Shaking

 Here's a sound collage I just put together, mostly woven around field recordings I took at the police brutality protests. There's also a loop of Mexico City protesters beating down the door of the governmental palace, also with their own grievances over corruption in authority. Other sounds were created with assorted gear. I can do this sort of thing but I need to practice basic violin more. I wanna get busking good! Sound experimentation may be art, but it won't get tips dropped in to your violin case underground. However, I spent the day making hand painted holiday cards instead. This can be time-consuming, so thankfully we don't know that many festive people. Just kidding.

Your Wicked Uncle Sam

It's a drawing from my comic diary, but I also think it says what it needs to as a standalone image. As an American, I'm filled with revulsion and ashamed at these things done in the name of supposed "security"...security? Fuck you Mr. CIA Man, as Tuli Kupferberg said. You're also the monsters perpetrating the things I don't want in this world. What makes us secure from you? The CIA Torture Report can be read here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/249761718/Senate-Committee-s-Report-on-the-C-I-A-s-Use-of-Torture

VSM

This is a painting for the cover of a forthcoming poetry book by Barbara Mor. I'm not sure what other commentary to add other than it was created of my impressions of the stream of conscious work.

6/2/11 La La Land

I'm also in the process of uploading Living In La La Land to Tapastic. I'm wide awake now though I was wiped out all day. I have no idea where this surge of energy came from, but it sure wasn't there when the new psychiatrist sprang a surprise psych evaluation on me, saying they really should be done every six months. I don't know what the results were, though he seemed amused when I answered the standard question about thinking about harming others with "Yes, well, I'm not a rich person or a cop, so that would be illegal." At least he feigned amusement.

Death Can Dig It

Mixed media, paint, collage, and some digital touches. The heat has been restored, making our bedroom somewhat warmer than it was. It took an inspector to make that happen though. And so the "tale of two cities" continues, and I'm just wondering when we hit the chapter where wire cut our "affordable housing fencing pens", kick down the poor doors like Bastille Gates and sent our de facto gentrifying aristocracy to the guillotine. "NY Ambassador" (what a joke) Taylor Swift, stepping up to meet her fate can say "Tis a far better thing I do than anything I have ever done in my music career." [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="444"] Class segregating fences. This is now a thing here.[/caption] Yeah, I'd make that little roped off area extremist art central if I lived there. I've gotten to the point where I court haters, at least among white supremacists thirteen years my senior with the writing skills of the mean girl from your 7th grade class. But silly rabbit, veiled threats admonishing me to be silent just encourage me to spout more opinions and put more stuff out there. Because at the end of the day, the only Haters I actually have any respect for are these: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NroBNygAE7c&w=420&h=315]

Platform Edge - "That's A-vore!" Pt 2

 

http://tapastic.com/episode/78051 

 Yeah, it's a spoof on the cannibal cop case, though the character's name is cobbled together from Sawney Bean and local cannibal Daniel Rakowitz.

No One Can Breathe

                

                    


Excerpt of an Astral Knife soundscape track set to some footage I got during the first night of protests over the murder of Eric Garner. I was in midtown, just got done caring for Abuelita. I walked over to Times Square and just joined in the first march I came across, moving up against traffic with arms in the air chanting "HANDS UP DON'T SHOOT" (Michael Brown), "I CAN'T BREATHE!" (Eric Garner), and "NO JUSTICE NO PEACE, NO RACIST POLICE". And though I knew it wouldn't be likely to crash the Rockefeller tree lighting ceremony, once I learned that was the plan, it was good to disrupt the yuppies and monied tourists lollygagging around the area. Their comments ranged from confused to inconvenienced to a bit scared...and good. I know at a lot of the activist events we do we're talking to the same crowd of people that already agree...these were the people who needed to be a little shook up.



I made my way downtown on foot to meet Eric, who with a friend of ours were in Union Square. Passing the library I got that footage that opens the video of a sea of cops swarming on the steps, then joined two women silently standing and staring at the cops with the arms up gesture.



We have a lawless country when the law itself is lawless. While this sort of injustice, particularly against black youth, is nothing new, it seems there's been a rash of police killing without consequence, all over the country. Aiyana Jones, Kimani Gray, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Rumain Brisbon...



I don't know what else I can add.

Platform Edge - "That's A-vore!" Pg 1

This isn't the first "Platform Edge" comic I've done, but it's the first page of a longer story. The initial one, created for an art/lowbrow culture magazine with the instructions to do "something with a cute tough punk girl in it" is somewhere in the publishing clouds, and I'll be sure to write when it's out. This one is on a cloud at Tapastic, where readers can subscribe to the comix they want to read (for free). http://tapastic.com/series/platformedge

An urban-surreal comedy centering around the deranged, demented and disatrous lives of two wayward housemates.

 

Slop Tank Cut-Up

 

We came home tonight from the cold following a trail of blood, at least until it headed in a different direction from the one we needed to go. The semi-consistent pattern of dime sized red droplets extended from the subway platform, through the turnstyle, up the steps and into the night. I couldn't say if someone had entered the subway bleeding and gotten on the train, or exited the train bleeding and headed to the street. But the little drops winked up saying "we'll tell the truth when no one else wants to. All you have to do is look."

This collage/cut-up has been sitting in my book for a minute now, I made it from some freebie paper I picked up when we all rode up with Sean to Philly, where he was one of the openers for Brighter Death Now at that venue. The back page of the paper seemed to be an anti-personals ad space where people could leave anonymous messages of hate to some unnamed person or other they detested. Of course, that page made for the most comedic cut-up text.

Self centered stupid trust fund bitch

inconsiderate, mean, self-centered, arrogant
and you talk about yourself way too much

Crookedly earned money

Why the hell do you want to be in someone's face

all the fucking time. You are the nastiest man

snorting up all the coke you can find with your

yuppie ass friends going to places like the fucked up 

bars that you need to sit in a tub with all these chemicals

and get that shit off you.

Walk away.

I bet your gonna have a really GREAT day tomorrow!

Rome Wasn't Destroyed In A Day

Automatic drawing with pastels, done during therapy. Somehow a lot of the blues in the original drawing got lost in the phone camera snapshot, but really, it's not important because none of it in this case was intentional. Talk, make lines, talk, put down colors. Triangles. I think one of the offices they use there is bugged, but not the one we were in that day.

Sandwiched in between AmeriKKKa burning and a holiday that means nothing to me---certainly not a maudlin inventory of "gratitiude", not when there are fleeting glimmers to appreciate in every day of the year, even the ones bogged down with the acrid fog of depression or anxiety. Sandwiched between a day of religious fundamentalists and genocide and the real life Hunger Games called "Black Friday" when a blood sacrifice or two will be made to the Gods of Commerce. And thinking tomorrow of making yams for Abuelita, and she'll likely ask again for me to play my violin for her and once again I'll literally fiddle while my culture's corpse burns.

Poking My Cultural Malaise With A Stick

I reject your definitions formed from ignorance

I reject your explanations that "Latina women love" your boundary violations, that it's our "culture",  that "freaky chicks will" that "crazy girls are"

Your solipsism, your reassurance to yourself that we know you're right, we disagree out of "fear" but you don't live with the guardedness that people like yourself create in your plunder

I reject being told I shouldn't mind something because you don't mind it

I reject being told I should be outraged or frightened by something because that's how you feel about it

I reject ignoring intersectionality. I  reject your SWERF and TERF special. I reject "social justice warriors" who come with 21st century fire and brimstone sermons of academia, rather than social justice

I reject "culture warriors" fighting to uphold a culture that is empty, repressive and anti-intellectual

I reject where this is all headed

Art On A Holiday Group Show

I promise not to put anything holiday themed in! Well...unless it's Krampus cuz he's fly like that. Or maybe some misfit toys.

  

https://www.facebook.com/events/669582643162697/?notif_t=plan_admin_added

So anyway, I'm flipping out in a there-may-be-new-blood-art-before-the-night-is-done way because I only just now saw James Sturm's comic "The Sponsor". That it could elicit such a reaction should only be taken as complimentary...it means the piece succeeds as art in a way that Kickstarters can't measure. Some people are reading sexism into the work, because it's two male artists discussing the success of a younger female artist. I don't really go to that because the mediocrity who bought her way into a brief flurry of hype in the past and gloated to me about it regularly was also a woman. So while I'll discuss gender politics in lots of things, this isn't one of them. It's also, on my part, old stuff, Qlipphotic bad tapes running on dross-stained, dirty felt heads. Because I'm not in that place really anymore, I've got enough to do creatively, and a lot of it doesn't even center around basic survival! But a one-page comic story that evokes those emotions can put me right back into that place of hardship. Now THAT'S art.

This week is the release for Cult Of Youth's new album "Final Days" (which Eric contributed percussion on) and he's performing with Kama Rupa on Saturday. Meanwhile there's stuff I need to draw and paint.

5/31/11 La La Land - Postal At The Post Office

My beliefs about a culture of fear and passivity have increased about 10-fold since the events in this comic, sad to say. My goal is to conquer my personal fears and phobias both rational and irrational. A highly ambitious goal for a human, I know, particularly one with anxiety disorders. But doing so would be for the better. There's too many people, from abusive personalities one might interact with to media, government, and the like that are depending on fear to control us.

Anatomy Of A...

 

collage on paper.

I'm lost on the spectrum of socio-political ideology in this country, except for the fact that I know exactly where I am. But where that is won't neatly fit where others would like it to be. In our last episode I outraged the "social justice warrior" (in which social justice mainly boils down to nitpicking over semantics) contingent by having the audacity to speak up and say I've heard the word "bossy" applied to men as well as women, and was not about to be silenced by it. (Not that I get called bossy, really. Plenty of other things, including "spicy" and "fiery" more than that. But who gives a fuck?) Tonight? I've bothered a bunch of rich white transplants, friends of a friend, or clientele, can I really say? Hear hear to the small independent shop owners. I stated that I'd most certainly experienced harassment on the street from upper class white men, so much as any other kind, while they were all trying to maintain that this is only done by poor brown people. They didn't take kindly to hearing that yes, it happens. I noticed an interesting defense being invoked repeatedly by the rich white kids though -- well, if you find projection and speculation interesting. They kept insisting that rich white men were all good and above perving on women, but other men weren't, and kept insisting that anyone who didn't agree was simply "afraid" to say so. Ultimately, in this very solipsistic defense, there was nobody that disagreed with their worldview. Only people who were afraid to admit it. So there you go. Racists who claim to be mind-readers. Both types, the SJW's and the reactionaries who talk as though their racism/classism is something new and daring, are two unaware sides of the same shiny, high-market value coin. But only one side seems to need to believe that their view is the only one so badly, that they'll try to convince us all that any dissenters are just lying out of fear.

Or maybe they just know that fear is such a powerful control mechanism for so many people, it's hard to imagine life without it?

Pencil drawing of a plague doctor mask done today in art therapy group. Would like to do a whole art series revolving around modern plagues, Eric is thinking possibly as an Astral Knife project.

Hallucination vs. Vision (I Really Don't Care)

 

 Today I was finally able to get a scanner that is compatible with Linux, and configure it in just two hours. I don't know why it looks soft focus though. I scanned this at 1200 resolution. I'm sure you're riveted to know that. So here you have it, another "hallucination"/vision-based image, another pandrogyne figure, but so much more than that. On the other hand, "hallucination" implies things aren't really real because they're not perceived by everyone in Assiah-level, hard world reality. Ultimately though, I just like the way "hallucination" sounds, a roller coaster word that makes me think of "imagination" "hallowed" "lucere" "lux" "luz" "lucious" "sin".

Mailer Daemon

#inktober, plus trying to get the idea flow going for this piece...it'll be mixed media, ad it's for a book cover...but I want the piece strong, overall. No, those postage-stamp sized Gunter Brus images aren't part of it. I just glued them in my journal.

I try to be productive. I try to be productive. I try to be productive.
                         Is the sin wasting time or the shame tied in
                          with this incessant need for self-validation
                            in proving I got something done, not
                             a couch potato mouth breather
                              fallen back into fugue state
                               depression hours days
                                weeks lost before you
                                  know it self care stacked
                                   against programmed disdain?

I know in part I'm compulsively making up for lost time, due to my mother/stepfather's non-artistically-oriented life decision making processes when I was a child, and later in my life, my own self-sabotaging self-medicating self-destructive dysfunction. Which is only an "artistic temperament" when it's backed up with talent and vision.

I sank into a pit of despair, a sense of failure the other day when I didn't hear back either way from a gallery I'd gotten an open submission call message from. Beating myself up that because I need to wait for my next check to get a scanner that works with this new Linux thing, I sent my submission as a digital snapshot, it was that or nothing, so unprofessional. such unprofessionalism didn't merit a simple yes or no answer. About 2:30 in the morning after the registration deadline, I got one of those "mailer deamon" emails saying the thing had bounced back from their system, never even been seen. I really need to chill the fuck out. Take a pill. No really I do need to take a pill, it's time for my nightly medication. Here's something I saw today:

Dogcatcher

NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                                        (howls of rage at moon's reflective
                                                                               glare)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                                      (a dogcatcher swathed in velvet and
                                                                           silver)     
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                                     (whore in white starch knifes whore
                                                                        in stilettoes; )
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                                 (she's buried somewhere near the  
                                                                      edge of page 11. an 8 lined
                                                                           paragraph.)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                              (just the ones in the streets who are self-
                                                                aware; the rest all think the game brings
                                                                   them theirs.)(someday.)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                         (the dogs lap at poisoned meat in the alley,
                                                              the crustaceans yearn to crawl back to
                                                                  the sea.)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                            (dogcatcher licks hisher lips in anticipation
                                                                 clutching a blinding veil a snare)
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                               (or even if they are, the populus too
                                                                  ensnared can't remember how to see
                                                                       it. )
NOT ALL WHORES ARE SACRED ANYMORE
                                                            (Dogcatcher-saboteur to memories of this
                                                                  way)

Taina Punk

As Inktober rolls along, here's a drawing of a Taino woman expressing my thoughts on a national celebration of rape, torture, and genocide. But I probably can't explain it as nauseatingly as Columbus does in passages of his own diaries, along with a particularly brutal account from another of his crew of beating and raping a Carib woman.

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2013/10/14/8-myths-and-atrocities-about-christopher-columbus-and-columbus-day-151653#.VDtC3w6_tTs.twitter

So reading these things I'm only left with a sense of mourning.

*

Inktober drawings made in the past few days:

Last night was joyful, a celebration of creative life, friends, and much to see and do and talk about, both at the (S)he Is Still Her(e) art show and at Tommy turner's film screening. I feel grateful for the way my life is presently, the people and ideas in it. It comes naturally to me to rant, and not quite as much to gush, but  I really feel like I'm in a shimmering translucent bubble that's existence at the moment. It will burst at times and reappear at others, because the Universe is constant flux. But right this second, 12:26 am, I'm content with what is before me.

Alchemical Marriage/(S)HE IS STILL HER(E) art show

This piece,complete, mounted, framed, and ready to go to this art show, in honor of Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge:

https://www.facebook.com/events/698102706933903/700849903325850/?ref=notif&notif_t=plan_mall_activity

Inktober Posts Interrupted By A Psychotic Break

But they're here now.

 Drawn from memory: photo of a Chicano immigrant teen in a zoot suit, 1940's Los Angeles. Seen on a documentary on Spanish PBS regarding Mexican immigration in that time period. Oddly though, it didn't seem to go into the Zoot Suit Riots which you'd think would be a key event in discussing the subject. Or maybe it was in a different part of the program that I missed?

Women with the heads of pigs were once a recurring motif in Irish and English folklore. The stories would be a gender-flipped version of "Beauty & The Beast": woman (or her first-born daughter) is cursed to have the head of a pig, usually for acting mean to a beggar who's actually a sorceress or whatever in disguise; eventually the love of a man breaks the curse and she's transformed into a beautiful woman. Except I drew this one playing atop the corpse of a corporately manufactured pop-star. Don't ask me which one, they all look and sound alike.

If only the power to turn classist jerks into pigs actually existed. Then I bet gentrification, poverty, homelessness and hunger wouldn't. Price me out of my neighborhood? BAM! Now you literally are a capitalist pig.

Rainbow Razor, Primordial Ego Consciousness

Got in very late and very exhausted last night, having joined a dinner party for a friend in town from L.A. So I'm posting two #inktober drawings.

This is in one of those Smash Journals with pre-designed textiles and graphics on some of the pages, so to be clear, I didn't do the rainbow clouds or the writing, the it definitely played into what I decided to put on this page.

Envisioning ego-consciousness separating from subconsciousness as amoebas dividing. Imagine all this occurring in a petri dish called the Universe.

So...is there a term for it when someone you've already written off for mean-spirited actions or say...racism (she typed as if there weren't someone specific in mind) out-does themselves in obnoxiousness and you get word of it? And...although it's still despicable, instead of anger you just feel you have to laugh, not because that's funny, but because they've pushed it to the point of hyperbolic self-parody?

Tempus Fugit

10/3 #inktober drawing. From memory of life, a woman I saw peering out from the back of a subway elevator.

They're tapering down my klonopin. I break the pills in half. I don't mind; it hasn't thrilled me the way it did when I first started with it. With my self-imposed moratorium on self-medication (at least for three months,I'm just riding with no preconception as to where this will lead to.

Inktober

I just found out about #inktober, the challenge to do one ink drawing for every day of October. So here's the first:

Though I've finally found time to write after midnight, meaning it's time to think about a new ink drawing. Artist fun.

Thinking of the phrase "radical acceptance" and wondering if "accept" necessarily means "be passive before". Or is it to sit and observe fear and disgust as though they were on a microscope slide, pondering the anatomy of each without recoiling or charging, and finding the best ways to dismantle and reconstruct them?

October 1st

Something was begun today, in addition to October:

Excerpt from something in progress, which I expect to have finished in the next day or so, as it isn't large.

My father comes into Abuelita's apartment right as dinner is done, with a small blue glass bottle of some sort of flavored sherry that makes me really wish I hadn't self-imposed another 90 days of sobriety on myself last week. I have to explain as much to him when he offers me some, and he sort of looks at me sideways as if I had just told him I was a purple unicorn. But he doesn't push the issue.

"The Arts Have Lost Their Dynamic & So Have Become Violent"

I think my opinion of that as a complaint is pretty obvious.

It's from a pocket sized Joseph Campbell book I found, put out by Shamballah. Abuelita's neighbors are pretty great about discarding piles of books in the hallway or on the stoop, though their literary tastes are hit-and-miss. To date my best find there was in the mid-90's, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. The worst? Some misogynistic upper-class angsty rape apologist piece of shit by some guy named Tim Sandlin. Let's get all Behemoth on rape-apologists.

art by Charlie Stone

art by Vladimir Janovsky

The Passenger

I want to walk in doors, not fall in holes. I want to experience a healer's birth. Be part of the solution rather than the problem.

I want to be an emissary, an intermediary, an explorer of uncharted truths. But I am a psychonaut lacking refinement or tact.

Pulled over at the abandoned roadside stop now overgrown with moss, because no one here relies on liquified dinosaurs to travel anyway. Trying to make head or tail of a creased and greasy faded map of the terrain. It's been handed down through generations, but it may not have ever been correct in the first place.

Not to mention the terrain is forever shifting, unfixed, reflected shadows gliding in and out of the leaves rustling in wind, or perhaps as a result of the creatures that fly and dart hidden in the canopy. A coffee stain on the map obliterates the name of the state, the nation, the capitol, but it doesn't matter. This is where I am and I will make my own way.

Astral Knife - "Guilty Of Everything" video

Actually this video is random footage I shot in Hell's Kitchen. By no means am I a filmmaker or editor, it's just what catches my attention. But I love the smoking metal pole I chanced on yesterday, it come's in around 2:08.

I've past through my period of despair bordering on nihilism regarding the increasingly blatant controls placed upon the world, the cruelties humans in our incarnations as primally driven sacks of meat inflict upon one another...every narrative of change has caveats...voting only does so much. Grassroots movements only do so much before they are violently suppressed, branded as "terrorist", or perhaps most destructive of all, commodified into a softened, palatable mainstream shadow of itself... ("I did my part! I bought a tote bag that says 'go green' on it!") To exist is to be at least somewhat complicit in such systems or as the R. Crumb postcard I have hanging above my workspace says, "Nobody's hands are clean."

So why the change, when nothing changes? Was it waking up with sunlight streaming in and classical music playing on the radio? Well, that's lovely, but I don't know if anything is that simple. I don't always know what's behind the fluctuating moods of my mental state of being, the state a friend and artist I respect says not to consider mental "illness" (the names are just symbols anyhow) because our different way of being doesn't make us "ill". The state a now former friend/collaborator told me limits my spiritual capacities in comparison to whatever New Age hodge-podge her new male friend taught her about in the past two weeks or whatever. It doesn't always operate with the rhyme or reason that we're taught things operate with. It doesn't always matter what we're taught at all when the teachers might not be reliable. But I'm riding with it. I'm thinking instead today of that old chestnut from Loren Eisley about the starfish:

Once upon a time, there was a wise man who used to go to the ocean to do his writing.  He had a habit of walking on the beach before he began his work.
One day, as he was walking along the shore, he looked down the beach and saw a human figure moving like a dancer.  He smiled to himself at the thought of someone who would dance to the day, and so, he walked faster to catch up.
As he got closer, he noticed that the figure was that of a young man, and that what he was doing was not dancing at all.  The young man was reaching down to the shore, picking up small objects, and throwing them into the ocean.
He came closer still and called out "Good morning!  May I ask what it is that you are doing?"
The young man paused, looked up, and replied "Throwing starfish into the ocean."
"I must ask, then, why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?" asked the somewhat startled wise man.
To this, the young man replied, "The sun is up and the tide is going out.  If I don't throw them in, they'll die."
Upon hearing this, the wise man commented, "But, young man, do you not realize that there are miles and miles of beach and there are starfish all along every mile?  You can't possibly make a difference!"
At this, the young man bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it into the ocean.  As it met the water, he said, "It made a difference for that one."

Apart from the  overall message here, I like how the perceived "wise man" can still be taught another perspective from the other character.

5/30/11 La La Land - Buddha Boner

 

http://www.webcomicsnation.com/jennydevildoll/lalaland/series.php 

I can't explain it, that cat was fixed.

Late night. Insomnia fueled by a ticking clock in my mind. I can create while I sleep, but can I share it with the world? I have no critiques of the age-of-overshare, so long as it is not violating the privacy of another. It may not all be interesting but I still have more critique of ceasing the exchange of ideas. Eric reads to me from the blog of another performance artist and it's a frustration that the performance, a thing in the moment, is gone, but there's still this imprint of the ideas in writing. Our space remains more haunted by the living than the dead, the removers of shells don't seem to have been paid for the building any more than the physical trash pick-up. The landlord will be the one in trouble for the latter, though he still repeatedly does it, but the former will eat a person alive if they don't keep their nose clean, their shields up, and the common sense not to shit where they eat.

Astral Knife - Scars

Astral Knife cover of Scars by Fran Landesman.

Mr. Shaman Bring Me A Dream

A horrifying hippie/new-ager. Though on second thought, the new-age sort probably goes somewhere a little more...upscale than Mr. Shaman and the other psychics who advertise in the back of freebie newspapers. Or maybe...that IS "Mr. Shaman".

Woman's Beaten Body Found

Veins, veins, burning pain, swelling skin and blood.

Sensing that separateness is a lie.

Spider Ulcers

Finished piece. Pen & ink, collage/cut up technique, watercolor paint. I want to do more like this. I want to make a book. Maybe call it  "Got Eight Gene Problems But Your Cage Ain't One", after reading this new article about how schizophrenia is actually eight disorders created by combined malformed genetic clusters or some such thing. What does that make schizoaffective disorder then? Eight gene problems and a "bitchy resting face"? Known to my case handlers as "flat affect". Whetever, it helps me pose with Gunter Brus images.

Where's my ax?

Eric and I went to see the Viennese Aktionist retrospective at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, an out of the way trip to the Yupper East Side but well worth it. It's a three story exhibition of visceral glory, Nitsch, Brus, Schwarzkogler --some of them came from Schwarzkogler's "3rd Aktion", a series of photos that Eric always associated with the birth trauma he experienced though can't remember - does anyone remember their birth? It's one of the things that led to his appreciation of this art movement. Also the "Wedding" series.

 I took some other pictures of just the work, but haven't had a chance to go through them all yet...or figure out which ones won't get me kicked off Instagram.

Yesod (with an appearance from Nox Sophia)

Rat footage with an excerpt from "Systole Diastole", an unreleased Astral Knife track. We have quite a few of them and are looking to put out an EP in the reasonably near future.

Art and Magick go together. Often it's advised to view Magick as a series of subtly occurring transformations, the people I've met who went about it hoping to shoot fire from their fingertips like something out of a bad fantasy film often end up the most disenchanted. But sometimes Magick does scream right in your face. I was getting agitated again today about not having the means to buy my way into art notoriety the way I've seen others do, and lo and behold, an art gig comes my way. One I'd be proud to affix my work to. Literally, right at that moment. Mid freak-out. The timing was uncanny, that's all I'm trying to say here.

Creativity Is A Bottomless Hole To Feed

It is because I never go "I did a lot today", I'm always going "where did the time go? It's almost 1 A.M. and all I've done creativity-wise was practice violin, work on comics, start a handmade book, and set up an Astral Knife bandcamp. (Which I'm not linking to until I'm happy with it.) But here's some work-in-progress stuff I'll share in the meantime:

Comix:

 

This is a new series I'm working on called "Platform Edge". I originally developed the characters for an art gallery magazine, did a one page color strip...I'm not sure if the magazine was ever released yet or not. I haven't had time to go down there.

Cut up/Collage:

Chaos reigns, and the phone I could afford has a low-res camera. I want to finish this within the next five days for a handmade book exhibit I heard about. It states "Do you suffer monotony, boredom, uniform venous spider ulcers." In the center it reads "What is the sound of a person thinking?" A question an interviewer asked the creator of mogees. Well, Bruno Zamborlin didn't have an answer, but that doesn't matter, because all the real people who do this answered it at the Sclimpfluch Extreme Rituals carnival in 2011.

All the sounds here are being produced by registering brainwaves. But this doesn't get the media coverage of Mogees, which cost three times as much as a Crank Sturgeon Plug Ugly, but they're pretty and brightly colored and transform everything into the sounds of conventional instruments! The demo video features a number of clean cut young hipster types making conventional sounds with their pretty plastic contact mogees, but I heard they had to shoot it that way because the GeroGeriGeGeGe were unavailable.

Eric says there's probably some way to subvert the intent  of Mogees, but I wouldn't bother till they're cheaper.

 

Finding Beauty In Terror?

Ok, I think I've gotten the post-apocalyptic nightmare fuel feel I was after.

Eric & I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary this Monday! We celebrated by getting matching spiral ear jewelry at Unimax, the Chinatown based purveyors of all things tattoo and body modification (except actually getting work done. It's a supply outlet.)

Perhaps apropos to September 11th, which was today, lately I've been thinking about the shame tinged pleasure - or is it pleasure tinged shame, that comes from something apealing coming out of something atrocious. Not 9/11 specifically. It was a very painful time here in NYC, and the various agendas that clung to it's coattails -- from Operation Shuck and Jaw to the attempts at Machiavellian manipulation attempted by our upstairs neighbor -- fill me with nothing but disgust. Consider things more like LSD - initially developed for governmental mind-control experiments, sort of does the opposite. Or Krav Maga - tool of oppression employed by the IDF, but an effective martial art. Or even these ISIL videos/stills...their methods are reprehensible and their agenda fascistic - but one of those guys has this one knife I'm so jealous of. (Though, as analysts have pointed out, there is more than one knife in the first video.)

Soon these will be the kinds of thoughts we'll be carted away for writing. They may even be now. But since I was little, that which frightened me had to be fixated over. And now I leave you with a journal excerpt.

Astral Knife - Do Not Draw Cocks

"Do not draw cocks - the Feds are watching
 Do not draw cocks - the Feds are watching 
 Who is funding Islamic State?
 Is it the IDF? Is it the CIA? 
Who is sending funds their way?
It's not Aset or Malek Taus
The Feds are watching
Do not draw cocks"

I was making the words up on the spot and the was more to them, but I don't remember all of it at the moment. 

A Dream Worth DANCING For

Cheap 99 cent store poster paints on a free newspaper.  This is our cat Enzo, the one who loves to dance. He's a subway busker today, because the city has decided that subway dance crews (comprised mostly of inner city kids) are against the law. However, the cop who murdered Eric Garner over what would essentially be a misdemeanor charge still seems to be in will-he-face-charges-or-not limbo. So...Dance is worse than Death, but mainly depending on who's dealing out either. Got it. </sarcasm>
And my trains of thought still derail into tunnels of disaster, given that all I was trying to do was post a painting of a cat.

Further progress...

 

... but not yet where I want it to be.

I saw a St. Elmo's Fire streak over the slaughterhouse tonight. Oddly enough, I'd been explaining to Eric in the morning how the phenomenon worked this morning, after hearing the fuck-awful 80's song on the radio when we stopped in to get coffee. The song is from a movie I've never seen, I know that. I'm not even sure what the film is about and too apathetic to google a plot synopsis. Instead I got onto this tangent about how this song should have been the quintessential anthem for 80's Reagan coke-snorting AIDS-denying yuppie greed, because ultimately these light flashes were illusory pockets of phosphorescence and nothing more and could be responsible for leading people astray.

"St. Elmo's fire (also St. Elmo's light[1]) is an electrical weather phenomenon in which luminous plasma is created by a coronal discharge originating from a grounded object in an atmospheric electric field (such as those generated by thunderstorms or thunderstorms created by a volcanic explosion)."

Here is a short but meditative clip of this phenomenon. Nice white noise to it too.

 

Astral Knife - "Casa del Carajo"

Eric says this particular track is "hot" not in the standard parlance but as in very loud, distorted, and immediate. The semi-audible lyrics were a rape-revenge fantasy penned furiously on a subway car heading towards the Bronx one afternoon after being triggered by news stories of the rapist pig Ariel Castro, who'd held three girls hostage for a decade. We originally performed it with Doll Hospital, a sort of precursor to Astral Knife with Andy Laties and Rebecca Migdal. Several months after this, Ariel Castro did the only thing a rapist can do right, which is take himself off the planet, in his case by accidentally hanging himself in his cell while attempting auto-erotic asphyxiation. But still, a fantasy about growing razors out of your skin and slicing up a rapist with them is still something to crow about. Hey, I should make that the subject of my next painting. Astral Knife in this recording are Eric Blitz, Jenny Gonzalez-Blitz, and La Femme Natal.

Lady Rides The Subway

I've been fighting with a sore throat & cold all weekend. That and the 7 line being weird are keeping me home from a party where there's bound to be hookahs. Sigh...
Santa Muerte image in my journal:

Abuelita is addicted to "Caso Cerrado" (a Spanish-language version of "Judge Judy" that sometimes has a higher weirdness factor) and the other day a girl was on with a Santa Muerte statue like this. The throne she was seated on had the Heru Udjat (Eye of Horus) as one of the designs on it, but as La Huesuda is already a syncretization of Mictecacihuatl and more European images of Death brought over by the Spaniards, I guess a little more syncreticism can't hurt. Especially if it's a symbol that sacred.