Whorelando: the wrap-up

THE PARK AT NIGHT






...AT DAY



miss you already
ox

Whorlando: week five +

Still cutting the video. One more scene to shoot.

Also formulating a thesis on modern entertainment in amusement parks...

Thursday!

Be sure to pop over to Portland OR to see Jeremy Okai Davis' solo show and some big boobies I drew for his pin-up wall.


my piece looks sort of like this.
(I feel naked without a scanner)

Whorelando: Week four and a half ish

A lot has happened in the last week +. Lots of folks coming and going. I have been to some places around town that are not horrid. Had a couple decent meals, went to this neat bar that has these secret rooms behind bookcases with secret cameras. live feeds from photo booths. Got a tour around the rides at the park. The Hulk Rollercoaster. The Spiderman ride (sort of mind blowing)...

I've been practicing my secret camera-ing during my trips to get coffee in the park. {favorite examples below}


But, some of the most fun I've had lately, is shooting a music video with the fine folks I work with down here. 8 blue men in drag. you saw it here first, baby. They are a fierce hot mess and I love them ferociously.

Whorelando: week thrizzle

WHERE I TAKE MY BREAK or SUESSLAND



...and by request: WRESTLER and WRESTLER BETTIES with forklift

{I am working on my sneaky photo-taking. more on that later}
check out those boobie lamps in suessland. ...and the exquisite topiary.

another video

So, an experiment in technique. no cuts. one constant speed. no reverse. one light source. One chunk of footage sped up to 200% (recorded with music at half speed). All further manipulations in speed, flash frames and reverse movement are illUUUUsion.

true love will find you in the end

a bit of trivia: I tuned the tv to mtv as I thought it would be the most flickery. As luck would have it, that tila tequila reality game show about her finding love was on.
booga booga.

Whorelando: week two

.....Fig. 1.......................................................Fig. 2......

.....Fig. 3.......................................................Fig. 4......

Fig. 1 - Stardust Cafe. A bit of solace from the craziness. A friend of Neptune works here. It felt much more home-like than anything else thus far.

Fig. 2 - Local foliage

Fig. 3 - The high-end healthy grocery store. They pipe in 'the greatest classical hits' and have an entire candy isle featuring a variety of jelly beans you can purchase in a plastic honey bear jar. No soy cream cheese, mind you. It's like aliens came and tried to figure out the proper way to do 'fancy health food store' and this is what they came up with.

Fig. 4 - Along those same lines, the staff "grill" at universal features some bizarre arrangements of plastic vegetables either standing upright in some sort of clear lucite substance or just jammed into a big glass jar. They simulate the actual flavor and constancy of the food vended below.

So I'm settling in okay. I'm missing my film camera. None of my digital devices capture crisp focus. I'm sending off the very last of the gene wilder t-shirts today. Since I got orders for six within the last week, I'm wondering if there will be a call for a second run. Sending jeremy off his booby drawing too. I hope I can scan it before it goes. Meanwhile, I have some sneaky plans involving a purse I bought at target and a certain weensy video camera. I need to see if there's night vision on it. we'll see. {dun dun Duhhhhhh}

*hearts*

via senor eades

alright alright alRIGHT alright

ode to my apartment


a regular lunataco.

orlando: week one

florida is totally strange.
It's as though all the parts and peoples were made from rubbery rubbery and hollow.
If you are looking to write a thesis on the intricacies of facade in american culture, I recommend orlando as an excellent field study. The whole place is laced with a tangible sensation of what that is.
atrocious food. Absolutely everything is a fancy facade with nothing to back it up. I suspect that I will be wearing just the front of my clothes, attached by some sort of tabs over my shoulders, by the time I return from here.

universal studios is a trip. I've been trying to take phontos of the madness. But, the crazy doesn't quite seem to be making it through the lens. There is actually a mini, faux new york city set with functional businesses in it. I go there for starbucks sometimes. All the buildings are fake two story ones and they have actually carved cracks into the sidewalks with some sort of tool. there is a delancey st and 5th ave and a weensy "central park" comprised of about four benches, a statue and a mix of real and fake shrubbery. There's also a sizable 2D painted public library complete with carved lions out front. The poetry of existence of this is not lost on me.
This cluster of blocks is just a few steps away from the "twister" building with the smoking sign and around the corner from the live filming of wrestling in the building next to ours. They block through their moves in the alleyways in all their spandexed glory. Right when I walk out of our building, I can see the Nemo ride and the dr. seuss land and the hulk roller coaster just beyond. All the buildings on our side of the fence have art deco paint schemes and big hollywood-like "Stage 34"s etc. on them. There are pieces of different rides in the alleyways and gobs of golf carts zooming around.

I'm told we can get into bunches of theme parks around for free. I'm thinking the best policy is going to be to not bother looking any further for "normal" but plug my nose and sail down that rabbit hole.

April: first half: phontos

jersey........................................path station

naked lady................................clothed man

Art vs. Common Man

Below: an experiment to see if a painting by an accomplished painter, fetching huge wads of cash for his work, could catch the attention of the average passerby.


An article in the Washington Post a year ago did a similar experiment with an extremely accomplished violinist busking in a mall. The argument that sound would have helped to get people's attention does not stand.

A wonderful send up of all sides of the argument, almost cartoonishly so, (regardless of the earnestness all participants wielded) can be found in this 80s British talk show about art featuring Leigh Bowery and some real characters both in the unappreciative studio audience as well as the stiffs arguing the case for art,
...well shit. the video has been pulled from youtube. the second part is still there though the meat of the discussion with all its "rubbish"s is missing. grr. Wonderful trilogy of discussions on a topic: dashed. Here's the second half, but you miss them all arguing about an installation of a stack of bricks and Leigh's fantastic performance singing and then giving birth to a full grown bloody, naked woman.

They're HEErrre...

Late March 2008: Phontos

Aforementioned Philosophy Post

Let's first say that I will be making absolute coleslaw of these ideas and I highly recommend checking out some of this work for yourself.

I've been reading The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts. I had a little trouble getting into it as I couldn't grock with his 'voice' initially. I felt like he was repeating the same thing over and over or then saying some huge concept and then skipping over its meaning. But, I soon found some things of interest. His basic idea is that our concepts of 'individual' and 'alone' are a myth perpetuated by language among other things. He works from a Hindu philosophy called Vedanta, which roughly says there is nothing outside of "god". I enjoyed the story he told his kids about us all being 'god' so involved in playing pretend, we've forgotten we are god.

God also likes to play hide-and-seek, but because there is nothing outside God, he has no one but himself to play with. But he gets over this difficulty by pretending that he is not himself. He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear.

Also his discussion of the crest and valleys of existence. dark and light, life and death, are like waves, "rates of vibration", "poles or aspects of the same thing". Nothing to be afraid of. Cause and Effect also figure into this concept. He says both the "cause" and the "effect" arise simultaneously, out of necessity. One does not create the other. (Chicken or Egg? both) Everything exists in relation to everything around it. You can only see a thing in relation to what it is up against. positive and negative space. It is all the same field.

He sites a quantum theory textbook:

...the world cannot be analyzed correctly into distinct parts; instead, it must be regarded as an indivisible unit in which separate parts appear as valid approximations only in the classical [i.e., Newtonian] limit... Thus, at the quantum level of accuracy, an object does not have any "intrinsic" properties (for instance, wave or particle) belonging to itself alone; instead it shares all its properties mutually and indivisibly with the systems with which it interacts. Moreover, because a given object, such as an electron, interacts at different potentialities, it undergoes... continual transformation between the various forms... in which it can manifest itself.

And from the biophysicist Erwin Schrodinger:

Thus you can throw yourself flat on the ground, stretched out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable as she, indeed a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew to new striving and suffering. And not merely 'some day': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth , not once but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end.

His basic idea is that we need to realize on something more than a logical level, that we are all connected. Almost the need for a physical understanding of the energy we are all comprised of.

What floored me, upon watching this Jill Taylor talk, was how all the ideas that Alan Watts was trying to articulate back in the sixties, can be fairly neatly plopped into the function of the right hemisphere of the brain. Science caught up.
{this talk is 18 minutes long. I highly encourage taking the time to watch}


So these are the things I've been pondering. The closest I got to any real understanding was during a fairly brutal session of kinetics a couple months ago. And was I lay there, suffering, I was struck by the lack of time and space and distance. I was every person who's ever lived. An abstracted, condensed version of the total human experience. I laughed.

Subcultures, their uniforms and their histrionics

I came across both of these facts a couple days ago. Apparently, there are riots in the streets of mexico between "emos" and "punks". I can't understand all of the broadcast. I get a "punk' saying something about "they're copying our style". A friend suggests that they're just teenagers blowing off steam. I find it staggering. The similarities between the two groups are many more than the differences. Both have intense devotion to a musical genre, some flavor of angsty world view that goes along with it and a rigid wardrobe and hairstyle scheme. (The strict rules of 'cool' have always been in opposition to the 'rebellion' it touts). All the more well matched, I suppose. A sort of civil war; brothers probably know the best ways to get their brothers in a tizzy. Music and style have overcome world politics in terms of what will get people out on the streets hollering at each other.

The very same day, I was reading a chapter in Boorstin's book 'The Creators' (an entire history of humankind's creation; creation myths to picasso. I've been chipping away at it for three years). This chapter was about Goethe and his first smash hit "The Sorrows of Young Werther". This book not only made him a lit-star but touched off an absolute craze in Germany at the time. The story of this passionate young melancholy chap offing himself drove hordes of people to dress like him in the signature pale blue coat and yellow trousers. The ladies could collect china telling the story in pictures and wear themed jewelery. (apparently there were a fair amount of copy-cat suicides too). I'm not sure if those Werther-lovers ever went up against other sub-sects of sturm and drang literary fans or not. But, I can't help but see the roots of emo and goth and punk and indie rock and their devotees in this. Amazing that something based on so much mopey-ness can breed such communal action. Perhaps political leaders should pay more attention to their clothing style and theme music, the merchants have known the importance of that sort of thing for ages.

T-Shirt Deadline

Stop the Gene Wilder Remakes!

The order is officially going in on wednesday (tomorrow).

You send request, sizes, shipping address-I send paypal invoice
- You send monies -I send you shirt(s)

vaganthead (at) gmail (dot) com

Gallery Opening

pure magic (courtesy of friend's incredibly fucked up camera phone, except for that last one. which I tried to match with the first two)

.....fig. 1...........................fig. 2..............................fig. 3.....

fig. 1: the artist with mr. weatherspoon's nefrotittyafroditie.
fig. 2: the gallery mascot, polly.
fig. 3: the artist with the Artist.(courtesy of ms. allison)

S O L - I - T U D E - A: a medley

Ah, life experience.
I am coming to the end of a four month period (with a juicy five week hiatus in toronto) of fairly intense solitude. Sort of my stab at doing a "Thoreau"(no tv, no cell reception, no people, lots of internet). Not for the fucking faint of heart. I'll save the particulars for the poetry tome. (alone... seclusion... dilluuuuuusionn)
Meantime, I've gathered some other folks' meditations on the subject:
.....................................................

The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.
- Pearl S. Buck


I love people. I love my family, my children . . . but inside myself is a place where I live all alone and that's where you renew your springs that never dry up.
- Pearl S. Buck

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Garfield without Garfield: genius. In addition to being an excellent depiction of the pathetic human condition, it is also rendered gorgeously with all that silence. go look at all of them.





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I would add, by way of soothing the ache, david byrne has a really nice collection of jazz on his radio right now. there's something about Monk, that makes me feel human.

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COMING SOON: My Philosophy Post! or What I Have Learned!

Movies I Approve of:

#73.1 - A HAWK AND A HACKSAW - Part 1 by lablogotheque

This is what life is all about.

MOVIE RECOMMENDATIONS:

Helvetica:





I adore Helvetica. I am probably the target/wet dream audience as I am an unschooled graphic designer-wannabe. (I am also a color-namer, EMT and luge-r wannabe, so...)
Perhaps it was all those little steel type set letters my mom had in her knick-knack case growing up, but that intro bit with the typesetting ranks with the opening credits of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (gene wilder version thankyouverymuch(subscribe for your t-shirt here)) as the purest of visual porn in title sequences of all time (if that sequence of the orange crayons getting made on mr. rogers would qualify, that too). I absolutely gasped at certain sections. When that man explained how he made grids and then drew and arranged letters. Revelation.

I am a typeface appreciator. (also chocolate, and I'll add music to the list) Things I adore that I lack the skills to make myself..


Be Kind Rewind:





I adore Be Kind Rewind. Gondry keeps doing all my ideas before I get a chance. Some kids were inspired to "swede" star wars. So awesome. See it now.


Also:




Genghis Blues (Tuvan throat singing makes me cry), Chuck Jones: Extremes and In-Betweens (Brilliant Genius man), Live Free or Die (excellent recreation of a meld of about 20 different kids I grew up with)

Somebody needs to make a really awesome movie about Richard Feynman. Gotta see if I can find that doc we saw in 10th grade science class...

Also, I made a Film/Video Production Reel that can be seen here. I'm working on (or rather avoiding working on) one for the performance stuff...

Stop the Gene Wilder Remakes Page + Timely News

I threw up a quick page for this {yarfff... splat} HERE

lots of interest. big ol' learning curve. It's gonna be awesome.
...............................................................
wow. talk about timely:

new york post today
time magazine today