Ethnic Vacancy

March 15th, 2010

It’s true I have felt like an outsider, been too self-conscious, too sensitive.

Some of this has come from my mixed appearance/consciousness. I am not “white” and yet I am not really anything else either. (Years later, after some dialog about this, a woman exclaims with joyful proclamation, “You’re Chicano, baby!” But, I am still unsure. Shouldn’t I be able to speak Spanish, or have had any Mexican-American friends or come from a family with Mexican-American inclinations?) But I have brown skin, and thick, black hair. This is because, while I have many ancestors that have contributed to my blood/DNA that were European (with some linking person emigrating to the “new world”), I have more who were native to this land/continent now called America. The family line is somewhat mysterious and removed from me, but as for the emigrated European line, I think, among the countries represented are England, Spain, Germany, Norway… For the native American line, I think, the people (Indians they’re sometimes called) come mostly from the areas where present day southwest United States and northwest Mexico have situated themselves, between the states of California and Chihuahua. (The fabled Aztlan?) My family is small: my mother only had two sisters, neither of whom had any children (so no first cousins, and I never knew of any second or more removed cousins either), and my father was an only child. My parents were both born in Los Angeles to parents who had lived in Los Angeles (some even born to it) for some time, lived in houses in mixed neighborhoods, spoke only English, carried no obvious ethnic identifiers. My parents raised me in the suburbs, where I made white friends, went to white schools, enjoyed white entertainment. And yet something was different. Sometimes I was excluded from activities or not treated fairly. Sometimes I incurred looks of hatred. Sometimes on the streets I’ve been asked something in Spanish by Mexican-Americans, which I’ve not understood, and other times I have been asked, slowly and loudly, by European-Americans, “Do you speak English?”

How many times have I faced that question: “What are you?” “An artist,” I might say, or “An aquarius,” or maybe just, “What do you mean?” “I mean, where were your parents born?” “Oh, here, in Los Angeles.” “Well, what’s your, uh, ethnic origin?” “Oh, I’m, like, mongrel American.” “Well, what’s the mongrel part?” “European.” “I thought you might be from India or the Middle East or some other place…” “Nope.” I think, “Why don’t I feel entitled to ask YOU What You Are?!” Oh, maybe it’s normal, no big deal, and I’ve just been insecure, defensive. But still, a lot of these “white,” European/Anglo-American types can come off like they’re so entitled to everything. I mean there’s like six billion of us living here, all connected through our humanness and the condition of being sons and daughters of our home and provider the planet Earth, so why don’t more people act like it, why don’t we feel it more?

My father worked in the film business, and because of it he traveled to a great many states and countries, kept a great many books, did vast amounts of research on various peoples from various times and places, watched a range of foreign and domestic films, and enjoyed a diversity of food. So, while I was raised in a monotonous looking suburb, I enjoyed a rich and diverse experience of world film, cuisine, music, art… I never felt a part of any particular ethnic group, but had a little bit of general introduction to many cultures. In a week I might watch films by Kurosawa and Fellini, eat Chinese and Mexican food, sit in a study decorated in Middle Eastern/Arabian furnishings, and browse through books on art from India and European medieval knights. Periodically I saw some commercial television or heard some commercial radio, but for the most part those things didn’t stick, and I lived most of my life feeling skeptical and sickened by, and avoiding commercial media/entertainment.

I was different, and I was aware of it, though I didn’t necessarily want to admit it. Because, while in certain areas I had some knowledge and understanding, in others I was horribly naive and unequipped. I wanted to be accepted, appreciated, connected, but often times I have felt unconnected, alienated, like an outsider.

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One Artist’s Passion and Dread

February 16th, 2010

Desire for liberation. I am driven by a movement parallel to death. Somehow this must be integral to art. But what about art moves with death, and why do I go animate as a wild puppet in this movement? Head turns, sludge and pinwheels. Heavy red apartment floors. Alcohol, cigarettes, and delirium. Sitting before an old typewriter and changing glasses. Light flashes, sloppy developing, fingers in acid. Still getting poems and art in the mail. Snug, black, leather boots and muscles in legs making sure steps on concrete, cutting paths, sliding through halls. Body going thick with blood at the sight of these girls. I get dizzy, want to fall down terribly and make a big commotion. I stomp slowly toward transformation, but through a strange and dense outer path. Captivated by exposed, undulating flesh. Scaling inebriated creep along the outside of third story apartment building during rainy night. So bent can barely talk. Crossing streets against lights, nearly looking. How can someone this reckless care this deeply? Sometimes I can hardly move. I go immersed in the surrounding sounds/noises. My best art is in letters to friends. I am overwhelmed by trees in the park, turning. The blood gathers in places in my body and hardens. Walkman headphones shooting screeching guitars, heavy bass, crashing drums into my brain. I run around, let myself go, conjure up all the energy I can. Channel it into art work. Draw with long sticks in ink or cloth in powdered charcoal. At night, crazy, running across streets, hiding behind cars. Mushrooms in painting studios. Lost in dark geometry and buzzing electrics. Each intersection as another knot in maze of cord. Unfathomable consciousness charges the air in electrical mystery. My interior is deep and dark. Or right there, smudged and prickly on surface. Perhaps all this moisture is a powerful conductor. I wobble and the moisture runs from my mouth. I draw and paint, fight with the surfaces. I need to paint on panel, scraps of wood and chisel at it, burn it. I am struggling with everything. The biggest steps on concrete falls. My apprehension of some of these girls is nearly unbearable. I swoon with tortured lust. I want to crash through everything and land in some raw, inner space. Sometimes I am completely empty, with only a recognition of the play of light on surfaces, patterns, textures. Sometimes my mind moves, but always within the loneliness and dread, passion and contempt, desire and anxiety. Smell of oil paints. The pale light reflecting all the grimy surfaces. I put such energy into writing notes, but perhaps they mean nothing. I throw all the sticks of my despair, frustration, anxiety, anger, depression into the fire. The fire: my drive to make art, my belief in creative exploration and expression. Fire burns me. I am hot and burning inside. No end to sticks. Blood gathers in my body. I am always hard. The flesh keeps me dizzy. Red room spinning around, pants down around my legs, girl’s dirty hair in fingers. The phenomenology of submersion. Each knot fierce in its mass and uniqueness. All vividness dangerously charged. The light here, and the dirt. And everything moving. How can this want be manifested in the depiction of form by line, tone, color, texture? I am trying to acquire technique, which means method, control, discipline, knowledge, while simultaneously trying to break it all down smash it by lack of method and control, against unknowing and purposelessness. Look for meaning in the bits and pieces remaining. All frightfully cracked and shattered and then stitched and glued together to show this process, to show the lack of belief in any conventional goal. What does it mean, focusing on the dissipation? Depicting the annihilation? Putting real life in the static and flat? Where is the sense in this? Can it be done? I gaze at the interconnected relationships of all these details with wonder and trepidation. Everything is so perfectly complex it’s frightening. Each passage is rising and falling. And there’s always something hanging at the edges that’s crystalline, super-detailed, and in gleaming cartoon color. I know it is related to chaos theory and fractals, or insect mentality and their colonies, or arabesque patterns. I know there is meaning here, but it is constantly unraveling. And desperation and hunger course through my tissue in double-time.

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Textural Process

February 9th, 2010

In trying to make a piece of art that makes sense, the texture of the thing, its tactile presence is important, a necessary component. Also, the process. It is the process, I feel, that can give the thing meaning. Process, the methods and conditions by which the piece is wrought, packs a certain potential, energy into the piece which might be accessed later by a viewer.

I carry on a kind of desperate search for meaning and where it resides. I am fairly certain that it does not exist in anything intrinsically and this puts me into a fit or crises of uncertainty. My confusion over what is meaningful causes me to question conventions, morality, limits… I try to put these energies, the confusion, passion, anxiety, desperate yearning, into the making of the piece.

I try all different kinds of materials and utilize a mixed-media aesthetics. I use electronic parts, pieces of metal, try tar, various resins, glitter, weird, cheap paints, whatever I can get, and see what they will do together. I often use a small blowtorch, burning areas to sizzling char. All these to burden or overload the recurring illustrative impulse of making a pictorial representation of something.

I had started with drawing, feeling that there’s something fundamental, foundational in its practice. And, I was always attracted to drawing things, depicting characters engaged in circumstances. Coming of age in L.A. in the 80’s, meant being exposed to a range of new wave graphics, cartoons, and illustrations, including the work of Ralph Steadman, Robert Williams, Bill Sienkiewicz, Sue Coe, Enki Bilal, Antonio Lopez, and others. (I was also so impressed by an exhibition of German Expressionist paintings I saw at LACMA).

My early impulses were in this mode of expressionistic illustrations. I think my tendency was more illustrative, but that I didn’t trust it or feel comfortable with it. I did not want narrative or representational coherence. This seemed too easy and dishonest, wrong. The artists mentioned above pointed to ways illustrations might be folded and disintegrated into other approaches, in complex, confusing, organic, or expressionistic ways. I sought to break apart my illustrative inclinations in my deconstructive questioning and my experimental processes.

Thickening the surface with layers and texture can frustrate the representations and keep them from forming. It is this tension between symbolic, pictorial representation and abstract, expressionistic, textural surfaces, that interests me, and the confounding, really, of them both. The thick, mish-mash surface ontology is a kind of representation in itself, but it represents a different order, in a different way, pointing to a sludge-like, ambiguous mental state. Thick, unsophisticated, crude and oppressive textural process as confused, desperate thinking.

To make a piece heavily loaded with so much difference that it collapses somewhere in the middle, and fails in a startling, overblown way, seems an exciting prospect. Especially for one constantly tormented with thoughts that don’t seem to lead anywhere, or whose destination doesn’t seem nearly as important as the quality and experience of the actual thinking.

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SF by Way of D

January 21st, 2010

(D for desire, doom, debauchery, deviancy, depression, drunkenness, degeneracy, depravity, despair, disorder, destruction, disintegration, dissolution, death…)

Clouds blowing through dark sky as I cross the Bay Bridge. The lit skyline rises before me. It is approaching midnight. I stick my head out of the car window and howl. The school is silent under the moonlight and the stones are cool. It is the first stop I make and I pee on the outside walls thinking “this is my new home.” In front of the hotel where I will stay strut half a dozen big-legged whores with thickly made-up faces and numb looks. I buy cheap scotch, find a place in the park, listen to Seventeen Seconds, and fall asleep in my car. When I awake a Chinese man stands before me swinging a chain around his body and blowing a flute. I check into the hotel, meet my future roommate, a nice, cute and tough girl. At nighttime I go out, towards South of Market, looking for something to eat. Police cars are interspersed between hookers, pan-handlers, street people, and thugs. Later, I feel that a sinister presence is trying to get into the room through the keyhole in the door. The next morning I see small burn marks around the doorknob, and a cloven footprint on the carpet just before the door. This is a bad omen, and I feel fear and strangeness moving in. My car is broken into and the stereo is stolen. The signs are clear to me: if I am to succeed (or even survive) here I must swim with the current and embrace the craziness head on. I walk up Haight street, look for freaks, and score some acid…

The drug-induced, sensory-overload, subconscious plundering tactics are a way to establish inner necessity, to discover what’s meaningful by deconstructing previous notions of art (sacrificing previously held notions of identity). Pulling out that which is hidden. A questioning by contradiction  of various conventions I have concerning painting, myself, and society. Looking for something in the repressed, the hidden.

I drink from a bottle of beer wrapped in a paper bag sitting against a wall and watch the prostitutes down around the corner. I‘ve never seen any this close before and I’m fascinated. They call to each other, get into cars which take them away, get driven back and emerge from the cars gesturing and calling to each other again. I watch for a few nights until one of them approaches me. She tells me she’s seen me watching her night after night, and that she knows what I need. She asks if I have a car around, and without thinking I point to it—it is sitting only fifteen feet away—she gives a big grin—her two front teeth are missing—and says, “let’s go.” I can’t think of any reason not to, and soon we are in the car. After she asks me to put my money on the dash, I place the fourteen dollars down that I have, and she swipes the bills away, she leans over me, supported by her knees on the passenger seat, gets my seat reclined and my pants down, and lowers her round, black face down into my lap. Her cool mouth slides around my stiffened flesh. I pull up her skirt and run my fingers over the warm, dark skin that’s bare underneath. She moans and gyrates, sticks ass out, her cheeks press up against the passenger window. Formally dressed, elderly white people leaving the theatre walk by, trying to look away and keep composed. The street seems to glow and my mind spreads tingling outward…

*

San Francisco struck me as an enchanted city. It was small enough to walk across, and yet packed with interesting architecture, people, and energies. A year or two before this I had gone to the city to visit a friend, and he had taken me around and showed me some sights. I had hung out and gotten loaded with some neo-hippies on Haight, seen a beautiful, tough tattooed goth chick fetch a huge snake out from behind an apartment off Market, went to a trippy, dark and dreamy party full of sexy, made-up people moving in slow motion through dim, colored lights, and wandered around the halls and studios of the Art Institute. The whole place seemed exciting and alive, and I started to think about the idea of moving there and going to art school. It seemed to be the perfect environment to creatively rearrange oneself and encounter something inspiring.

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Steps

January 13th, 2010

High school didn’t grab me, at least not in an academic way. Actually, I thought as a program of education the experience was a joke. My mind during this time drifted off, searching for more interesting, stimulating terrain, wanting to cut an alternative, creative path that was informed by my interests in music and intoxication. I realized after I had graduated that I needed to engage in a more serious study of art and should try some college. I began taking art classes at Art Center College of Design, while fulfilling my general education requirements at the local community college, College of the Canyons. After a couple of years I picked up an AA degree in Art, and acquired a little bit of insight, confidence, and technique through the half dozen life/figure drawing classes. In addition to drawing and painting I was very much into photography. My first job after high school was at a photo shop, and sometimes I’d acquire equipment in place of a paycheck. I set-up a darkroom in my parent’s laundry room and spent many, many hours in the dim red-amber light, bent over trays of chemicals, watchings images emerge burning on wet paper.

I was interested in exploring the modes of visual art as forms of cognition, and I engaged in various approaches of image making as ways of acquiring knowledge and understanding through a subjective experience of perception and thought, a type of thought that was both visually symbolic and visually textural or tactile. Because of this there was something very attractive and challenging about painting. It seemed multidirectional and unlimited in its potential.

This is the period when I ingested mushrooms for a sustained duration. Also of influence were the creative relationships I had with a few friends. We would get drunk, go on road trips, stay in weird motels, watch movies, listen to music, have stimulating conversations, experiment with intoxicated states, make art, eat, sleep, try to avoid responsibilities, and heave through life, dealing with ourselves and others, figuring out who we were and what we cared about. Sometimes I was euphoric, other times I was depressed, sometimes I was emotional, other times I was indifferent, but it was a great time, filled with ideas, impulses, influences, and insights. There was something very potent and special in these eclectic, subjective experiences, something that my art practice was deeply informed by. There was something about the feel and presence of this time that I wanted to capture in my subsequent artwork, something that would manifest itself in strange and murky atmospheres. If this time had been a space and my visual art an audio recording, than it was the particular sonic imprint, with the reverb and echo characteristic of that room, that was so important to the piece. And I would try to call it up in many later pieces, through a felt memory, and in the form of texture.

After a stimulating visit to San Francisco, I applied to the San Francisco Art Institute, was accepted into the school, and eventually packed up my car to move up there and engage in further study.

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A Crude Stab at Sense, Truth, and Meaning

November 11th, 2009

What is sense, what does it mean in the expression “making sense” or to “not make sense”? Isn’t this the sense of sensory experience, the experience of information one receives about the world through her or his senses? Sometimes it seems to me this term is being pushed to mean something logical, rational, conceptual, or intellectual. But, primarily, sense has to do with what we experience through our senses, and that which makes sense is that which is not contradicted by this experience. What corresponds to our experience of sensory perceptions—the experience of listening to music or feeling bare feet on wet grass or the caress of another or the smell of plants or the sight of light streaming through trees or the sound of bustling traffic or crashing waves or the feel of a cool breeze or the taste of a stimulating meal—these are things that make sense.

And what about meaning and truth, or our sense of meaning and our sense of truth? How might these concepts tie together? I think these things arise from experiential relationships. I don’t think we can talk about absolute or objective truth, because that implies extra-species knowledge. Human beings can only perceive a narrow band in the spectrum of light waves, or sound waves, we have a limited set of senses, and a certain consciousness that has evolved in relation to our language, technology, needs, abilities, and experience. Since we can never get beyond this, all the concepts or knowledge we have about anything is largely determined by the experience of a specific group of human beings. Our concepts of meaning and truth are therefore rooted in the specific experiences and relationships that people have with the world and others. In some important, fundamental ways what is true is that which makes sense.

These concepts are pulled in both a personal or subjective direction and also towards a widespread and common direction—which is usually thought of as objectivity, but I don’t think it is really, instead it seems to be a view that is or can be widely agreed upon by many human beings, or sites of subjectivity. So, whether the notions are broad or specific, they still have their root in individual experience, and the necessary relationship that arises from experiencer and experience. It is in this relationship between experiencer and experience, between the thought/feeling or affect of subjective awareness and the thing or event perceived or apprehended where truth is manifested. It is how the knower is connected to the known. In this way, a high degree of truth might come from a highly thought and felt sensory experience, where a low truth value would result from a weak or flimsy connection between the subjective affect and the world of experience.

Meaning is related to the exchange of expressions or statements of feeling-thoughts/affects. When these can be expressed accurately, in a way that makes sense in the experience of a perceiver/interpreter and fits into the relations of the world, then these expressions can be meaningful. Must these expressions or statements be understood to have meaning? Meaning does appear to be related to the understanding of a sign within a certain relational context, but a sign doesn’t have to be understood to be a carrier of meaning, and might have a type of meaning regardless of being understood. Consider a person making an utterance in a crowd of people, where no one understands what it means. Yet it still might mean something to someone, it might trigger a thought or reaction that means something or it might just mean a nuisance or noise. For another person who comes along and understands perfectly, perhaps the person speaks the same language or has had past experiences that enable a higher degree of understanding, there will be a different kind of meaning. Or, consider a book lying about unread. It carries the potential of meaning even though it might not be presently engaged in any meaningful relationships. It might mean something to someone as a paperweight, but that is a meaning detached from the inner text. Someone else reads the book, understands some of it, and unpacks a certain amount and type of meaning. Another person reads it, understands it differently, perhaps more, and unpacks another amount and degree of meaning. The quality of meaning seems to be linked to the relation of understanding between the experiencer/interpretter and the sign-thing/event, the carrier of meaning of the experience. And this quality or degree of understanding and meaning is also dependent on that which makes sense, and connected to the truth-value, with truth and sense providing a ground for meaning and understanding. And this process of apprehending a truth that is expressed in a form through the senses so that it is meaningfully understood all happens in the event of experience where a conscious body is connected to the world by an awareness of the presentation of an aspect, statement, sign, or expression of the world.

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Intoxicated, part 2

November 4th, 2009

While in my early twenties, I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time (upper Haight, San Francisco at dusk), and among the right people (neo-hippies) to result in my first dose of psychotropic or entheogenic mushrooms. The experience was so impressive and uncanny that other experiences soon followed. The activating agents in the mushrooms may be psilocin and psilocybin, but in my experience there is something else there as well—a powerful and intelligent, communicative force.

By this time in my life I had developed a rigid ego structure that was severe and unbalanced. I was too tightly wound, had fears and prejudices, and a lack of knowledge of my deeper self. The mushrooms helped me to change these things. They prompted a deconstruction of my uptight ego, and opened me up to genuinely awesome and perplexing experiences. (I should mention that I was never so much a recreational drug user, but a semi-serious psychonaut who used substances to work through issues, learn about myself, get in touch with repressed or alternative mental conditions, and/or create states I wanted to explore through art, while occasionally just wanting to chill or trip or freak out). The mushrooms brought me in touch with some deep, natural, organic connections, while showing me certain absurdities in dominant society and mainstream culture; they offered me insights to spiritual and/or metaphysical questions I had, and let me experience a whole new domain of or way to perceive the real. I also had some very bizarre trips. These experiences imbued in me some great mysteries. I spent more than a year ingesting mushrooms on a very regular basis, and was aided tremendously in a transformative process. I shutter to think how I might have developed had I not gone through this period of my life. Even after it had ended I was far from being even semi- well-adjusted, and there were many lessons that I was not ready for, that I would have to defer until another time. After this period I only ingested mushrooms periodically, usually once every several years or so, and in some ways, my life between doses became a time to prepare myself for the next dose.

It is noteworthy to point out how at odds mushrooms and alcohol are. Even after knowing this and having these experiences with mushrooms, I continued to drink for about another ten years. Perhaps I was too weak or had too many problems, or perhaps I needed to go out of control (there was something alluring about the utter degradation and helplessness of my severe drunken episodes…), or needed to take this path for some other reasons, to learn other lessons. I stopped inhaling volatile chemicals however. I knew that this was an extremely dangerous activity, and that I’d learned my lesson from it and it was time to move on. But I would continue to drink, through car accidents and awful behavior, and having to suffer others who were painfully and disgustingly intoxicated on alcohol.

At some point, somebody gave me a big bag of marijuana, and I smoked it, and it was good. Before this I had tried it some times and it had usually been unpleasant and a cause for paranoia. But, with this bag, I became witness to its mellow, soothing, pleasant, and even mind-expanding, or at least mind-floating, effects.

It’s interesting how the substance(s) one uses contributes so much to one’s personality. This seems obvious, but maybe some people don’t realize how thoroughly a substance can permeate one’s being. I guess the saying “you are what you eat” is accurate if we take “eat” to mean “ingest,” to mean everything we put into our bodies, and our minds as well. It does not seem possible to disentangle our identities from the stuff we consume. The experiencer is a part of the experience. It might be seen as a way of forfeiture or a lazy and irresponsible way to go about our lives, handing over the task of our personality formation to a drug or a teevee show or an organizational belief of some kind. But, we have to go about it in some way, don’t we? And we must do the best we can, without any rule books, hopefully finding a way that suits us, that offers us each meaning and valuable lessons, and gets us by, basically amicably with the rest of the world. This is something that’s been a concern of mine, and my engagement with intoxicants may indicate a personal oscillation between searching for guidance and being reluctant or unable to take responsibility for myself. At the time, from my perspective, I was intensely driven by burning questions of meaning. And, I found myself often consumed with a questioning of personal ideas and moral boundaries in an effort to find something meaningful that I could hold onto.

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Intoxicated, part 1

October 29th, 2009

Young teenager, with unpleasant experiences in daily routine, seeks psychic stimulation. Imagination and music and the cracks in suburbia revealing glimpses of weirdness make for an enticing luminosity. How to enter these spaces, where the mind is aglow and able to perceive and feel from an alternative coordinate system? The young teenager here, he goes from sniffing markers and holding his breath to inhaling rubber cement and liquid paper*. The waves of tingles that move through his body and the accompanying chemical changes that rush through his brain seem to indicate a breach in his immediate reality and the existence of another dimension of experience. He and a similar-minded friend soon acquire the guidance of an older, knowledgeable and mysterious, fellow named Seth. Seth instructs the two boys on the way of inhaling glue. They sit against apartment buildings, tucked away behind bushes, with tubes of model cement and the plastic bags from the supermarket produce section, learning the rudiments of vapor inhalation. They practice with amounts of glue, how it’s spread into the bag, how to hold the bag and with how much capacity in it, and how to work it with the other hand to establish a good rhythm between the lungs filling the bag and the squeezing down of the bag to fill the lungs. And through the experiences of this practice they psychically move into another dimension, or at least psychically move out of the one they were otherwise in.

Our young teenager also experiments with alcohol and sessions of heavy drinking. From the earliest of these he goes through intense episodes of falling-down drunk, foggy and ill voyages into blackouts. Soon he is drinking fairly regularly, beer mostly but also wine or wine coolers, and it is during these drunken times that he also acquires the habit of smoking cigarettes. Alcohol is an easy fix because it is so prevalent, even to a minor, and it enjoys such widespread acceptance and support. It might even be said that the path to mindless drunkenness is encouraged or can seem normal.

And so, the teenage years go by, filled with days getting mad drunk and smoking, tobacco as well as a great many clove cigarettes, and occasionally mixing another substance into the equation such as marijuana or cocaine. But still, the special relationship between our teenage user and volatile chemicals is a deep one and continues on, whether it be by inhalation of model cement or liquid paper from a bag while parked alone in a secluded place, or from bag with an intoxicating spray in a storage room at place of employment, or slumped over a sink in the graphic arts class pouring lacquer thinner into running hot water…

Oh, the beautiful, sunny, breezy, southern California suburban days that float by, with these boys sniffing up tubes of glue, sitting in a car at a community shopping center (where the necessary supplies were readily available), listening to Pornography by The Cure, and floating in and out of vaporous inebriated states of sensation! How the outside world would change, while their insides would turn strange and grow numb! After some hours of filling the car with dangerous vapors, one of them or both of them might want a cigarette, and while pulling one out and handling the lighter, they would giggle perversely at the thought that the car might be so full of fumes that a spark would ignite the whole thing into a ball of flame! Then they would flick the lighters, and even though there was no explosion in the suburban shopping center that day, there was a couple of boys aware of that cool and noxious feeling one gets when commingling nicotine-laced smoke with toxic glue fumes in a being with numb body and mind peeking through one of those weird and ephemeral ruptures in mundane reality.

*These, and as far as I know All the substances mentioned herein, were of a different constitution when the events depicted in this writing took place. The events themselves might in fact never have occurred, and this could be merely a piece of fiction. In any event, the author is not advocating in any way the use of any mentioned or related substances.

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Perceiving the Surreal

October 25th, 2009

I became interested in the ideas of surrealism, and its aim of enabling practitioners to escape the control of reason and the imperatives of the moral order, to become mediums of a wider self. Surrealism suggests using the experiences of dreams, automatic texts, playful and unrestrained investigations, and questioning the prevailing social standards and tastes, in the attempt to minimize and heal the fragmentation of consciousness and to restore more of the totality of a human being’s lived experience. It proposes that the true function of thought can only be attained in the absence of control exerted by reason, and beyond moral and aesthetic preoccupations.

It was revolutionary for attacking and attempting to overcome the crude and restrictive divisions and barriers of Western thought and logic, which operates in dutiful procedures according to clock-time and social conventionalism and protocol. It wanted to lay waste to the ideas of family, nation, and religion, and stated that “there is no room for compromise.” The subject in these previous sentences not only refers to surrealism, but also the thinking of Andre Breton, the main proponent of surrealism. Andre Breton was calling for a widening of the notion of reality, so that our concept of the Real would not suffer a logical reduction down to the simple and mundane, the practical and observable, but rather so our conception of the Real could expand to include the dream, the subconscious, flights of fancy, musings of the absurd, and other strange and marvelous imaginings. If we understand this then we are filled with the knowledge that reality is permeated with imaginative, transformative power. The Real is always open to what is unknown, mysterious, and not commensurate with rationality, and it offers outlets to the marvelous, to dreams of love, ecstasy, revery, to parades of bizarre superstitions, to a space that can be explored with the fanciful play of thought tracing the extraordinary and inexplicable movements of fantasy and dream.

Surrealism calls for the reassertion of Imagination, and a transformation of the World. A practitioner of surrealism or a surrealist is one who makes a piece of writing or artwork or related artifact, or performs an act of some kind, which can cause a kind of surprise, a convulsive shock between the piece/work and the spectator. This convulsive shock (which may, I think, be very subtle, almost imperceptible) originates from the perception/reception of a current of transformative power, a transformative power which moves between the piece and the spectator’s consciousness and enables her or him to see beyond some barrier, to imagine a larger realm. The current or charge of the piece is borne from a kind of desire or turmoil on the part of the surrealist to change or enchant, to affect, the spectator and the world. And the larger realm that the charge points to is surreality or the surreal.

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Thought on Shamanism

October 13th, 2009

I was to be attracted (or lured, compelled) down a path of creativity and expression, a path of art. In many ways I felt that the role I began to explore as an artist had connections to that of a shaman. Some of the aspects of shamanism, as I understand them, are:

The shaman serves a vital role in the community or social group, but lives on its periphery. He or she is a link between a tribe of people and the surrounding, occult forces that the social group dwells within. These forces are part of an All, an encompassing primal unity that provides a net of power or flow of knowledge and support for the people, but go mostly misunderstood or unperceived because of their hidden/occult nature. There is great risk and inevitable hardship when a person or people stray too far from these forces, because being in ignorance or at odds with these forces means being ignorant or going against the major guiding forces in life: this is a self-defeating and destructive way. The role of the shaman is to provide a link between the tribe and these forces, to access some of the power in these forces for the people, and to keep the people in a harmonious relationship with these greater, immersive forces so that they may be connected to a source of health and well-being. Their function is not necessarily one of the pragmatic and empirical tasks which satisfy the daily needs of the tribe, but a way to provide ecological stability and meaning, and to keep the people connected to the larger sphere of life and the forces pervading the environment.

To understand the tribe as an element under or within the umbrella of the world and its guiding forces, and the role of the shaman as the handle/pole connecting the umbrella to the tribe, is to understand the importance and significance of this function. It may be easy for a society that situates human production and intelligence as the pinnacle of nature, and science and rationality as its supreme methods, to dismiss these ideas or talk of them as superstitions of primitive peoples. But for a people who feel they exist within nature and that forces in nature are more powerful than themselves, great value will be placed on one who has a special or intercessory relationship with these forces.

It should also be noted that in order to achieve these aims of providing a link to a greater natural source of power the shaman must undergo a dissolution of his or her own separate and autonomous ego, and a commingling with other outside spirits and unseen forces.

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My Favorite Movie Growing Up

October 7th, 2009

The movies that came out and affected me the most when I was a teenager include: Apocalypse Now! (1979), Alien (1979), Excalibur (1981), Blade Runner (1982), The Wall (1982), The Thing (1982), Dune (1984), Brazil (1985), Blood Simple (1985), Blue Velvet (1986), Angel Heart (1987), and Withnail and I (1987).

This was a science fiction and fantasy thriller with neo-noir and black comedic elements, the story of which went something like this:

A divine mark or calling is placed on our young protagonist’s head, and he is wakened from a deep sleep by a techno-magician with a kind of militaristic power who assigns a mission to hunt down an insane Other of terrifying proportions. Along the way the characters that come in contact with or surround our protagonist become possessed with an alien mutation that drives them on a blood-lusting rampage of chaotic destruction. Our hero is forced or compelled to kill these possessed individuals, and suffers an increasing existential crisis as a result. His only relief is in the company of his lover, a beautiful but eerie androgynous figure who always seems to be in the right place at the right time while remaining situated within a veil of mystery. The two are forced deeper and deeper into both urban and wilderness labyrinths, chasing after the insane Other on the one hand and being chased by the possessed chaotic beings on the other. After a fight, due to stress and miscommunication, the androgynous figure flees with personal secrets that can ruin our protagonist. Our hero continues on, and seems to be closing in on his enemy, when without warning this enemy, the insane Other, bursts forth and abducts our hero for several nights of threatening, savage, and torturous ordeals. The androgynous figure returns and manages to free our hero, but in the process has to sacrifice her/himself in a barbaric and bloody ritual. Our hero comes across secret evidence giving proof to the undeniable link between the techno-magician and the insane Other, as well as their connection to the State. He returns to confront the techno-magician and avenge his lover’s sacrifice only to be informed of his own complicity and involvement in the whole string of acts. It seems that he is also inseparably linked (mentally and physically) to  both the techno-magician and the insane Other, that the three of them are a strange trinity, and that this has been a personal quest for identity. He himself had been responsible for the possession of the people who went mad with chaotic rampage, and the sacrifice of the androgynous lover had been a necessary act in the discovery of their mutual identity. The last shot shows a kind of union with these three retiring in a dark, womb-like chamber.

It had a great, original score, terrific high-contrast, low-key lighting, compelling performances, and stunning art direction. Very influential on me…

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Musical Roots, part 2

October 6th, 2009

Then I heard David Bowie. A friend of mine was telling me about hearing the song “Space Oddity,” and soon we each had a copy of ChangesOne. It was interesting listening to this music, and there was something very attractive in it for me and also something different, that I had not heard before. I was compelled to buy another of his records, and I decided to try his most recent release: Scary Monsters. It was 1981; I was 14, and wanting to find something I could absorb myself in that sounded fresh. I found it in Scary Monsters. I was so happy on hearing this album I shed tears while dancing around in ecstasy. I couldn’t believe how the music wrapped around me, feeling so new and comfortable at once. I started collecting all his previous releases back to The Man Who Sold the World. I was so fascinated by his creativity. There was something in his process and execution that stirred an artist inside of me. I still think he has the most incredible output of a musician over that decade (‘70 – ‘80), over those albums. I responded well to all that work, but I have to say, the stuff that really got me, that really stuck and went in deep, is the work done between ‘76 and ‘80, when he had the rhythm band of Carlos Alomar on guitar, George Murray on bass, and Dennis Davis on drums backing him up. Those guys laid down a solid groove for Bowie (and whoever the lead guitarist happened to be, and anyone else who might have appeared on the track) that was moving and tight and bouncy.

Another thing that listening to David Bowie did for me was get me ready for the coming new wave British explosion, which started for me in 1982 when one afternoon I picked up my first two 12” singles: “Tainted Love” by Soft Cell and “Let’s Go to Bed” by The Cure. What followed over the next few years was a musical inundation by a range of these new bands, including: Soft Cell, The Cure, OMD, Visage, Japan, New Order, Depeche Mode, The Thompson Twins, Blancmange, Thomas Dolby, Bauhaus, Cabaret Voltaire, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Adam and the Ants, Public Image Ltd., Shriekback, Tones on Tail, etc. I started to go to dances, and got into spinning records a bit myself. And that’s the stuff, the early 80’s synthpop and post-punk stuff, that made the indelible impression on me. That was the music I was obsessed with when I learned to drive, experimented with intoxicants, started having sex, graduated from high school…

And it was a period that was for me ushered in by David Bowie. And even though I wasn’t so fond of his new look and popularity after his move to EMI and the release of Let’s Dance, I feel that I learned a lot from him creatively, and through him I also became acquainted with other groups that would be important for me, like Iggy Pop (and the Stooges), Brian Eno (and Robert Fripp), and The Velvet Underground… Something of the spirit of David Bowie struck a deep chord in me that still resonates today.

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Musical Roots, part 1

October 6th, 2009

The first record I ever owned was The Originals by Kiss. It was a new, special package containing their first three records, the self-titled debut, Hotter Than Hell, and Dressed to Kill, and some stickers and stuff. These records changed my life. It must have been around the last part of 1976, when I was nine. Over the next couple of years I obtained all their albums, excitedly picking them up as they were released, including Alive 2, the solo albums, etc.… I played my Kiss records hundreds of times, actually wearing out several of them. The band and their music invaded my dreams. On several occasions I performed their songs with friends. We made costumes, painted our faces and acted to their music in front of audiences. My favorite members were Ace Frehley (the spaceman) and Gene Simmons (the demon). These two characters were deeply appealing to me in an archetypal way. I saw them play at the Forum in L.A. in 1980, the original members, still in make-up, and experienced it in a state of awe.

But after a couple years, I had grown through them and was ready for another band. By 1978 I had heard Led Zeppelin in an undeniable way. Where I’d been skipping more and more of the Kiss songs, Led Zeppelin captivated me with every track. My first albums were Led Zeppelin II, and the forth one, with the symbols. I can’t describe the impact these had on me. Soon I had the rest of their records. (This was before In Through the Out Door had been released, and when they were still a band). I felt that their music realigned my adolescent consciousness. Especially those electric guitar riffs of Jimmy Page. They activated something in my blood. I was upset when Bonham died. I felt like I had lost a friend with the demise of Led Zeppelin, I had grown so psychically close to them. But in a way, it might have just cemented my bonds with them more, and at least a half dozen of their records played in my mind consistently for a couple of years.

I was also into Pink Floyd at this time. My experience with Led Zeppelin was more overpowering, but at times I would slip into some intense states listening to Wish You Were Here, or Animals, or Meddle, or Dark Side of the Moon, and when The Wall came out it was my favorite album of the year.

There was a period around 1980 when I was also listening to Yes. I had some different albums between Fragile and Drama, and I would play them when I went into these weird and dreamy moods. It’s hard even to recall the experience of listening to them, because of the quality of these meditative moods.

These were the first bands that I attached to, that shaped my young mind, these classic, 70’s, blues-based hard rock/heavy metal and progressive/psychedelic bands, with their theatrics and magic and angst and trippyness, with their imagination, and intensity, and evocative sonic journeys.

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Difference

October 1st, 2009

Please don’t misunderstand me and think that I am trying to insist on the reality of dualism as a fundamental system at the metaphysical level. I think that it is far too easy for us as humans to impose a template of duality over the world, because:

1) Biologically we are each created by a mother and a father, and exist principally as one of two genders.

2) Biologically we each have a right and left side to our bodies and brains.

3) Terrestrially we revolve around a single star, and so experience periodic cycles of day and night, and summer and winter.

4) Have, in addition to this single burning star we revolve around, a single satellite revolving around us, so that temporally we exist through a sun-in-day and moon-in-night ever recurring cycle.

5) Geographically we are always caught by gravitational forces against a horizontal plane of land while extending upright into the air.

6) Symbolically, the human consciousness has developed within political and/or religious systems that have drawn lines between “us” and “them” or notions between what is good and bad or legal and illegal, as a way to regulate and control society.

One can continue to produce influential reasons for seeing the world through a cognitive map of duality, and explaining how similar systems became inscribed as a reality for human beings, but I think one can also discern the short-comings, limitations, problems and falsities that such a simplistic and generalized method of categorization leads to. One problem is that there are so many ways to divide things and events up. One might come up with a thousand binary categories and then place a thousand things or events in one of the two columns for each of the thousand categories, only to discover that each thing or event is a unique occurrence, an entity consisting of a unique set of overlapping categories, while none of these categories can offer anything other than a very small perspective, and the uniqueness of a multitude of categories becomes itself beyond categorization. Another problem is the contestable nature of placing an event or thing into either one or another category. Different minds will have different ideas on how to divide phenomena up, and the process itself denies or ignores any intermediate or gray area, or variations to a two-term system. Attempting to split the elements of the world up like this is obviously a very crude, nearly laughable, procedure, which we would probably be better to avoid or think beyond.

Still, it is a fact that there are many differences. And while it may be true that the human mind tends to assemble types that can be spread out along a spectrum and identified by their poles, it seems more true to assert: Difference exists. A multitude of instantiations of Difference exists. Somehow the fact of Difference is primordial, and built into the ground or the metaphysics from which reality arises.

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Undercurrents

September 22nd, 2009

There is always a Movement with Counter-Movements.

If we look at dance music, for example, we find this in the rhythm of all the groove oriented or funky forms. There is a dominant movement described in 4/4 time on the One, Two, Three, and Four; and, there is also an alternative, counter-movement, which both conforms to the dominant rhythm as well as works against it in a relationship of tension. It may for instance start on the One, but then proceed by increments of 3/16’s, landing on the 1.75, 2.5, 3.25, and 4. The Four will get it back into conformity so that it can start again in unison on the One. This is more than just random syncopation; it is a counter-rhythm proper.

We might extend this principle, in an even more crude, simplistic, and basic way, if that can be tolerated, to the sphere of politics and the authority of the state. There will always exist a dominant authority, and there will always exist an element of intolerance or dissent to this dominant authority. Let’s call the state of authority Control, and the movement of intolerance and dissent Anarchy. Control cannot be absolute and will always give rise to accompanying movements of Anarchy. Anarchy will always be in tension with Control, but will also be subordinate to it, will be conforming and reacting to Control. It cannot displace Control, because if it ever did it would suddenly take over the role of Control, while all of its opposing movements would become the new Anarchy. The rebel challenger kills the king, only to become a new king, with all the king’s duties, including defending himself from rebel challengers.

In the realm of thought, since the age of reason, through the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, there has been a dominant movement for the restructuring of society and methods of science and production under the banner of Reason and Rationality. And, there have been the attendant counter-movements. These counter movements have not been completely anti- or unreasonable. More often they have questioned the conception or constitution of reason, provoking it to try and define itself, and critiquing the range and method of its application. I was always attracted to elements in these counter-movements to reason, especially in the arts: Romanticism, the Gothic revival, Expressionism, and Surrealism. It is interesting that in addition to being somewhat antagonistic or critical to Reason, or perhaps because of this, these movements have also been considered Experimental or Avant-garde.

Some elements of these movements have been: the mystery and wildness of nature; the sublime; the supernatural and occult; intuition, imagination, emotions (including trepidation, angst, anxiety) and subjectivity; the psychological and psychic structures; melodrama; uncontrollable subconscious play; the fantastic; the primitive; the atmospheric and hidden; the crazy and revolting; horror, terror, and awe…

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Pulse

September 15th, 2009

Electricity shoots through tissue, a fantastic interwoven network of blood, bone, flesh. There are always at least two terms; even a fundamental state must be different from what it is not, and this difference between what is and what is not links these terms together into a single unit, an inseparable block.

I have wondered if polarity exists “out there,” or if it is something the mind imposes onto the world, but here again I am caught within the poles of a human being’s consciousness or subjectivity and the world or objective reality. But isn’t it always like this, that we are between this and that, or right and left, or light and dark, or some other set of terms? And don’t these term-sets always define each other? One of the terms is never enough alone to properly establish itself. Each always needs its companion, its oppositional double to come into a meaningful identity. What would a Consciousness be without a World, or what would you be without them? What would Buddha be without Suffering, or Jesus without Sin? And vice versa for all. What is music without noise? And, when we put noise in music doesn’t it force music to change, to redefine itself according to the movement of its oppositional double, noise?

And, what of the Dirty and the Clean? To be dirty is to not be clean, and to be clean is to not be dirty. Is this but another mutually defining polar pair of opposites? Dirt refers to matter or a quality that is misplaced, while clean refers to that which is free from these unpleasantly misplaced pollutants. The concept of clean relies on the idea of purity, on the reference to an idealized, innocent and autonomous, regular and essential form. What dirty and clean are will vary for each individual, and will depend on that individual’s opinions about what should be kept free from mingling with other things, and how much separation is required in order to retain the purity of the thing, and the accompanying notions of purity.

Despite all the antagonisms and tensions, everything is deeply dependent on the other, the opposite, that which it is not; and, life and energy depend on the coexistence of difference. Life without death, order without chaos, authority without dissent, minds without bodies—these are unrealistic or delusional concepts, without any indication of possibility.

How amazing it is to be alive and moving against, but always towards, death! To have a consciousness and a body, to be both a singular entity and inextricably part of a whole, to be lost amid a conflation of the dirty and the clean, to be a site under control while overflowing with rebellion!

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