My Jim obsession
When I was at Bard it was my first exposure to the American culture. But we were up in the mountains and I started there in the dead of winter, short of two weeks after I finished high school in the Netherlands. I was seventeen
The snow was piled so high that you could not see out the windows in the commons where everyone went for meals. It was a strange place made up of international students, children of wealth or of whose parents were famous movie stars or somehow connected.
I guess the only connection I had for even being there was for their theatre department as at the time their literary department was buried under the drunken minds of professors there of antiquity. I dropped my duel major because of that, but then—even the other department —theatre—was a huge disappointment
but what I managed to get out of it were observations of people
The film professor I had was pretentious as well as self impressed. He looked like he needed a good dip in a flea bath. We would meet in this ancient building that was set up like a cinema. Seating in those uncomfortable pull-down seats with wood that jabbed your ass bones for two and a half hours. And it was freezing in there. But my first views of Cocteau came from those sessions. The shock of Avant-gard in film style
I liked the crudeness of the cinema and the old projector
The class was about fifty students and seemed to fill the theatre
But there was this one odd guy in my class that stood out to me because —I guess he looked in a vague kind of way, like me —if I were male, had brown hair and was tall; that is, he dressed like me (boots, ponchos, hats), wore his hair like me (shoulder length and long bangs to the side) and sat far in the back hiding in the shadows like me. Back then I was searching for characters for the film I was constantly working on, Bard provided an interesting variety of odd character influences. But this guy—his name was Sean—so even his name was close to mine and I found out his birthday was a day or two near mine. I was not infatuated, more fascinated. As I liked to explore details for my characters, I found out, by chance, things about him from friends who knew him; he was shy and introverted; preferred being alone and …..was obsessed with Jim Morrison
As I grew up in the Netherlands, I didn’t know about too many American bands or the culture going on.
So this is how I discovered Jim Morrison. Sean was a film major like me and, as it turned out, so had been Jim Morrison. I happened upon Jim Morrison’s poetry soon after reading No One Here Gets Out Alive—which is what saved me from killing myself after my rape and —surviving my out of body death experience— at school and so, you see….once reading Jim Morrison’s words— I was changed forever. If anyone was like a mirror, it was Jim. The Oedipal I recognized right away and his methods of hiding his secrets with Socratic riddles
a deeply philosophical and literary intellectual who used a persona as his soapbox
