It’s almost been two years since I’ve serialized Resplendence on ShindoTV. It’s definitely been quite a journey. As far as ongoing projects go, this one has come to completion. Several years ago, I put this project together to satisfy my MFA degree. I took a thesis template, tweaked it, and created a limited print edition for San Diego State University Library and their special collections, my thesis chair, my friend Scott, my mother, and myself. Writing and compiling was a definite process over several years and and this book, which cost about $500 to print and bind, was what I had to show for the work.

For most people to read the project, they’d have to go to my alma mater and go to the Love Library. This limits the audience, though the advantage for them is that the book is inexpensive to read. They can spend all day in one of the floors of the library and read it, or they can check it out and take their time. The problem is only one person can have it at a time.

My next step was to serialize the work on my website. I wanted the work to be accessible to more people and create an interest. I hope I have managed to do so. A majority of the text (save one or two pages) have been posted and the text and images can be seen by anyone. Benny’s had a journey to sanity on his own terms, right in front of the world. And he’s shown everyone the Gold Lady.

Now the next step is to get this thing into print, where people can buy it. It shall be done and it shall be called Resplendence.

I dedicated the thesis to my friend Scott, if he wanted it¹. I dedicate the online version to Jaylen, if he wants it. He’s been on a writing journey of his own for the past two years.

Thank you everyone for sharing in the Resplendent Journey so far. – Shindo

¹inside joke – see The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt.

The truth be told, I did not become part of the Gold Lady. I learned that she was a part of my being. It would be fabulous if I was the Gold Lady and I found in my purse the keys to the Gold Mercedes. How splendid would it be to drive down Santa Monica Boulevard. I did however, ride down that street with Dylan. It took him forever to find me.

I knew I had to come home. Who would tell the story about the Gold Lady if I didn’t? I certainly could not let Roger do that. He has his own ideas about the Gold Lady, but he’s more like Madame Satã. If Roger is anything like that Brazilian legend, I would see his show. I have a book and this is my show.

I’ve drawn so many pictures, written so many things. When I got out of the hospital, I called Shin and I showed him all my stuff, He was a little nervous at first, but Dylan convinced him that I was OK. Shin helped me arranged the images so that the story could be told. I even have a few of Roger’s drawings. They’re going into the book too.

Shin asked me what I wanted the book to be called and I really did not know what to tell him. I told him “The Gold Lady,” but he told me the this book is as much about me as it is about her. I found the title in two of my drawings. One was called Resplendence and the other was called Elegance. I liked Elegance, but Shin said it should be called Resplendence because the Gold Lady is resplendent and so am I. She shines and I shine. She is radiantly fabulous, but I learned that I am as well. So the book shall be called Resplendence.

I met the Gold Lady and she changed my life forever.

Credits:

Drawings and text by yours truly, Benjamin Jonathan Nelson, AKA Benny Nelson.

Compiled and edited by Shinichi Evans.

The Stars:

Benny Nelson and the Gold Lady.

Additional Players:

Edmund, Roger, Dylan Nelson, Shinichi Evans, Susan H., Christian Presley AKA Man with the 4-Way Hips, Bryan with a Y, and even the evil Dr. Marcus. (Editior’s note: Let’s not forget that Ella deCastro Baron was in “Benny’s Narratives” and “My Bald Avenger.”)

Thank you for reading and I hoped you enjoyed the online version of the book. – B

Since I can’t find her anywhere, I go to the pier and ask the silver Cat Woman. She bows and makes whirring noises, and then points to the downtown area.

“The Promenade?” I ask her and she nods yes. I checked the Promenade, the area that is closed to cars, but I did not see her there. I return to the mall, walk down a block, and I don’t see her.

I hear someone behind me call her name. It’s my brother Dylan and Shin is with him. Shin runs up to me and explains to me that he called Dylan after he saw me on the train. He tries to tell me that I should go home with Dylan, but I tell him that I have to find the Gold Lady.

As we cross the street to the other block, I see the lovely black woman I saw at Horton Plaza. Her dress has so many mirrors sewn into it, reflecting the sunlight in so many different directions, and she is wearing a diamond bracelet and earrings along with a pair of silver shoes. Her blackness soon burns away, revealing her to be the Gold Lady.

She holds her hand out to me, and soon everything around us stops—the people, the cars at the intersection, the breeze, and even Dylan, who is frozen in mid-air running after me.

“So she is real,” Shin says to me , and the Gold Lady touches my head and heals me. I say goodbye to Shin and soon become part of the Gold Lady. She integrates me into her being. Shin asks her what he should tell Dylan and she tells him that he will be able to come up with an explanation that satisfies Dylan’s rationalistic logic. She becomes black again and everything starts to move again. Shin tells Dylan that I somehow got away. The Gold Lady puts on some lipstick and she is ready to bring the world into the 22nd century.

A crowd is outside of the NBC building waiting for her, roped away from the red carpet she will walk on to get into the building.

A gold limousine parks in front of Macy’s, and the Gold Lady steps out, wearing a gold Dolce and Gabbana trench coat and matching Prada high heels along with a Fendi purse, also gold. She walks up to the obelisk in front of the Lyceum and poses for pictures that will be in a magazine. She is then followed by two very big men in black suits and sunglasses as she strides down to the red carpet. She can kick some serious ass and really doesn’t need bodyguards, but a famous woman needs bodyguards like a pair of diamond earrings from Tiffany’s.

I push my way to through the crowd, jump over a velvet rope on the carpet, and run towards the Gold Lady, calling out her name. Suddenly, she’s no longer gold, but black, and her halo’s gone. Her bodyguards almost grab me, but the Gold Lady says, “It’s OK, he’s just a fan.”

She walks up to me, kisses me on the cheek, and whispers into my ear, “Let me go and I will want you.”

]]> http://shindotv.com/2010/07/09/resplendence-feuille-50/feed/ 0 http://shindotv.com/2010/03/10/resplendence-journal-9/ http://shindotv.com/2010/03/10/resplendence-journal-9/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:00:52 +0000 shindo http://shindotv.com/?p=3547 I’m sitting in Susan’s office like I do every Wednesday. Everything is the same as it is when I visit—the fabulous fashion magazines, Harper’s, some issues of the New England Medical Journal, photos of her boyfriend in trendy frames, watery iced latté from Starbucks clutter her desk along with the keyboard and gigantic monitor. She likes her Vogues, lattés, and boyfriend, but I think reading the New England Medical Journal is a chore for her, that she’s in the wrong job. I overheard her say to another medical student that she came from a family of doctors and she was doing what was expected of her. I don’t think she’d tell Dr. Souza this. I know Susan is jealous of the Gold Lady, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

I ask Susan if I could use the phone to talk to the Gold Lady and she says, “No, I have accommodated your fantasies long enough. You need to talk by yourself, and you need to talk to me.”

For the past few months, she has been acting as if the Gold Lady exists, listening to me and writing things down. Susan would look at my drawings and sketchbook writings as well. Susan and I would talk in the little office time left, and every once in a while, she would say something about “normal people reality.”

Susan takes a lock of her hair hanging by her shoulder and twists it around her finger. After reading Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar, Susan should want to do something radically different with her hair. Perhaps she would like to cut her hair short or put it in glamourous waves. Or she could shave it all off and be as elegantly bald as the Gold Lady. Hair comes and goes, but the Gold Lady’s smooth head is timeless; she has no need for long hair, curly or straight. She is not restless like Susan.

As Susan continues to twirl her hair, she asks me what I’m going to do when I grow up.

“Grow up? I’m twenty-one years old.”

“I know. What I mean is what would you like to do for a job?”

Susan seems to be on the offensive about “normal people” reality today. I think about it for a second and tell her I want to get paid to draw the Gold Lady and her dresses.

“You can’t get paid to draw the Gold Lady,” Susan replies. She pauses to think and she tells me being a fashion designer or cartoonist would be a good job for someone who likes to draw, someone like me. “Have you thought about that?”

I don’t answer right away. I have thought about it but I don’t want to give Susan that satisfaction. I think about the people who make the Gold Lady’s dresses—Issey Miyake, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Yves Saint Laurent, Donatella Versace, Dolce and Gabbana, Karl Lagerfeld, etc.—and if I were a fashion designer, then I can make some cool dresses. I the Gold Lady wears them, which I know she will, then I will become very famous. I nod as if Susan just told me something new and insightful. OK, I played her game, so I think it’s fair that Susan lets me talk to my friend on the phone. But she says, “No, you should think about finding your place in society and what you want to do. Going on about someone who does not exist is not going to get you very far.?

I’ve been reading The Little Prince lately, so I ask her, “What about Antoine de St. Exupery?”

She tells me it’s a book and it’s simply make-believe. She just doesn’t get it.

The Gold Lady is walking down the street, the breath her only friend.

I talked to her on the phone and she told me the Man with the 4-Way Hips broke up with her this morning. When I asked her why, she told me he was tired of being known as the Gold Lady’s boyfriend because he could be famous for much more—that he’s got talented hips, that he’s the bastard son of Elvis, and that he’s incredibly suave.

It is public knowledge that the Gold Lady was the inspiration for the Kid A’s Gold Sutras (when he was in Lizard). Kid A is heard by millions and everyone knows the Gold Lady is the source of such greatness, but how do the swivel hip motions of the Man with the 4-Way Hips compare? “He said,” she told me, “that he must become famous on his own, but why is he suddenly hanging out with Christina Aguilera?”

Of course, he left her for the teenage pop princess,* but he never could say it concretely to the Gold Lady. When he finally got it out of his mouth that he was seeing Christina Aguilera, he fled the hotel room quickly because the Gold Lady would have kicked his ass in a fit of rage. She told me she had to leave the Chelsea for a while, and that she would call her agent and get herself booked on a flight to London.

I asked her if she was going to see Kid A while she was there, and she could not tell me if she would hang up with Toshio (his real name) or hook up with him.

*This was written in 2001, when Christina Aguilera was still a relatively new artist. She’s still around for this scenario to be plausible.

She is the one Supreme Being, whose lips and hips (and elegantly bald head) will always be her greatest things, and she’s dressed to kick ass—all her dresses are couture, made specially for her, and she doesn’t buy her dress off the rack.

She is a saint and much more. See her halo? That just shows she’s the Sweet Divine Thing, the World Famous Gold Lady.

She can dodge bullets faster than the guy in The Matrix and she can kick some serious ass, so I wouldn’t mess with with her if I were you.

I clipped some pictures out of a magazine to show she is real though I had to draw in the halos because they don’t show when she takes the form in the three cutouts. Susan, the medical student assigned to my case ever since Dr. Marcus was “dismissed,” has tried to tell me the woman in the photograph is a woman named Alek Wek. I just told her, “So she is, maybe that’s what she wants to be when she doesn’t feel like being the Gold Lady.”

If that is so, she is also Grace Jones and Erykah Badu. It really doesn’t matter, she is famous anyway. 

The Gold Lady has helped me get through some very hard times and I would not be alive without her. I’d hate to lose the Gold Lady though Susan keeps trying to get me into “real people reality.”

I now present you with the Finale of Benny’s journey with the Gold Lady. Here, he starts to find sanity on his own terms. Somehow, I have the feeling we’ll hear from him again in the future.

The Gold Lady lives. Enjoy.

The Gold Lady was the one who got them to raise their voices high enough to become famous. She was also John Travolta’s dance partner in Saturday Night Live. Men who danced well have always done it for the Gold Lady and John Travolta can put the Man with the 4-Way Hips to shame! This was way before she met the Man, way before he inspired that song by the Tom Tom Club. Not only did the Gold Lady do the movie with John Travolta, she was often seen with him at Studio 54 when that place was cool. I asked her if she could ever bring me back in time, but she told me I was never meant to be there.

In the picture, she is bald because you see her as she is.  In the movie, they added hair and a different skin color in post-production. Why is it that the Gold Lady must be kept secret? Why can’t everyone see her for the glamorous being she is?

Resplendence will return with “Glamour” on March 16.

I have wondered why the Gold Lady was not there to save Andy Warhol when Valerie Solanis went into the Factory and shot him. If the Gold Lady is eternal and outside of time, then she could have gone back to that moment, slapped that bullet away, and kicked Valerie Solanis’s ass. When I ask her about it in our phone conversations, the Gold Lady told me could not change history; she can only be there if she was mean to be part of that event. Even if she wanted to stop Andy from getting shot, there was no way she could.

Whenever I said, “You are perfect, you could have stopped it,” she would say, “I’m not perfect, but I’m perfect for you.” Andy Warhol even said she was perfect in a video where she is being painted by Keith Haring. I think she is being too modest when she says she is not perfect because she is the one Supreme Being who will bring us into the 22nd century where men and women, and even Andy, have lost their hair. She brought me forward to that perfect age; maybe that’s why there’s ab attempt to cover up her existence. They are afraid of the change she would bring.