April 2004 Archives

I forget when these were taken, but The Edge Gallery had a installation in their back room that consisted of a pile of charcoal and a note saying to draw on the walls.

Well.

Say no more.

I drew a picture of Penelope, and she drew a picture of me, then we shot each other with my camera phone.

Wall drawings using charcoal are tens of thousands of years old. I think I got this camera phone a week before we happened upon this room. I just took them off phone tonight.

Flips me out... how -

how we compile the very Old with the very New. The old never goes away and the new is severly looked at and audited to see if it will be in a our future, or should I see overwhelmingly in our future. There's always someone around that collects what has become useless shit. I can't wait to see someone's camera phone project using phones from 2004 in 2014.

Yesterday was my birthday. I helped Justin Beard design his postcards for his show at Capsule @ Pod. We managed to run up a bill of $150. Here's the front (I also took the photo)

It's a picture of him smoking a cigarette, sitting on a booth he built, blowing the smoke into a sketchbook that's hooked up to a vacuum (I shit you not), that's hooked up to a filter. The filter has a template attached to it, so the smoke goes through only a part of the filter. This all creates a picture, using the smoke as the drawing tool. Pretty sick.

I realized at about midnight that there was an odd white blotch in the middle of his head and then found out the next morning that Santa Fe was spelled wrong and Kinkos messed up the alignment on the back.

Gaw.

I went to Kinkos at around 11pm and reprinted them with the corrections. I can't let me friend Beard down. I felt awful. Somehow the bill is now only $50. I think it's very important to go to Kinkos and make sure you get a clerk that somehow connections with whatever subculture you belong to. That's why I keep all my skateboard apparel around.

It's 3 am, and the 19th (like I said) was my birthday. I've been having trouble sleeping (seems to happen around my birthday), so I didn't do anything on it. Every day is special or could be special and should be Celebrated if one wants to celebrate it. That's a key to happiness. Special occasions should never be saved, kind of like orgasms. Let it flow, let it flow...

What I did do that day was console a beautiful girl while she awaited the answer to a love letter she sent. No one thinks she should go out with the guy, I don't think she should go out with the guy, but gut feelings should always be followed, no matter what the cost is at the end.

So many things to do in the next few weeks.

I should get some rest.

I went to Boulder with Melissa to see,

William Pope.L, the Friendliest Black Artist in America.

And yes, even though the above picture is frightening and uninviting, he is really really friendly. One of his mediums is performance, which I won't even get into in length describing (but I will, wait for it...), because I am tired and it would be impossible to get into them without length, since they have so much, umph! in them.

In the Q + A session I asked him if he saw in his own work that what he thought and felt changed while his performances and after and if he had to reconsider his entire statement of doing the piece. He answered that yes, the piece does change in ways and new thoughts and ideas run through his mind, but he hit on something else that I completely forget about, but it is still a part of what I do, and that is the idea of, internal discipline.

For example, a William Pope. L performance may be what he calls a "crawl", which as the name implies, has him crawling on the ground in a public space, for example... New York City. Now, people may laugh at him, may kick him, may urinate on him, may ignore him, may arrest him - it don't matter, because he sees that he needs the internal discipline of sticking with his goal of simply, crawling. In a way, this is a good thing, since what would be the point of crawling for a few miles and then walking upright and announcing to everyone that,

"Hey, I'm alright!, no worries and nothing to see here!"

I would at least feel decieved and lose faith in what his performance was about. I'm a little bit uncomfortable with having something over my head telling me what I can't do, but then you just have disorganization - (which is just another type of origanization, and then is the, "internal discipline, but I digress...). Take Jazz, (why not?), There is an internal discipline - or, let's replace, "internal discipline" with, "basic riff". The jazz musicians will travel wildly out of this basic riff, but they will eventually come back to it, and their wild travails will be based on this basic, internal discipline that they have all agreed upon. Can you have play a song without it? Sure, but that's not what jazz is.

It's just like a roadtrip. There is a destination. Things happen in between. I call them, "adventures", but I still have the internal discipline of, "Destination". You can give the point that, "Not all the wander are lost", but then the internal discipline is to wander: Destination: Wandering - it's not a point on a grid, it is the grid.

Thanks for that insight, Will.

All in all, I also had a good Boulder experience. Sometimes I don't, even when I lived there, there were days that I thought the town was ludicrious. Just little things, like seeing stereotypical college kids from CU Boulder, or a certain type of landscaping. Just weird memories associated with the town.

But this time, I saw so many people that have shaped me and that I love. I bumped into Catherine when entering the UMC, which I swear I've done before at exactly the same way, I saw Lewis and Shylo (whom I kicked accidentally once)... Lewis is having his BFA show in a few weeks and he's graduating with Honors! Go him. A beautiful person at heart. I also saw alex Beard and Kevin and Maggie and Erin and Rebecca and Harry and it was nice to be surrounded by so many people I knew and respected. Instead of coming to Boulder and feeling as if I stepped into a place I abandoned, I felt it is now a place I can visit and again learn in and also from.

And especially Melissa, who it really was the first time I ever hung out with her outside of school, us both being shy and silly. She's a very good listener as I babble about my road trip stories and I see her about to have a huge breakthrough in her life and art. She really didn't do anything spectacular except stick with me for the night - sometimes a hard task, as I go on pointless tangents and say things that only I can hear or understand. Enough to make me have to write this all down when I'm drowsy and completely over-caffienated.

The only thing left to say is,

Happy Birthday, Dad.