June 2004 Archives

Upon leaving the coffee shop earlier tonight, I noticed that my car's odometer read:

0888886

Meaning, it's just a few miles till it reads all eight's. I had my camera with me, so I decided to drive around until it did. I saw it as my job. I went east through Congress park, down Eighth, coincidentally, and then south on Washington.

I began to wonder why this was such an interesting event for me. I thought of an old Married... With Children episode where Al Bundy continuously drove his car back and forth in his parking lot so that the odometer would read 999999; Dodge was going to give him a Viper if they could document this final turnover.

I then realized that this number I was about to hit was just an arbitrary number, and that it was a no event. I then realized that we, as humans, make all sorts of non-events; New Year's eve, the Full Moon, lucky numbers, star constellations - they don't really mean anything outside of our minds, but we insist to give meaning and order to anything we see.

Part of me thinks that this is just a primitive condition; 'Ugg' the Caveman probably had the instinct that anything that didn't look like jungle was either an enemy, or, food and evolution made this instinct stronger. Now we're out of the jungle, we still take note of what seems to be interesting coincidences of organization.

Even though, a string of eights on my dashboard has to be more than mere Gestalt, it seems to me that I have attainted a specific number towards... some sort of goal - I will never be able to, in this car reach that specific number, but then again, every number that flips on the odometer is a unique and specific number that will only show once and in order from least to greatest. A full moon is just one step in a continuous process of it waxing and waning, why do we specifically look for the center of this process?

Am I, whilst choosing one single number, celebrating every single number? It's sort of like the tomb of the unknown soldier. There are many, many, unidentified corpses, yet we only have a few monuments to iconify this fact. And if so... why? Why am I celebrating my set of specific numbers, when there have been millions of cars produced, each counting the miles traveled.

In that case, am I extending my idea of my own uniqueness on a possession that I have? "This is my rifle car, there are many like it, but this one is mine".

I guess to me, all eights on a dashboard looks like a nice continuous line, and I guess as a human, I like lines: text in a book is in a line, gravity falls in a straight line; a line denotes assurance, even though different lines can define different things, like pensiveness (a horizontal line) or alertness (a vertical line!) - the line is "sure" of this thing it is.

So I don't really know for sure, but it's quite nice not to even fully understand something simple as to why I take pictures of a line of eight's on my odometer, when at night I gaze up into the Milky Way and wonder... It makes me realize that I will never really fully understand anything, and that the point isn't to understand by to keep wondering to find interesting questions.

I've been playing with taking letters cut out of books, skewering them with pins, and putting these pins all around the place so that they spell out my name, similar to the stamps.

I first have to say that I am endowed to both Harry C. Walters and Jeremiah Teutsch whom were putting odd things (hair, matchsticks, pill capsules, pin holes, masking tape, balloons) on walls, etc, for people to find by accident much much earlier than myself. I am not attempting to completely appropriate their ideas, but play and explore similar concepts. As for as it concerns me, they both are the originators of this little medium. I intent to fill it with myself.

I love how this photos came out. Some concepts I am trying to play with:

The letters are clipped from books, the actual book can be very important conceptually to the piece - much, in a sense how Cornelia Parker picks exactly what items to use (example, "Tarnish from the inside of Henry the Eighth's Armour, 1998"), but with a complete difference, as an uncountable number of books are printed en mass. The interesting part isn't the particular copy of the book, it's the book itself - what it contains in its text. I for one, think collecting useless garbage is pretty silly - not that I don't do it to some account, but I keep it well in its limits.

This is interesting if you take it with what you can make from the clippings. For a silly example, I could take The Bible, and clip the first, "L" I find, then the next, "i" on the page, then "e" and, "s", and then start over again. Once (heh, if) I get through the entire Bible, I will have enough letters to spell out, "lies" a few hundred, if not thousands of time.

You could read this two ways; You could hold the letters clipped out, and perhaps pasted onto a board and state, (with some truth), that I have found a thousand or so, "lies" in the Bible. Then again, you can show the board with pasted, "lies" and the bible with clipped holes everywhere and say that you have now purged all lies from the Bible - that this is now the true word of God. This ambiguity is very hot.

I chose for the above sketch to spell out my name using pins. I used my name because I think it's important to own up to public art that shouldn't be there - in harsh contrast to grafitti, which is basically anonymous to the majority of the people who see it, (most of the grafitti-like paintings I've done had my name anyways). This is similar to putting a drop of blood on the stamps, if you were so inclined you could run a DNA test on the blood and attempt to match it up - but, it's only a one cent stamp and doesn't really make any long-term destruction of the property it's on.

Same with the pins. I chose pins for their versatility - you can stick them into a wall, in a crack, prick a more organic material, like a leaf, a person, leave them scattered about; they're easy to manipulate with your hand, they create a frame for the letters themselves; you can use the pin as a "line" in compositions, and the letter itself as a, "shape" and they're cheap- 400 or so for less than a dollar. Pins hold things together temporarily, these little pieces are not supposed to be permanent - they're supposed to be easily removed if warranted. The pins also give a more sculptural quality to the letters, and will grab more attention.

So, with a lack of permanency, the photo documentation becomes the only lasting artifact and interesting pictures are themselves interesting. The pins and letters also give an excuse to photograph the given area, and a collection of photos will demand an interesting composition themselves.

...

I am at the moment in a terrible rut. The ink in my pen has not run out, it's more that it seems I have forgotten how to actually think - it's almost a small depression. I don't know if it's the weather, a symptom of my (completely self diagnosed) mild bipolarism, or just the stress from trying to graduate this semester. Who knows or cares. I feel trapped and the lure of getting into my car and going far far away for a weekend and coming back with an adventure or five is overwhelming. It's most likely going to happen.

What I want to do is make enough of these pin and letter sculptures to bring with me on the trip - to disperse writing from one book all over the entire bloody country, document this with photos and locations and come back, releived.

Take one book, find hidden meaning in it (for example, I found my name 100 times in War and Peace - the title itself a diadic relationship), scatter this meaning in as large of an area as possible, with great care of placement, document the process. Smile at the end of it. Present documentation in an interesting way. Hopeful side affects: perhaps someone curious enough will look up my name and find out who I am.

Mr Quintron and Miss Pussycat killed it on Saturday at the Larimer Lounge, with the help of the drum buddy.

This is, The Show is the Rainbow sporting some awfully fake blood.

He was one of about five acts that opened up for Glass Candy. Glass Candy's lead singer is one of the sexiest people alive and I regret not putting a photo of her up, lest I ruin your erotic imago with shoddy photography. Oh well, here goes:

It is absolutely not my fault that the girl eminates light like a gothic cathedral. Although it does facilitate seeing Calan, whose birthday was that day, Adam and Brian, located in the upper left hand side of the shot. Oh and there's Buddy of Ultraboys with the glasses on.

...

I really don't have many hobbies. Hobbies become much more like obsessions to me. One hobby I do have is dumpster diving. I don't do it often - less then once every other week, but the obsessive comsumerism of this country and its molted coat of less than shiny-and-new material items just lying about is much too tantalizing to pass over.

Perhaps it's from my childhood memories of walking up and down endless beaches with my family, searching for seashells... or my childhood memories of walking up and down endless streets with my family, picking through trash - I dunno, but I like to find things that are not supposed to be found and take advantage of that.

Today I found a free pair of Doc Martens. The dumpster was about 200 feet from my apartment. I looked in, and there at least 5 pairs of shoes - not one in bad condition. I thought that maybe the entire dumpster was filled with one guys' possessions... a bad breakup perhaps? An angry girlfriend? I tried on the shoes. Perfect.

A man in his fifties comes to the dumpster and disposes the contents of a small garbage receptical. I offered him my salutations.

"Those shoes are in there for a reason, you know.", he cautioned.

"Oh, why?", wondering what exactly this reason could be. Were the shoes the last victim of a ill-mannered dog, unable to wait for the master to take him for a walk? Did this guy have fleas so bad as to make the throwing away of his shoes necessary? (I wouldn't put it over this guy)

"They make my feet hurt", is all he said. I guess that's good enough reason for him and quite safe enough for me to try them out. Anyone who has the hobby obsession of running knows that feet come in a very odd jumble of shapes and sizes.

Sometimes, the city gives back.

I found the anonymous residue of puckered lips on my driver's side window tonight. I last cleaned my windows Sunday (yesterday). I don't exactly know whose these belong to - although, of course, I have my guesses. Very interesting.

I can't say I haven't myself left the anonymous tracings of my own lips on someone elses car in this same parking lot - A small act this world could do with in much larger quantities than now with no preceiveable ill that I can think of...

Andenken had a show entitled, "Special Materials".

Many many artists were given wood panels to do whatever they wanted on and then turn back to the gallery to then be put into a massive collage. A huge magnificent corpse. Here are a few of the penels I did for this massive collaboration:

"It was harder to make then it looks"

"I wear my heart on the outside"

"The string finally snapped off my car after a few hours of driving"

"There is NEVER only one way"

"Stealing Warhol's Wig"