It Was Beautiful I'm Done with It
~7.5x11" / 19.05 x 27.94 cm
--
fucking finally. spent all summer in the sun and street, broke as hell but having lots of fun. lots...
it's november again, cold again. time for another big art project like the 62 drawings i did last november. i'll be inside, working working working.
and around christmas, time to take my works round to galleries. no excuses.
in other news, Dov Charney's a pretty awesome dude. he's been around my store a lot lately.
--
ps- josh, your drawing is next- not the poster, but the next illustration-size drawing. i'm looking for the right subject for the colors you chose. mwah.
-- Dennis asked us for 'our dead'. i really don't have any. obviously i've been alive when important people have died. obviously i've had friends, family members, and acquaintances who've died. but none in particular stand out as 'my dead'. Dennis said he meant someone whose death had made a particular impact on us. some of my artistic heroes, like Haring and Mapplethorpe, died while i was alive, but at the time i was too young to notice their deaths or know their art. i can't say that their deaths made any impact on me at all. when i came to know them, they were dead already. their being dead was+is like any other part of them.
there is James Lyons: i always really, really wanted to meet him. there were so many things i wanted to ask him about cutting Todd Haynes' films, especially Velvet Goldmine. and i wanted to ask him about all his own favorite movies. but is James Lyons my dead? naw, i can't claim him.
so about 'my dead', i wasn't sure what to say . 'i don't have any dead' sounds preposterous and most people would misunderstand that sentence, like i've never known someone who's died. 'my dead don't exist' is confusing and weirdly sci-fi. 'my dead are still alive' avoids the question. but 'my dead are not born yet': that sums it up for me.
to be clear about my dead not being born yet, assuredly, i don't mean that my dead are what some call 'the unborn'. my dead haven't yet been [biologically] conceived either. but if i say 'my dead have not yet been conceived', 'conceived' sounds like 'imagined' or similar.
when i imagine my dead, i think of the far future. i think probably of people who will be born after i die. and when those people eventually die, they will somehow impact me enormously.
from the bottom of my arm, my patient nooses and tears dangle in anticipation.
here's me in front of all my mom's Spode, in her new bungalow in Pasadena. everyone in L.A. keeps telling me they love my 'haircut'. i'm totally a compliment whore, so great; but: really? are these people serious? it's basically a hair-uncut, growing everywhichway because i'm waiting for my bangs to be long enough for a Franzboy before i actually pay for a cut. meanwhile, everything except my bangs is growing first and frizzy. if you ask me, i look like Andy Warhol.
The things that confuse most people have never confused me. Who I want to fuck? Myself as Robert Mapplethorpe, forever. What happens to us after we die? We flop back onto the world as one instead of many. The things that confound me are tiny and specific: numbers, flames, pieces of hair. I wouldn't really say I've chosen those confusions, but I've always found them easier than enormous things like creation. It is easier to have a clear picture of creation in your mind, I always thought, than of a fire.
Last night, though, sitting on the edge of my bed in my first track jacket [red of course], I experienced my first spiritual crisis while looking at a pretty small cross-section of delivery menus from my neighborhood. It was one of the most ecstatic things I have ever felt in my life. Now I get why people like to be confused about giant things like why we are here; how: the slip never ends? Freefall surely isn't the only freedom, but it must be in the top 3.
When I was growing up, I was never a particularly churchy person because my parents only ever took me to one [obviously not unusual], La Cañada Presbyterian. Kevin Costner and his family also went[/go?] there. The place is preppy, fake, and boring to the max. I loathed being ordered to dress up. Too many people in the congregation had had plastic surgery[*], and the entire sight was just kind of sickening and scary to me. The church was located across from the only place I ever remember seeing a cigarette machine, a chain restaurant called Conrad's in a strip mall that also held a Vons market, Baskin Robbins ice cream, and my mom's favorite drycleaner.
I remember what bugged me most about church, starting from when I was little and through high school [after which i kind of forgot that people even go to church], was the idea that the world had been created for humans. I found it arrogant, and also for some reason, a lot of people used this idea to justify the idea of eating meat to me, or even to instruct me to eat meat [including, repeatedly, i shit you not, the extremely conservative Christian math teacher i had throughout most of high school]. When I think about the idea of a human-centric world now, the idea of 'meat' just has nothing to do with it. I'm sort of fascinated by the fact that these concepts were even connected in the minds of so many people I knew.
So, last night. I was ever so slightly drugged and sitting on the edge of my bed with maybe like 4 or 5 menus in my hand [we probably have about 40 from restaurants that will deliver here], trying to think of what I wanted to eat, and I got extreme vertigo, and I fell, not over physically, but just fell, dropped out. It was like being a ghost and walking through the papers that were in my hands in front of me. It felt so amazing. I don't know how long it happened. It wasn't instantaneous, and it didn't last longer than 15 minutes, but it could have been a few minutes or a couple seconds, I don't know.
I was realizing that there were god, what?, over 500 [vegetarian] dishes that I could order and have brought to me? And suddenly I considered that if the world was created for humans to use? That is actually the humblest way to possibly think of it. If the world was not created for us, we absolutely took it anyway and we are going to use it right up. How. Fucking
um
oh
For the first time I read the introduction to The Thief's Journal in the original French. The Grove translations of Genet's books are all loveably awkward [lots of 'i buggered him' and 'we were buggering together'... i expect to see new ones sometime in my lifetime]. The translations of Sartre's introductions are also slightly off. The idea at the end of the introduction to The Thief's Journal more or less makes it through, though: basically, every person's greatest secret is that s/he is exactly the same as you. This is totally distinct from the idea that 'we are all the same', which is how a lot of people misread the introduction. What Sartre is pointing to is the bigness and darkness of the secret, and the possibility of endless twins and mirrors. S/he is the same as you, s/he is the same as Jean Genet, and you are the same as Jean Genet, but the three are not the same. There are secret endless twins, but no triplets. I guess I'd phrase it: what no one will ever reveal to you, specifically, is that s/he is exactly the same as you, specifically.
It took me a long time to put my head back on after I read that. As far as I am concerned, there is hardly anywhere to go from there except to blood and bleach and out. It was months before I even started the actual book.
If that is our enormous and unlit, well, a smaller wink belongs to you and me
thanksgiving: imagine whatever the fuck you want. fundamentally, sure, it's comic. racist jokes. slow, confusing explanations of the premises of horrid-sounding television shows. 'i buy boxed wine because i'm the only person in the house who drinks it and i mean once you open a bottle of wine, what are you going to do with it? so i buy these 2-gallon boxes from Sam's Club instead.' i'm handed the glass. it's chilled. i don't know much about wine and i'm absolutely no snob when it comes to alcohol, but when i tongue the glass, i'm absolutely certain that whatever this wine is, you are not supposed to serve it chilled. sorry. what was that you were saying? something about how the Vietnamese eat dogs? yes, that is hi-larious! you sure zinged Southeast Asia, didn't you?
is this what bothered me during thanksgiving weekend? hell no. this was the part that was fine. this is the part i can talk about. so yeah: you never believe, you never remember, that such caricatures of awfulness exist until you have to hang around with them, basically 24 hours/day, for 3 days straight. i'm honestly not joking when i say that Steven's stepfather openly insulted either Steven or i about every 20-30 minutes. FOR THREE DAYS. our vegetarian diet. the fact that we eat vitamins [?!]. parental shit so clichéd as 'you need a haircut'. you really want to say: 'this could be so much more tolerable for everyone if you would just grow up.' i write 'you' because it's hard for me to say 'i' and 'me' at the moment.
for all of thanksgiving weekend, i was unable to look at my colors, unable to draw, unable to write. literally i sat, tuned out nonsense insults cast in my direction, watched extraordinarily ugly American television.
i'm back with my colors, with November ending as we speak and not even 60 drawings finished yet. so i ask myself, what did i mean when i say i was going to do 100 drawings in November? i wasn't simply promising myself that i would continue to make quality visual art at a reasonable pace. i knew that was going to happen anyway. i like drawing. it's fun. so i didn't need to say i was going to make 100 to ensure that i would, just, actually, draw.
i meant, i guess, that i wanted to amass a body of visual artwork rather suddenly. with the number i've drawn so far, i kinda have done that. but there is something about three digits, and something about 11:59pm on 30 November 2006.
it's not that i mind missing sleep to draw or spending all my free minutes with my sketchbook until the end of the month; the problem i face is this: what really interests me right now, what i really want to do, is spend 4-5 hours on each drawing and make them very complicated. i want to experiment a lot more with color and tone. i want to see if maybe i can afford a rapidograph pen so that i can mix my own inks and draw with my own colors using a pen. sometimes i really like dashing off quick drawings, but right now, it's not what i feel like doing. i feel like spacing out with each drawing for the better part of a day, or even the better part of 2-3 days.
but when i said i would do 100 in November... what is it, exactly, about wanting to finish this project? in general, i'm a total hedonist. i don't mind abandon, so how could i possibly mind abandoning?
[and yeah yeah. answers to the above question are easily rendered. they're fun but they don't matter, because actually, i don't mind.]
and still, i sit and think and i realize i'm trying to reassure myself about something. i'm telling myself that something is okay. i say to myself, i will let myself do complicated drawings right now, because i need to just yeehaw have some funFunFUN after those days [thanksgiving weekend] that were just intensely... yeah. i mean, something like oh, getting arrested?, is not half as emotionally wrecking as that was. and then, i guess?, if it comes to it on November 29-30ish, i will dash off a whole bunch of quick ones, ballpoint sketches on cocktail napkins or whatever. i do want there to be 100 before November ends.
i know it must seem strange that i am explaining this at such length. faced with this problem, a promise of volume and a later disinclination toward it, there were so many things that i wished i already knew. should Anyone Ever make art in a way that's not _completely_ and utterly how _they_ feel like doing it _at exactly that moment_?, fuck whatever goals uttered in even the most slightly different context?, the most important thing is to develop intuitively as an artist? faced with these questions, i looked for anything helpful in the journals and documents of my heroes, and i just couldn't find anything to help me. i couldn't locate a similar experience, an analogous analysis.
this made me think: in this giant chain or web of which i am part, of which i have always been part and which would be foolish to try and escape, there is still, inevitably, at least one way that i am the first. i mean really, there are a million ways that i am the first, and most of them are meaningless. but still, this notion held me still, briefly. it is for me as it is for everyone: it's given, as a guarantee, that in one way at least, every single one of us is the first, and every single one of us is the last.
Steven and i made it home and collapsed. ate nutritious food for the first time in days. watched Martin Tahse afterschool specials. the mildly attractive teenagers looked like gods to me. i wanted every single one of them, carefully bent to my exact specifications.
we fucked and i didn't have my glasses on. experience, in general, was blurry. while we were fucking, i was imagining a boy who looked exactly like this. in one way he was the first, in one way he was the last, and he would let me do anything i wanted to him- because; he would: try anything. once.
--
whewee. so this is what i look like when i'm artistically spent. fucking arted out.
i'm definitely still going to finish 100 drawings by the end of November, but i'm gonna take another 2-3 days and just kinda breathe. i'll probably post my next set of drawings midweek.
oh, and i decided to grow out my hair some. my goal for the winter is to get my muscle tone back [i haven't been to a gym in, like, a year] and then get an 'Alex Kapranos 2003'-style 'floppy fringe' haircut.
A little under a year ago, Steven and I were driving all our belongings cross-country to Brooklyn in a Penske truck. It was expensive.
I took this picture on a day when I was sick, to show that I had gotten a cherry limeade from Sonic that was as big as my head. It really was; it's not an illusion. I think it was 64 oz maybe?
I made it home to Brooklyn safe because I was wearing my lucky sneakers. I didn't know at the time that they were lucky.
Me, I have long held that the best way to code yourself as physically available [which is to say sexually available, yeah, but also something much larger, 'in public' in a way that's morally correct]- the best way is to look a little bit preppy, a little bit young+masculine, and a little bit pink. If I want to look like a whore [a: servant of the city], I imagine a boy in a pink Lacoste shirt with chemically burnt hair, and I try to evoke him through similar gestures. Not the same gestures, precisely. I don't look very good in a Lacoste shirt myself.
Soooo, I wanted to like the new hot pink automat in the East Village a lot more than I do;
In the first place, I'm writing this without the magazines at hand. I'm in a room where musical instruments are scattered upside-down, empty glass bottles crowd every surface, and a busted trampoline faces me directly: my view. Not exactly how I planned it but at least Storz+Bickel are present.
I encountered this girl in the apparently final print issue [2001] of Propaganda Magazine, an enterprise of Fred H Berger, a dude whose cultural role I have never quite gleaned. He takes photographs [which are pretty good]; reviews minor music releases. For a time, I guess, he was behind a print magazine called Propaganda. I always find that the most unexpected people know Propaganda Magazine, so if you know it, you know it. If not;
Early issues were goth-oriented and 2 steps above Xerox. As years passed, it grew into a reasonably glossy... 'scene magazine'? 'Fictional photoessay' magazine? Basically, these really hot, androgynous boys and girls would pose for clearly made-up Life Magazine-type photojournalism pieces. Or would you call the pieces porn? The narratives were similar. The pictures were generally sexual, but didn't have nudity.
For example, in the photographs below, The Girl, dyed blonde in black leather looking like a boy, is acting the part of 'Dmitri', a Russian street hustler. Dmitri's words are briefly quoted; he mentions his girlfriend 'Zosia' [the other girl below]. He actually says 'I'm not a faggot' with reference to his invented profession, and this gets a block quote. Seriously... at whom was this magazine aimed?
So yeah: The Girl. I don't know her name. My feelings for her are singular... unlike, unlike, unlike...
One time I tried to explain it by saying I didn't know whether I wanted to fuck her or to be her. It wasn't a flippant expression; it was an honest attempt to reduce the conflict, to aim it at a 'central tension', chill the situation out. I asked other people, who is it for you? You can't decide whether you'd prefer to be or fuck who? And I mean really, like if you actually gave it a lot of thought?
I got gorgeous answers: Egon Schiele, Kim Gordon, Morrissey. But I realized that my friends played the game differently. To the names that attracted them, enormous lives and myths were attached. No one proferred an anonymous photo and said, That One. Instead, they felt a pull, more or less, between Fucking That and Having That Career / Having Made That Art.
It's true that with the girl in the photos, I don't know if I'd rather fuck her or be her. I know that I'd say yes to either and both. The former, of course, is unremarkable: you can all see that she's boyishly cute, self-aware, and involved in some kind of weird art project. But as for being her, I don't know what her daily life is like now, or what it was ever like; I don't know where she lives; I fundamentally don't know what she does. Further, if I were to be her, it wouldn't be so that it was me in these photos in Propaganda Magazine. It's not that I wish I had been the one to make that art- art that's totally unobjectionable and quite sexy at turns, but not the sort that makes me jealous.
I guess I see: The Surface of The Girl. If she walked toward me, in a mirror or on the street, and said, Do You Want To Switch?... and she would become me and I'd become her and we'd walk away, each into a new life formerly belonging to the other... I Would Say Yes. No doubt, I would probably try to fuck her too. So basically this makes her... a point of entry? I see the other side already.
Some people want themselves. Some people want you. Some people want boys or girls coaxed halfway into existence; some people want light; and some people want the whip. Me;
I have about -6.5 vision in one of my eyes and about -6.0 in the other. I don't remember which is which. For those who aren't familiar with that particular system of numbers, it means I'm incredibly nearsighted. Minus 6.0 is, as they call it, 'off the scale' so far as the familiar 20/20 schematic goes. That scale stops at 20/400.
I once visited an optometrist who was also nearsighted. I don't know to what degree. She explained nearsightedness this way: actually, nearsighted people see more 'strongly'. She didn't quite use the word 'better' but that was the implication. We see so intensely that our brains can't process it. Intense, apparently, in a good way. As opposed to, say, a war.
I didn't know, of course, at the time, that I would probably never find another optometrist, or any other kind of medical professional, who agreed with this at all. Or would think about describing it this way. I have yet to find a doctor who thinks 'nearsighted=stronger sights than brain can handle' is a useful way to think about it.
What was particularly unusual about the moment is that it didn't seem like she was saying it for my sake or for her sake. I didn't need to hear this. She didn't seem like she needed to hear it either.
[antiposing? antipostures? __but definitely not 'anti-Polaroid']
This is how I look at this very moment-
;I'm laughing ;I've probably gained weight since you last saw me [unless we were last in Oklahoma together... in which case I am a little smaller] ;I need to _do something about my hair_ ;The early evening colorscheme is a little bit Polaroid [swoon!].
Steven (right) doesn't like this one, but I've always been kind of proud of it. It's one of the first good photographs I took of people, and one of the first I didn't crop.
What a Waster
Fuji S7000, 2004 large (3000x2250 / 3.1MB / 7.5 x 10 inches at 300dpi / right- or ctrl-click to save)
What do you suppose animals hear when they hear music?
