NYC ornaments.
jaundice and vaporware
i wake up.
a monolithic hangover appears in front of me, no matter where my gaze is cast. thanks to years of familiarity, this is bearable.
i read theory for an hour or so. [oh baudrillard, how i love you so for being chock-full of consumption-hierarchies and prefab fashion codes.]
i then spontaneously scribble on paper, perhaps frustrated about that one time in kindergarten when i was framed by some wily little redheaded cipher who dumped a hefty portion of applesauce in some poor kid's snow galoshes. or maybe i was thinking about how taking random pills could substitute for post-collegiate value systems/moral codes. [this model, at first puzzling and bound to a self-erasing equilibrium, soon gives way to a relentless typhoon of critical concern. or so i say. selective scrutiny, in any case, ends you up with an impressive array of "whatever-you-like", whether it be sword-swallowing gingersnaps, exploding tricycles, or type-two diabetes. or so i say again.]
i realize: bullets shot from the hip are invariably rubber, yet i perpetually luck out. but all facetious lollygagging aside: i know that if i am one day faced with a resolute coalition of things that i have gotten away with, i will not get away.
nonetheless, i stress here that the ink-etched surface shown below and the exotic vacations my thoughts encounter live in separate and thoroughly-gated projects.
so after this, i almost-accidentally render what is perhaps the most quaintly retarded cartoon-milieu the universe has ever seen:
prove me wrong.
a monolithic hangover appears in front of me, no matter where my gaze is cast. thanks to years of familiarity, this is bearable.
i read theory for an hour or so. [oh baudrillard, how i love you so for being chock-full of consumption-hierarchies and prefab fashion codes.]
i then spontaneously scribble on paper, perhaps frustrated about that one time in kindergarten when i was framed by some wily little redheaded cipher who dumped a hefty portion of applesauce in some poor kid's snow galoshes. or maybe i was thinking about how taking random pills could substitute for post-collegiate value systems/moral codes. [this model, at first puzzling and bound to a self-erasing equilibrium, soon gives way to a relentless typhoon of critical concern. or so i say. selective scrutiny, in any case, ends you up with an impressive array of "whatever-you-like", whether it be sword-swallowing gingersnaps, exploding tricycles, or type-two diabetes. or so i say again.]
i realize: bullets shot from the hip are invariably rubber, yet i perpetually luck out. but all facetious lollygagging aside: i know that if i am one day faced with a resolute coalition of things that i have gotten away with, i will not get away.
nonetheless, i stress here that the ink-etched surface shown below and the exotic vacations my thoughts encounter live in separate and thoroughly-gated projects.
so after this, i almost-accidentally render what is perhaps the most quaintly retarded cartoon-milieu the universe has ever seen:
prove me wrong.
thermal nippy tunafish carrion plaque magna-carta
i’m now prone to tip-overs. more and more! i yell help, here in pandora’s suburban toybox.
as of late:
christmas - it’s two labradors and a churning lake. sleep and wine previously coveted, sleep and wine became convention.
love - it’s the one grocery bag set down in order to produce housekeys, jingling, front-pocket.
the girl - i am a reputable protagonist, yet i beg for the intricate trance of her venom. tragic! applause!
values - forgot where i hid ‘em previous to wintertime. now bankrupt.
scents - scents knock me down. some get me up and blur the lines so i can cross them.
this work is the child of neglect and the antithesis of labor. tulips, impatiens, and snapdragons think they’re a vital costume of nature, and as seasons hang them in death’s attic, this morning i too give myself up. sorry.
shallow work, is the work that i do.
flyers, forcefields, and lemon meringue:
i'm all over the place.
[i abandoned to myspace!]
so? you're prone to visit.
i know you are.
brinyballbearings,
sirpanthercuddle
betamax baroque
"work expands as to fill the time available for it's completion."
does it not, mah homies?
roland barthes. paris, france. the sordid year of 1970. S/Z. his five codes. like vultures of most automatic deliberation [vultures with razor-wire teeth that can effortlessly cleave through an infant's delicate flesh, of course], the codes can slice up and deconstruct any form of literature. uncompromising, brilliant. honoré de balzac's sarrasine. a classic, readerly text. S/Z pulls it apart, transforms it into the writerly, and owns it. you know the semiotic street slang: [1 hermeneutic *HER, 2 proairetic *ACT, 3 symbolic *SYM, 4 semantic *SEM, 5 cultural *REF->referent, gnomic]. 1: the snare, 2: the act, 3:antithesis, 4:connotation, 5: history/myth.
archetypal avant-goulash of the most puzzling octane, you say? you're goddamn right it is.
i have lifted barthes' codes upon an unsuspecting, loosely connected and false narrative. one can never go wrong hawking and reapplying the systematics of genius. i plagiarized my way through cub scouts, junior high, and am now approaching a fake university degree... yours truly, active proof there's no stopping a wily copycat with taste. these are all printed from 4 x 5in negatives on 20 x 24in fuji paper. what you are seeing, on the other hand, are scanned negatives that i had to color balance with that perverse chew-toting step-uncle that is photoshop 7.0. of course none of it is really balanced correctly, and i'm fine with that. i'm not some kind of metrosexual static-guarded lint-fearing polyester-crotch person who pre-soaks his starlite mints in barbicide. last week someone told me my bike's rear derailer hanger was poorly aligned. i got home and found myself hitting the thing with a baseball bat.
each photograph is, let us hope, a lexia that denies the traceable closure of a signified. the pitter-patter of oblique metonyms... the keys in every photo ascribe to the unlocking of the signifying galaxy, with multiple paths... deflated balloons arranged by a noticeable schema of color acting as the main ambiguous seasoning... videotape and flour act as semantic paint on the landscape.... in summation, the usual disclaimer stands: if you siphon any sort of further concrete meaning out of my photography, then you can probably also shove a steering wheel into a bowl of tapioca and drive it around town. as umberto eco fails to name the rose, i fail to reveal it:
barthes, saussure, kristeva, derrida and other poststructuralists/ deconstructionists see: an obvious multi-valence to text, allowing it to exist as a constellation or web, rather than a simple linear path of meanings. i believe visual experience is the same, especially in the archived spaces in photography, which we must index, sort, and quantify before communicative evaluation.... in the end we rearrange/deconstruct/connote what we each see: it's all indicative of an embarrassing, relative linguistic labeling. so why all this forced reification, huh, humanity? i think we're all just primordially uncomfortable about things we can't run over with our cars or illuminate with our ikea desk lamps.
oh yeah, one last pity-collecting excuse: you'll notice that the symbolic code photograph is pretty much the same as the semantic code photograph... now that's just fucking boring, jim. i know, but barthes' symbolic is simply a deeper version of the semantic. i'd have the asshole change that to better suit my little project here, but a year prior to me jumping out of the womb with my fax machine, that pansy went and died of tuberculosis.
[and now, your friendly informational postscript]
if you're reading this and worth more than $80,000 a year:
this art looks better if you're giving orders to indentured servants from your hovercraft jacuzzi.
if you're reading this at the age of 12:
"welcome..... to JURASSIC PARK!"
if you're reading this and salvador dali, ansel adams, or mc escher are in your personal treasury of "brilliant" artwork:
i heard spencer's gifts at the mall has a new queensrÿche poster. it shows a stainless steel yin-yang dripping with blood, and inside each blood droplet is another yin-yang. but those little ones don't have any drippin' blood on 'em.
if you're reading this and are easily bewitched, hoodwinked, flim-flammed, chicaned, hornswaggled, or bamboozled:
i work exclusively in our america's proud-yet-humble food service sector. ask me about our current pizza special: the haps home slice.
if you're reading this while watching public access TV:
"hello. have you ever found yourself on the go, and just wishing that cruddy old raw ham-hock t-bone you're holding would magically turn into some über-scrumptious jerky? introducing scott baio's signature pocket-sized FOOD DEHYDRATOR! it BOILS, it ROASTS, it FRIES, it COOKS, it BROILS, and it BROASTS!" [confused applause from geriatric studio audience]</i>
twirl the oxen, cut my beloved wife in half.
two things.
[firstly:]
the pixies reunion. the cure. the flaming lips. radiohead. kraftwerk. belle and sebastian. the rapture. stereolab. mogwai. le tigre. i am going to [coachella]. if you are also throwing down, drop me a line.
[secondly:]
look here now. put your mouse on the house and click to read something i find most adorable. put your mouse on the proust and click to read something i find to be affirmatively awesome.
[firstly:]
the pixies reunion. the cure. the flaming lips. radiohead. kraftwerk. belle and sebastian. the rapture. stereolab. mogwai. le tigre. i am going to [coachella]. if you are also throwing down, drop me a line.
[secondly:]
look here now. put your mouse on the house and click to read something i find most adorable. put your mouse on the proust and click to read something i find to be affirmatively awesome.
car crash turns frown upside down.
so what do we have here? significant form. the contrapastic-plastic optic-shock of materials that manifest, absurd in unlikely surroundings [like a rusty hex wrench, wrapped in pink yarn in a bathtub filled with milk]. the content is also loosely organized, and predominantly trivial. it's fuckin' polka-dots. and electrical tape. and rusty nails. on porcelain. wait.... what kind of sex-obsessed maniac am i?
okay, let's clear up some space in my cognitive landscape, so you kids can have a picnic and play badminton on it for awhile. in two of these photos, there is a pink silhouette in the background. that sucka is my proverbial home slice, my trademark "rabbit" signifier[dutifully cropped off, on this occasion, by my heartless scanner]... the rabbit always acts as my personal tension-unraveling suture... because of course, my old pally jean-luc godard and i came up with that whole method simultaneously one night.... we were probably somewhere drunk shooting our mouths off as usual, you know, gettin' high and playing the french version of uno, watchin' old jacques derrida and baudrillard beat the piss out of each other at the pool table. man, those were the days. i wonder whatever happened to those poor sons-a-bitches. a group of fuck-ups, if i ever saw one.
ah christ, where was i.... oh yeah. these images aim at the most direct artifice-volumed pleasure: if you look at them, and feel the same way one would feel buying a pair of nun-chucks and beating the shit out of a stuffed animal, then the art is a success. pretty for pretty's sake, per se. you know intuitively that none of the grain on the film i was shooting with graduated from MIT, or even worked on the janitorial staff. i'm talking about the kind of grain that sorts glass at a recycling facility, or picks up trash at the park. i'm talking about grain that needs hospice personnel to monitor them when they're around sharp objects. i'm talking about grain. anthropomorphically. and i'm not even drunk. moving on.
forsooth, these photographs activate specific contrast-guts of freud's infant object-relations theory: it's shiny, it's red, it's soft, it's colorful, i'm a baby and i so i wanna touch it. and then shit in my pants and cry because i can't do anything else. wah wah wah.
so! the sensory is prime. it's the emperor, wearing lots of glittery clothes. i traded my usual top-heavy conceptual work to prance about in some aesthetic carnival of whimsy and cotton-candy-like gravity. these photographs sure do bring back some memories. come to think of it, i clearly remember the era of my life when i thought i could forever give up function and concepts for pure form and color... it was precisely the summer of 1986 that i was this innocent, young, and carefree....
[flashback sequence begins. add your own sound mirage-like sound effects now]
( Collapse )
the swoon of the blonde.
ACT FOUR:
a sapphire curtain unfolds:
another claim to usurp the throne of decadence, to make a self-propagating self-handshake. as the dilettante does ceremonial laps around his prosaic track made of coffee-stained ayn rand literature, i also do as i am inclined. ignore the [inner] dispossessed. as the body retires it becomes the archive. before this, i say banish all in favor of [exploratory] self. what's left for us, or rather for everyone else still living, is historical. do we hope our legacies mitigate themselves into favorable myth? it will never spread unless you get it spinning nice and fast to start out.
i love photography as it can so effortlessly trash and devalue [traditional] high art; i love painting because each stroke represents a quaint result of the human condition. i love it because it is touch. i love it because is primal and tactile. it nudges your most amoebaic olfactory feelers to pound on a block of wood with a hammer. i love it because it is the customary cash-crop of slave-based agrarian art-economies that are, to be honest, comatose, from the lazy eye of classic aesthetics. i love it because people look at the sistine chapel and believe bullshit like Hennessy wrote about painting as, "...a gift we will never finish unwrapping." awww. i laughed at this sentence until tears came to my eyes. one could say the same of a YMCA synchronized swimming team, or those fast food places that give you like 20 little square hamburgers for $1.39. granted, these photos are just a start of adhering the pretty, the shiny, the mythical, the bright and sunny,(in this case the underwater), and then systematically deconstructing each element that creates this illusion...until eventually you're just gonna see a fuckin' dirty fishtank with a garden hose shoved in there, sitting in my backyard. as you see below, the photographs are at their most illusory mode. i have yet to print the others.
i say if your father kept bees, you should get to work on cloning a hybrid that does your grocery shopping. step onto the shoulders of genius but then put out for display their suspenders. they have your trademark boot-print. savor your acquisitions until they themselves are acquired.
¡atchung!
okay, here's an announcement from your celebrated prime mover: i don't know if any of you live in florida[excluding the actual three or four REALITY-BASED people i have on my friends list], but if part of the black hole you're multiplying out of to consume my livejournal resides in our hegemonic nation's armpit, you should come see me [darius axis] in st. augustine this saturday. i admit don't even know where the show is, or the entire bill of bands... i have gathered that gainesville is bringin' the party to this played out beach town, as usual: us, FIYA[the quinney twins are something to behold] and true north[those fancy [no idea records] darlings]. so from this experience, one can get the idea of how i'm not some picturesque hand-held in-stasis cutie pie. i'm a wobbling, unstable gross drunken old little wreck with a shiny, heavy instrument in my hand. i am not intelligent. my actions make as much sense as an ice skate stapled to the shower curtain. it'll be a dim access to what gets revealed as a flat lackluster wall. here's a trifecta of even more ghastly wonders of life i have seen with my very retinas:
[1]i've been to payless shoe source.
[2]when i was eleven, i decided to base an entire lunch on convenient store beef jerky. i promptly threw up.
[3]i have played the sports of golf and tennis before.
i am dumber and uglier and more base in real life than you could ever imagine of a bipedaled creature who seems, at first inspection, to be capable of sovereign thought. i would be your worst nightmare, but i'm too lazy. oh: and we're playing tonight here at [common grounds], but don't expect any bodies to be flying. this town has that stuck-up "i think i live in new york city." indie-rock affliction: the inability to rhythmically bob one's head for fear of it being uncool, as emotion is apparently so last year. also, lots of people are working or out of town for that 9-day weekend warrior spring break fever bullshit, so i imagine not many are gonna be there. so come and take up space in our loud, deliberate arcade. we'll bring the fun, and you just have to dance and pose, you glorious tang-filled fountains of youth, you.
last and on the precocious brink of least: it's my fucking birthday. i've lived through just over 8,000 days in this miniature version of life-support pay-per-exist hell. slide a little idol worship my way if you have a spare moment.
how beautiful it is to be anything at all,
hastily strangled by tinsel