A Tiny Before/After Interlude

I began this painting early Winter 2010, and did not finish it till a few weeks ago.

What was missing? the background.

The new digs (ours as

long as Providence allows it) has these red-coloured walls. When I picked up the painting again, a

fter having moved it clear from Atlanta, I looked at it, looked at the walls, and saw the rust-red was the missing ingredient. Somehow I had to wait a year & 1/2 to see the needed background manifest.

A symbolic still life, all describing the same process - I had a particular muse, if you will, for that entire period of my life. To describe it in a modest, succinct way, the Muse waxed eloquent re. the Good Things in Life - how intoxicating and seductive they be - and sought to beguile and impress. Yet - how quickly they fade and die, no? How silently all the systems and infrastructures of a home, a town, a society fall asunder while its drunken boozed-up glazed-eyed residents turn towards the next amusement... The concept that most encapsulated my imagination at this time (and I had been plotting this painting for a long time, since May 2008, actually) was that of the Vanitas Still life. The poetic passage from grape to wine to vinegar, the noble life cycle of the grape The Vinegar bottle I've had since about that time - the wine bottle (and, in an inexplicable twist of fate, the grapes) came from our Good Friend Larry Taylor - sort of weirdly perfect, considering the thematic, for all who know the slightly hedonistic over-the-top larger-than-life personality.

The true still life was a smaller, more air-tight version that has ended up at the house of one Stuart Thomson, aesthete and excellent backgammon player - and, of course, a Very Great Friend in addition to Art Patron Extraordinaire. After finishing that version, the grapes, Thanksgiving dinner, and scores of petty tragedies and minor triumphs provided the oomph for the completion of that still life's more psychedelic cousin.

I believe I like this version better - it tries less hard, and is more honest. Plus, I had a whopping "if I only knew back then what I know now" moment informing the whole process that made the new reality more real, if not more agreeable.

The Vanitas still life theme wherein grapes turn to wine turn to vinegar continue, with the added baggage/residue of a Thanksgiving dinner (turkey bones), a half-smoked cigarette, a half-smoked cigar perched on top of an extinguished candle -proably extinguished in desperate pursuit of some magical conjuring or other, by the light of a last-quarter moon, a half-smoked cigar and a wine long since soured), a half-finished painting by Good Friend Colleen Hackett, a portrait of my grandparents (Alicia Moder and Arturo Araya Peters - see p. 9) and (though I didn't know it at the time) the background colour of the walls in the New North Carolina abode.

"Oh Rose, Thou Art Sick"

This fun, fairly aged mixed media piece comes from a small burp of joyous expectation in my life - looking forward to agreat weekend with dear company - during an otherwise glum, powerless, and uninspiring era of my life. This was long before I managed to slough off a lot of what proved uneccessarily paralyzing in my life.

William Blake instantly came to mind, especially since the last rose of Summer lies there, next to the mirror, encased in epoxy resin - andnot faring too well, colour-wise.

An allegory of what happens when you try so damned hard to hold onto dead, dying things, when you hash over the memory of, in your life, over andover, things that came to their natural cycle and then are meant to go underground? We all do that a bit, no doubt -

But mainly I have often been rather fond of Blake, as far as 1998 when I sort of felt what he spoke of when he begins:

O Rose, thou art sick!
The Invisible worm,

That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed

Of Crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

I have lived much of my life through the modality above described. As I worked on this painting, I ran across Camille Paglia's interpretation of Blake in general and this poem in particular: in Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson

Female genitals are traditionally symbolized by the queen of flowers, from the medieval Mystic Rose of Mary to

the rock classic, "Sally, go Round the Roses." Blake sees solipsism as the danger in female sexuality. The rose's exclusiveness blends fear, shame, and pride. Its layered petals are a form of self-population. That the rose's "bed of crimson joy"

suggests masturbatory pleasure is well accepted by critics. For Blake the rose's self-completion is perverse and sterile. The rose is a sexual schismatic, making division where there should be wholeness and unity in nature. It is this an early version of the solipsistic hermaphrodites of Blake's prophetic books.

Blake's masturbatory rose belongs to the tradition begun in Egypt where autoreroticism is a method of cosmogony. Blake sees a sexually private world as a prison cell. The rose is sick because, she thinks, the communion of sex drains and obliterates her identity. Blake's own ambivalence toward sex produces the cryptic duality in the poem.

...

Blake thinks the being living alone and for itself is sick because it rejects the strife of contraries by which energy evolves [...] Blake regards virginity as a perverse fetish. [...] Like Sade, Blake sees chastity as unnatural, energy-killing. But in urging Thel, a sick rose, to cure herself by surrendering to communion, Blake is closer to Shakespeare of the comedies, where all are given in marriage, than he is to his fellow Romantic poets, for whom solitude is imaginative perfection.

Why do I post this?

1. The sex and eroticism described (and which I make reference to) are being used here in an allegorical sense, where masturbation/autoeroticism = narcissism/solipcism, and where sexual union/congress = joining the human fold, participating in life. As such, both the poem and the analysis are dear to my heart as representing the fundamental struggle of my existence, and that of many.
2. I've been lately transitioning from journal keeper/diarist to online blogger/participator. Once again, this shows the transition from narcissistic, sterile rose to someone/something brave enough to get out there and allow others' access to one's inner workings. Pain and danger and criticism are all possible here - but a better life and chances to GROW all exist there as well.
3. The rose in the painting, close to a decade old, was a bizarre relic that never quite got tossed away - found in a box years later - that sort of thing. It had occurred at a time when I had weirdly given my heart to another. The experience turned out mostly to my detriment (as such things do), though, like in Camille Paglia's analysis, the experience was INSTRUMENTAL in opening me up to the world. Before this experience my psyche very much was "narcissistically convoluted", and I had inhabited a self-complete, but perverse and sterile inner world. The experience of thus loving someone else who can hurt you and open you up falls under this rubric (also taken from Paglia): "Woman's flirtatious arts of self-concealment mean man's approach must take the form of rape. The phallus becomes the conquerer worm, death's agent." Openness and emotional maturity come at a cost which feels much like a violation. Taken literally, it all seems crassly sexist and downright perverse; taken allegorically, it very much is a process to which not even men are immune.

http://re.pn/b/zXhD

a more proper, albeit incomplete, portfolio site has sprung up

“We Would Rather Die in Our Dread”

No need to write exists when others manage to convey what you've dearly wanted to convey for so long. I am accompanying it with an epoxy painting I did, with the conceit that Phil Rockstroh's written an appropriate narrative for it - and because this is still supposed to, I suppose, be an "alicia art blog".*

"With this in mind, let us take a moment to pity our own poor, little, economic despots — from the start, so misunderstood — they only built the U.S. on the bones of African slaves and watered the soil with the blood of murdered Indians, and, from that time on, proceeded to pile corpses to the sky, only so they could climb atop and look out for us lesser folks.

And from the soil rose a culture of kitsch, unhealthy food, and creepy, over-priced banal distractions. Consequently, the U.S. seems an over-priced, downscale theme Park — Six Flags over Denial and Decay — a grotesque, kitsch-bewitched land of negative enchantment, unprepared for the gathering, denial-sundering storm that, from all indications, will leave the nation devastated.

One progenitor of the defiant idiocy of the general population of the U.S. can be traced to the tendency of the consumer state to induce impulsivity rather than reflection i.e., rendering individuals self-involved, infantilized monsters of the id, dazzled by and perpetually reaching for the next bright and shiny.

Regarding the persistent, liberal fallacy: Obama needs to stand up for his convictions. Correction: Throughout his presidency, he has been standing upon his convictions i.e. standing on the throats of the powerless as we’re being mugged by his elitist benefactors.

Moreover, how does he or anyone “change the tone” of political polarization so evident in the nation, when the right is a walking landfill of noxious arrogance and inexplicable self-regard? If contemporary conservatives showed any indication of harboring even a molecule of humanity or self-awareness then a dialog might be possible.

But we’re dealing with grownups who believe God is some kind of cosmic CEO — folks who are certain, if one listens closely, one can hear him counting his money.

There is the banality of evil and then there is the evil of banality. Witness: The present banality of our ecocide-inflicting mode of being — one that reduces the world to only those things that can be commodified and thus reduces earth, sky and psyche to controllable (dreamless and dead) bits.

On a personal basis, the present system levels this dismal legacy upon the nation: Minds made of internalized shopping malls; bodies built by junk food; libidos informed by celebrity porn; agendas driven by a crass, good versus evil, winners and losers, cartoon cosmology. Congratulations, America, we’ve done the architects of the republic proud.

Accordingly, here are a few heart-wrought observations from the personal ash heap of my poetically archaic sensibility and sent out to the fear-bandying cynics of the elitist political and economic classes — to those in positions of insular, arrogant power who inflict great harm upon those bereft of privilege and then proclaim, “this is just the way things have to be.”

False, that is merely the way things exist in the confines of your miserable cosmology. To the contrary, the world is a vast, ever-changing tapestry that you merely perceive as a dung rag for your exclusive use.

From We would rather die in our dread, by Phil Rockstroh

*this is probably the best policy - why clog the already saturated online world with my blather when such worthy ones (as the one quoted above) say such excellent things?

Shea Hembrey: How I became 100 artists

Possibly I have found a new Favorite Artist.

Speaking to a -- from large-scale outdoor installations to tiny paintings drawn with a single-haired brush.
desire to make art that MATTERS.

Months in Europe viewing major art installations led Hembrey to witness lack of satisfaction in what was out there, and increasingly found that what he was longing for was:

1) more work that was appealing to a broad public, more accessible

2) more exquisite craftsmanship and technique

He invented 100 artists "to create a biennalle I need artists from all around the world" he explains - so he did. He figured out their passions, their identities, their styles in life, and begun making work. He created all of these disparate, lively, lovely things within a 2-year period - hence, the Biennalle concept.

He would curate this fictional event with mainly two sets of criteria:

1) "MeeMaw's Test" - to be able to explain the concept or the piece to his Arkansas country grandmother, and have her understand and appreciate it within 5 minutes or less.

2) "3 H's" - head ( interesting intellectual ideas/concepts), heart (passion/soul), and hand (excellently crafted)

In a tongue-in-cheek display which seems to poke fun at the fact that such artists are hard to find, Hembrey opts to invent the 100 artists by himself. Here are a few samples of these fictional artists. Hembrey shows his great energy, versatile creativity, and imagination in conceptualizing, and then committing to creating identity and artwork. I have outlined a few present in the TED talks presentation Hembrey made:


Kay Overstreet is interested in ephimerality and transcience - "weather I made" - making weather in the body scale - breathed back and forth on the lawn all night to leave the mark of her breath

Gus Winemiller - a large project, "Arts for the People". As a subsection of that there's a project called Artists in Residence he spends a week at a time with a family, showing up with a toothbrush and pajamas at their doorstop - he spends that week talking to the family and asks "what is great art to you?" living with them, producing art based solely on things found in the house. Whatever he makes somehow references nesting and space and personal property.

Joaquin Perez Vega - he believes art is everywhere waiting to happen - he just has to help it happen. He gets wild birds to make his art for him. He places materials to allow the birds to make nests from it. Sample here is "mixed tape love songs nest"

Mika Avernathy and Bud Holland - they are interested in creating culture. They more into and area and try to establish a new tradition in a small geographic area. "We need a positive tradition that goes with death" was the decision when passing through Eastern Tennessee. So they created a "DIG JIG". For a birthday or milestone anniversary, you dance in a graveyard, over the space you will be buried. After you dance, everyone toasts you and tells you how great you are. "It' a funeral you get to be present for!"

The Silver Dobermans, a collective. Their motto is to spread pragmatism, one person at at time. They're very interested in how over-coddled we've become. They've put a warning sign on every single barb on this fence. "Horse Sense Fence"

Estelle Willoughsby - she heals with color, and is one of the most prolific artists, even though she's already 90 years old.

I adore his creativity, and the way in which he seems to address a point I've raised earlier here, in my work with/for/through Marshall Arts.

New York art critic Jerry Saltz, who weighs in on the bleak state of both contemporary art and artists’ creativity. “It’s work stuck in a cul-de-sac of esthetic regress, where everyone is deconstructing the same elements.” What is wrong with the art world? Are the sorts of artists who merit a show at the Venice Biennial, or other important international art houses or shows, really a representative selection of the best that creatives worldwide have to offer?

I challenged Saltz to provide an answer to that query as well as to the question

Is there not something you can DO in your influencial position as a member of the New York artworld? Have you no ideas about how to rescue art from the sterilized death even you admit to?

I even emailed him. Hell, it only takes a minute - plus I don't have a lot more going on in this bucolic petri dish I inhabit, truth be told -

- and then i received the email. No, not from Saltz (as if), but from a friendly Atlanta listserve, showing me Hembrey's work and the way he, unlike Saltz, unlike all who deplore the stupid state of contemporary art, did something.

Ego

A new thing needs to happen with this dead space. THat thing is, simply, to put forth stuff. So I propose to post a different painting/drawing/etc and tell a little tale about it.

Today we begin with the Ego.

What is this ego, then? The bruised, half-exhumed cadaver of our cardboard-thin demands upon that expression or modality of life which we are forced to occupy. Against our wills, usually against our wills. Always something shinier, prettier, more pro forma hiding in some corner of the imagination, isn't there? Something better to strive for? Something better to BE? Cleaner, richer, thinner, healthier, more popular, more and more a perfect carbon copy of some self concept a 6th grader dreamt up and then was never really able to let go of? This happens a lot, more often than we'd ever care to admit to ourselves.

I don't side with the Ego, necessarily, that two-bit two-faced construction, that cardboard prop to which the entire advertising industry and perhaps our whole pitiable commodity culture depends on - but neither do I side with life, the messy, gooey, three-dimensional manifestation of it - that slimy trail we leave with each moment's passing, the compost heaps and the daisies, the goodwill and the Shadow, the gruesome noisome morass of guts and blood contracting which produce a human life - or any life - taking the good with the bad, leaving it up to God, admiting to imperfections and doing the best you can and hoping for the best.

no - I side with neither, I sit on the fence

Which is why my Ego Epoxy portrait looks so fundamentally disgruntled

I live to sulk... so far. And cast insults when I dare.

Why do you live?

How swell to be mentioned on someone's blog!

This is Jill Kettles, from DeFoor Gallery, who makes lovely things in her own right. We swapped pieces - I got a lovely vase that lends my new space in NC a melancholy, Old World air - it's hard to describe the feeling - but it has something graceful and fleeting about it.

We are, on our end, after a groovylicious weekend with friends, getting ready to launch Marshall Arts. Still a long road to hoe, God knows, but some of what it's about can be seen here: marshallcommunityarts.wordpress.com

Marshall Bluegrass Thursdays

cool thing that happens here every week. One week I shall play ha ha

sthg weird happens to me with this blog - whenever I want to write, I don't have images! Whenever I don't have images, I want to write! Isn't that something....

all to say I intend to come backa nd describe the awesome musical charming caffeine induced bluegrass event that occurs near us every thursday. 7 to 9

Stained Glass Table

The successful completion of a stained glass table - I designed the tabletop (as far back as 2009 it was finished) and the commissioning owners hired a talented furniture artist to build the table around it.

I think it looks great, but it'd be easier to tell that this was the case if i were looking at it. Unfortunately, Cincinnatti is somewhat far away.

I would love to have another commission like this. However, just the tabletop part takes something like 40 hours. Food for thought re. pricing possibilities.

New Dwelling

in NC

We cannot go through life without infusing disproportionate quantities of optimism and forward-vision into everything - no matter how real and glaring our personal limitations and the world's pitiful state seem to us. So saying, we still have "high hopes" for this new place and this new phase of our lives. lower overhead, nicer place, more in the country for us wild uncouth beings - and of course an awesome view.

This was the day, Febb 22, that defined our destiny - the day we signed the lease for this New Place

spanish

been doing more spanish translations. whee.

Kirkwood Ballers Round 2

This time took Jim with me. What a trip!

For his first round he was drawn to collaborate with Ed Hall and one other (whose name escapes me) - him scatting and vocalizing galore while Ed accompanied with a weird metal thing and the other guy (sorry, other guy, maybe someday I'll know your name) on a monster of a synthesizer. They sounded AWESOME. He really got into the whole collective space of the collaborative experience (Jim, that is) and really became part of the ensemble. He has a great gift for timing and theatre, and in this instance it worked excellently.

Then, a second group decided to invite him up to further collaborate. This time Spirit moved him to channel a monologue, leading inevitably to a discourse on Depleted Uranium. The ensemble thus became a sound accompaniment to an excellently delivered Jimbo rant - entirely different in character from his first experience on stage. Better? Worse? Whose to say? Certainly I expect that Aaron with his ceramic and kitchen percussive tools didn't expect that to be the effect at all - but that is the nature of collaborative noise-making. Certainly in a sense I was a bit dissappointed - I was enjoying seeing him as part of an ensemble in that other way.

Then came Jim's solo turn on stage.

He took over, without missing a beat - mid-sentence, in fact - from the previous rant which had been interrupted by the end of the previous session's 15 minutes. Once again, dizzying, potent, angry, anguished cries emerging from a man who feels too personally the woes and terrors of the world, and seeks to, at every opportunity, give voice to these sentiments and seek, thus, a measure of salvation. He didn't even need the microphone, for God's sake!!

I'm sure it seems entirely weird and 'out there' to the 7 or 8 people there, but if you ask me, there's some weird power there. Something entirely different, edgy, and jarring in what he does. Though he does say some probably unwise things ("no audience"? is that a fair accusation in a general sense for that space? It certainly is at least a little off-putting of not globally inaccurate) his delivery is so perfect - even with no rehearsal - that who can be anything but riveted by it all? I sure was.

He mentioned something about a 'recent article' and it can be found here.

For my part, I got to sing and whatnot, with Tom again and then with a group. It was fun, as always - though once again I quickly abandoned the notion of following the music score. But Tom's songs are always fun - the lyrical perambulations of his mind come through well in the lyrics, and, especially in the last set, the way he droned the lyrics to the beat of what the others' were doing was hypnotizing. The last set with Tom was far superior.

The other solos - two on synthesizer - were, like last week, total roller coasters of the mind. The music took you to strange places - weird, outer space, violent journeying with the synths, and with Aaron and his collaborators' (in their set without Jim) a deeply Eastern soundscape provided a ready path to meditation and chakra explosion.

Who knows - we might go back - if Eyedrum will have us. Certainly I'd like to give the ole thing a try again - Jim might be sworn off improv for a while - though I've half a mind to drag him down to the Java Monkey open mic one of these Sundays. That would be totally insane!!!! I can't even wait.

come to my party

experimenting with comics format. It came out sort of small - probably need to work on that.

On the Beehive Collective up in Maine

Oftentimes I find myself wondering, "is there any point to art? Any social utility to it?" And I don't mean about the inherent utility of bringing aesthetic elements to life, or whatever psychological aid it may bring. I mean, can art change things?

more here. http://www.justmeans.com/Beehives-as-a-Sustainable-Business-Model/33263.html

"From way up in a corner of Maine down to the energy killing fields of Colombia, these worker bees manage to make sweet work out of harsh reality. If one listens carefully to the beautiful harmonies of the BeeHive Design Collective, if one examines closely the magnificent struggle for compassion and caring in the brutal context of an empire thrashing about in its death throes, one will either weep or have no choice but to not ruefully that "inside this chest beats a heart of stone."

I spoke today with Emma, and, again and again, I gasped at the mastery of mystery that this collaborative articulated through her--she insisted that I understand this notion, that she was not presenting an 'individual point of view,' but a bell-clear expression of long considered group molding of understanding, which itself came not from them as bright and talented artists but from the labor of listening to "the people themselves." This preternaturally youthful--I'm guessing--grouping of artistic genius and political wisdom is but ten years old.

Their origins, "Beehive was born 10 years ago out of anti-globalization work--really came out of 'the battle of Seattle' in 1999." Emma was not present then, but many of her cohorts were and "many of them, founders" of this little Yankee jewel, "noticed a lack of strong political graphics in a lot of the movement, especially of images immersed in content."

Again, to the likes of this humble correspondent, this is exciting, this birth of new forms. They gained this capacity, to 'immerse graphic expression in content,' through "an organic evolution of our arts and ideas through learning new ideas and complex ideation" that many of them didn't grow up knowing or go to school to study. "The jargon wasn't easily understood" to them, so they knew that the people whom they wanted to reach would also wonder, 'What the heck is this?'

"We challenged ourselves to create understandable ideas that made huge complexity easily digestible." She emphasized this dialectic. "Own experience of struggling to get it is part of understanding" how to create images that are understandable."

So, this group, this Beehive Collective, shows some sort of answer. They focus all their artistic, technical, and creative energy towards creating pictorial forms that narrate some of the most glaring structural sociopolitical problems around. One piece is Plan Colombia:

Wasps in incubator mode, wasps flying through the air firing their death-squad munitions at the waiting, verdant South American wilderness below - wasps play out the entire lifecycle of Western colonialism/hegemony, and show how the ravages continue to this day. These are powerful images. A person needs to sit with the poster for a while to take in the great level of detail and attention. I'm happy that when I personally met the Beehive Collective folks for the US Social Forum of 2007, I got to sit with them for a while and purchased this specific poster.

In an attempt to overcome the tendency of images to simply portray "what we are against," this graphic illustrates this story in three "layers" to help the viewer experience the different aspects of an extremely complex, and brutal situation.... The tools produced from this collaboration are being distributed, as anti-copyright material, for use in campaigns in both the South and North of the Americas.

This detail from their 6-foot long poster resonates the most with me. The wasp larvae lay in a complacent state of apathy, fed on TV, BigMacs - all the trappings of comsumerist Western lifestyle, really explicitly rendered when seen up close. The banner drawn on the nest itself reads "Plan Colombia: 500 years of terrorism". The rest of the poster evolves from this starting point - the rest of the images seem to cascade down off the wasp's nest, as if someone has shaken it a bit and had these dreadful things fall out.

The indictment is clear. It begins with us. The complacent larvae are us, all of us who choose to ignore social realities and diffuse our power to work, think, and fight for the sake of the trappings of a high-consumption, low-engagement culture. As if this were not clear enough, the wasp's nest itself is shaped like the geographical region otherwise known as the United States.

I find it hard to imagine any sort of lifestyle in this country that would not, at some level, contribute to the 'larva' state here described. True, we watch no TV. We don't own expensive gadgets, we do not shop nor eat at chains of any sort. But, Starbucks is still the de facto meetup place and stopping point when indie alternatives are lacking. We still use tons of gas to toodle up and down the highway at will. We belong to that grid that consumes more electricity than almost any other nation in the world. We own enough computer equipment, appliances, and stuff to definitely mean we're contributing to the 'larvification of America'. How to get around it?

This poster makes me think. And their very lifestyle makes me think, too. I'm sure that just through living in the bosom of Empire, as it were, they contribute more than their share to the larvification of the world. Yet their living model, like their artistic model, is consistent with their message. A collective, entirely zero-profit model of engagement, a set-up that to me sounds like the Catholic Vows of Poverty nuns and others take, whereby there is no private property but all is shared, and a person's life energy does not go towards making or accumulating cash, but towards contributing to the larger mission.

Does art, then, serve a useful social function? In their case, most definitely. Through their approach to art, their choice of narrative/subject matter, and, finally, their lifestyle - a model that, if nothing else shows an intriguing alternative to this grasping, desperate, rapacious existence so many of us find ourselves engaged in.

James Victore in town

Location: The Portfolio Center

125 Bennett St.
Atlanta, GA 30309

Phone: 404.351.5055 or 800.255.3169
Fax: 404.355.8838

Date: Thu, Oct 14
Time: 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM

Admission: TBD

James Victore, vastly talented, world renown graphic designer, is giving a chat at the Portfolio Centre in Buckhead Oct 14th.

"James Victore is an independent graphic designer whose clients include Moët & Chandon, Target, Amnesty International, the Shakespeare Project, The New York Times, MTV, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and Portfolio Center. He has been awarded an Emmy for television animation, a Gold Medal from the Broadcast Designers Association, the Grand Prix from the Brno Biennele (Czech Republic) and Gold and Silver Medals from the New York Art Director’s Club. Victore’s posters are in the permanent collections of the Palais du Louvre, the Library of Congress and the Museum für Gestaltung among others."

I'd heard about the Portfolio Centre from my days doing graphic design at State - they have great resources for designers, freelancers, and artists of all stripes.

Kirkwood Ballers, Eyedrum

Last night, on a whim, decided to abandon the hypnotizing computer screen for more interesting climes. Randomly saw on ArtNews a thread regarding the Kirkwood Ballers' Club, an event (like many many many) I'd always SAID I would attend but never manage to.

Not this time, by gad!

Drove down to Eyedrum. Got there at 11pm and saw all of 7 people. "Is this over?" I ask one of the fellow I run into "It's just begun..." ok, I can dig it. Small audience. Cozy. Nice.

Promptly I run into our old buddy Tom, who's ready to do some of his numbers. Since I'd sang along with him at one of his Christmas parties, he invited me up on stage with them, where I let loose a number of shrieks and verses, the whole time trying - and failing - to read the lyrics sheet in front of me. No matter, this is improv!!!

The other numbers were just ear-shattering, trip-inducing melanges of sound, sensation, vibration. I was able to completely disconnect from what I am and what I am doing and where I'm going and where I've been just by riding that 30-minute synth & kitchen pot & african drum airplane - my consciousness exploded into endless scintillae of sound, such as aerosolized U-238 ordnance sparks liberated from their shells. In other words, it was hell of cool...

I don't know if the meagre attendance speaks to the decadence of this activity, which promises to happen once a month at Eyedrum, but I dearly hope not... Go! Go forth, people. It's well worth it.

Next time I go I may take my violin.

Mountainousness

Glorious gorgeous natural scapes do invite one to let one's hair down. At least that's what I've found to be true in the mountainous climes of Transylvannia County, NC.

There's a moment of being before nature, especially upon hearing the roaring cascading swirls of water, where the rest of the world just falls away, and an attentive person will find herself blending with the landscape. After a while you cease being a person with that constant barrage and baggage of noise - you just be.

This particular swirly wood lent itself to that theme

I feel the need to update this blog

so I will just post some random stuff:

1) a possibility exists of a collaboration show at Eyedrum with a good friend. If not this year, soon


2) wood art: these pieces are created from found driftwood

3) Other "plutonian" work, actually, that does take me away from art but which seems important and transformative in its own right - helping post, code, and illustrate Jim's intensely powerful output on JustMeans.

I'm making a committment now to start posting here more - and elsewhere. Aside from my constant scribble-scribble in journals hopefully nobody will find till I expire (and hopefully not even then) I realize I do myself a disservice by staying holed-up in my own little universe for so long.

My output here makes no sense - it is random and hermetic and not really representative of all I do or all I care about. I've kept it up because it has served as a portfolio of sorts, but I'm tempted to just take it all down, my entire online reality, and start from scratch. That's probably too much effort, but I will, even though it will be difficult, strive to be more real - even if it hurts a bit.

Dragon and Derivatives

What begun on June 2008 as "Venus Commemorative" morphed into Dragon and its various derivatives. I realise I'd not posted these images before so, here we are
1. Original drawing from June 4, 2008, finished
2. close-up top centre
3. close-up top left
4. two plate pronto-lithography process + poem
5. the 5 editions of a 3-plate pronto-lithography process
6. 3-plate pronto-litho

I am delighted to have made the acquaintance of Neeti Ray, astrologer extraordinaire (albeit virtually). She posts fun meme in her blog that I'll enjoy taking part in and, in the off-chance someone actually reads this, feel free to participate.

If you want to play, you have to ask the person whose post you’re reading to interview you. Then you get five unique questions that you answer by posting them on your own blog.

Then...

1. Leave me a comment saying, “Interview me.”
2. I will respond by emailing you five questions. (I get to pick the questions).
3. You will update your blog with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

1. Which aspects or placements in your chart are revealed in the art you create? Inevitably the Venus- Uranus conjunction with the Midheaven comes through as an urge to make stuff - and I suppose a lot of what comes out is sort of dark, chthonic - perfect for this conjunction ocurring in good ole Scorpio. The other thing about this question which is interesting comes re sthg I read in Dawn's Astrology blog, actually - that of the 4th house planets denoting that place where our psychology happens. Well, Mercury's my only planet in the 4th house - and what do you know... I've been an obsessive-compulsive journaler since age 13. In fact, most times I can't even string 2 thoughts together, much less act, unless I spend about an hour ranting into the little ole notebook beforehand
   
2. If you could pick any sign for your sun which one would you pick? I think Sag's fine, but at times I think I would be better off having been born 4 hours later - Capricorn would agree better with that pesky Virgo moon and would have added that oh-so-necessary Real World energy
   
3. Which aspect or placement do you find challenging in your chart? The fact that every blessed planet is below the horizon - I have NOTHING save random Chiron anywhere above the Asc-Desc line. I very much feel like some sort of Emily Dickinson at times - not due to any hopes of posthumous glory but due to a sense of living in an entirely private world communing with ghosts and random insects instead of actual people - save a special handful
   
4. Which has been a joyous synastry aspect that you enjoy with any one person in your life? For some reason, my favorite people on earth have all been Geminis (I married a Gemini)- though I've not been able to account for it synastrically, aside from a Sag sun and a lot of Mercury energy
   
5. Why astrology? hmmm... hard to say... because it's beautiful?