PEARLS before swine

For those of you kids who don't know, I just got a show at COFFEHOUSE NW here in Portland....

I usually write off coffeeshop shows....perhaps a bit of snobbery, but I've seen to much bad and overpriced art in them...and also bought into the notion too much that valid art is only seen in galleries....But with my embarking upon finally trying to establish myself in the art community (upon arriving in NYC) I started to question even galleries as really "fertile" places to present work: The whole notion that this is the only acceptable model for artists....to slave away on work and then you get to hang it on four walls and wait for the fish to bite....and the people who visit tend to be artists or those who love them....just seems short of the mark somehow.
I don't want to trivialize or thumb my nose at other peoples' accomplishments, but it just seems a shame that alot of good art is hidden away from where it might play a more active role with the larger community.
I am, finding myself more interested in site specific work....or public art and I am excitied to see where this may lead in the future of my own personal work.
BUT, for now, I am working on this show. I saw this big wall, from the street on Burnside, and started thinking about implementing a large wall paper cut-out "mural" and this got me going, and a whole show has grown up around the idea....
I am thinking about ellaborating on a smaller piece (more on that later), and trying to come up with a cohesive theme...and have started thinking about fables and fairytales...both my own personal mythology, and the larger cultural one.

This morning I started thinking about that great PIETER BRUEGEL painting in which he depicted a whole slew of NETHERLAND PROVERBS (of the time), some of which are still in use to this day.....My dad had a reproduction of this painting in his office, and I used to stare at it all the time, trying to figure out what all these odd people were doing....it looks like a gaggle of nutters from the local looneybin have escaped and wrecked havoc upon some small unsuspecting hamlet....animals run wild...nothing is as it seems...and others simply seem to cower in the safety of their houses from this surreal onslaught

So I looked it up on WIKI...and they have a detailed explanation of what is going on in that painting...finally a small part of my perplexing youth has evaporated and I can breathe a sigh of relief....

CHECK IT HERE.....and stay tuned for more developements in this project and the show, sometime in SEPTEMBER....

happy as a KING

....alot of people don' know what a
SEKRIT SAP I can be.....

...I luv this song: I first heard it while watching
the awesome BBC Television production
of DENNIS POTTER'S "THE SINGING
DETECTIVE"......with the ever amazing
Michael Gambon.....

....there's a montage where the writer
remembers his sad childhood...a sunday after-
noon spent about his disfunctional family....with
all the tensions of parents who no longer know
how to be happy with one another...if ever they
did...

...I'd be whistling and it would just spring to my
lips...where ever I walked.....

I associate it with happier things though....
...walking in a park under an achingly blue sky....
or laying about with some one
you dig.......or floating in a hot tub of water...
a cold beer nearby...watching the sun beams
fluttering about the ceiling.....

THE VERY THOUGHT OF YOU

the night before xmas....

....a number of years ago....back, when my older brother was still in art school..

...we had his then girlfriend staying over...most of the family had run off to midnight mass
that christmas eve (back when attendance was still somewhat "enforced")....maybe we were supposed to meet them all there, or we had all finally fallen out with the Catholic religion for good...but we stayed home...just the 3 of us I think.....

...our big old house was quiet...but pregnant with the excitement we still managed to conjure up for the holiday....and we were huddled 'round the television watching IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE (a film I can STILL watch and never get sick of.....)....

....for some reason we flipped to the Los Angeles public t.v. station and this amazing little ditty of a film was on....we all held our breath in awe....the house totally still...the snow falling inside the t.v. set seemed to expand to include us there in it's wintery umbrella...huddled around it's glow....breathless....

PART ONE

PART TWO

twilight ride......

.........the Moon in a paling sky

a cheshire grin.

more fun stuff....

I luv pretty much any pop/rock outta the skandinavian countries....

ROYKSOPP is definately up there....

they also tend to have great accompanying vids....

here are a few....

HERE...

AND HERE.....

ALSO HERE.....

..........oh yah, and HERE

X it OFF the list.....

Sometimes I think about the point in history, If one had the where-with-all, when one could have read ALL THE ACTUAL PRINTED BOOKS IN EXISTENCE....(though when I think about it...this may have been even BEFORE Guttenburg invented the printing press in the 1400s...back when manuscripts were written out by HAND...by monks....)...

Granted you would have had to exert some sort of power, or otherwise have access to those books, ...been from some sort of priveledged class....(been able to read Latin etc.)...but it could have been DONE.

Nowadays, just the sheer magnitude of magazines published is enough to occupy one...assuming you wanted to read half the crap they contain....

We grew up around TONS of books....my Dad was constantly going to library sales and dusty old book stores...it pretty much cemented my love of the printed word....so that, even though I KNOW it is impossible to read all there is out there...I often seem like I am giving it a shot....sometimes I am reading 3 or four at a time...and I ALWAYS write down any recommendatons on a scrap of paper...

As if to start the new year on a good note...I FINALLY crossed one of those books off my list...that scrap of paper has been following me about for a couple of years (literally from the west coast to the east coast and back again....)..







It is called THE OUTER EDGES, BY CHARLES R. JACKSON....and my Dad told me I should read it a while ago...(It's the same author who wrote THE LOST WEEKEND that was made into a black and white film ages ago....)

It's about a really horrible murder and the way it effects everyone who comes into "contact" with the tragedy....If you have seen the lost weekend...or read any books written back in the 30s and 40s, they can come of a bit "melodramatic"....perhaps it is because the way people acted in movies back then or just the way people talked, period, by today's standards...Regardless, Charles Jackson not only makes his characters believable, but he really understands the motives behind peoples' actions....

.... Perhaps this is understandable, because on reading up a little on him, I discovered that Charles Jackson had had a bit of a hard life himself....a hardcore alcoholic (THE LOST WEEKEND is loosely veiled autobiography I think...), he ended up comitting suicide in the late 60s while only in his 50s....

They say "the sick oyster gives the pearl"...and while Mr. Jackson ain't around, this great book is...put it on your list if you have room...or not....see if I care......I am glad I finally got around to reading it.....sigh..............

I'm thinkin that, what with all the INTROSPECTON everybody be doin right now, that we need tunes to put us in the mood....

Here's a lil ARVO PART....(just as much for the cool archive footage this person spliced together to go with it...it really enhances something in the music...all that old yellowed, saturated color....like angels are watching all those sad confused human beings scurryng about...ala WINGS OF DESIRE...)


(OKAY, as an afterthought, had to throw in this one too....is a new favorite ARVO)

don't stop the beat

A good pop song is like junk cereal...one bowl just won't do....

Here's a new (for me anyway) JUNIOR BOYS song I cannot stop listening to....

LISTEN HERE....

MILES TO GO.....

It has been almost TWENTY YEARS since I abandoned Los Angeles....town of my youth....for the Pacific Northwest...

It was a last minute decision...only a handfull of days to go before my second year at college, and I walked away from it....taking the long ambling drive up the most gorgeous highway in the US: highway 101....me and Brother Tom were to look after my parents new home while they sold our childhood home in San Pedro...(There are few points in my life that I can return to and really view the actual CROSSROADS of an important decision....how different my life would have turned out if I had decided to remain in Los Angeles....moving to a new place really allows you to REINVENT yourself....)

When we got there we drove out into the overgrown grass and conifer woods outside of Oly...there was a meadow with an old collapsing red barn ..(now long gone...)...the air full of the seed pod fluff of some plant or other....like a shot from the beginning of Ridley Scott's LEGEND....

During that summer it was idylic....wandering through the endless woods of Fort Lewis...the local army training base...over 30000 acres....exploring Olympia, overrun with self-righteous Evergreen College hippies (a.k.a. "greeners").....

One day I came down the road with our dog Luke (also long gone now...) and saw a van driving down our road slowly....seemly sinister....Back then there weren't as many nearby houses and so you didn't see many folks on that road...When the driver pulled up and rolled down the window, I asked if he needed help...more as if to ask him what he was doing there than to actually assist...









He said he was just visiting..that he had lived in that very area of the Evergreen Valley some 20 years ago...(this would have been in the 70s shortly after/before? I was born...), and just wanted to see the old place again....he now lived up in Whitehorse in Canada...possibly owned some inn or hotel?...I forget.....

He also went on to tell me that when he had lived in the area, that there had only been himself and 2 other people in the whole stretch of forested lands...(!!!)...I marveled at the image..like something outta Laura Ingels Wilder's time.....I have thought about him from time to time since....through that first winter...when my brother returned to Cali for a bit, and I spent a month or two secluded in that house...through all the ENDLESS rain ...ALL BY MYSELF..(it was heaven....coming from a family of 5 kids...)...every so often going into town, but mostly wandering about the country...through those woods...getting to know them intimately...it really did feel like a second childhood in a lot of ways for me...








Later I moved up to Seattle with some of my siblings who had shown up on the scene, and went to art school there...and then on into the thick of life.....

Recently, I was back at the ol' homefront for the holidays....walking down TUCKER ROAD as I had a million times since that beginning, and I thought about that guy again as I looked up to the ridge over the shoulder of my folks house across that field...now sans barn...there was a house now up there in the trees where once I had roamed without any thoughts as to whose property it might be....just wandering through thick untamed woods...once discovering an old auto mobile from the 30's or 40's ...sitting there in the trees long after any road that might have brought it up there to that spot had vanished into stinging nettle and wild buttercups....




Alot had changed since way back then...more and more people had moved into the area....sections of trees had been chopped down in that endlessly frustrating cycle wherein people move to the country and slowly forget WHY they moved there in the first place and try to TAME IT...thus completely changing it from the sprawling countryside...all lazy and scruffy...to a miniature golf course....go figure....

And here I was almost 20 years later....feeling that time gone and now it was my turn to step into that man's shoes....who would remember if not me...what this place had BEEN...after the cranky old gal nearby and her husband had died...and the kids divided up the property and sold it off and scattered to the wind...?








I wondered what this area would be like in ANOTHER 20....and where I'd be THEN?

Somehow it was all very appropriate to be thinking about as the new year closed in for the kill....I imagine it will haunt me like that guy did driving down the road...is he still around?...still in Canada?....Where will I be in another 20? Alive? Will I come back and drive down this road? Will I like what I see...?

HAPPY NEW YEAR to all of you.....here's to a new year with lots of good things in it.....

TOO HOT to hold...

Today....while up in SEATTLE....finishing a sign for an old employer...I got to witness a big learning lesson for my lil nephew....

...we had a lil bonfire in the yard....burning some wood that was lying around...just the remedy for this FREEZING COLD....it was HOT...creating a lil bubble of warmth arounds us....Joe put a pail of frozen water near it to watch it thaw....and then lil J grabbed ahold of it...the fire had made it super hot...and he howled in bewilderment at the pain...thinking, somehow...it was the water in the pail...he howled and sobbed for over an hour...reduced to almost animal-like shuddering and babbling incoherently...his face a mucousy mess....he had never experienced this sort of throbbing agony....it was hard to see him learning these lessons...FIRE HOT...

After at least an hour and a half...he passed out from shear exhaustion...he slept for quite some time...and when his mommy came home he was just returning to some sort of normality...ready to laugh and goof about...maybe bolstered by her presence...that despite this horrible event...life could still go on the same...and us trying to make him laugh even harder..as if trying to erase any last glimmer of pain from deep in his brain...trying to reassure ourselves there were no permanent scars.....but his body had learned too...that really bad pain goes away...and life goes on...AMAZING how resilient kids need to be in the face of the infinite unknown experience...
I don't remember experiencing that first pain...obviously the body needs to forget...thank god...so it was amazing to revisit that moment through his eyes....