06-08-2008
TOUR:
Good morning. The final dates are not entirely solidified yet, but at the end of May I will be lacing up my Doc Martens or my bowling shoes or something and will be on tour with Unwed Sailor and Sybris doing photography and drinking a lot, from the Pacific Northwest to the East Coast of the United States.
This will be the first opportunity for me to bring my new book Please Don't Leave Me on the road. If you want to purchase a copy from me at any of these cities, they will be on sale at the merchandise booth.
I will have a tour blog running, which I am rather excited about. Because my hand cramps when I use a pen and a personal journal, this time around I will be using an electronic public outlet for this bullshit.
May 27 - Portland, OR @ Someday Lounge
May 28 - Reno, NV @ Satellite Lounge
May 29 - Berkely, CA @ Rasputin Music
May 29 - San Fransisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop
May 30 - Los Angeles, CA @ Cafe Mariposa
May 31 - Long Beach, CA @ The Prospector
June 2 - Phoenix, AZ @ Modified Arts
June 4 - Mcallen, TX @ The Incubator
June 5 - Houston, TX @ Walters On Washington
June 6 - Austin, TX @ Emo’s Lounge
June 7 - Denton, TX @ Hailey’s
June 8 - Norman, OK @ The Opolis
June 9 - Tulsa, OK @ The Continental
June 10 - Memphis, TN @ Hi-Tone
June 11 - Nashville, TN @ Exit/In
June 12 - Atlanta, GA @ The Earl
June 13 - Tampa, FL @ The Orpheum
June 14 - West Palm Beach, FL @ Respectable Street
June 15 - Orlando, FL @ The Social
02-05-2008
UPDATE NEWS: Photography - Book - Tour. Good morning. This website will shortly be undergoing smallish changes, with updated galleries and archives on the way. It's a new(er) year, here, and we've decided that the world inside this website has more trials to give itself up to. It's growing up, like a little baby boy pitching bits of stone and brick through the windows of an abandoned warehouse. It's refining itself.
We hope to have a new gallery live by March as well as an archive, and...
My book PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME is finally being released in a couple of months by Brown Paper Publishing. It's a collection of fictional short stories. It's sad, at times. Please keep an eye out here for details. You can also check in at MySpace here:
PLEASE DON'T LEAVE ME, by Jaret Ferratusco
Details and possible tour with Unwed Sailor soon. Thank you for reading.
- JARET.
12-23-2007
I don’t know, I just think that isolation is probably what’s going to be the first thing I think of every time I manage to slide close enough to the edge of the wall where I feel like this isn’t going to end really badly.
You just have a feeling about these things sometimes. It’s a start, and it’s an end. I fill everything with a void. This is what I do, I guess. And maybe I’m not the best person to ask, but I think it’s killing me.
12-15-2007
Whatever will happen, it'll likely encompass your bones. Your fine suit of flesh, your armor, your excuse for batting an eye. There isn't a means of softly falling asleep on her breast and forgeting the Devil. We all have our off days.
10-16-2007
Tonight I stripped my arm of the hospital bandage that’s been made nearly threadbare this past month since the day-long stay when I was first hauled out of the road in Astoria. Because he’s a good talker, my attorney Kevin Aimes was able to get me out of medical custody and he paid for me to fly me to Manhattan on the hospital’s condition that I see a doctor in New York and report the sessions back here to Oregon. Aimes has a very large office in a skyrise you can see all of New York City from, and in the office there are a few smaller rooms off to the side that he uses for meetings, or drinking engagements with clients, and in one of these smaller rooms there is a massive olive colored leather fold-out couch and that is where I stayed for two weeks (sleeping, writing, ordering a pizza, even). As per Oregon’s apparently legally solid request that I see a doctor on the East Coast while there, I started meeting with Aimes’ personal physician Boyd Bryce (who came to me at the office without my having to hail a cab down to his), who is not a psychiatrist but merely a script-writeout engineer for Aimes’ fondness for pain pills.
Dr. Bryce was very pleasant, and he would share some drinks with me and some friends of mine who came to see me at the skyrise office, and he scribbled some notes and signed some forms and Aimes’ secretary had them faxed back here to Oregon, and since Aimes is practically like some kind of bloodhound for the talons and the teeth of the law, I do not have to go back to the hospital anymore and I am free to drink alone in my own bedroom again.
I am presently waiting for a cab that will take me back to the airport. In a few hours I will be boarding a plane for Norman, Oklahoma. In Norman, I will be spending the next four days photographing the ending sessions for the new UNWED SAILOR record, titled Little Wars. I don’t think I have seen Johnathon in about a year now.
I’ve been in Portland that long now. Just over that much. I’d like to have a drink right now, but you know, there’s nothing in the house, and it’s past last call. The next I’ll be able to secure one is on a forthcoming layover. In Phoenix, Arizona. In about five hours or maybe a little more.
07-04-2007
Six o’clock in the morning has all the beauty at present as a flat wall up close. It looks as flat and dead-end as a smooth patch of ground-up dirt might when you’ve fallen and it’s too much trouble to right yourself again, so you stare and refocus a wall of blurry granules and you can taste it in your mouth too, but you won’t get up.
I don’t know what happened to me a few days ago but I ended up crawling into the corner of my bedroom, pulling the few cardboard boxes of photographs aside and wedging myself in so that if anyone had come into the room they would not have seen me. Maybe it hasn’t been a few days, but I could have sworn it looked like a month. The sunlight peeked around the boxes and then the wall went blue, then black. A couple of times, maybe. I've dreamt of falling out of a car. I woke up a few hours ago to a spiteful pain in my hand, and I let it sit there and turn my arm numb until I realized that it was not the position I was bent in stopping up my circulation but a green spider the size of a nickel, curled up at the web of my hand between the index and thumb, eating my skin. Its legs were scratching at me as its teeth sunk harder. With my other hand (this took a while to maneuver) I pinched it until it burst, and a cold, sticky fluid seeped down almost to my wrist until it stopped, and is dry now.
I am having trouble moving my whole arm. A call to my attorney went unanswered. Writing with one hand feels cheerless. I plugged the telephone back into the wall. I don’t recall having pulled the cord out, or again, why I’d hidden in the corner for the past few days. I’m not so sure that it matters.
06-13-2007
Realistically, I feel sick to my stomach. Mixing medicines, as greatly as it doesn’t seem to bear in mind much in the way of smart calls, has effectively finally hit me as poor decision making. Yet I still do it. It’s starting to scare me that alcohol is being replaced by something else in my blood (like real blood), but drinking more to try to reverse this process is just making me tired. And the thing is, for the first time in years . . . I’m getting up earlier in the morning. I’m still turning in shortly before sun-up, yet I find myself back up and on my feet between nine and ten just hours later. I should start taking my own blood tests to see what my alcohol level is sometimes. I’d probably keep the blood and mix it in with rum and drink it back down. The wall around me is a lot smoother. Mostly it used to have rough patches like the steep hill of a mountain, but presently I’m regarding it as a featureless, colorless cool wall that I can lay my face flat against to lower my body temperature and sing away all the pressures of feeling like I have to mimic what I think a real human would say when spoken to, and silently with my eyes closed and my face against the wall I walk in circles as it presses in on me and it takes me two hours to figure out what I want for my day’s meal (which always ends up being a sandwich). How every eatery seems to spider out from around this house like it’s caught in a web. That familiar crawling under my skin when my hands feel like they should be doing something, it responds to the flatness in the wall. I bet evil tastes as flat and cold as an iced glass of water. I wish tap water had a high alcohol content.
05-11-2007
If you have your life mostly rested on shelves, it begins to all look like books you've already read and have no intention of picking up again. If I were to intentionally end my life this week, who would find me first? The police or my friends?
02-07-2007
Werewolves at the front door.
12-15-2006
RESIDENT PHOTOGRAPHER JARET FERRATUSCO SLATED TO RELEASE BOOK.
I am found pleased to announce that in mid-2007, I will be releasing a literary collection of fiction through SLOW JANUARY RECORDS. Please note that this is not a book of photography, but short stories written by myself for the express purpose of attempting to make it easier to get out of bed in the morning without regretting my life thus far. That's not actually the reason, but in any event, the book, titled Please Don't Leave Me, will be comprised of twelve short stories about loss, love and horror. My new label should have it up for sale probably sometime by summer 2007. Should you like to be informed on its release, please send me a note with your e-mail address here, and if you like, include your physical address and I'll send you a goddamned sticker too.
To celebrate its release, CORPSE ON PUMPKIN PHOTOGRAPHY and SLOW JANUARY RECORDS will be having a book release/reading somewhere in the city of Portland (Oregon), featuring live music and a reading of certain selections from the book, voiced by myself (who will be adequately drunk). All subsequent information will be forthcoming, so if you want to, do check back in.
09-01-2006
It's difficult to stand there in a room full of flames and not think that somewhere up near the ceiling, lost in the billowing clouds of black smoke and fluttering ashes, lies Heaven. You can listen to the world around you crackle and pop, watch bursts of flames tear down a wall. You watch two poor little kids running across the room with their limbs windmilling, frightened, screaming their poor little charred lungs out, bent down and shaking their fallen father. The man is not moving, but from where I am standing, by the door, I can't tell if he's breathing or not. It's just too damned hard to see anything because it feels like my eyes are melting.
The two kids are shaking him, screaming, "Daddy! Daddy! Wake up!" Their little voices are shrill and full of terror. The flames are closing in on them, engulfing what little space in the large room not already burning. Sooner or later they'll have to leave him there and fend for themselves, and let the poor guy burn, whether he's already dead or not.
It's times like this that I have no clue why I became a firefighter. Not a clue.
Guess I better duck out of here before those two little kids spot me, because I'm still trying to find Heaven. I know it's here somewhere, and I've got to find it. There's no time to be a hero and save people, because Heaven is here somewhere. I just know it.
