Devastating Beauty

Stevie Wonder's output of four studio records beginning with Talking Book in 1972 remains a period of artistic masterpieces firmly rooted in a cultural and political terra firma that has rarely been matched.

The deeply funky Maybe your Baby, though not political, sets the tone of paranoia that could be said to characterize the aftermath of the 1960s. Later on the record, the defeat of utopian hopes and the faint, dying pulse of an American Left are heard, (or felt) on the song, Big Brother;

You've killed all our leaders

We don't even have to do nothing to you

you cause your own country to fall.

The richness of the analogue synths, the production of Talking Book marked the beginning of a string of albums that showed Stevie as no longer 'Little Stevie', but rather a fully mature artist doing what artists should do, which is giving a generation both a gift, in that those who receive this work are shaped, are taught by the works they receive, as well as paint a picture of the times they find themselves in.

The next record, Innervisions, saw Stevie recording virtually all the instruments. The album covers a wide range of themes and emotions. The song, Higher Ground redeems one's failings in life, negating regret by seemingly insisting on reincarnation while still alive, in this life, in this body. Mistra Know it All is a scathing attack on the Nixon administration. Too High, and Livin for the City describe a time when cities were an anathema, decades before they were put up for sale and had become the overpriced playgrounds for privileged young adults.

The next record, Fullfillingness' First Finale is a stark record in production, opening with the telling, Heaven is Ten Million Light Years Away, and the bitter, wrenching They Won't Go when I Go. This record was done after Stevie had been a car crash with a logging truck that left him in a coma. It seems to be a deep rethinking of what it is to be a human in the waning days of a tumultuous century. One cannot say it is a return to form, as it is the third of a string of brilliant records, but it does show an artist rethinking his place and role.

While 1977 saw punk as taking up the Vanguard for political music, disco moving to the forefront of popular music, and Peter Frampton and Fleetwood Mac inserting their bloated egos into the marketplace, Stevie was to release the crowning achievement of his career with Songs in the Key of Life. The title alone sort of says it all. By this time, the artist has shown us so much, art as activism, the depth and breadth of what a song about love could possibly be. Here, at the end of these four albums we could say, “Thank you, Stevie, you have made the world a better place”. A double album with a four song 45 bonus single included, which sums up the polarity of his vision in two ways. One is a line in the song, Ebony Eyes; Devastating Beauty. Indeed. The other is the song, Saturn, which seems to imply that for all his hope, all his love, things would be better anywhere than on this Earth.

I love you, Stevie Wonder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYz6gdbeXpo

Modern Journal of Popular Savagery

I am reading a two volume set a friend of mine made. It is the story of The Smiths, in their own words, song by song. There is the album, the lyrics, followed by quotes from interviews from the band members over the years 1984-2001. One thread that is consistent is Morrisey's insistence on the band making popular music, as opposed to underground, indie or alternative. The band existed at an interesting time, when such categories were being developed. It got me thinking about reading Marc Almond's autobiography last year, and his lamenting not being mainstream enough, or underground enough to fit anywhere. But what this is about is my friend, Porest's new record. The Smiths and Almond's lament fit. Porest has recorded a record so sharp, so angry, so funny and so political it sounds as if it is both the death knoll or radical, left politics as well as the last gasp of those things. I was thinking of how this record does not fit neatly in any category. Found sound, very crafted songs that you can dance to, post 'industrial'. For sure, especially given our current political state it is an important work. Another friend once commented, 'It is not MY fault Keiji Haino or Tony Conrad are not popular music' I get it. What machinery and zeitgiest make what sells, or is heard? Porest makes important records, the only ones that seem to matter politically after 9/11. And guess what? He is playing in portland right after Thanksgiving, our Genocide Celebration. The record is called The Modern Journal of Popular Savagery, by the artist, Porest. Look up the date for the west coast shows. I will be at the northern one!

Post Revolution Blues

While I like public declarations of love, the recent Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage left me a bit sad, and while waiting to let the feelings come and begin to articulate themselves I thought to write out my own public declaration of love; a love for certain times, a love of many people and for a way of thinking and acting that is increasingly vanishing. In order to trace such a line of inquiry I have to visit times that were before my own, but of which I consider myself a son and heir.

I consider myself a son of the 1960s, of its struggles histories and myth. My earliest memories contain vestiges of its turmoil. By the late 60’s I had entered first grade. The anti war movement, Civil Rights, Black Power and Feminism were daily topics on a national scale and everyday topics in the streets and homes, but as the people participating in some of these movements of social protest still believed they could change the world, our government’s leaders were waging a war to keep that from happening.

It is the marginalized that have the most to lose in such times, so when we have the margins of the marginalized rise up, it is often a thing to behold. Prior to the Stonewall Riots, what were called Homophile Societies lobbied for the acceptance of gays into mainstream America with a philosophy with a doctrine that “We are just like you”, and that if heterosexual society could see this we all could live happily ever after, meaning ENTER society, not CHANGE it. These Homophile societies were made up of largely white, middle class men.

Well it was Black and Puerto Rican drag queens and trans identified youths who were the ones at Stonewall to throw rocks and bottles at the cops for days, NOT an activity that displays a similarity to mainstream, white culture, and it was they who had the courage to finally stand up to the daily, blatant harassment and racism, and homophobia in that watershed event which is now considered the birth of modern Gay Rights.

Footage of 1972’s Gay Pride shows white, gay hippie men sitting around on the grass while one of the brave fighters from Stonewall was heckled and ridiculed. It was heartbreaking to see this footage when I did some 30 years later, and I thought, “ Here it is, the beginning of the end.

Shortly after Stonewall, two groups emerged as the dominant forces in early activist forces. One was the Gay liberation Front, and the other the Gay Activist Alliance. While the former sought cross-cultural ties with other minority group’s activists, seeking to CHANGE society, the Latter concerned itself with exclusively gay rights, as a way of ENTERING society. Throughout the early 70s those who sought out revolutionary change were violently crushed by our dear, great Democracy, however revolutionary thought was still carried out in the universities and in academia, growing into what would become great theoretical lines of thought in Feminism, in Multiculturalism, in Sexuality and the human body as they all relate to freedom.

Gay culture flourished in several different directions and gay ghettos cropped up in every big city across the continent, providing an open, social nurturing of gay people who may not have had this in smaller towns or cities. Infrastructures for public sex became established both in the private and public sectors in bathhouses, cinemas, parks and bathrooms. I have always thought even before Samuel Delaney could so eloquently put it in words, that in the world of public sex cross class contact happens more than almost anywhere else, and I believe cross class contact is very important in our country, so that people from different social strata can not only meet with intimacy, but sustain real relationships that can last years.

Flash forward to the early 1980s. AIDS and Post Punk. I was just entering my public life as a gay person, in my early 20s and people were dying like flies. It gave this country, the Government, the Churches, and the people to show just how homophobic they were. It felt like war, and it had its joys and its rage. The culture of Post Punk was utopian; it carried the revolutionary torch of the 60s and early 70s, and framed my coming of age. It also was not afraid of, or intimidated by Academia, or High Art, though its own aesthetics were low and abject. I remember going to clubs and talking over the loud music about essays like, Is the Rectum a Grave, or quoting essays that said things like, “it is our promiscuity that will save us” We were reading French Post Structuralism NOT to become snobs in our 20s, but to arm ourselves with whatever we could in a fight where the gay male body was seen by the larger culture as the home of death and disease.

With this association of the Gay Male as the home of death and disease, Gay Rights took a turn for the worse; it had returned to a discourse that echoed the Homophile Societies of the early 1960s, which was, “we are just like you”. In the mid 80s to mid 90s I saw a breach in gay culture that could really be broken down to Assimilation or Revolution. When I speak of Revolution it must not be pin-pointed to some ideology, or even violence. My own revolution has been a subjective one. I have become radicalized because of what I have experienced, because of what I have learned of life, because of the art I have seen, the music I have listened to and the books I have read, but above all because I despise hierarchies and power, I love human beings, and I am horrified by suffering and injustice.

Which brings me back to the first part of the day today when I read the Justices decision. I do not begrudge those who wish to be married, who are married, who enjoy love, But the White House, which I believe only houses sociopaths, as I think any head of state must be, lit in rainbow colors, and my bewilderment at what once began as a riot by black and Puerto Rican trans folk, in a time when people believed in revolution, culminating in THIS? I spent the morning feeling as if it was the death of an era.

To get back to the public declaration of Love. To paraphrase the late, great film maker Chris Marker, “to say I loved that time is to say I loved it unconditionally”

I woke up this morning and felt I have outlived my life yet again.

The pictures are of the demolished Trans Bay Terminal, where I had relationships with several young men of the course of several years.

Having never had bought a book through the Internet

Books, those magical objects that neatly contain whole worlds, have shaped and changed me just as much as has my movement through Space in Time. Certain books have detonated like a mortar in my brain, shattering ideas of what was real and opening up infinite possibility.

I have carefully built collections of books and sold them time and again. I have owned beautifully designed books printed with the finest of paper, with mounted illustrations and bound in soft leather, and I have owned cheap paperbacks with the covers ripped off. At one point I covered each and every book I had in plain, brown paper so I could not see the author or title. At this point my collection was so fine that I could grab one off the shelf and say to myself, “today I will read a slim book, and a tall one tomorrow”. It was my encounter with the books of Jean Genet that first showed me the true, transformative force that writing can be, and since then I have sought out literature, prose, poetry and memoir of equal beauty and strength.

There are shops whose shelves I have combed in cities across America and Europe. I can recall one, rainy afternoon in a bookshop dedicated to books on film in Dublin as easily as I can finding shelter from the fierce sun in Athens in a cool, dark shop. Some shops are rich like a stew, thick like nectar, as neat and orderly as a plate of sushi, or as indiscernible as a pot of thrice-cooked jambalaya.

Twice I have traded one continent for another, both times losing by collections and starting again. Now living again in the town I was born in, I am slowly excavating the thoughts of others and growing my own through the shops of this city. Powells bookstore is a thoughtless, dimwitted giant where a good book might be found like a polyp clinging to a colon, yet this store seems to be revered like the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

My shock however was great when I recently visited Mother Foucault’s bookshop the other day. I said once of Paperback Traffic, A shop I worked at owned by Margaret Cho’s father, which you could go in blindfolded and whatever book you touched would be an excellent volume on whatever subject. The same could be said of Mother Foucault’s

My heart raced as I spied books I long ago read as if I were seeing dear friends from times gone, such it was like watching a home movie on super 8 film, or taking a walking tour through the history of my brain. The store is charming and welcoming, seemingly designed after the principles on Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space with each corner and crevasse loaded with intimacy and image.

I purchased two books, Trio by Robert Pinget and Juan Goytisolo’s Space in Motion, and in the quiet of my car not an hour later I found the following sentence in the latter book, a sentence referring to the author Jean Genet mentioned earlier;

‘who transmutes the inner impulse into a manner of intuiting and revealing an alien oppression, which up until that point has never found a literary expression. The alchemy through which passion is transmuted by a body—a physical and cultural model of a body—into a voracious form of knowledge, capable of turning a lover into a linguist, a researcher, a scholar, a poet; of making him leap from the individual to the collective and opening the eyes to history and its tragedies and injustices…’

Heaven is Just Like This

The corner of 53rd and Thompson pulls me into its arms at least once a week. I park there an hour before work and read. It is a tiny intersection and the panorama afforded from the cab of the truck yesterday was punctuated by moving black; a crow flew directly at the windsheild, indeed stirring the fresh spring air as it flew low over my window, while a small, black cat glided lazily oversoft grass across the street. Standing in front of me, across the corner on the median between street and sidewalk were three trees in full white bloom, their roots immersed in the rich soil, quietly thinking, while in their arms two children climbed, whose motion caused a shower of fragrant white petals from the over ripe blossoms. To my left stood two houses built in the early 1940s with foundations and fireplaces made of river rock smoothed by years of huddling next to one another under the purr and gurgle of some forest stream, near or far.

It was here that I sat in what barely passed for a car some time ago and finished reading a bleak and beautiful novel, and was moved to describe the moment experienced upon turning its last page and looking at this corner. Yesterday, seasons later I finished another bleak and beautiful novel and thought to write how those two companions, Bleak and Beautiful inform each other, for bleak describes beauty by carefully inscribing its absence. Looking out the window I thought of other companions, fear and courage, hunger and satisfaction, war and play, and it felt as if I was suddenly in the sea of this Fierce and Beautiful World as in a current, swirling madly. I remembered a quote from a Jewish philosopher who it may be said killed himself on the Spanish border when his escape from Nazi Germany had come to an end. He wrote, "Heaven is just like this, only slightly different."

The Gray Squirrels, busy with their practical obsessions are unaware of this.

older short works

National Holiday from Tim Blue on Vimeo.
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National Holiday from Tim Blue on Vimeo.
Anna and Stalin from Tim Blue on Vimeo.
lost from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

Architecture from Tim Blue on Vimeo.
Tim Blue on Vimeo.

Ghostyard Supernova from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

labor from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

Fire in the Belly. A biography of David Wojnarowicz

Hell is a place on Earth. Heaven is a place in your head. David Wojnarowicz

The first book of David Wojnarowicz I encountered was the small art book, Memories that Smell like Gasoline, and what stood out were its contradictions. I recall being attracted to the title but not liking the cover for its striped border. Then there was the lurid and dangerous content that was beautifully rendered in words from the gutters, streets and porn shops that raised him from a tormented childhood. These stories then were illustrated in delicate, cloudy watercolors. Thumbing through this book unlike any I had held before I turned a page to see a painting of a man covered in Kaposi Sarcoma legions and was viscerally hit with fear.

This was when to get HIV was indeed very often a death sentence. I was in my early 20s living in one of the epicenters of the epidemic, San Francisco. In the early years of the Plague, the virus changed everything. It brought out the homophobia in our government, our churches and our families. Hate seethed and fear seeped. It felt like war. It was war, with real deaths everywhere.

I bought the book, and later his others. David was an artist working in several medias. He was a writer, a film maker, a painter and musician. His memoir, close to the Knives was his war cry. That book, like Memories, contained beautiful texts, black with sorrow and rage.

I have just finished Fire in the Belly, by Cynthia Carr, a great biography framing the cultural context in which David moved from an abused childhood, into the East Village scene, and on to become a very famous artist. It brought back those days to me. Days of a viable and thriving underground, where bands were not simply a weekend’s entertainment, but a form of activism that articulated our values, when art was not simply a decoration or investment, but stood up in anger for a youth with little hope for a future.

“He saw his death, the secret theme of Memories, as the logical outcome of a society that did not value him, that did not protect him, and never would” Fire in the Belly, page 531

Times have changed much. In my years of making art I have even met many of the people in this book. Some of the stories Cynthia Carr tells I have heard first hand. Fire in the Belly paints an accurate picture of those Viral Days.

Dust on the Dash

There are moments when all the senses become heightened and agitated, excited about what they perceive and time simply dissolves. At these moments a person can wander through all the lives one has lived and slippery memory hardens like polished agate.

In one of my final moments inside my car looking out of the windshield the huge, tumbling clouds allowed no sun to shine. The sky was seen through glass covered in drops from a recent and heavy rain, condensing light from the grays and white, cut with wires and poles. The scent of wet asphalt and tar rose from the parking lot in whirls of vapor.

It was in this damp warmth just such a moment came upon me and the interior of the car dissolves and reforms into car after car after car, ushering in memory after memory;

My father holding my bleeding wrist while driving me to the hospital after I had shattered a window in the back of the truck.

My sister simply falling out of the cab of another truck after her door had opened during a sharp turn. She was there, then not.

Wondering where my father had ‘put 500 dollars’ into the car before deciding a safe must sit in the floor where I now know the transmission was.

Getting stoned with a friend while parked in front of the downtown library listening to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks under golden autumn leaves lit by streetlamps.

The musty smell of sex, muscle cramps and feeling as if I were turning into a lawnmower, bicycle, or other awkward and bulky object.

Stiff with fear driving through a flashflood, a landslide, or misjudging the distance of oncoming traffic while passing on a desert stretch, nearly killing a friend and myself.

Crying alone after the death of a loved one, or hours spent reading, feet out the window.

That brand new chemical smell of a new rental car after signing an agreement I would not leave the State. My brother and I drove through at least five States and two countries.

As the moment falls away, in a final moment with a car I will soon retire, I look at the dust on the dash, the floor tossed with rolling papers, water bottles and dead lighters, a spider web made just that morning, and I will know I will always remember my dog resting her head on my shoulder while driving and all the laughter with friend or family at my side.   

Memorial Day

Memorial Day from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

Cinema is

Cinema is nothing but a series of relationships. The gaze at the object filmed is just a marker of the relationship between the film maker and the subject. Placed next to another shot, a relationship is constructed between not only those shots, but to that sequence and the film maker. When a film is finished it encompasses several of these relationships, and a new relationship with time and how it is experienced.

When projected through light, these relationships are sent over the heads of an audience, and reflected back from the screen to retinas of these people, where these relationships explode into thousands, if not millions more; relationships of people to memory, to hopes, to fears. Time, light, color, sound, these are vehicles for this vast set of relationships that we very simply call a film.

Social histories, personal memories, the concrete and the theoretical, narrative or abstract; a film is what is NOT there, but what is between each element in a perpetually creative whole.

Moment

In describing a moment, or rather what one soul might feel at any given instant, it may well be said that the entire experience of time for that soul must be called upon, for that is what a moment is; all of time for one soul condensed, compressed and sealed in one instant. Should I say for instance, that while sitting in a car, he finished reading a novel? A novel where the final words filled him with such sadness, or should I say that upon finishing a novel in a borrowed car that the first thing he saw upon closing the book was the petals of a tree in late bloom were scattered in wind and rain, and that this image was then gently extinguished by drops of rain on the windshield, thereby obscuring it? Or perhaps I should write that he thought for years that the precise image he had just seen was the exact image of happiness and that he had always wished to film it? At any rate he watched this image unfold and become obscured as a sadness filled him upon finishing that bitter and beautiful masterpiece of a book. It might be enough to write that with the passenger windows of the borrowed car open that four teenaged boys sat on a grassy slope to his left and as he listened to these boys, these Kings of Leisure quietly laugh, bounce a ball that their pleasant patterings sent him into his own past, for he was once a Sovereign of Leisure too, who though not often bouncing a ball, had Laid Waste to Time while sitting while sitting on grass, scented in rain. No, it was the first notes of music he had once played with his brother, who he missed and therefore brought the CD of a concert they had played once in Finland to play in the borrowed car. This music from the concert in Helsinki, and the series of notes he had played and was not satisfied with and gave to his brother, who took them and worked on them as a writer works on words, or a painter does with color, and made these notes beautiful, so the concert could continue in joy. As these notes played in the car as he finished that very sad novel, his mind went to Finland, to the sunny Island where their kind host took them, to the nap they took outside the museum on a grassy slope in a park before performing the concert. As these Kings of Leisure sat to his left, softly Killing Time, those notes of music played, and that singular image of happiness was blotted out by rain, he was filled with an almost lovely sadness, and he thought all these things in a moment, at once, and he thought to write down that moment. Scrambling for paper before this moment faded like dreams do upon waking, he ripped a paper sac open and tried to describe something beautiful.

This describing of a moment is also a review of the novel, Seiobo There Below, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai 

and then I woke up

I am working at a funeral/memorial service for a recently passed poet. There are in attendance several people from my distant past who no longer recognize me. As I am watching them in bewilderment a loft bed where children sleep collapses. While sifting through the debris a boil develops under my skin. Pushing my sleeve up to examine it, I can see it growing until to my horror it explodes in blood and pus. I continue working as my status is that of a serf, and I am required to regardless of any other consideration. All the while I feel new boils growing and exploding like waves.

After a while I notice a wonderful industrial machine, like a crane, but designed simply for pleasure. There is a line of people waiting to use it. One among them is a handsome young man flirting with me. He makes eye contact with me, and accomplishes several daring and impressive feats on the crane like structures, jumps off and immediately changes race, gender and age.

I take the lumber to a waiting truck and seek assistance for my condition. While a person reads poems of the deceased to a large crowd, I turn and notice Mt. Hood collapsing in a huge avalanche. I run to it and am surprised the distance was not distance, but scale; it was only a model of the mountain and was a set piece in a theater that ran films of Mt. Saint Helens exploding in a continuous loop.

The waves of boils continue.

I run into my sister, Theresa, who says, “you know what I got Jerry”

When I do not reply, she continues, “A whore on Kirk’s credit card”

Wait wait wait wait….

And then I woke up

Three shorts

Without Self from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

Light out of Soul from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

weg from Tim Blue on Vimeo.

The first is a statement on identity I made from out takes of a feature by Chen Wei Liu, and starring Kathleen Parks.

the second is documentary footage from a CHEAP tour of Austria

Lastly is a short meditation on political violence starring the shadow of Susanne Sachsse

Favorite Things, the next ten of fifty

Next 10 of 50

Graphic Design

When I was in my very first years of school, I remember sitting around the breakfast table, eating my cereal behind a wall of cereal boxes I had made using three packages to hide myself from the rest of the family so that I could wake slowly while examining these marvels of graphic design. In those days breakfast cereal would even come with a 45 rpm single on the back, which you could cut out and play on your record player, which is precisely what I did with the Bobby Sherman song that came on one such box, playing ‘Easy Come, Easy Go’ till my Mickey Mouse player wore its grooves into nothing.

This close scrutiny and curiosity of product packaging has continued all my life. Later things like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, with its bold prism cover, fold out sleeves and poster were treasures I would nearly give my young life for. Fonts, colors, shapes, images all in the service of selling something. Maybe this is what Marx meant when he said, ‘the metaphysical niceties of commodity fetish’

Still I somehow value a book a bit more, regardless of content if it has a pleasing and unique size, harmonizing color, and a spine with a title that calls out just a bit more to be picked up and read. The revolution of silk screening has spawned and endless sea of banality in regards to T-Shirts, but the simple image of a gun on a tank top of a gangster in the TV show, The Wire was brilliant. Graphic design as self-expression; I am a weapon. Indeed the merging of politics and popular culture bled into the 1960s and 70s, from Black Power to Punk through graphic design

 Acid Mothers Temple

A Friend of mine visited me in San Francisco once. Throughout the 80s he was a research engine on anything ‘underground’, and though he was never the type of person to wear it on his sleeve, being more interested in the contents of his passions more than personal credit, he is probably one huge force in supplying ‘cool people’ with their tastes in film and music.

This particular trip we made our customary trips to record and bookstores, and when we got back to the house we put on a copy of Acid Mothers Temple. Pataphysical Freakout. Within seconds I asked him to take it off, knowing that what I was about to hear would blow me away, and that moving around the house and cooking dinner would not be compatible with such an experience. I later bought my own copy and entered a universe that would change me forever. It was all there; the connection to the past in the form of mind bending psychedelia, and even to Dada it the reference to Alfred Jarry’s Pataphysics. I submerged myself in the waters of Japanese underground as the underground dried up here on this continent, morphing first into Grunge, then later Indie Rock.

Whether it is the masterful musicianship and arrangements of Tsuyama Atsushi’s troubadour albums that sound as if they came from the middle ages, or the psych/drone, aggressive minimalism of the solo works of Tabata Mitsuru,, the lovely shimmering light on water sound of Higashi Hiroshi, and Cotton Casino’s project, Pardons, powerful drumming of Shimura Koji (who could very well have fit into Coltrane’s world), or the searing, ripping guitar work by the group’s leader Kawabata Makoto, AMT remains a strong and vital force, both live and studio, working their asses off with constant touring, being a huge inspiration to me in my own work. Indeed it was after hearing a side project, Mainliner years ago with Kawabata and Nanjo called Imaginative Plain, that I felt I needed to attempt an answer in my own record with Jerry Blue, Mark Gergis and Cheryl Leonard, The Pixie Kitchen’s RIOT 00:00, a record that also was in my own way a tribute to one of my favorite records of all time, Sly Stone’s, There’s a Riot Goin On.

Mainliner, in a new lineup put out the most amazing record I have heard in years in 2013. It is called Revelation Space. It sounds like predator and prey, or the song of oil on water fucking. The Ouroborus with a contact mic on its tongue!

 Savory and Sour

I prefer these tastes in both beasts and in the bounty of our earth. Warm squashes, baked with butter, maybe stuffed with nuts and other things, Tender little quail are among my favorite fowl, living or on my plate. Rich stews, Kale sautéed with onion, garlic and tossed in mustard. Quince pies, lemon tarts. Music played while preparing this feast could be begun with Coltrane’s Favorite Things

Francis Bacon

I can make sense of the 20^th century by looking at his canvases. The blood, and the fear exist in a clean, modernist background. He paints the Utopian dream of Modernism as a failed project, or at least an impossibility. One thing I did not know until seeing many of his paintings up close is that much of what I thought was white space painted was unpainted canvas, absence as part of the composition. Clean nightmares.

COIL/Genesis/TG

I first heard Throbbing Gristle at a record shop on Burnside in downtown Portland called Singles Going Steady. They had a turntable available for customers to play records before buying them. A friend was with me and he was taken with the name of the band. It was a 45 rpm, but I no longer remember the name of the song. We both were familiar with punk, but were completely unprepared for what we heard. My friend laughed his head off, and gave me the headphones. What I heard would change me forever. It was noise alone, aggressive and anarchic, but done on purpose and committed to vinyl, and with art on the sleeve. What could this be, or mean? It instantly had me questioning everything; what is music? What is political? What is Art? It took me some time, a couple of years in fact to wrap my brain around what I heard that afternoon, but TG became MY Velvet Underground, and an inspiration and soundtrack to my life. Various other, later projects and offshoots I would follow sporadically, but to this day always returning. The symphonic, diabolically beautiful music of COIL is a wonderful trajectory to follow from beginning to end. Genesis’ Psychic TV Theme records are among my most cherished records. It was an amazing birthday brunch in 2009 where my friend, Marie Losier brought Tony Conrad, AND a copy of a record he had just finished with Genesis. It was through Marie that I met Genesis later, and had a chance to personally thank for helping make me a musician and artist.

The Arcades Project

Begun in 1927, Walter Benjamin began collecting a variety of texts relating to life in the 19^th century. These texts range from political tracts, letters, essays, bits of advertisements, newspaper articles. His aim was to use collage of various sources to paint a critique of life as a whole when Capitalism was consolidating itself into a great and fearsome force during the Industrial Revolution. It began as an idea for an article and grew into a massive, unfinished tome. The book is a dizzying one, best read non-linearly, and is by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking. As well it is an important book for us, laying down a history which we are connected to as Capitalism revolutionizes itself again in our post information, post speculation days in the 21^st century.

Lewis Mumford

Though I love all the books I have read by him, the one I will talk about here is Sidewalk Critic, a collection of article he wrote during The Great Depression for New Yorker magazine. Nothing escapes his gaze, he will review a local diner, a Laundromat, a row of houses or something as ambitios as the Rockofeller Center. He examines how these structures impede, or help life flourish, and of the forces creative or monetary which shaped what we know to be the New York today as it was being built. Sometimes hilarious, always entertaining and sometimes very sharp. But when Lewis Mumford shows his fangs is sometimes when his writing is its funniest.

Tsai Ming Laing

I first saw The Hole, a musical set during a pandemic where humans were ‘turning’ into cockroaches. It is a love story of two who refuse to evacuate, and the erotic center is a hole in the floor between their apartments. Fantastic! Later I saw The Wayward Cloud, also a musical and a love story, where thwarted lovemaking due to porn shoots ends in what could possibly be necrophilia. This film comes complete with dancing penises coming out of toilet stalls and having sex with watermelon helmets! Also Fantastic!

Feedback

Maybe guitar feedback is the Dark Matter of rock music, and those who wield it, shape it and coax it out are alchemists. Feedback is chaos speaking. Playing with feedback is dangerous, like feeding the big predators at the zoo. Hendrix at Monterey pop Festival, John Fahey on his revelatory Womblife. I always have kept an archive of feedback to season any new music with, like garlic or hot sauce.

Women behind the more famous men

Unica Zurn/Hans Bellmer

Yoko Ono/John Lennon

Dorothea Tanning/Max Ernst

Alice Coltrane/John Coltrane

Laure/Georges Bataille

Beverly Conrad/the Warhol Scene

Diane Arbus/Allan Arbus

Yes this could go on and on, and while most of these women are famous as well, the stories of these relationships fascinates me, and I would love for someone to write this book (I am too lazy, but would eagerly buy it)

Thursday, October 17th

For many reasons I have been celebrating a personal holiday every year on October 17^th. When it lands on a Thursday it extra special. There is a feeling in October that you are in the company of a very dear friend, and you both know for whatever reason you will not see each other in a very long time. So the feeling is a calm presence, yet very strong, and tinged with a bit of sadness.

This year I spent my three days off leading to the 17^th in a nice way. On Tuesday I drove to the beach with my Mother and Sister. Every millisecond was visual overload of psychedelic beauty, like gold and red flowing into your eyes at 60 miles per hour. There were quiet times when my sister read her textbooks in the back, and my mother and myself simply were conduits of yellows, reds, purples, and light flashing off forest streams alongside the highway. At the ocean we could see for miles on the empty sands, and I could let Lola off her leash safely to run her full strength with that simple joy that dogs have.

The next night I went with my dear Friend/Twin to see the premier of a documentary on The Satyricon, a punk club in Portland that had a run of nearly 30 years. It was an emotional night for many reasons. The first was that this was the first time I had gone to see a feature in a theater since coming back to the US, and it made me miss my Berlin friends quite a bit. It was intense to see thirty years later so many faces from a youth that set standards for the rest of my life in what friendship means, and also to see what both time and hard living has done to many of us. Indeed, many did not make it to 2013. The film, Satyricon, Madness and Glory was a success for a few important reasons. One was it showed clearly how a nightclub is more than a place where people listen to loud punk and experimental music, score heroin or coke in the bathroom, or breakup with a bad lover, but a nightclub can also be a political work of art. This film showed us as a politically minded generation, and the owner of the club as an artist. The film had nice many performances that had me very much missing playing music live, but more importantly it also showed the violent side of gentrification in a section on the bombing of that block by a few would be developers, and police intimidation in a section on an alleged riot started at the club when police roughed up the owner. Afterwords I went with a group of folks to The Matador and oh did we conjure the old days, ending in an impromptu dance in what was by no means a dance bar. God, it was a night to love life.

Lastly, today, the 17^th, I went for a nice long walk at a nearby marsh with a dear friend. Tonight I cook dinner listening to music made by my friends Cheryl E. Leonard and Jim Campbell. Cheryls compositions are as if nature came alive and started playing weird and lovely songs, and Jim’s are like all the flotsam and jetsam and debris from our overworked, beaten world had started vibrating, pulsing, shaking and humming. 

How Far We Have Come. New Paintings by Eric Stotic

Earlier today I went to go see new paintings by Eric Stotik at the Laura Russo gallery in Northwest Portland. I have not seen Eric’s work in about 30 years, but the time back then is worth a story. Then the neighborhood was affordable, and most of my friends were part of the vibrant and fertile, as well as destructive and drug addled post punk scene, and many of us lived there.

 One of my domiciles then was a storefront on NW 21^st. I remember sleeping in the display window the first night hoping someone would want to buy me. I lived there alone at first, and did not know what to do with the place, so I painted a question mark on the door, thinking that and an ‘open’ sign would speed up the ideas. A woman came in one day and asked if the space was a gallery, because she would love to do an installation there. I had no idea what an installation was, but said indeed it was a gallery and she was welcome to do such a thing, and my first show was on. I think it was Tammy (now Stotik) who arranged for Mike King and Eric to do the next show at the Question Mark Gallery. Mike hung paintings on glass, and Eric hung a few very intricate paintings.

 Back then there was a very strong current flowing between art and the Underground, and flowing through our young politics. I learned much about 20^th Century art back then in our minor utopia which we saw as standing against SO much; Reagan’s covert wars in Central America, AIDS (then still a ‘gay cancer’), and a never ending cold war. For myself, a 20 something gay boy, I really did not feel myself as having much of a future. Many of my friends were in bands, were performers, writers, poets and painters. Though I did not really know him then, Eric was among us young embattled underground utopians.

I soon left Portland for 30 years, returning now, finally as the artist I was sort of made to be. Clay has called it a disease, others have called it a ‘calling’, others still have called it a career. Art does a few things. It shows a person’s soul, and how they see their world. Art shows history from the side of the extremely personal, art is a synapse between individual and collective imagination. Art tells stories.

Eric Stotic has become a fine artist. All those things art does, he has learned to command with skill and grace. The large painting, maybe 50 feet long, was conceived as a circle, a painting with no beginning and no end. The slide from a barely maintained peaceful rural setting into hell is a very quick one, and the bodies strewn about, tortured and dismembered are the end of so many stories. The work is a staggering comment on the state of the world, a hymn to all those torn apart by largely western, capitalist interests. For all its violence, it remains a somehow tender thing as well. Shit, so may things come to mind, but the one that sticks out is a painting I saw by Hieronymus Bosch at the National Gallery in Berlin. On a black, wooden square, he painted a white circle. Very small, in the center of the circle is a fire. It seemed to me that all of his paintings were conceived in this tiny fire. It appears Eric has wandered into that fire and gives us the vision he had there.

Walking down 21^st as I left the wake of bodies hung on the gallery wall, I was looking at all those fine buildings we lived in back then when cities were not bought and sold by the rich, and I could not help but wonder what it meant to say something like, “Look how far we have come”

painting details were not uploaded with permission, just trying to get y'all out to the show