"It's like," she said,"I miss him...but he's right here.  I'm looking at him, but he's not there, and maybe I'm not here either."

more on this to come...

Friends

Can we be friends? I think that maybe we can.

Sure, we're very different people and I don't always understand what exactly happens inside of your strangely shaped head, but that's no reason for us to not have cucumber and hummus sandwiches on wheat bread together at a small, locally owned coffee shop in a large city.  

We can possibly walk together down a quiet side street and we probably won't have awkward silences, because we are friends and it is understood.

You can show me your quartz collection and I won't act interested if I'm not.  When I say, this is boring, your feelings won't be hurt because we are friends.

I will come and help you change your tire when it goes flat after you run over a porcupine and you will come to help me when my computer melts because I downloaded too many full-length soft-core porn movies.  We will do these things for each other, because we are friends, and that's what friends do.

We won't have to call each other to hang out, we'll just run into each other randomly and we'll pick up where we left off and maybe make plans to play miniature golf.

We won't say mean things about each other when other people are around, because we're friends and friends shouldn't say mean things about their friends.

I will forget your birthday, and you'll remember mine, and I'll be upset with myself for 10 or 15 minutes, but you will tell me not to worry, that I can buy you a beer and it's not a big deal because we're friends and these things aren't of much consequence in the long run.

You'll move to another country, but we'll keep in touch by email.  You'll write me long emails about how it feels to be alone in a new place and I will understand how it feels.

We'll both have gmail chat, but we won't talk through it because it's too personal and we are in different places, living our own lives and speaking in real time is just too stressful sometimes.  We will accept this idea because we are friends and friends understand this type of thing.

murakami

"Memory is like fiction: or else it's fiction that's like memory.  This really came home to me once I started writing fiction, that memory seemed a kind of fiction, or vice versa.  Either way, no matter how hard you try to put everything neatly into shape, the context wanders this way and that, until finally the context isn't even there anymore.  You're left with this pile of kitten lolling all over one another.  Warm with life, hopelessly unstable." -Haruki Murakami

Proposal Student Gallery Space

I would like to have a show in one of the student space galleries at MICA, hopefully in the springtime.  I've been thinking a lot lately about how someone can literally be someone else in a given moment, act, look, think differently, respond to stimuli differently.  I am using myself as an example, in this case.  So, to humor this idea, let's say I'm watching Oprah on the television in the middle of the day.  I'm lying on the couch, with my feet up, in sweatpants and warm socks, because I am sick.  I have eaten a banana and two bowls of ice cream.  Oprah is a charismatic person, and I can see this.  I am imagining through her gestures and animation what it is to be like Oprah.  I think of people smiling as I reveal that I am going to give them a makeover, and their smiling crooked teeth look hideous to me, which is part of why I want to give them a makeover in the first place.  I want to make everyone feel great about themselves, and I want for people to listen to me, and most of all, I want for my toy poodle to live a long and healthy life.  

For a moment there, on the couch, I have become Oprah Winfrey, through the power of my own thoughts and by literally placing myself in her position as I can see it at this moment in time.  This happens often to me, and to other people I believe, these moments where you don't feel that you are residing in your own body, a moment when your mind has completely numbed out any physical sensations and you can sometimes even imagine looking at yourself from a different physical viewpoint in the same room.  These moments are fleeting, to say the least, but what if they weren't.  What if one could sustain this feeling of being someone else for a minute, or an hour, or even a day.  What if someone could create paintings, as I do, as if they were someone else.  Painting to painting, created by a different hand each time, with different sensibilities and completely varied subject matter.  The power of thought and deception of the self is something that interests me greatly, as a reaction to this interest, I would like to curate my own painting show, using a number of different aliases to label paintings that we all created by myself.  The point of this is not to pull a publicity stunt through some novelty art piece; my name doesn't need even need to be on the exhibition wall, preferably not if possible.  I would like to test the control and strength of my own mind against the eye of the viewer.  Is it possible to create paintings that have absolutely no connection with each other when you are the sole person creating the paintings?  

I hope to make this exhibit part painting, part performance, and part installation.  The painting portion is self-explanatory.  I would have 8-10 pieces of artwork, all fairly traditional paintings and all given equal amounts of time and care into their makeup.  I would hope to create aliases for each painting, create a booklet with names and background information for each individual "artist."  To take it a step further, I would attempt to gather a cast of characters to play these "artists" at the opening for the exhibition, create a tightly woven script in which I would create an artist's statement for each of the characters, and with their help, put on a performance in which a gallery of paintings are the stage.  At this point, there will be blatant lies and deceit, and there is no way around this.  I would hopefully be able to plant an ear bud in each actor, and monitor their conversations with gallery goers, and speak through the microphone to one actor at a time, inserting my own bit and pieces into the conversation as I see fit, improvising on the script in interesting and hopefully funny and awkward ways.  I'd make a point to document this experience subtly, with people filming throughout the crowd, these conversations between the artists and the viewers.  Part of the project will be an open jab at the idea of gallery openings, about how much of a spectacle they are and how ridiculous and inane some of the conversations can be.  This documentation will be edited and then shown in three different parts, on three different monitors inside the gallery space, after the opening has already happened.  There will then be a closing exhibition in which the "artists" will be invited back as spectators to view their own performances, and of course, the paintings themselves that they "painted."  

Carbon Footprint

I calculated my carbon footprint today.  Some people do not know what this means.  Here is a definition for the term, carbon footprint.  I used a number of different carbon footprint calculators, and then took the average of all of them.  This may or may not be a good way of finding out what my carbon footprint actually is, but I think that since the different calculators have such high degrees of variability and complexity, it may be my only option.  

Here are the calculators I used:

BP (nice little flash interactive thing going on, comprehensive): 9 tons per year

Carbon Counter (ridiculously simple, mostly interested in selling off-sets): 4.5 tones per year

EPA (my favorite, very comprehensive, also provides results for hypothetical reduction scenarios, the site is unattractive though and seems a bit daunting): 4.072 tons per year

Sterling Planet (straight forward, made me feel good because they say the average is 27 tons/yr): 3.12 tons/year

Climate Crisis (only really focuses on direct energy uses, i.e. cars, planes, and heating/lighting): 3.1 tons/year

Ok, so my grand total average whatever you want to call it is 4.76 tons/year.  Not too bad.  

Now for some issues with these calculators.  Clearly, they aren't taking into effect the collective transgressions that are committed constantly.  For example, we are all responsible for the jet fuel that is consumed  to transport packages, goods, soldiers, etc.  We are all responsible for the food we buy.  Meat does not appear in a cooler in a supermarket, a cooler that is on at all times, using energy at all times.  The meat is transported from god-knows-where (you can find out though) to the supermarket in a truck.  Trucks use an insane amount of fuel, especially when they are dragging 20 tons of meat behind them.  How do we account for the energy that is consumed to create plastics bottles, or computers, or refrigerators?  The list goes on.  The problem with these calculators is that they do not address our world society as one entity, they are breaking it down into individual responsibilities, which in theory, is logical.  We can each make a difference in our own way, but we can only make an actual change when we create a paradigm shift in the philosophy of how we live our lives.  I guess for most people, these calculators are designed to show them how much they are contributing personally to a global problem, and the hope is that these results will inspire an alternate course of action.  My own carbon output is relatively low, so I was not surprised or worried about my own results.  I know there are things that I can change, but I realize that making a difference means reaching out beyond my own personal impact.  

As for my own course of action on how to reduce my footprint, the options are fairly straightforward.

Here are the facts:

I do not drive a car or take public transportation.

I rent an apartment in a building that is extremely inefficient.

I do not use air conditioning, ever, if possible.

I am not careful enough with my use of electricity.

It is not possible for me to alter my living conditions at this point in my life, i.e. energy-saving appliances, better insulation, a choice in energy provider and the type of energy provided.

I am just barely wealthy enough to make small changes in my life.

Here is what I can do to reduce my footprint:

I can switch to energy saving light bulbs, although this can be problematic, because I need good light when I am painting.  It may be possible to only paint during the daytime, which would be an ideal solution.

I can turn my computer off when I am done with it, make a better effort to keep the lights off in my house when they are not necessary, and try to convince my new roommates that air conditioning isn't really needed.

I can buy food locally more often, visit the farmer's market once a week, stop succumbing to the convenience of supermarkets.

I can encourage others to ride bikes locally, as opposed to driving their cars.

There are some other issues in my own life that I can address that would have an indirect effect on my own footprint.  One example is recycling.  Our building does not recycle.  Everything goes into one dumpster in the center of the building, and that dumpster is emptied once or twice a week.  This can change.  I have spoken to the landlord and he has agreed to participate in any reasonable projects or solutions that I can come up with to keep "valuable" materials out of the garbage.  I say "valuable" because I know that we are still down-cycling materials, but this has to be better than the landfill.  I can also change something in my own life, my eating habits.  Eating habits often dictate how our daily routines, weekly routines, monthly routines are performed.  Although it does not directly affect my own carbon footprint, I have done enough research to realize that eating meat is not a sustainable practice for our planet.  The amount of energy that goes into one pound of beef is staggering, from the labor to create pastures, to the energy used in the slaughtering process, to the packaging and transport of the meat itself.  I have begun to wean myself off of red meat already, and I feel as though this has been something I haven't thought about enough in the past, which is maybe why I am both physically and mentally ready to do this.  Meat often makes me feel not good in my body, and I often feel downright sick after eating a meal that is full of fatty meat.  Yes it tastes good, but there are other options.  For many people, it comes down to a matter of cost.  Meat provides the most physical energy in the form of mass for your dollar.  I believe that with more planning and a bit more legwork, I can exist without having to burden my planet with a demand for meat.  This is a shift in philosophy, and while it may seem like a drastic change in lifestyle, it is essentially the same as turning off the lights when you aren't using them.

Failure

I ran to the bank.  It was closed.  There were a couple of police officers outside.  I waited until all of them exited, and then tried to open the door.  I didn't realize that the bank was closed.  No one explained why it was closed.  One of the cops got into his car and then said something like, bank's gonna be closed for a while.  I looked around at other people.  We were all confused together.  Was there a bank robbery?  We all hoped so.  This girl who was a bike messenger looked at me.  She had a purple bike.  I said, awesome, in a really sarcastic way, as if I was complaining that the bank was closed and that it was actually a big deal, but the way I said it made it seem like I was just annoyed that it happened to close just as I got there, but that it wouldn't really ruin my day or anything.  I spoke well.  She looked at me through sunglasses and then walked towards her purple bike.  I ran away to buy a bike tire, so that I could maybe one day ride with her.  

I have a job to do

Today, I have a number of things that I need to get done.  I will list them in order of priority, and then in parentheses, explain why this task is important.

1. Get a new bike tire and tube (I feel incapacitated without my bike)

2. Go deposit money in the bank (I have $3.14 in my bank account and sometimes money gets taken out without me realizing, because I'm only a partially responsible person)

3. Install new bike tire and tube (reason listed above)

4. Visit the Office of the Public Defender (I have a court date on October 27 and I'm not a lawyer, nor do I have a lawyer, nor do I have money for a lawyer)

5. Go in to the restaurant where I work and create an inventory list of all the glasses and silverware in the restaurant and include the holding capacity for said items in each hutch/cabinet in the restaurant (I have no idea why I have to do this, but I do)

6. Try very hard to call off of work tonight (because this list isn't over yet and I've only got 3 hours to do all of this if I have to go to work)

7. Calculate my carbon footprint (for my Climate Change and Sustainability class)

8. Buy concrete from Home Depot (for a sculpture that I'm attempting to create)

9. Finish drawings for architecture class (I don't know why this is so far down on the list, I guess because I can go to the studio any time of the day or night)

10. Call Citibank and other loan-givers and tell them why I can't make payments (because I am still in school, something about deferment, thinking about it makes my face hurt)

11. Paint?  (fuck, I could just wipe everything off the list and only do this)

12. Read (this has become an escape from all the other shit I have to do, so it has to be last)

Finally, here is how I feel right now: 

This is a glacier.  I feel like a glacier.  To counteract this feeling, I will now run with great speed to each of my tasks.  If I happen to cross paths with a glacier, I will steal someone's car and drive it with great inefficiency and laugh as the glacier melts before my eyes.  It will make me feel pained to do this in a way, because I feel like a glacier, sort of, so I can empathize with the glacier.  Maybe we can become friends one day.  I love the glacier.

This guy is awesome

Here is an artist that I have been thinking about a lot lately.  His layering and space are both sensual and convincing, and I can't get over the way in which he overlaps abstract color fields and definable spaces.  I'm surprised that he isn't more well known, he's not gotten much press from what I can tell, but the paintings speak for themselves.  He uses the color blue in ways I wish I could.  Here's his website, he certainly deserves some attention!

Graffiti buffs

Here are some images documenting a project that was done in France and continued in the US involving graffiti buffing.

France paintings

Here are some images of work from the past year or two, these specifically are from the France studio program I participated in.  More to come.

Scrabble

We were playing Scrabble.  Me, my sister Bronwyn, my best friend Glen, and his girlfriend who's name, oddly enough, was also Bronwyn.  Normally when we played amongst our friends, Glen and I would allow people to use their own name as a word for score once during the game, but in the case of these two 16 point threats, we decided to forge a linguistic treaty disallowing this friendly exception.  I found myself wondering how these two girls could be so ridiculously good at Scrabble; it had to be partial luck, right?  I had never in my life played the game with a person who completely dominated the competition, but when these two girls played together, one of them always won and the other would stare at the winner with a face of pride as if they were somehow on a team together just because they shared the same awkward and uncommon first name.

Except this time was different.  I had just crushed two double word scores in a row, "dalmation" and "scarecrow", piggy-backing off my opponents weak word choices.  In the clear, I thought to myself.  My letter placement was relentless and sniperish.  I thought about using sniperish as a word.  I knew that it wasn't a word, but I thought that it should be one.  I thought about bureaucracy and paperwork and long phone calls and decided not to pursue this word any further.  I felt like the Garry Kasparov of Scrabble for a brief moment.  I started to brag, recalling the vocabulary drill sergeant who was my 7th grade English teacher at the St. Thomas Academy in some randomly affluent American suburb.  As my hot streak continued, wood slapped wood, grimaces were squeezed like ketchup out of previously glorious faces and the dictionary was opened and closed like a drawbridge in a port city during rush hour.  Obscure and archaic words made themselves available to me, I was in the zone:  pysmatic! manciple! rollerblade!  

Bronwyn #1 and Glen held hands tightly; they sensed that the end was near and that they would soon be able to retire to their room and perform acts that didn't require nearly as much thinking or physical dexterity.  Bronwyn #2 looked me in the eyes and I could see her frustration mounting.  Her embarrassment at losing was clear and it made me feel like the wind and she was wearing some horribly breezy skirt.  I had exposed her.  

Her concentration remained a taut fishing line, however, and this made me nervous.  The game had been going on for quite some time by now, and it felt like Michael Jackson had completed some long and complicated dance in which every square on the board that he touched turned into wood and rose up 1/8" from the surface.  

This was Bronwyn #2's last chance; the blocks in the strange gray bag were dwindling and the game had officially become a fire hazard.  Suddenly, her eyes brightened, she saw her in.  I tried to follow the logic, desperately, the path of her eyes as they averted my own, but I could only look on in horror as she performed the unthinkable.  She placed a "P" in the bottom left corner of the board and, then, at that very moment, I saw red in my head, with black letters: triple word score, I knew it was over.  "H", "Y", then made use of a "T" that tailed down from another previous word and finally, the hammer: she placed an "O" on the other side of the borrowed "T", and linked her move up to another previously existing word, "plankton."  The "O" had dropped like a slab of marble and I felt my chest decompress, the whole time thinking of fat blue whales, paradoxically and inefficiently eating "phytoplankton."  Triple word score.  Game over.  I sighed and put on of the blank Scrabble tiles in my mouth as if I was a giant wooden ibuprofen, and swallowed it down, the sharp right angles scraping my throat.  I thought about metaphors, something about an act of swallowing all possibility.  I choked a little bit on that thought, drank some water, and kept the piece down.

Years later, I would have a colonoscopy and the doctor would ask me if I had ever swallowed something unusual, as he stared at the tiny blue monitor that contained the contents of my stomach cavity.  I said yes, and asked him to leave it in there.  He nodded solemnly and went back to work.

people sometimes do things irrationally and that is ok

today i thought about lebron james and wondered if he understands his own actions.  he likes to throw baby powder in the air before games, except he makes it look like it is coming out of his mouth.  this is because the cameras on TNT film him from below, always from below to project his staggering mass and height onto the television audience.  here is what his performance looks like in person, at a game: 

there he is, one person, doing something with great care and intention.  there are other people behind him, walking around without direction.  these select people are being watched by thousands in person, millions on television.  

after i saw this, i dumped baby powder into my mouth, and then ran and jumped as high as i could into the air.  when i reached the pinnacle of my leap, i spit the baby powder out of my mouth and into the air.  most of it rolled out of my mouth in chunks, because my saliva had wet the baby powder, because the baby powder was in my mouth.  there was some powder that was launched into the air, where it hung for a moment before dissipating.  then i sat on the floor and almost cried, because having baby powder in your mouth is one of the worst feelings in the world.  i did not feel like lebron james.  i did know what i was doing, though.  i said this out loud to myself, with some baby powder still in my mouth, you knew what you were doing, david.  

label makers

someone has run loose with 

an electronic label maker

there is some confusion

and alot of white labels

with black lettering

relevance is lost

and gratitude has been forgotten

plates and glass are shoved

beneath the dripping sink

and cleaning supplies, sponges

toilet bowl brushes, bleach

are all placed in the china cabinet

lovers grow apart in the midst of this event

they can't understand each other

and their possessions are misplaced

tissues are found in the trash

without snot or bugs or spit in them

people feel uneasy

they are quick to snap at each other

grace appears despite the confusion

but no one recognizes it

they have a thin filmy mucus

over their wet bald eyes

sight has become secondary

to touch and intuition 

artificial hearts are common

and iron lungs are normal

tears are found crystalized

on the face of many people

they are ground down in a giant tub

to powder

and re-shaped to make cloudy diamonds

poor men buy the stones

for their wives and children

buying their own sadness

so that they can be happy again

even for a day.

got the stones to pay the bones

some people have vcrs

that look like beepers

other people have steering wheels

that look like twisted pretzels

i have my own two arms

and they look like awkward clubs

together, we have language

and it looks like a computer screen

we can see words in new ways

through a screen full of static

because the monitor is old and glass and heavy

my brother likes to sew

he is not gay

i wish sometimes that he were

then he would look like something else

instead of looking like me

with a needle and some thread

Questions like respiration

He wore a respirator to bed that night.  She asked him why, and he with replied with some muffled and delayed response.  She gave up trying and turned over to go to sleep.  He thought about how she assumed he was wearing a gas mask.  He wished he had a gas mask, not out of fear of some biological attack or sudden mustard gas explosion; he wanted to take pictures of all his friends wearing a gas mask and then send in the pictures to an anarchist website with words of encouragement, so that the anarchists would think they had a lot of supporters and would then stage some huge uprising and then no one would show up and it might be on the news because a Honda Civic would be lit on fire for a brief moment before being extinguished. 

He thought about this as he breathed deep the mask, deep and controlled breathing, conserving oxygen as if only a small part of usable air was actually making it through the mask to his mouth.  The filters were positioned like stubby antlers on each side of his jawbone, and she slept soundly next to him, or at least pretended to.  Was she wondering about the mask?  Did she worry that she smelled of something foul, and this was his not-so-subtle way of notifying her?  He didn't know, didn't try to know, just questions about other questions, piling onto each other in no logical way, like a stack of green sea turtles precariously balanced, scared of each other and scared to be apart from each other.

oh...no.

umm ok,

i feel like a bag of soggy chips that smell like feet.  

this is not bad.

it is ok.

i am ok.

i'm trying to be honest.

is it working, can you tell by my erratic spacing and paragraph errors? 

i'm not fucking sartre, and also i'm not herman hesse.  i'm also not jean-claude van damme and i'm also not fucking william faulkner.  i wish i was.

i am not poor and i am not irish and i'm not living in famine.  i am poor though.

i like wine, sometimes.  i like to talk to people, occasionally.  

please don't fuck up my friends' cars, they love their cars.  

please help everyone to realize what needs to happen.

The Great Pretender

He was a great pretender.  When he was younger, he'd get down on his hands and knees on the stained blue carpet and bark at the family cocker spaniel.  She wasn't the brightest dog to begin with, but when he threatened her like this, her glass button eyes would turn into storm clouds and she would bare her shiny white teeth.  She once bit him, on Christmas Day, and there had been a family feud over whether or not to put the dog down.  It ended up being his choice and he decided that she was not ready for the floor, not yet.  The scar on his face was bad at first and everyone looked at him with sorrow in their eyes.

His mother screamed when she saw what happened.  He remembered wondering if she was going to be mad that there was blood on the carpet and on his new polo shirt that he had unwrapped only a few hours earlier.  She always had treated the objects that had been bought as precious family heirlooms.  Everything must be preserved, from the dirtiest sock to the expensive oil painting that hung, mismatched, above the purple leather couch in the den.  He never understood her insistence but it was accepted nonetheless as a necessary sanction to be imposed on the household.  She was not mean about it; she was honestly and constantly concerned about the state of things at all points in time.  

As the blood ran down his face and onto the turquoise collar, he imagined himself in the cold basement with all of his Christmas presents, alone and free of his terrible predicament.  When he unwrapped the shirt that morning, he deconstructed the package with a very certain method; quickly, with feigned excitement, but careful, always so careful to keep the large pieces of paper totally intact, so that the volume of the wrapping paper pile could reach it's maximum potential.  He was not interested so much in the actual things that he received for the most part.  The pile of paper interested him, this physical by-product of a happy Christmas morning, a way to measure contentment with waste and trash.  When the pile became bigger than him, he burrowed into the center while his family watched, so much crinkling and crackling, like all the presents in the world being opened at once.  Once inside, he laid down and closed his eyes, and started to chew on a section of Santa-printed paper.  It tasted like mildew and polymer, sort of like the basement smelled, and he wondered if it was changing the color of his tongue.

Eight hours later, people were yelling a lot and saying things like "hospital" and "hurry" and "bitch."  There were more stains on the blue carpet now, brownish stains that dripped from his own slight frame.  He stared at the grandfather clock, and felt no pain.  It didn't move anymore, the clock, just a piece of adornment for the household, another thing that had some strange lost value.  Where did the time go when the clock didn't work anymore?  Everyone was moving around him so quickly, and he wondered if maybe he was experiencing the lost time of the grandfather clock, since people were moving so fast, but he felt so very slow.  Someone locked the dog in the closet; another person yelled about getting blood and paw prints on cashmere coats and hand-knit scarves.  The hands on the clock didn't move but they were certainly redeemed by the hands touching his own face.  He felt hands under his skin, it was wet and warm and felt good in a horrible way.

The scar was long and hideous, when his face healed months later, but it wasn't so bad.  He couldn't see it most of the time at least, except in the mornings before school when he'd gel his short hair in front of his parents mirror.  He kept the turquoise polo shirt, for some reason, and left it hanging in his closet for years, like some forgotten friend.  It looked like it had been decimated by a bowl of chocolate ice cream, not blood.  He didn't keep the shirt for his mother's sake.  It was for him, so that he could remember how easily a brand-new shirt could be ruined, in just a split-second, and how time marches on despite stained shirts and scarred faces, and how those stained shirts and those scars would always be his, even after the shirt left his sticky white chest.  His shirts.  His scars.  Not hers.