboard confessions that recite one's backstory, purpose, and notable achievements in junior high school. Absolutely NOT something that Becker would do. He's as tight as a closed vise, incapable of schmoozing.

Because that renders Becker somewhat opaque, revealing behavior nothwithstanding, it's fun to chat about this interesting man. He's almost a monk, sacrificing himself as an angel of vengeance. He's controlled by his cold hearted parents and corrupt family friend Lt. Lepsky, fairly obvious from dialogue and description. Kyle is a shrewd observer. He sees that Becker is an unstable paper tiger with an emotional glass jaw, desperately in need of a partner to support him and a woman to love him, which Becker denies. He shoves everybody away in anger, won't let them join or compromise his crusade to dominate. Simple Kyle sees through it. Becker needs him and Becker cares about Kyle and clever little Karen. He does this by cursing Kyle, pointing a gun at him, ordering him to go away, and in the finale abandoning Kyle to face death alone -- after making Kyle his wealthy heir in bank documents!

Are there other characters like Becker? Sure. They're thriller heroes and odd ducks consumed by blind, insatiable revenge after losing a loved one to the bad guys, a See Spot Run motive for Charles Bronson to sleepwalk through "justifiable" violence. In the film Bad Day At Black Rock, it was Spencer Tracy's turn to avenge a death and to kill. It bored Tracy. He sleepwalked through pasteboard scenes, let the talented ensemble of snarling bad guys shine.

In reality, are there men like Jimmy Becker? Fewer now, but yes there are and were in 1975. Marines are devil dogs prepared to fight and die, steeped to the bone with one imperative -- to obey orders unquestioningly -- and trained to fight as a team. The smallest possible team is two. Becker needs a partner at his side. Lepsky and Judge Verhoeven issue the orders.

That's why I wrote Partners, to show what partnership is, why it exists.

https://www.amazon.com/Partners-Wolf-DeVoon/dp/1722608595

For the good of the nation

I forget -- oh! -- now I remember. Wilda's lede in her weekly gossip column suggested doing something for The Good Of The Nation, which seemed like common sense to heed. I told her I'd get right on it, patted her affectionately and came home to my writer's lair, if you can call a tin barn a writer's lair. It has a coffee pot, microwave, laptop, and a plywood bunk that needs a pillow. The old one became so filthy with mold that I had to toss it on a flaming brush pile, along with that week's trash bags. I generate a lot of garbage, not exactly good for the nation, but it's life on life's terms in rural living. A year ago when I still had a car, I drove trash bags to town and let the town garbage collectors bury or burn it. If I understand the national situation correctly, nearly every consumer in the United States produces tons of waste.

Nothing I can do about that. Voting won't fix it. Same intractable problem with 9,220 Veterans Administration buildings and 49,000 Dept. of Agriculture offices and inspection stations, plus 373,000 miles of road maintained by the Forest Service, a USDA subsidiary. The military? Hah. Defense occupies 696,470 buildings worldwide, plus 8 million square feet in Virginia. Roughly six million people are directly or indirectly employed by the Pentagon, not including allies. In the Old World, allies were called "auxilliaries," had to be fed and watered, disinclined to do much serious fighting, unless they were British Gherkas. Ancient history. War is a Raytheon inventory to be launched by stealth fighter or drone nowadays. There's not much that you or I or anyone else can do to enhance national security. It's already the third-largest budget item funded by government, after Social Security and Medicare. I'm not sure that anything can be done to assist the Corps of Engineers with 650 dams, 12,000 miles of channel, and 926 harbors to maintain. I guess we could vote to borrow more money from offshore tax havens.

I'm not big on voting. The last time I voted was in 2008, because Sarah Palin was on the ticket, a reasonably normal person, guileless and honest. Since then I spent quite a lot of time at my laptop, exercising my remaining wit as an author, hoping to contribute inspirational literature for The Good Of The Nation.

I should have stood in bed, as the expression goes. Jews, blacks, gays, and doe-eyed victims of Christianity have a lock on publishing and the 16x9 public square of televised squabbling. Frozen out, I self-published twenty books. Good joke on me. A decade of effort exiled my work to laughable obscurity. My latest and best novel was shunted to Amazon.mx, denied existence in English, deemed unfit for American readers. Mighty hard to leverage The Good Of The Nation when the nation in question forbids admission to the marketplace of ideas.

"Free speech has limits," they scold. "You can't shout fire! in a crowded theater."

Maybe that was my mistake, I should have shouted fire in a gay nightclub, won a customary fifteen minutes of fame as a patriotic pariah, a noodlemeyer paraded in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons. If I owned a car, I could have waved a tiki torch in Charlottesville, shaved what little hair I have left on my head. Unfortunately, I don't give a shit about Confederate statues or any other legacy writ in concrete. The focus of my work was liberty, an extinct species of civil rights, and embarrassingly frank cis-het adventure novels, an antique artform.

It seems strange that national progress should be left in the care of bartender Sean Hannity and butch Rachel Maddow, but they're certainly less boring than Andy Rooney was, a salutary binaural eclipse of monotone Sunday night CBS schtick. I give Fox and MSNBC a one finger digital salute and note in passing the fan-losing Negro Football League taking a suicidal knee for The Good Of The Autonomous Vehicle Gig Economy Queer Nation. Mom always said that I was an optimist. Liberty is the future for some of us, unwilling to bend over for modernity.

I find myself in agreement with Fernando Wood, the mayor of New York, on the occasion of Confederate secession from the Union. "Let the erring sisters go in peace," he pleaded. Why not? Separate yourself for the greater good of all. Boycott Nike.

Now playing on Amazon