"I" was a performance not an essence.

Time pressure had narrowed their 'cognitive map' ; as they raced by they had seen without seeing.

 

 

Running into a café to grab a latte, I noticed an old stained glass window hung on the wall like a picture. As I waited for the espresso to brew and the milk to be frothed, I thought about what that out-of-context window meant in the larger scheme of the atmosphere, of attitudes, of life.

Sure it fulfilled some generation specific fascination with all things 'vintage' in the hipster world of re-appropriation, but having spent so many years building things with people who will never be thanked for their participation, let alone noticed by the kinds of people that consume the things we produce, my heart swelled for a second. This piece of functional history was given the opportunity to grace a wall in the manner of artists. There are few names we know in the world of metalworking or construction, but someone allowed this errant piece of craftsmanship imply that an individual did craft this thing and it was beautiful in the way art is beautiful.

Even though sunlight will not pierce its glass and give color to the dust motes in some child's memory, something about removing it from the structure of houses, which we wear like skin, ours alone - it allows me to contemplate the individual who made this thing. To wonder if he liked his job, to respect the cleanliness and straightness of his lines and soldered edges, to guess at the time this piece was born by reading the weathered wood framing, and to place his meticulous, rough hands inside of its history.

It is a portrait of its creator. It is a depiction of the place where drudgery and art define the life of a man. Just as it exists everywhere around us, from carpenters to garbage men, so many unsung heros in our day to day that have jobs too boring for us to remember or acknowledge. When I look at this piece of salvaged architecture on the wall I am filled not with thoughts or opinions, but a strong sense of a person, faceless, focused.

And hands.

Sure, steady, meticulous, patient, rough hands.







if ritual is art, then it is stretched over the frame of habit.

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Pearls are commonly viewed by scientists as a by-product of an adaptive immune system-like function.

let's move slowly to the pulse of the neon golem we sculpted from the bones of this city

 

 

 

 

Showing up at an odd little storefront, where I had been invited by a friend I hadn't seen in awhile, I walked into a cramped costume shop area that opened up into a kitchen. It was a group of fire spinners and circus folk, a community of rainbow colored hair and expertly fantastic makeup. Descending into their basement-turned-yoga studio, I sat on the side and watched the packed space filled with bodies twisting and turning sticks in a bizarre pantomime, barely missing each other in their pajama-like clothing, moving to music playing at varying speeds in their heads. It wasn't until my friend lead me upstairs and into the ice slicked courtyard that I understood the importance of that awkward room. Once the ends are lit, they swoosh deep and loud through the cold air, and the fearlessness of the body manipulating these flaming batons is fiercely obvious. Enviable. Powerful.

As the J train moves through Brooklyn, it sits above Broadway, so looking out of the windows alternates between looking out across different neighborhoods and staring into upper apartment windows, level with the people inside. There are surprising and silly placements of graffiti, both good and bad to break up the architectural landscape with a hint of whimsy and broken rules. I usually sneer at the unpracticed hand of some of the wannabe artists... but that awkward room of kids twirling batons and balls on string stayed with me - I realized that for there to be truly profound graffiti, there first be massive amounts of bad to mediocre graffiti. That we must all begin at the beginning.

That we constantly undervalue and overlook the importance of Time.

Two different psychics mentioned during readings with me, right before I went away to college as a freshman, that they saw something blocking my throat. It would take me years to eventually realize that I struggled most of my life with feeling like no one could hear me, and it reflected itself in my sexual relationships as well as my work ones. College provided powerful training in how to have a voice visually, but not in what I wanted to say with it. Schools and parents place such high expectations on a fast turn around from our studies to making money that they never pause to consider the human being at the center of it, underdeveloped as a person, but expected to crank out accolades and a reasonable rate of return. Going from home, to school - from parent's opinions about the world to what teachers feel is waiting out there - how can anyone expect us, upon Graduation, to have big, important things to say yet. All we have is other people's experiences to draw from, someone else's story. Someone else's voice.

It might take years to hear our own voice under the clamoring of voices and opinions around us, at us, over us.

In the behemoth machine we are an extension of -the Economy- our time is transubstantiated, from intangible to flesh, its physical form we know as Money. In the entertainment/labor industry, working amongst all these various standards and rules provides me the opportunity to look into the future. Most of these aging stagehands and carpenters in their unions, the ironworkers and the truck loading Teamsters have spent their whole lives, used up their bodies and any bit of good karma in acquiring piles of money, but it is flavorless. Their daily existence is one long whining complaint after another. When you've spent your entire life putting aside freedom and exploration, how do you start, in retirement to even comprehend those things? Especially when you've got no mobility left, mentally or physically?

Run.
It's a trap.

We are starting to resemble our meat, packed into little cages that cut of our access to the world and fed a specific diet, so our flesh and memories have no flavor and no color, consuming blindly until we die. We are what we eat, literally.

Pork used to be a red meat. It lived longer and ate a much more interesting diet not so long ago, recently enough that there are people who still remember a more flavorful animal than what we see today. At some point, even the poorest person knew how to slaughter an animal, how to make bread and cheese from scratch. Most of us don't make or grow our own food, we are forced then to buy what the market offers us. As we have less and less respect for Time and its vital existence in every aspect of our lives, we've sped up all of our processes. We give our time-as-money to machines that process our food for us, the things we eat increasingly becoming a singular product manufactured in a myriad of deceptive ways. In doing so, we also relinquish that knowledge, the thousands of years of learning to harness the elements to nourish our bodies, the ability to provide our own sustenance - and the more we buy into the system, the harder it becomes for us to exist outside of it.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

We have handed over the power we once had over our bodies, from the act of giving birth, to turning healthy food into something torturous (diets), to selling us on Anti-microbial/biotic everything, villianizing the things that make us strong and self sustaining. We've let the GovernmentPharmaceuticalFood industry distance us so far from our bodies that we don't even pause to ask it what it wants. We don't trust our bodies, and we don't allow them to speak with their own voice, because we aren't listening. We go through motions - being taught hygienic standards by unaware parents, washing our hair with shampoo that strips it of its oils, upsetting the balance of the delicate ecosystem that is our scalp, so it over-produces oils to compensate, creating greasy hair that needs to be washed again... allowing a profit based system damage our bodies to justify buying other things to treat the void they created. What would happen if we simply walked away? Opted out?

Would our fears of not being good enough even survive if we no longer let society dictate the things we take pride in?









'When an environment fails, over and over and over again, to provide her with a means to follow her internal compass, then she will leave.'



“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.”
―Groucho Marx


“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

-Steve Jobs

and he tells me that maybe we used to be flint.

Once, during an exploratory meeting with another creative type, as we were discussing a potential partnership of sorts and researching warehouses for rent, I nonchalantly pulled out a painting I had done recently on a piece of wood and handed it over in lieu of a description of my work.  The painting was on a small square of 3/4'' plywood, taken from the shop I was working in, one of a million pieces of scrap used to shim up height variance in the building of platforms. 

In the dry spells between busy seasons, in the industrial district of Greenpoint (Brooklyn) one could almost see the comical tumbleweeds blow past, gray-green metaphorical shadows against the acidic spray paint colors shaming the walls around me, it was like the wild west, lonely and desolate and sometimes blisteringly hot. In the blinding, scraping nothingness of boredom, my awareness to the things I was blindly stacking and re-stacking, to keep busy, to avoid censure, suddenly shifted focus and I saw music, frozen into the surfaces around me, and emotive eyes, pure poetry looking up at me out of the rich textural grain from the massive amounts of sturdy sheets of wood being tossed into the dumpster every day. Little, practically worthless bits of wood, that I smuggled a handful of home like a bandit with a bag of diamonds became resonant and full of depth, after layers of varnish and the backsides of each, supple and soft from ruthless sanding, because the world is beautiful, and we have no respect for it, like Pocahontas mistaking corn for gold, like our own bodies, strong and resonant and capable, but we move through life too full of fear to express its full power, so we forget how to see it, or what it even looks like - the shape and texture of our uniquely human motive power. Those worthless bits of refuse were like the shining pieces of my soul, that were getting whittled away from the disregard, from disrespect, from the fact that in those old movies the sheriff is always dirty, and the law is often opposite of justice. Those pieces that I salvaged, that I could take home and buff away the splinters and the lies from, barely needed a hint of paint to be sodden with purpose and a potent extension of self. 

The other creative type, a carpenter with whom I was sharing this recent excavation of my soul with, could have had no idea how much that painting on that piece of wood meant to me. What it represented. So many people look at artwork face on, and it doesn't penetrate any of our other senses. The barriers of visual art keep us from reaching deeper into the craftsmanship, the meticulous care with which some of us strive to make a piece complete, and something about the remove makes me fiercely angry, because it is perpetually inaccessible. What is the point of any kind of expression, if it cannot truly breach the boundaries of perception? Why are we so afraid to touch each other, or to let ourselves be examined in return? Are we afraid of what others will see?

He took it from me, looked, appraised its visual appeal with his eyes, then rolled it around in his knowing, work-roughed hands. He flipped it over and felt the back, he looked at all sides of it, found value in it and acknowledged that as he handed it back to me. It was a moment, but it was my entire life, my soul and body's yearning to be handled and explored so specifically, respectfully as a whole, the front and the back, the hard and the soft parts. To be explored and witnessed, and accepted for what is there... by hands as sensitive and conscious as eyeballs. All the blemishes and scratches, down to the roots and the core, the structure underneath the shine, witnessed and accepted as valuable simply because I exist. 

He will never know what that meant to me, and my interactions with him are random and a bit strained due to the odd consistency of life (full of lumpy weird bits)... but I learned something about myself in those few seconds, like a sudden burst of clarity. There was no emotional exchange, yet the depth of sharing from myself that was given without fear or expectation, based on my innate knowledge that the product I had created was of value... became the most intimate exchange I've ever experienced. Like a caress to my deepest principles. He would never remember that tiny moment, but I saw it, and it meant something.