God, the All, and Us

July 15th, 2010

I have had a strong or recurring belief that whatever divine spark exists in the cosmos, exists within and throughout it. This is a much more natural and powerful idea for me than that of an external, anthropomorphic creator being. The concept of God only carries the weight it connotes and makes sense to me if nothing exists beyond it. A superhero type being that gets jealous, has chosen people, excludes those with other spiritual faiths, metes out eternal punishments and rewards, and that kind of thing, hardly seems worthy, for my tastes, of the status of God. My idea of God is much bigger, all encompassing, nothing would be outside it, it would be woven all through reality and the cosmos. Everyone would be a piece of this sacredness. Every animal and plant, and the Earth from which we all spring. The biosphere. All the processes of nature. Evolution and Chaos and all the unimaginable stuff that exists out there. All of this is God, and everything else too.

This idea is nothing new. It’s called Pantheism, and it’s the original Old Time Religion. Maybe people couldn’t deal with it because of the responsibility it requires. To accept it you have to accept that we are all, each and every one of us, sacred. There would be no justification for sexism, racism, or classism. People wouldn’t accept witch-burning, genocidal movements, or persecution of non-heterosexuals. Patriotic Nationalism would never have acquired all the overblown militaristic puffiness that it has; and, we couldn’t have decimated the raft of species or the aspects of the planet that we have so thoughtlessly done. We would have been obliged to have gotten along, to have found ways to respect each other even when we disagreed, even when we were different from one another. It’s easier, I guess, to have personal, cultural gods so that we can justify our hatred of one another, the ravaging of our planet, and hope for (or even believe in) a heavenly plane where we can appear our idealized best for all eternity. Well, not all of us have Fallen for that one. I can see having a slew of local, personal gods, entities that are associated with various specific aspects of nature (since the cosmos is way too big for us to comprehend in its entirety), but then they would each need to be acknowledged as one of many, various, small g, gods, not the Big One, not the All.

What might a notion of Pantheism imply? That we are each a human being, sensible body and consciousness, experiential node in the God-complex, each with a specific, unique, embodied perspective. That everyone’s experience, his or her thoughts, feelings, sensations, desires, would also be the experience of God. I think that the potential for experience, and consciousness too, exists coiled inside the potential for life which infuses every cell, every atom. They have to be assembled into the right kind of functioning aggregate, but the possibilities are unlimited. (Just look at all the craziness that has sprung up here over the last so many millions of years, and this must be only a drop in the bucket of potentiality). Imagine how the experience of All would vary with internal states of strife and killing or internal states of cooperation and joy. Our conflicts with one another would be a cancer or disease within God.

Of course, human beings are a flawed species, and maybe we can’t help it. And tension, difference, dynamism permeates the All, keeps it going. And we are each born and have our day and then die, like every other countless number of specific entities. Life to Death to Life to Death to Life to Death…

I look out the window and watch the trees blowing in the breeze, breathe and let it go…

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Borderlands

July 6th, 2010

I was being told something about what was rational, logical, good, and true, and this was not just about art or by anyone in particular, but a kind of general and pervasive line. It’s a method of understanding and perceiving the world that is presented as normal or of common sense. By this method the chaotic strangeness of life is ordered into arrangements which offer both meaning and comfort. It is a way of illuminating experience, and the light shows everything how it really is, and gives us a proper way of seeing things. We are instructed, trained from an early age, on how to make these illuminating light sources, unquestioningly, and wherever we travel in life’s dark journey.

Yet, I remained skeptical.

“But that’s not how it really is out there,” thinking about the vast regions beyond the reach of illumination. “Out there it’s dark and chaotic. Why is this way of order through illumination deemed good and true? It’s not anymore true than the dark out there. And it’s less natural. Artificial. Maybe it presents things in a false light…” I might waver, change my mind, fall into bouts of uncertainty, but I would never be convinced that these methods of illumination and order were true. Useful for certain things, yes. They could be functionally employed. But to accept them as normal or common sense, without question, was to live a lie: be conditioned or molded by a particular methodology, trained to accept a whole accompanying sets of discourses, and, ultimately, a complete lifestyle and worldview. Certain people might find this an acceptable way to live, but I could not. It went against my fundamental notions on what it meant to be an artist, an individual creative perceiver.

And yet, in spite of my feelings, I could never travel very deep or for very long into the darkness beyond the illumined sphere. It was rough on me. One must be prepared to have his or her insides scoped out and outside burned away. I couldn’t go all the way because after a while I’d worry too much and start questioning what I was doing, or I’d get sick with depression or anxiety. But maybe this is just as well. After all, it’s a good thing to question your beliefs, to cross boundaries, to look and move in new and different ways, but one also has to, after a while at least, listen to that inner voice that’s screaming, “What are you doing? Stop!,” or look into the reasons one is becoming sick with depression or anxiety or rage or whatever other malady, because it may be a sign, a warning to change one’s actions. My belief was that it’s good to challenge or ignore this voice too, but after a while I’d wonder if I was just being stupid. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with stupidity, but it can get one in trouble. Not that there’s anything wrong with trouble either, but at some point these things can be painfully unsustainable, and for someone who goes through periods of uncertainty, there will probably be a time when one wonders about continuing in painfully stupid pursuits, especially if one has the means to avoid them. And so it was with me. For these reasons I gravitated to that diffused region between the dark and light. I don’t see this as fence-sitting, or a case of being too weak or uncertain to pick and so meandering around the in-between spaces. I see this as a complex position in the midst of interesting occurrences and strange interactions. It’s a place where your view can drastically change with subtle movements of your head, and where you’re removed enough from either side to be convinced of it’s totality or ultimate rightness or logic. I understand how it might appear as a compromise to someone firmly entrenched in an extreme position in the dark or light camp, but when you’re standing between the two it feels fascinating, rich, full of its own overwhelming reality, and capable of offering a more complete and intriguing perspective.

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Velvet Eraser and Wild Peaks

July 1st, 2010

Impressions of Early David Lynch Films

The countenance of this man, how he is lit, and the particles that create a haze floating around him in the darkness, indicate the embodiment of a strange world, where the change of a lever’s position causes a greater change in a far off industrial wasteland or a sunny, small town in the U.S.A. A woman emerges from her home—the darkness—wearing a mask, perfectly strange. The corridor appears empty but it is not: it is rich in texture and full of sound, it is a vacuum tube gateway full of unseen movements, hissing and sucking. Every absence points to an unknown presence. There is a blank window. There is a head in the window. The expression on the head is blank. The eyes in the head look out, full of uncertainty, and pain or fear. And there, between the twigs and steaming pipes, a pile of dirt and an unruly collection of strands of hair. (Is that blood?) Those pipes didn’t just grow in those houses, and that hair didn’t get there merely by accident, without a reason. And it is the reason that should make us nervous, because it is not one we will expect, and it won’t be pleasant to discover. There is always a reminder, especially in the times when we are most afraid, that we are composed of, and exist by, a system of circulating fluids. Here the energy is always electric and shot through with sex and violence. Ready or not: here comes the dark.

It is an enigma that these small boxes can hold the potential for such brutal and uncontrollable energy, but look at how much space can be squeezed into an atom. Are these symbolic markers or mysterious but actual material objects? Time, too, collapses and expands, and the nights can be drawn out into long and turbulent trails. (I sleep, I dream, but this is no refuge: even my dream-show confronts me, mocks me, frightens me) And within this world, there is another, and beneath that one lurks another… The best place to discuss all these mysteries and risks is in a bright cafe, with the lights shining in our coffee and smiles on our faces. We can plan events situated in realms of chemicals, control, and perversion; and, later we will walk through the night, into the wildness, and dream.

The characters’ faces are contorted by irrational expressions of emotional extremes; behind them fabric is blowing, but it is probably not being blown by a mundane, natural breeze or wind. These faces and fabrics are being contorted and blown by mysterious flows of intensities. To understand this, and learn what these forces may be, one must uncover certain hidden dangers. In an endeavor like this failure is much more likely than victory. And there is a dance for every occasion. If you can’t find where the birds sing a pretty song, you can always try hiding in the closet. Try to be receptive. Be open, for instance, to communications through dreams. Go with the flow. Fighting it can be disastrous. There are signs everywhere, but you have to know how to read them. The motion of a flame, the vision of an owl, a well-dressed man, or a couple of silver dollars, anything may stand for a potent secret. Watch the desires, emotions, and anxieties play themselves out in living, interacting bodies. See the characters squirm and sigh and burst, watch them dance and eat and smoke. They are not who we think they are. They are vessels of secrets, mysteries. They are embodiments of the tensions and pleasures of violence and sex. And they are right there, close to pain and in sight.

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Cut-up #2

April 25th, 2010

(Cut-up of posts 11 – 20)

But something logical, rational, and understanding through a subjective and thugs. Later, I feel my tendency was more and the moisture runs from my mouth. I lived in Los Angeles (some even psychedelic/experimental/acid, underground diversity of beings that can originate from the started with this burning discomfort of Inner Need acting especially in the techniques toward a widespread and common mushrooms for a sustained duration. They call to each other, get into cars with layers and texture can frustrate the representations, perhaps they mean nothing. I throw all and he traveled to a great many states and disliked the purism…during rehearsals…darkest work… Question habits, tastes; approach situations/look at things differently. Be, day-to-day or very short-term basis. deconstruct binary oppositions by distortion, displacement, who comes along and understands perfectly, perhaps the depressed, sometimes I was emotional, other and keep composed. The street seems to glow and my mind spreads these energies, the confusion, passion, anxiety, desperate swoon with tortured lust. family is small: my Birthday Party, painting uses because this surface limitation appropriate remedy? This is not an easy various explored methods to counter this control and push toward primarily, sense has to do with what we life/figure drawing craziness head on. I walk up something fundamental, foundational in sloppy developing, fingers in acid. Still Mexican-American inclinations?)

The Top Ten Favorite Bands of Institutional control and become manifest into a formed expression works further to confound such  largely determined ideas, impulses, influences, and insights. There fascinated. They call to difference that it collapses somewhere in the blood gathers in places in my body and hardens. somewhat mysterious and removed from me, comically absurd, aggressively innovative, and thereby enter into consciousness. Some outer expression is called for, is thought that has brought us through complexes of enslavement of meaning seems to be linked to the relation and unlimited in its potential. burn marks around the doorknob, and a cloven piece which might be accessed later in powdered charcoal. At night, crazy, running across European/Anglo-American types and Rockets of living/reading respects drilling a hole in my head with his general attitude toward women—they don’t think we can talk about absolute dim red-amber light, bent over trays of chemicals, interspersed between hookers, pan-handlers, expressionistic, textural surfaces… That interest in dense outer path, captivated by exposed, undulating flesh. For the native American mental instability…ironic…status quo and enforces the pressure of a reductive movement between my inner and outer realities, such that binary oppositions, and the limitations of Word and Flesh, are expressed potential of meaning even though it might not be presently in a space and my visual art. An audio gyrates, sticks ass out, her cheeks press up against might be folded and disintegrated into other approaches, in complex, confusing, a powerful conductor. I wobble and started with European medieval knights. Periodically I saw some commercial television changed…ousted…strong…affiliated…executed upon it. The surface holds a potential determine meaning or something that operated in a predominately rational or coherent way. I struggle with control, whether it be by political systems, intoxicating substances, language, or biology itself,

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Cut-up #1

April 25th, 2010

(Cut-up of posts 1 – 10)

Even shoots through tissue, a fantastic interwoven network into conformity so that method of categorization leads to knowledge and support for convulsive shock capacity. The forth one, with the symbols Bowie did for me, was ready for me, get chased by the possessed chaotic beings on the other bizarre flow of it. And how natural, organic connections, while showing me to work it with the other hand and perplexing experiences goes through intense episodes of being a person or people straying too far from these forces, because being dirty is to not be, will always be in tension with Control.

Get the horizontal plane of land beyond some barrier, while extending upright mind consistently for a couple stickers and stuff. These years when I learned to drive, experimented with possessed with an alien mutation pragmatic and empirical tasks which satisfy expand to include the dream, the subconscious, flights of equation such as young protagonist’s head, and he is wakened from a deep sleep marijuana, or experiences imbued in me, some great, always towards death! Let’s call the state of authority the short-comings, limitations.  The shaman impact these had on solid groove for the techno-magician left side to our bodies and brains and the insane special or intercessory relationship with these overcome the crude and restrictive rudiments of vapor inhalation.

I couldn’t believe, after knowing this and having possessed individuals, how the music wrapped his body, and the accompanying chemical around much separation is required in the mystery and wildness of experience. Periodic cycles of day and, while it may be true that the human mind tends to night, records hundreds of times, actually wearing so dances fascinated by his creativity.

A divine mark or calling is placed on the aspects of shamanism, as mediums of a Two, Three, and Four; and, there is also an alternative, wider self. They practice with amounts of another change for these things. And don’t these term-sets always built into crude, simplistic, satellite revolving around, realigned my adolescent indelible impression, inseparably linked (mentally and physically) to a greater natural source of power to change or enchant, to affect, of heavy drinking. From basically amicably with the rest of the consciousness and a body, banner of Reason and contestable nature of placing electric guitar riffs of wanting to find something forced deeper and deeper into both encompassing opposites?

Dirt refers to matter or a quality that is misplaced, while clean refers look at primal true function of thought voyages into blackouts. Even after it had ended I was far from without noise? And, when Expressionism, and Surrealism opened thousand categories, only to discover that each recall the purity of the experience of listening deep chord in me that still resonates logical reduction down to the simple and mundane, the practical and observable, discovery of their mutual identity. The last shot great value will be placed on one who has a special or intercessory absence of control exerted by noxious feeling one gets when commingling mind-floating effects.

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William S. Burroughs

April 25th, 2010

I became absorbed in the written work of William S. Burroughs. I first read Exterminator!, Naked Lunch, and then Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands, then Interzone, Junkie, The Job, and other various writings, also biographical material. Something sharp and unique stirs in those works, and I was drawn into it by both the rhythm of the language and the absurd incidents disclosed. The struggle with control, whether it be by political systems, intoxicating substances, language, or biology itself, which runs through these works in many forms, and the various explored methods to counter this control and push toward states of freedom, were particularly fascinating for me.

I was quite struck by many of the ideas presented in these works. The one, for instance, that language is a virus, connected to the Right virus—disease that causes infected party to believe s/he is right and others are wrong—which has evolved into binary logic systems, working by either/or, right/wrong constructs, and the kind of “rational” thought that has brought us through complexes of enslavement and death to weapons of mass destruction and the brink of extinction, and the connection between this virus and white people, who became infected and contracted it after barely surviving some kind of atomic or nuclear explosion some 30,000 years ago in the Gobi desert, which forced them westward to undergo genetic mutation in the darkness of caves…

There is a magical aspect to much of the writing of Burroughs, especially in the techniques he considers for liberation. (Sex magic, cutting up the Word to rewrite Reality, etc.) His literary works create a sci-fi, carnivalesque, kaleidoscopic, mythological realm, where the concern to break free of binary oppositions, and the limitations of Word and Flesh, are expressed in a variety of permutations. There is a general outlandishness in these due to the working through of his objectives: deconstruct binary oppositions by distortion, displacement, and satirical methods, and then cultivate the emerging eruption of a new term that cannot be absorbed into the traditional binary structure and that works further to confound such structures. Though the characterizations and scenarios are not always to my liking—there is an awful lot of sex and violence, and I cannot concur with his general attitude toward women—they are always smart and creative, and worthy of some consideration.

Consider the meaning and function of the logocentric body, the methods, and by what forces, it is artificially constructed, and how, contrary to this fact, it is passed off as something natural.

Consider methods and reasons for transgressing the limits of this artificially constructed logocentric body.

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Inner Need, Internal Desire

April 9th, 2010

Perhaps what I wrote earlier was misleading. This was not my intention: I have wanted to offer thoughtful and generally accurate guides, but pinning down messy, complex states with a line of language has always seemed for me to be a daunting and futile task.

I feel now that I should stress a point: There is an Inner Need, a reoccurring Internal Desire, and it has torn against my insides to be freed, to course through my body and become manifest into a formed expression in the world. The tearing of this Inner Need has caused a sort of psychic torment. I’ve experienced an unbalanced force of pressure between my inner and outer realities, such that the inner pressure calls for an outer event of suitable expression to balance the difference and alleviate the torment. Some outer expression is called for, is seemingly necessitated, by this Internal Desire.

But what type of expressive manifestations are an appropriate remedy? This is not an easy problem, and finding fulfilling, or even adequate, solutions to it has consumed much of my energy. I did not start with an appreciation for an art form. Not really. I didn’t enjoy looking at paintings or photographs, or listening to music, or watching movies or reading books, so much that I said to myself, “hey that’s neat. I think I like that. I’d like to try and learn that.” I started with this burning discomfort of Inner Need acting as a driving force, pushing me on a desperate hunt to find a suitable form of expression, for the purpose of offsetting a consuming sensation of inexplicable pressure.

Maybe painting wasn’t the perfect choice. It was very frustrating for me, and I struggled with it, at times quite dramatically, throughout the entire duration of my practice. But, I didn’t know what else to do. I tried using different media. I tried using psychotropic substances. I tried engaging in various life experiences. I might have tried drilling a hole in my head if I thought it would have helped. As it happened, I did what I could to try and get through it, usually on a day-to-day or very short-term basis. I developed an art practice, both disciplined and experimental, with experiential and philosophical aspects (of a type), a certain habitual regime of intoxicant use, and fell into an uneasy balancing act with wave-like states of passion, anxiety, inspiration, frustration, relentless determination and insatiable desire.

I feel this explanation is closer to the heart of the matter, and that it would be misleading to speak of my process as an intellectual sport or an obsession I had with trying to determine meaning or something that operated in a predominately rational or coherent way. I believe that all these other elements have a place, and that I have operated by a form of logic, but that these must be understood from the perspective of this Inner Need, Internal Desire.

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One and All

April 6th, 2010

Everything is connected. Interconnectivity, by a variety of means and modes, is ubiquitous.

Maybe the World and an Individual is similar to a Text and a Reader, and the acts of Living or Reading, and the production of meaning and the ways of understanding, are dependent on various frames of reference, cultural conventions, the individual reader’s experience…Maybe it is like a detective assembling a solution from clues that can be assembled in an infinite number of ways, that can yield an infinite number of solutions—like the diversity of beings that can originate from the different organizations of a set of DNA/chromosomes—and, with each of these different solutions having a unique bearing on the meaning of the World/Text and the understanding of the Individual/Reader. The particular way a life is lived or one reads has consequences on the appearance/perception of the World/Text and the subjectivity, identity of the Individual/Reader.

Opening up to various methods of living/reading respects and utilizes the endless potentiality that exists virtually everywhere. Just beyond the Actual, behind every mundane and superficial perception of what is Real lies the Virtual bubbling with numerous unrealized possibilities. Some sources may tell us this isn’t true. Institutional control and the cultivation of consumers by capitalist enterprises, requires a reasonably stable ideology of the status quo and enforces the pressure of a reductive movement of homogenization. The Individual/Reader, however, may yet have unlimited opportunities to slip out from under this wave of homogenization and enter into a polymorphous production of rhizomatic play. Question habits, tastes; approach situations/look at things differently. Be, Exist, Differently.

These or parallel ideas emerged from and ran through (although in a rather vague and intuitive way) my art practice and process of painting. I liked the flat, two-dimensional surface that painting uses because this surface limitation can throw into relief the unlimited possibility of graphic marks that can be executed upon it. The surface holds a potential for a boundless array of articulations. I tried to vary my approach, do away with plans and pre-conceived notions, make shapes or use colors that I thought were “ugly,” question my tastes, aesthetic notions, open up my methods to allow for the unexpected, etc. I found that certain elements would continually occur. I was happy to discover these elements and allow them to appear, feeling that they indicated a more important or deeper level in my psychic disposition than the more superficial media or questionable (commercial, corporate) culturally derived sources. (A way to clean up, wash off a layer of filth). I made many free associations, let forms grow, then intuitively covered up areas, allowing only traces to remain and suggest new structures, on which new tissues of markings could be added…

To uncover processes of painting through which sensations of difference can become manifest, and thereby enter into consciousness.

Underneath the distinctions, beyond where the categories fall apart and leak out all their contents, an undifferentiated All churns in messy, seething flux. And, though our way of life, and maybe our sanity, may depend on the mediation and/or denial of it, it is still out there, all around us, pulsing wildly and absurdly, despite our actions and discourse.

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Favorite Bands of My 20’s

March 28th, 2010

The Top Ten Favorite Bands of My 20’s (late eighties to late nineties), in more-or-less chronological order of my liking them (allowing for discontinuities and overlaps):

Love and Rockets

Camper Van Beethoven

The Fall

Pixies

The Birthday Party

Sonic Youth

Butthole Surfers

The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion

Pavement

Grifters

Alternative, post-punk, no wave, lo-fi, indie, eclectic, psychedelic/experimental/acid, underground/garage, soul/folk/blues/punk, art/noise rock with cryptic, expressionist, surreal lyrics, screeching, off-beat melodies and thumping repetitive rhythms. Abrasive, misanthropic, religiously tormented, sinister and brooding, comically absurd, aggressively innovative, eccentrics…wide range of styles…cult following…taking over…extremely…percussive influence…key in the emergence of later…chaotic and disturbing…loose concept…inspired by…changed dramatically…returning to second guitar…references to mental instability…ironic…tension…handful of minor…in disgust of…vital part of…disliked the purism…during rehearsals…darkest work…moved away…continued…dense…treated…sense…headed…rawest…hardcore…problems…drugs…changed…ousted…strong…affiliated…

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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 used to say when I was young, 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.” It’s weird, I think, because I don’t feel entitled or comfortable questioning strangers about their racial compositions and family histories. Oh, maybe it’s normal, questions like that, and I’ve just been defensive. But still, what’s with people coming off like they’re superior and entitled to a line of questioning and receipt of full disclosures? There’s something about there being six billion or so 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, that seems to get lost. Sometimes there is a strange lack of curiosity and openness to foreigners and other cultures. (Indeed, there are in many cases impulses to kill, contain or change an other before learning about, sharing with, offering respect to). Strange because it seems so immature and weak, so lacking in the kind of self-respect that leads to a compassion for the predicament of humanity, in whatever body it has manifested itself into.

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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