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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
