November 2003 Archives

One of the members of Mr Pacman knew me from Mojo Mail. I guess that'll be the last time that's going to happen... but try to sense my surprise; I'm in some random warehouse in one of the shittiest parts of town and someone that I came to see knows me from a computer program I started to write four years ago.

The Wesley Willis benifit show was great. I thank Jack for getting it all together.

I made a little painting on the wall of Monkey Mania. I really don't know why; it's just a bunch of dots on a wall, sort of Vance Kirkland-esque. It was wild; usually when I do random paintings on brick walls in the city, I'm usually alone and afraid that someone is going to arrest me.

I wonder if Art is Good Art if it reminds you that love exists. That would give me hope.

I think this piece may be successful if only for the fact that I do know if it could have been successfully accomplished five years before or after right now. All this technology, like the webcam and the digital camera I'm using may well be so widespread in a few years that we won't even think about filming every part of our lives. I also don't know how relevant a painting is going to be in the future. I paint because I enjoy painting. I want to be quoted as saying there are still important painters but there are no more important paintings. I guess if I wasn't as well trained in painting, I would film 100 hours of myself doing a menial, repetitious task.

For instance, would it be more successful if I filmed myself mopping the floor of a giant airplane hanger instead of filming myself paint a painting? I actually don't think so, since that airplane hanger will be an airplane hanger once I'm done mopping it - relinquishing itself from it's art objectness, the painting will forever be a painting. Although, I think I'm just using the painting itself as a facilitator of communication. Paintings are known fairly universally as an "art form" and does have some sort of role in someone's life, if not just to make a wall look, 'pretty'. This one just has quite the past.

Back to airplane hangers - there's someone whose job may very well be mopping that same airplane hanger and I'm not sure it's really that, well cool to take away someone's job or use that job as a means of expression. I think it's very important and there's much self responsibility for an artist to do things in the name of "art".

I think that may be what people forget; there are many mediums to work with, but the medium isn't the artwork, what you do with the materials as tools is what makes something simply amazing. If I ever see some film of a white guy mopping the floor of a airplane hanger repititiously, I'm going to think just that - it's a white guy, who's much to much full of himself.

That's what I'm sort of afraid with other alex's work: it's fairly inventive, but it's a bit too meaningless for me. alex made a model of an armchair that moves wildly around on the floor. He's going to cast a life-sized version of it in plaster and then make it finally in wood, transferring the design from plaster to wood using a tool much like you would use to transfer a plastic sculpture to marble ala the Renassaince masters. Being a process freak, this whole idea is interesting, but asking alex why he's doing that, gives me a muddled 'ahhno', and a shrug of shoulders.

And now I really don't know what the medium of this piece is. I have the painting, but I also have the film, and now I have a collection of stills from the film with critical thoughts on the film and painting or something completely different. I also have the program that created the coordinants I'm painting... I have the swatches used to match the paint colors to their RGB counterparts, I have cut out paper letters, I have the pencils used and there's also myself, the dumb white guy that's painting it. This thing is going to be impossible or at least, very fun to categorize... But where do I stop? Do I include the drinks I was drinking while painting this? Do I include the clock? The calendar? The people I slept with while painting this? All these things have shaped this painting. So I selectively include things to strengthen my idea?

This is all taking for granted that this entire painting works out, because I am not sure all the pieces are fitting together. Thinking about how many things could go wrong is unnerving. The color may not have been mixed correctly, there could be a bug in the program that made the coordinants, there may be human error in painting everything, I could somehow lose all the data from the films (which is in the gigs, raw), it could just not make sense from anyone else, and on and on and on. And yet, it's impossible for me to say if it is working out; I'm stuck on a process which is dissimilar to working up from say a sketch or underpainting. It's this lose of control that I do not like.

This painting is such a commitment. It's hard to explain how it feels, but It's almost like being very well ready for a roadtrip, leaving for the trip with fairly good directions, but not really knowing if the place you're going to really exists.

I have the flu, I think. I received a flu shot a week ago, which is oh so sardonic. I think I got the Flu from Penelope, but that doesn't bother me. If anything it's adorable for two people to watch a movie feeling miserable together.

I don't like being sick. I'm too tired to really get into it all and my room will not stop spinning. The End.

Oil on board

I seem to be getting faster at painting - looser for sure as well, but much faster at rendering stuff. I finished this painting:

in a little under 3 hours (the colors are a bit mucked up in the photo); not two semesters ago, the same painting would have taken me 12 hours to complete. It's nice to know some communication between my brain and my hand is happening.

I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do with all these weird figure painting sketches; maybe I'll jockey a local coffee shop to hang them up to sell cheap under a fake name - perhaps I'll double the cost of the material and get rid of some material goods. My bedroom is looking less and less like a bedroom, and more and more like a place I keep paintings, books and clothes. I don't know where I'm going to put a bed in there when I do (if... I do) get a bed again.

User-Agent: Microsoft-Entourage/10.0.0.1309
Date: Sun, 09 Nov 2003 00:53:58 -0800
Subject: Re: s k a z a t Mailing List Confirmation
From: alex Simoni
To: sarah xxxx
Message-ID: xxxx%alex@skazat.com>
In-Reply-To:
Mime-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1"
Content-transfer-encoding: quoted-printable

Hello Sarah,

> hi alex its sarah here. Not a sarah you know, but sarah all the same.

Bah, I'm horrible with names. I'm almost sure if that I did know you, and you emailed me saying, "hey it's sarah, the sarah you know, the sarah that slept over on your couch 2 weekends ago", I would draw the mental blank. Seriously. Girlfriends have gone by where I couldn't remember their name for *months*. My mind works more with relationships with other thingies, rather than relations with an abstract label. I think. That's why the messy room is always easier to find something really really important in and cleaning said room right before trying to find RI thing leads to a mess from, well, trying to find it.

> I've stumbled upon your mammoth online body of work via your mailing list site
> and have spent the last two hours scampering through your blog (if thats how
> you see it, as a blog).

Skazat? More of a sketchbook, but with added nonlinearity I guess. When I think blog, I think postings of interesting/funny/dumb things with filled out quizzes and humorous test result percentages on how X someone is; or the listless banter of a 16 year old (in mind, in body, whatever) going on and on about how worthless their life is. Basically something someone toppled together when they were bored, like a mash potato sculpture or a leaning tower of half and half mini containers you'd make at the all night diner. I use skazat to remember things (I can't ever be bored; burnt out, perhaps depressed, but bored? Oh my never: give me a cardboard box, or a pencil, or like something that's shiny; I'll be good for hours). It's my messy room I guess.

It's sort of silly to stick something that is relatively a new medium into an old model, but it's easy to grab. I'm a 'artist', so this is my sketchpad. If I was a writer, it would be my 'journal', if I was a corrupt politician, it would be my, 'memoir'. Same thing really. Picasso is quoted as saying, "Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.". Picasso ended painting something like 5 paintings in a day... sketches, you see?

I really didn't know what skazat was for a while, but it's become a sketchpad now; sometimes personal, sometimes a bit too personal, sometimes geeky, silly, nonsensical: usually fairly rough. So I guess the metaphor of a sketchbook works; since if you would go through a realª sketchbook of mine, you'd see sketchings while I eat, nude figure studies, perhaps the sketches of a girlfriend I've *somehow* gotten to pose for me (the silly girl(s)), computer programs written in pen (for real), crayon doodles - which is what some of my dates come down to (again, for real), totally spontaneous prose ala Kerouac... Whatever pops in my brain and lingers and needs to be counted.

I find physical sketchbooks a little not my style; they're relatively boring to go through and they just don't have the punch that I get from skazat. And, oh man, they take up so much room, although I could never get rid of them. It's not a position I like, really; it's like the stuff has ownership over you.

You seem to be hip on the whole colloquial lingo, so I thought you'd dig all this.

> It's been the most surreal process because although i
> have played on the www before it hasn't ever happened that i've been compelled
> to
> trawl through such a body of information, link through to contextualise what
> you're referencing, find out about your friends, thoughts, days and nights,
> just to consume everything you've posted...and then to write an email about
> it.

Me neither... Maybe that's why I did it myself. There's sites that have some of the elements of it; prototypes I guess. The backend is written by a very good friend of mine almost seven years ago, who used it himself and I thought it was the coolest damn thing in the world and I asked if I could (please please please) use it myself. He was more than happy to give it away, being proud it's of use to someone else. He mainly used it as I have; keeping press clippings of his doings, the odd poem or the autobiographical tell-all.

But, I don't know, once you get a few years worth of stuff up there, you tend to understand that what you're doing now has some sort of history, or link to something you've done in the past that you can only understand in hindsight. And obviously, it does take a long time for a body to mature enough to have this happen. You could write everyday, and I've been adding entries more than I've ever, but you need time to write, and time to live -

You cannot, or at least, I cannot really do both. I've tried keeping a small notebook in my pocket and I do indeed have some amazing things that I've generated in there, but my tool of choice write now is a digital camera; it seems to work as fast as myself and allows me to Experience as well as Document - if I write something down, I have to think, "writing now" and that flips you into a different mind set. Maybe I'm more visual, than I am literal, or something.

> This is a thank you for putting yourself out there. you use the medium as the
> message and i like your messages. i'm going to go and have a think now about
> what i've just experienced and put it together in my head.

Well, you're welcome and I'm glad you do enjoy it. I hope, beyond anything that you React to it. It may be the Why of "why do I do this?". It seems that for some people, ideas are something to keep away from others, as if they were something to steal rather than to build upon other ideas. I'm not saying there is no such thing as a new idea (there are Many people who do think this), but there is no such thing as a idea that isn't based on a root idea, which itself is based on another idea, ad-infinitum. Ideas need spark, you know? Or, well, nothing will go, Pow!

But, yeah, it is somewhat putting yourself out there; I sort of see it as my obligation. Some people say they could never keep something like this up, maybe it's the same way if I say I could never rebuild a car or hitchhike for a year or become a astronaut; even though I may want to do all these things, there are tugs inside me that say something else. I'll just put myself out open and make sure I don't kiss and tell too too much.

Good luck on your exam. I hope you do a smashing good job. If not, dirty up your room a bit,

alex

ps: come back and flip through it a bit every once in a while; who knows what you'll see...

On 11/8/03 1:27 AM, "sarah xxxx wrote:

> hi alex its sarah here. Not a sarah you know, but sarah all the same.
>
> I've stumbled upon your mammoth online body of work via your mailing list site
> and have spent the last two hours scampering through your blog (if thats how
> you see it, as a blog). It's been the most surreal process because although i
> have played on the www before it hasn't ever happened that i've been compelled
> to
> trawl through such a body of information, link through to contextualise what
> you're referencing, find out about your friends, thoughts, days and nights,
> just to consume everything you've posted...and then to write an email about
> it.
>
> Maybe my exam on monday morning is playing a role. I always manage to find new
> obsessions once a deadline comes into focus.
>
> This is a thank you for putting yourself out there. you use the medium as the
> message and i like your messages. i'm going to go and have a think now about
> what i've just experienced and put it together in my head.
>
> S
>
>> From: s k a z a t
>> Reply-To: s k a z a t
>> To: xxxx@hotmail.com
>> Subject: s k a z a t Mailing List Confirmation
>> Date: 8 Nov 2003 09:03:47 -0000
>>
>> Heya, Subscribe?
>> Click Here:
>> http://www.skazat.com/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi?f=n&l=skazat_me_baby&e=xxxx%4
>> 0hotmail.com&p=1234
>>
>> Really Confused?
>> Don't be, one of your friends probably randomly put your e-mail address in
>> somewhere to subscribe to s k a z a t for all this:
>>
>> this is a list for my personal site, http://skazat.com. lots of random stuff
>> gets done on it all the time, so i want to share what i've made when it
>> finally does get done.
>>
>>
>> my apologies if this is the case, if it aint, click the link to subscribe.
>>
>> archives:
>> http://skazat.com/cgi-bin/mojo/mojo.cgi?flavor=archive&list=skazat_me_baby
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