2017-09-27

The inimitable Robert Patrick…on life: 

 I don’t like life much. I prefer art. I am interested to discuss it. My favorite artists are Plato, Bach, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Shaw, D.W. Griffith, Noel Coward, Vermeer, S.J. Perelman, Cole Porter, Euripides, Auden,Jean Kerr, Federico Fellini, Dorothy Parker, Chekov, Marilyn Monroe, Vladimir Nabokov, Walt Disney, Brancusi, Wilde, Pollock, Tennesse Williams, Hitchcock, Dali, Ayn Rand, Alfred Bester, Gwen Verdon & Bob Fosse, Gore Vidal, Picasso, Emily Dickinson, Barbra Streisand, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Georgia O’Keeffe, Christopher Fry, Doric Wilson, Lanford Wilson, Billy Wilder, Johnny Mathis, Tchelitchew, Mary Renault, Eartha Kitt, Paul Cadmus, A.E. Housman, Al Capp, Sappho, Catullus, and Billie Holiday. 

I am a 70-year old, single, Gay Libran writer and ghostwriter living in Los Angeles strictly for the sunshine. I abide in good-natured despair about the failure of the ideals of the 60’s revolution.

I see the western world at present in terms of the theories of Christopher Lasch (“The Culture of Narcissus”) and Alice Miller (“The Drama of the Gifted Child”). I’m not sure anything can be done about the mess our wasteland is in, but I do regard the collapse of our civilization as a fascinating opportunity for a writer to discern the structure of the culture crumbling around him. I regard myself as a refugee from the apocalypse, striving to keep alight a small campfire of human humor in an increasingly dreary darkness.

I am not committed to any particular cause, nor am I apt to be convertible to yours. In the interminable struggles for status and identity which pass for “parties” in our culture, I haven’t yet found a side I’d care to take. The password to my fireside is, “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me.”

http://hometown.aol.com/rbrtptrck/myhomepage