Hekate Group Halloween Show

Friday September 30th I'll be showing two new paintings in the Halloween Group Show at Hekate on Ave B, the witchy elixir themed sober bar that's been making a splash downtown. You don't need to be an occultist to enjoy the concoctions and events at Hekate. You don't even need to be sober... proprietress Abby Ehmann also owns Lucky, the bar across the street. 

The show will be up for a month. 167 Ave. B NY NY 10009 

www.hekatenyc.com

Angry Pro-Choice Bitch T-Shirt!

New shirt at #teepublic! Show them how you REALLY feel while aiding and abetting abortion at every turn! Linktree in bio or https://www.teepublic.com/user/jblitz

"Become Ungovernable" Rat T-shirt Design!

The "Become Ungovernable" BaphoRAT is now available on an array of tees, tanks, sweatshirts, and other gear!

   It's on my TeePublic shop at https://www.teepublic.com/user/jblitz , along with some of weird and creepycute original designs.

For the 100th Anniversary of Kurt Schwitters "Ur Sonate", recording Urchestra in Woodstock

 

Around 2008, Eric and our friend Andy Laties founded Urchestra, a freeform experimental band dedicated to interpreting Kurt Schwitters tone poem, Ur Sonate (or Sonata In Primeval Sounds). They both share a love of jazz and dada, so this seemed natural. Rebecca Migdal, Andy's wife, joined on vocals. Over the years, a number of artists and musicians have participated. There's also been some of the participants who have passed. Valerie Caris- Blitz, Eric's first wife. Pronoblem. John Landino. So it seemed like the moment should be seized to do a definitive Urchestra recording. Though Glove, (aka Josh Selman) was not able to make it due to being across the country at his wife Alison Knowles retrospective . 

However we were joined by Clubhouse Studio owners Karl Berger and Ingrid Sertso (who's vocal work I'm now getting into as a result of this.) I would have loved to spend some time checking out Woodstock, but maybe another day.

Head Peddlers Record Release

NYC folk-punk duo The Head Peddlers are having a record release at Hekate on August 14, and me and Eric will be helping on the live show with drums and vocal harmonies (as will another talented singer named Laura Thomas). You can get more info on Hekate's site here:

https://www.hekatenyc.com/events/head-peddlers-album-release-party

...and also get some healthy herbal elixirs at their sober bar.

Revamping My Artist Blog

But because Weebly software is annoying as hell to work with, click this link to read about Ayin Halliday's Small Potato Manifesto, Too Tough To Die from Birdcage Bottom Books, and Jon Allen's Pop Wasteland magazine, all of which I contributed to late last year after a go round with the NYC shelter system. 

https://jgonzalezblitzblog.weebly.com/

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.