Less Glue, More Fire

Is This What Adults Do?

2012-02-14T11:58:00.000-06:00

So we're trying to be funny. It's a comedy troupe that has no name yet, but we've started filming skits anyway just to get to work. So far it's Aaron Baker, Reid Bangert and myself, including more or less anyone that wants to be involved in the skits and can stomach the off color material. Here's some on set photos, with more to come. We should be posting skits within a month and a half I believe.

I told Zach and Marguerite last minute that we were filming a skit about a %&*# that gets @#$% when you &*^% until finally it &*%# and they were all in.

Greg, Courtney and Anna showed at the last minute to help out and were totally game even though we told them we might %^$# %&*( %$#@!^ %&^$# %^^$#@. But seriously, they really helped make it special.

how about these transformations?

Buried in Bullets

2012-02-13T15:37:00.000-06:00

the two girls at the deli said

i hate to think that my mom and my brother will go to hell
but i can’t help them with that

and

when your car broke down and cost three hundred dollars
i prayed for you

and

i don’t want to have sex,
i mean, but i almost did.
i’m scared of that.
i was in the back of his car, i had my shirt off
and the cops busted us.
it was totally funny, i mean it wasn’t
but it was

and

i drink sometimes,
a lot sometimes
but i really struggle with that

and

they like, go to church, like, on sundays
but, like, they aren’t really devoted to god

and

she can’t find the right person
and i pray for her

and
they keep heaping munitions on this pacifist.

Overslept

2012-02-11T14:03:00.003-06:00

this is me writing about nothing.
‘cause the opposition had me overwhelmed,
i admit it.
i gave up struggling against those ozone layers not yet identified
whose diminishment seem to allow our frozen stockpiles of
spirit to dwindle.
it seemed the earth must be a rotisserie,
turning us in the ash and and acrid musk of our own breath,
bringing us face to face with that which we have eaten,
which explains the smell.
the people appeared too over spun to note,
sagging and dry on the pottery wheel
to such an extent that i stopped commenting on them,
as we seldom mention dirt
or garbage.
it’s just that counting sheep on the streets
made me so sleepy,
so fatigued,
and so disparaged to discover
that thick pelt of curly white wool sprung
across my back.
this is me,
writing about nothing,
‘cause the wheels are padded in elastic polymer,
making their travel a circuitous rubber room,
making going anywhere just plain crazy.
this is me writing about nothing
‘cause sensibility and hope
loomed thin into protective spells
has spun them into atmosphere that we barely notice,
with dreams recycled and refurbished,
copied and dragged into folders so buried
that the deepest of the unconscious
sits atop them blinking, from the sudden flood of light.
this is me, writing about nothing,
‘cause i forgot how to speak,
stunned into silence by a pit so deep it made
Proles look like go-getters in airborne zeppelins
atop a desperate dog pile so vast and perverted
that mass graves seem quiet and dignified by comparison.
this is me writing about nothing,
what with nowhere to go,
what with everyone a fiend,
addicts on disastrous escapes from themselves,
the straight edged people mistaken as well, cutters really,
surgeons, making zippers of their needs.
this is me, writing about nothing,
cause the corporate giants put me out of business for a while there,
that is,
there was nothing i could offer you
that you couldn’t find cheaper and easier somewhere else.
this is me writing about nothing
because it’s still better than nothing,
because i can’t allow myself to become one of those wretched people,
you know,
the ones wearing headphones?
the ones that turn people’s ears into glory holes for their glory days?
i want to blame abduction and fluoride but i can’t.
still, i know something important happened,
that the culture shifted and took me with it.
still,
i recall that ladies
were not born
to be a spittoon
for the jocks
with wads of chaw in their pants.
i recall that gentlemen
were not born
to be handy men,
to retile or renovate the dollish hopes and vaginal canals
of females.
i recall that electro shock treatment powers our leisure,
every device a remote electrode,
every invention a greased up conductor,
the options and upgrades rubber bite guards while we act as diodes,
passing current through the economy.
i know that once again,
finally,
i do not trust the life that comes my way,
like a shady coke deal-
i don’t know where the coca was grown
and i don’t know how many times
what you’re telling me
or what you are doing has been stepped on.
i don’t know where it came from,
who told you this,
who taught you this,
i don’t know what kind of fevered regret or spineless hesitation your opinion might be cut with.
this is me writing about nothing,
as i’m not as expert anymore on what to to talk about-
the reality was so much stranger than the fiction:
all the little second rate magicians
sawing themselves bloody, in half,
just to draw a crowd.
today’s Springer show
featuring creationists and atheists
administering a paternity test on life itself,
trying to figure out who the daddy is.
the latest silicon valley
robot with its tiny proprietary blog and links to insight by association.
the people that consider themselves XXX
who are really rated G for very, very general audiences,
the people trying to remain as good as they used to be and
better than who they’re gonna’ be.
this is me writing about nothing as
there’s little to discuss-
the world violates and perverts all our language so that words,
by the thousands, become those which
Must Not Be Named,
lest we invoke or awaken the evils of which we speak.
this is me, writing about nothing.
genius is not in demand.
i didn’t know who to tell anymore,
tired of rubbing my thumbs raw on each particular permutation of
every person’s child proof cap,
tired of those who’ve have had their hearts ripped out
and have thus installed a swinging door
in their chests to expedite the process.
those who’s hearts no longer beat with free will and blood
but rather respond to outside influence like ear drums.
those who cannot stand the suspense
and have taught themselves
to turn to the last page in every relationship.
i gave up for a while there because it’s difficult,
when it comes,
not to feel swaddled by the cave in,
hard not to come to know the collapsed i-beams and rebar
surrounding you as a kind of reliable bassinet,
the wreckage still swinging from a half destroyed ceiling
a familiar and decrepit mobile.
it’s hard not to know rock bottom as a sure and comfortable thing,
as there’s nowhere left to fall
and yet after time your noble and nihilistic little foxhole
begins to resemble more and more,
a grave,
and what lullaby is played in that grave,
what warm milk administered and by who?
you.
you roofied yourself
because Rohypnol is the only way you’ve found you can bear to
pat yourself on the back.
i just woke up,
but please, no applause
and goddamnit no help either.
i just found out the sandman is unlicensed and running amok with propofol.
i just found out the tooth fairy takes our teeth so that we cannot chew against the cage.
i just woke up.
i’m pretty sure i still have my hospital gown on,
IV’s dragging
and i don’t have my wits about me just yet and
this is me writing about nothing.
it ain’t much,
but it’s a start.
give me a few seconds will ya?
i don’t have anything to say.
i just got up.

FRAP! (Or, Clear the Room, Somethin’ Died Inside of Me)

2012-02-07T11:11:00.002-06:00

looking around
I have to wonder
was it the catered lunch
or the fast food
of this easy way out
that’s caused the indigestion?
or was it the decay of
the young rebel breaking down
from wishing on stars
to begging of cruel reality,
breaking down
to cabbage compost
and finally to the comical joke of flatulence that he is today?
what we used to be, decomposed into what we are now
creates a zeppelin of compressed gas
twisting your intestines into abstract balloon sculpture,
turning your sphincter into a deep space airlock,
a gasket cracked and about to give,
a tea kettle bucking with steam,
a child trying not to laugh.

christ, man, aging is enough on your plate,
and now you come across some spoiled brat,
a close friend that turned fast and easy like milk,
some rotten disposition,
some old prick
whose wisdom molded and not at all like cheese or wine.
here’s some processed, pasteurized bullshit.
some synthetic, triple filtered nothingness,
some jack hole trying to pass off memorization and recall as comprehension.

it doesn’t agree with you.
well that’s it.
your water just broke.
you’re crowning.
some swollen capsule of your guts
has held onto something like tupperware in the back of the fridge,
curing something furry and rancid,
something now liquified that seeks its own level.
you realize that the call of nature is much, much more than number one
or number two
and it has elevated to number eighty-three
which is a totally explosive expulsion of everything you have done, been and learned.
it is suddenly, urgently clear
that rush hour is but an unsupervised train car
to a think tank
or respected and fashionable
camp of concentration.
on top of that
the calcified tradition and fossilized systems have crystallized into
a belly full of gravel,
a bladder full of buckshot and
your bladder is a hot spring,
a garden hose straightening out inside you
and the pharmacy is out of Vicodin.
this whole thing,
this betterment,
this fitting in
is a bug they didn’t have in your country,
in your hometown,
it’s a microbe their third world morality does not filter for,
a hygiene their dark aged simplicity
does not practice
which, upon contraction
will have you praying for something so simple
as IBS, Crohn’s disease or Montezuma’s,
‘cause the nearest stall has no door and no toilet paper.
or maybe you’re stuck in line at the drug store
and a stupid old diabetic lady precedes you
with forty two liters of orange drink and twice as many coupons.
that is, there’s nowhere to put the swollen combustible you’re carrying.
it’s uncivilized and unrefined to talk about it,
to drop it,
to unburden yourself of everything you’ve taken in.
look, i’m talkin’ about art here,
so go get your sewing machine
or guitar
or canvas
or whatever it is that you do
and tell your friends and family to light a whole box of matches,
to ready the lysol spray and fire up the exhaust fan.
tell em’ somethin’ died inside of you,
and that you need some time alone with your toilet crossword book,
your new Saltwater Sportsman magazine.
tell ‘em life didn’t turn out as planned
and it killed you a little bit.
tell them you gave in,
like everybody else,
to the western Shangri-La of the all night, all you can eat buffet
and now you gotta cut weight.
you know,
for a fight.
i mean,
the rest of your life.

Spectrum 18 is out

2012-02-07T10:59:00.005-06:00

Spectrum 18 came out months ago, that's how negligent I've been at the blog. Anyway it's a fantastic book, self-promotion aside, it's gorgeous and bursting with top notch art. Available on Amazon. Additionally, Spectrum Live is happening this May 18-20. I'll try to keep updating on that event, and, you can look it up online. Should be a pretty exciting deal. Mike Mignola, (creator of Hellboy.) representatives from DC, Marvel, WETA, ILM and disney among featured guests...

5:48

2011-10-19T07:26:00.001-05:00

Coming soon!

Spectrum Film Jubilee!

2011-09-20T10:25:00.003-05:00

All I can do is reprint things you can read in a much more informative link. Short version? This is really going to be a huge event, with big name guests as well as representatives for portfolio review from Disney, Lucasfilm, WETA, and more! Filmmakers and artists of the fantastic take note and submit! I'll be both an exhibitor as well as running the Film Jubilee, so get involved, it should be a really fun three days!

http://www.spectrumfantasticart.com/spectrumfantasticartlive/?page=sfal_film_jubilee

The Vibe: A Memoir

2011-07-27T10:53:00.006-05:00

The bachelor greeted me in the pitted gravel parking lot. He pointed out a particularly chunky red stain on my bug splattered windshield and asked Did you hit a tampon on the way here? That was the vibe. I looked up at The Bearded Clam resort sign, yanking coolers and duffel bags out of the back of the jeep. Tree choked hills surrounded us. The sun was a bright white reflection, broiling. We were somewhere near Arkansas. I didnʼt know, I never pay attention.

We hauled this latest load of gear to the poorly titled suite, a three bedroom accommodation that would be housing seven men for the next day and a half, all of it the color of a dirty cigarette filter in low light. The flooring was coated in a buzzed green carpet, the short kind of industrial grade material you might find on heavily trafficked stairs, not intended in any way to match the yellow, stained glass drapes or wood paneled walls. Humidity had wrinkled the starving art in their frames and the floor flexed with each smashed bag of ice, each drunken stumble, as though we were only holed up in a balsa wood replica of luxury. The bathrooms were always sodium vapor yellow as though lit by streetlight, revealing pubic hair and mold packed into the grout between tile and plastic trim. One of our party emerged from one of these bathrooms, claiming to have sprained a testicle trying to pass pizza and two pounds of bacon. That was the vibe.

Outside, the second floor walkway was fenced in with white railing, enameled in dried drips of chipped white paint, the nails all sweating rust. Air conditioning units sagged inside window mounts, their slats bent and grimacing in the one-hundred plus degree heat, drooling condensation like pit stains onto more of the utility grade astroturf. (This carpet had an unintentional, unconscious effect on our class and status. As weʼd each arrived in our own time, instead of red carpet we carried our duffle bags across this stuff, this wet velcro made to withstand sun, booze and vomit.) Dumb, buzzing insects motored into things blindly, as though theyʼd been there long before us with a head start on the drinking. We started out in flip flops, but as the booze came we went barefoot, thoughtless of whatever damp human dandruff, how everything was a bucket seat pooled with the waste and pasts of all the tenants that had come before us.

From the balcony, the pool was visible, a cloudy milk bath into which no sober person wanted to lower themselves, but impaired groups would later happily cannonball. Beyond that squatted the modest bar: a concrete patio, tables, chairs, a stage and a small shingled island from which to buy a drink.

The beers came from coolers, from the refrigerator, from the hands of friends, from the bar, the hi hats of popped tops hissing as though the beverages were sizzling against the heat. Frost covered elixirs came from the freezer and later, little plastic ramekins from the bar, the alcohol all a mixing media, a homogenizing solution blurring one place, one sentence, one person into another: there were no corners, no turns and no segmentation but for the streaking carousel of everything being one place, one time.

The lake was a lake and it served its purpose, primarily as an exercise in abandon, deprogramming the civilized mind. No thinking person could swim that vast, wet deposit with any degree of awareness or concern. No one could float atop a hole in the earth filled with dark stew and rumors of piranha, ball-biting pike or VW sized catfish. It only followed that after suppressing such prehistoric anxieties, one would drink to excess and use too little sunscreen, attempt foolish dives and handle propane drunkenly, the whole scene an experiment in surrender. We discovered our boat had no anchor, as if weʼd needed anymore indication that the group was letting go the grind for a spell. There, on the pontoon boat, a folded six-pack box became a make-shift spatula. Fumbled packages of brats splashed into the water, feeding whatever horrors lurked beneath our butts floating like fish food in inflatable doughnuts. We all P.P.M.ed there, or Parts Per Millioned, or more simply, pissed in the lake with an albeit more scientific name, referring to the total parts of urine per parts of water. Get on the boat, someone would say. Canʼt, someone would say back, Iʼm Parts Purrin. That was the vibe.

Finally, the bar, the getting of a third or fourth wind. We changed clothes, sliding that one nice pair of jeans over the still tacky film of sweat and sunblock, pulled on fresh tee shirts, hoping their over-washed cologne of detergent would be enough to approximate a shower. The sun went down and the band got up, doing a respectable Steve Perry or Roger Waters.

Inevitably, in this semi-wild preserve of a getaway, the women showed up. These ladies might have had a story, a history, a reason for being there, but it didnʼt really matter. Somehow, someway, it had to happen. It was natureʼs doing. Overdressed in heels and dresses, skirts and cowboy boots, there was a sudden and major gravitational shift in climate, each of the men feeling the greater skies above us, suspecting that we had driven all this way not to see friends, not for a bachelor party, but rather we were summoned there to suddenly take part in a nature documentary that was beyond our consent. They stomped their pumps into the dance floor like elegant, hoofed beasts that could charge but had no need as the matadors would always come to them. They took shots, they sang with the band, they jumped in the pool clothed, they did whatever they wanted. Our night of men was suddenly invigorated and also ruined as a total pole reversal took place in the mind and glands of males that could not be undone. Though we were half of that sticky gender sandwich, we also suddenly did not belong and would spend the rest of the night trying to fit in and to be loved, to find the proper orbit around those country road house celebrities.

At last, it was dark. The women had wrecked the place, cut a peacockʼs warpath and removed themselves. The nature documentary was over. Stumbling, we decided to return to the black water, blacker now but for the shattering of moonlight bobbing upon it. The guest of honorʼs father was ever present, looking like an old timey burleyman, stocky, bald with grey mustache and goatee. He paced his consumption in the manner that age requires and wisdom affords. That sounds like a terrible idea, he said, but let his son go, knowing that as the dominant species, men must be allowed to prey on themselves every now and again.

On the lake, the bachelor didn’t look so good. I think I better go Roman, he said. One of our pack spotted a figure getting into a boat and claimed it was a Sasquatch, heckling the poor silhouette, calling him or her out as a marine enthused Bigfoot until they slipped away into the dark, irritated. I see you Sasquatch! You can’t hide from me! He continued to yell from his floating pink lounger with cup holder, the claims skipping across the water and on up the hill to tenants trying to sleep. The bachelor repeated, I should probly go Roman, looking back across the dock, estimating whether or not he could make it in time. One among us started a stranger’s speedboat and we talked him out of it only minutes before the rather large and rightful owners showed up to take it out. I’m gonna go Roman, the bachelor decided. He came back sweaty, pale, with jaundiced, yellow eyes, having induced vomiting. He claimed, I feel so much better, all the while swaying on his feet, grinning. (Was this gross excess? Perhaps, but only in answer to the anorexic amount of indulgence daily life affords us.) Another of us reviewed photos from the bar, reliving the second hand reproductions of close encounters with women, not yet done with the narcotic rush of attraction. He laid on the dock, drunk and slightly dyslexic, slurring out across the lake, Wait ‘til jew shee all the tig bitty pictures I got! Abruptly done with all things lake, one of the group started throwing our possessions and rafts and beers into the water, done with them in an executive decision only sensible to his own booze flooded brain, among them a blowup doll. As we watched her drift away, arms permanently outstretched, mouth open in a puckered pocket of pink nylon, he claimed She’s starting a new life and this had a gut wrenchingly sad and erie quality that hung over the silent lake.

Staggering back to the room, we picked up a lone wolf, a trouble maker who can only be remembered as some kind of supernatural wraith, some possessed representative of the unknown sent to test us, to dampen us. I first spotted him publicly urinating in deep country shadow, wide stance, and he seemed drawn from that darkness, a fouler magnetized to the light of our good cheer. (This image of the man would later summarize the altercation, him with a wide stance, brazen, marking territory.) He followed us back to our room under friendly pretenses and then attempted to remain there in disruptive, passive aggressive defiance meant to disarm and antagonize. The guest of honor pushed him out the door at which point he latched on in a sloppy, drunken bear hug. He held on in the most unsettling display of strength and resolve. I remember him in black clothes, with long greasy black hair, a malignant barnacle. Perhaps we were only drunk and it was made this much more psychedelic, but this man seemed to be death, to be sadness, to be feebleness manifested as though if he could, he would maintain his grip and drag us back to the lake and under. He was every accident weʼd narrowly avoided, every blown tire and neck-snapping pool dive come to collect. Only something as audacious as evil dared saunter alone into a room full of men and be a villain there. We threw him down a flight of stairs and got on with the night. This was total victory. This was how we dealt with evil, with death. We threw him, no, cast him down and out.

Adrenaline subsided. Gulps and swallows turned to sips turned to drooping eyelids. Someone was asleep on the floor in spite of the numerous beds and I realized suddenly that this was, at its heart, a slumber party. An infomercial warned us about the sizes of our dicks and sold a remedy to it. This seemed a perfect punctuation to the day, just fitting that a motel room full of drunk, fighting men would be faced with this. We watched in defiance. We couldnʼt show that God-damned commercial any insecurity or self-doubt until someone finally mumbled change it, and I abruptly had the notion that this was the theme of the occasion. Weʼd dodged the temptresses, dodged the violence, dodged the accidents and so far, dodged ourselves, our insecurities and pasts. Somebody was getting married.

Change it.

That blowup doll had started her new life.

Or maybe we had.

That was the vibe.

Book 'O Poetry

2011-05-16T17:59:00.002-05:00

At last, it's out. "Down, Down and Away," a collaborative book of poetry whose hundred pages is split between Jason Ryberg and myself is now available at Prospero's Books. I don't usually get too excited about my projects, but this is a really solid product. This is definitely Jason's strongest collection of work to date, in my opinion. Swing by there and pick up a copy. I can mail editions if needed. I have to give particular thanks to John Deuser for helping to make this possible...

Indrid Cold Perhaps?

2011-05-11T21:22:00.000-05:00

Found this outside of work today. The wings were as big as my fist, with fat, furry little wriggling legs and two plush, stuffed animal beady black eyes. I've never seen anything like it, anywhere. It was huge and substantial. Of course, the crappy picture does not do it justice.

There is No Greater Love

2011-05-05T22:34:00.001-05:00

My pops, at 72, singin', "There is No Greater Love," at The Phoenix.

This Confounding Flourish

2011-05-05T21:55:00.000-05:00

things snag.
a satchel strap catches on a gear shift
a tee shirt arm winds around a washer spindle
a coat gets caught in a door jamb.
shoelaces will come untied three times a day
and yet an electrical cord will knot itself
in half a dozen places with no assistance,
each of these objects possessing a will of their own.
things are barely what we know them as
barely the names we give them.
any ornamentation beyond a simple shape is a flagellum.
a bathrobe belt is a barb,
a bra strap a snare,
a spool of kite string a gaff,
a finger a hook,
a car,
a possession,
a keepsake,
an environment
all bait and tackle,
all coral reefs to filter the ebb of life.
cellophane is cilium.
scarves are cilium.
arms and legs and necks are cilium.
despite moving parts and thoughts
the cars and brains and products are protozoa,
the city is a milk bath,
a water breaking,
the streets umbilical,
the alleys dilated canals,
the spindles of cells,
the spokes of bacteria meshing, absorbing,
assimilating,
cross breeding,
our deep thoughts and big ideas
a spectral, fine web,
catching against the mesh of others,
all of us stuck upon it,
bobbing and scaling
this fine, wet gearbox,
the trees nodding, tapping our scalps,
the mud with seeds in it
riding the tread of our shoes like suckerfish,
the exhaust in our lungs,
breathing each others waste,
stealing each others air,
not telegraphing and sending a signal nonetheless,
screaming outrageously and saying nothing,
the helicopters and planes are seeds in light carriages and pods,
a rainfall of fertilization,
the air is every bit as much a pesticide as it is a nutrient.
the tree bark is stamped so lightly into our eyes
it is hardly there,
the atoms of it do not touch us
and yet the pattern goes somewhere,
stores somewhere and comes back out of us as
a brand new way of designing vacuum cleaners.
someone says hello
or excuse me
and it is not those things.
you see a commercial
or use a toilet
and yet they are not those things.
we think and it is a pin,
a rod,
an axis,
a stamen
a carpel
we give and take
unisexually,
our fears and complexity
our lifestyles
and legacies
all orbits
and trajectory,
merely the shape of
our function,
the brand of our mission
and the ants have no idea what they are doing.

clear conscience

2011-05-02T11:43:00.000-05:00

it’s sad,
most people are a uniplegic-
they have no use of their bodies above the neck.
christ’s cross was dismantled and refurbished
into arm chairs
that we are not so much nailed to,
but just too comfortable to get out of.
the stakes were melted down into paperclips and pen filaments
so that we are not fixed to our burdens,
but rather we staple, and collate our instincts into to do lists.
the notorious cry for help
has been lengthened into a very long, articulate run on sentence
we now know as conversation.
given the couch potato condition of the average person,
the humid dirt and fecundity of their turnip brains,
even as people appropriate one another in microscope slideshow
sideshows of
supply and demand
they rest easy,
digesting all the nut jobs and fruitcakes,
knowing full well
that despite the gorging and excess,
they are still vegetarians.

Here Kitty

2011-04-17T23:17:00.003-05:00

although
we are sure that no god
is hurrying home from its cocktail party to feed us,
or thinking of us, slipping away from its soiree
to let us out anywhere special so that we might empty that bladder of
our discontent,
it is possible that
as we make our way
with crude senses,
we pass through
the territories of
Other Things.
imagine that a higher being
attempts to cluck its tongue at us
in the form of wind,
or that the darkness of the basement
is a demigods crude attempt at replicating our dark age as a means
to communicate in a way it guesses we might understand.
the cliffs with sheer drops and the
invite of an open road with no destination might
be only
The Thing,
huge and far away,
beckoning us with a bowl of something from its kitchen
that it guesses we might like
and for moments we are frozen mid hunt and gather,
making ourselves still and quiet,
trying to reduce ourselves into something average
and paltry that no larger beast might want.
we make ourselves tasteless and roly poly,
playing possum in the most glamorous version we can invent.

as the moment of suspicion passes
we climb into coats and cars
like puffed fur,
like raised luxury hackles,
and go about our bitter surety,
and sullen safety.

Spectrum

2011-04-04T17:13:00.006-05:00

Finally. Finally got into the Spectrum Fantastic Art annual publication. Be in there with some graphic novel artists whose work I buy and read on a regular basis. Been submitting for three years, but kept sending them unsuitable material. Finally sent them the right stuff I guess. It looks like either of my paintings, "Down Down and Away,"

or, "Manguish,"
or both will be featured in there with a ton of other people from around the world. That's all. I'll post a self-aggrandizing pic or something later when I have the edition. Funny, this was going to be my last year submitting. I was going to give up. Because, well, after three years, delayed gratification really just turns into blue balls.

This was last years edition.

The Savage Beats (a short film)

2011-03-27T23:22:00.005-05:00

This is the latest short finished by my brother Zach and I, although none of this stuff ever really gets finished without every single extra, favor and helping hand throwing in. This was really a group effort, from Gilhouly's bar allowing us to shoot on their off day, to people holding rolls of duct tape, to Aaron's excruciatingly patient post work. I am most excited by and proud of the four original and local songs by Aaron Baker, (me), Nate Charlson, and Jerame Gray. I have this fixation on originality and getting new shit and I had vague ideas for what I wanted from the songs and really, these guys fleshed 'em out just perfectly and professionally. Anyway...

The Savage Beats from Josh Rizer on Vimeo.

Origen Historia (Origin Story) a short film

2011-02-21T11:28:00.001-06:00

Origen Historia (Origin Story) from Josh Rizer on Vimeo.

This is Not the Truth: Part 2

2011-02-14T15:09:00.007-06:00

I’m interested in the idea of “emotional corporations.”

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, billboards are expanded in size in order to continue to be dominating and legible as traffic moves faster in his dystopian future.

Well, instead of faster traffic, it is our minds that are moving quicker. The billboards have stayed the same size. In order for companies to be sure that their products stay at the forefront of our short attention spans they have had to braid products irreversibly into our subconscious, into our lifestyles so that these material things are no longer items we pick up while living our lives, but rather they are our lives. They become less companies and more ideas and ideals that we are meant to identify with, thus we adhere ourselves to them in massive percentages of populace, thus we are corporately, not just collectively, minded. I don’t mean simply that we have them on our minds, but more that individuals are grouped together and identified by products. As business got slicker, tapping into our ideologies and insecurities, they intertwined with our unconscious. There are massive quantities of people that are Pepsi or Coke, Mac or PC and they use this to identify what types of people they are. (Oddly, the common advertising trick is to sell the idea to the consumer that they are an individual and free thinking for buying into these products.)

More importantly and more sinister is the concept of branding, which is the practice of a company to define themselves and their service or product with an immediately recognizeable identity such as green or hip. I’m seeing this trend more and more on a personal level, with people branding themselves according to what they wear or use. Fashion, as a trick of commerce, was already devious enough in making people modern or outdated depending on what a person was wearing, but it now defines what type of person we are. People are in effect emotionally branded and have succumbed to a corporate takeover of their identity. Even terminology and emotions are used to telegraph an effect, to elicit a response, more than they are felt or practiced. You might have someone tell you who they are. They may inform you that they are studying vigorously, reading a certain book, or of their quick temper. This is essentially their logo, typically followed by several iterations of a tagline, a jingle or a slogan.

Now, we have reality, as mysterious and unknowable as ever with a populace more removed from it than ever, essentially product placing themselves within the meta-reality of their own corporately inspired franchises. They might tell you which bar they were at, which movie they watched, who they they saw or spent time with. Reality is but a weak, posh Jerry Bruckheimer stage into which people place themselves for notoriety and sales opportunity. There’s a Mac in a summer blockbuster. There’s Jeff in the hot new after hours locale. Meanwhile, less personal efficacy, less tactile experience, less authenticity. People are but helium balloons, typing updates on their doomed altitude. They are websites, not even monetized, just accumulating hits. The more frequently a person changes their interests or favorite band, the more they resemble a bank being bought out every other month.

Additionally, hot button issues have had a way of scattering the slow, deliberate mind into choosing sides when neither option might be perfectly suitable. This could be analogous to a brutal financial market, scaring smaller entities into buying or selling in order to survive. Hostility and insanity has been turned up loud enough that people are quickly absorbed into right or left (In any field of debate. Not only talking about politics here.) and these polarities are cleverly woven into our emotions and more specifically into a type of person we want to be. Consequently you may see people telegraph their brand via a political stance as it sells them as a certain quality of character. This often has more to do with identity than conviction.

We see this same polarity with entertainment, with consumers siding with a character or season of shows. With the Twilight franchise, fan websites are littered with Team Jacob or Team Edward. Lost had these same camps. Every franchise does. This is exactly why films started producing individual movie posters for every major character in their films, such as they do with Pirates of the Caribbean or Tron: Legacy. Each character is a brand, meant to snare a certain demographic who then waves this character flag to describe themselves. Emotionally, a person might be romantic or bullied or hopeful with a complicated history that explains this, but it ends up culminating in the block-headed summary of Team Jacob. Emotionally corporate.

I have a repetitive habit of trashing the Coen Brothers and their films. I’m just not very impressed. But I say this to have an effect. I’m describing myself according to what I side with instead of an ability to define my spirit or demonstrate it. It’s contrarian, to be sure, but it’s more than that. It’s garish neon instead of braille. It’s the Cliff’s Notes to my soul. It’s a Nike emblem, it’s an obscure import beer, it’s a thrift store trucker hat. Whatever it is, it sure isn’t me. Where is my voice coming from? Who am I other than a commodity, a stock that gets traded to whichever company holds my interest? Beyond the pop culture politicking, it’s difficult to know.

I’m sure of this: I like both Wars and Trek. I can’t tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Put a beer in my hand. I don’t care what it is and if choosing one over the other makes me a public share for share holders than I refuse to choose.

Because I’m totally liberal.

This is Not the Truth: Part 1 (3 people like this)

2011-02-14T14:54:00.002-06:00

We once had religion as dogma. It was the primary (And to some, arguably still is.) means by which one person judged, ordered or informed another.

As science is slowly coming to replace religion, utilizing a fact based, quantifiable legitimacy over the more fable based guesses of religion, it has also taken on its dogmatic arrogance.

If we stand back from either form, or whatever format so called knowledge takes, we can deduce one thing: the human being needs a method by which to know things and to hold those things in combat against others. We would assume that science is much more stable and reliable as it bases itself upon a system of investigation whereas religion relied upon superstition, so we would conclude that one was imaginary and the other is lawfully accurate. But in the hands of humans, they seem to provide the same function: armchair haughtiness. Again, science is granted a new credibility as it’s based on...atoms and microscopes and microns. This is well and good but the most unreliable ingredient is the lens of the human mind. There is still a gaping hole in that we assume the human mind is able to deduce where and what to go to for truth and veracity. The most chaotic, unstable particle in science is the human psyche. Simply because a human discovers something it is assumed to be a concrete puzzle piece to a larger truth. But we know from another field, psychology, that the mind will almost always seek out that which completes its own idea of how things ought to be or that which is most comfortable within the framework of what one has already learned. Political polls can be slanted and so can quests, so can appetites.

This part of the critique is admittedly based on observation, which as I have just stated, may be flawed coming as it does through the filter of my unconscious, but we commonly see athiests now and this impoverished, rabid group of blustering cripples is as wildly excited to sit over the red button of annihilation as are religious fanatics. The joy of an atheist is in denouncing that which others believe in. Being contrary. This is to say that I am not convinced the atheist's conclusion is one found at the end of an exhaustive and relentless search for truth, but rather at this point, it’s just a fun way to be play devil’s advocate after an age of religious authority. Again, we must ask why the atheist chooses this belief, just as we must look at the hateful church attendee and ask why have they decided upon these convenient explanations? It is not the result of logic, but of a need to believe in something specifically tailored. The atheist, I believe, enjoys the individuality, the self-reliance, the illusion of independence. (It’s hardly distant from the Anarchist, standing around in a leather jacket, holding a switchblade and a can of spray paint who’s conviction and dedication are actually very shallow.) We could say that at this stage of human development, human beings have reached a teenage rebellion, driving away from the parents house in an agnostic huff, only to surely discover later the wisdom in all that they have rejected. We find as few humble, quiet athiests as we do fervent creationists and this is telling. The claim that there is no god, that we have no meaning or purpose is barely different from the alcoholic or smoker who professes to be proud of their nihilism. It’s juvenile and near sighted.

We have entered an age of information and this is the new currency, just as religion was the primary traffic of thought once upon a time. As such, information, as is commonly quipped, is power and everyone wants power. Consequently we have people everywhere acting as human hard drives, reading and memorizing data in the belief that this is a search for truth and accuracy when in fact it is only the latest version of the thigh bone wielded by this still very primitive species. I come to this point by way of reading too many Facebook updates and the abundance of amateur political reporting done there. These “updates” and bristling comebacks found underneath are equally impartial. They come from a place of defended identity, not unbiased deduction. It reminds me that we do not seek to inform or share or alert, but rather to posses the knowledge. The cutting power of these infobytes is typically held in their contrary nature, depending on the stance of the informant. I hate to say it, but liberals are as guilty as conservatives in this area. And in this age of information, everyone is equally equipped with the same data base, leveling the playing field and creating a cold war where individuality is concerned, as it’s become extremely difficult to differentiate ones’ self by cornering a new market of information. Consenquently we have a population of snots instead of thinking people. We see it with grammar, (Don’t you mean “whom?”) vocabulary (Ignorant idiot said irregardless!) and trivia/current events. (That soy milk is actually bad for you.) In a sense, this is all the opposite of sarcasm. Sarcasm is a generally mean spirited exaggeration whereas these are mean spirited facts.

When I was eight years old, I got stuck with two of my mother’s friend’s children, both younger than me, who proceeded to push Christianity on me. We walked an empty sewer bed for what seemed like a long time and the argument got heated. I was very indignant over the assertion that I would go to hell if I did not believe in god. My final, continuing argument was if there is a god, may he strike me down right now with lightning. Because it didn’t happen, I felt right and powerful, but I also didn’t feel accurate. Simply because I wasn’t struck down didn’t really prove anything. In the end, both arguments were designed to be right, they were vindictively crafted to scorch the higher ground that neither of us were an authority on.

There is an ancient question that asks how do you describe a river? Is it the water, is it the banks on either side that make it a river? Is it the the land that butts the banks up against it? Is it the wetness, the direction or speed of the flow? There is no way to definitively encapsulate exactly what it is. We can only describe it. Religion might call it a spiritual artery, geography or cartography or biology would call it something else. We really don’t know, though, it’s a matter of perspective. It would be a shame to prematurely limit the thing and our understanding of it or anything else with an arms race-style looting of what little knowledge we have so far. What we have is an age-old need to superimpose a framework over the mystery. Religion certainly did this. Science does it. Health and politics does it. So does anorexia and OCD and other pathologies. While I wouldn’t suggest not trying to understand, I would suggest trying while at the same time always carrying that open ended fact in the backs of our minds: We don’t know. This is what we share in common, this mysterious experience. Instead, we find ourselves in a time where each person, desperate to distinguish themselves, is an island of fanaticism, trying to convert constituents with comebacks and bumper stickers and Facebook updates.

Don't Know Jack

2011-02-11T21:05:00.002-06:00

This is a piece I started two years ago that's just sat in the computer ever since. I never got all the footage I wanted to really complete this documentary, but a few days ago I just decided to put something together with what I had. This is about my neighbor's unique collection...

Don't Know Jack from Josh Rizer on Vimeo.

Back on the Eighties Game Grid

2010-12-16T10:17:00.001-06:00

Brushing up on my Tron skills in prep for tonight's sequel. You can't get this shit in the 21st century!

eighties game grid from Josh Rizer on Vimeo.

Install at the Bar

2010-12-13T23:33:00.001-06:00

You can stop by Gilhouly's bar at 39th and Bell for what I believe is a permanent install, featuring the photography of Jon Bidwell and a couple of nice prints 'o my stuff. I've been going to Gilhouly's for a long time now, so, I'm sorta honored to be up on their walls. Huge thanks to Bidwell for the stunning canvas prints and to CJ for letting us desecrate their walls. The painting, "Down, Down and Away," was originally staged at Gilhouly's and now it's hanging there, so there's kind of a cool "meta" thing going on. This very nice drunkish fellow was talking to me about, "Down," and I told him I took reference pictures in Gilhouly's for the painting. "Really?" He asks. "Yeah, the painting is actually done from your vantage point, from where you're sitting." He was looking at the painting, back to his perspective on the bar, back to the painting, back to his perspective. "Whoah, that's trippy," he says. Cute.

The Veteran Poet

2010-11-30T15:21:00.001-06:00

you dont get to cut off your circulation
and call it a purple heart.
metal of armor
is not medal of honor.
you don’t get to self-mutilate
and call them battle scars.
you want pussy and money like any
ghetto athlete.
you don’t get to sit on the periphery of the action with a dunce cap
and call it cornering the market.
youre gonna need more than the tin foil of a poets armor.
your tough veneer is little more than a mosquito net,
trapping
the blood sucking pathogens of your own disillusionment
inside with you.
what you thought was a hardened ploymer of tough love
is little more than a doe eyed wedding veil
wherein you try to peserve the anal virginity of your very,
very inner child.
the sharper your glare,
the more the bitter glint gives away your cowardly snipers position.
if youre gonna get in peoples face and look down the bent barrel of your
largely stolen homage and pastiche,
you can’t be gun shy
and if you decide you’re a trigger happy malcontent
you’ll want to check the safety, punk.
talking about women like meat
makes you a butcher, not a lion.
calcification isn’t wisdom.
if youre gonna strut around and act tough,
stomp around in boots and black,
if you’re gonna act honed by the years
and sharp,
you might wanna make sure you ain’t
runnin’ with scissors
ya dumb fuck.

Obsolete

2010-11-20T13:32:00.001-06:00

you outlast the villains,
they retire and become pathetic.
the cape and cowl
begins to look ridiculous
with age.
down,
down
and
away.

Interviews

2010-11-20T13:21:00.002-06:00

these are some interviews that Aren't We Clever and Itzu Media were nice enough to put together...

There's a lot of fudging room right now. [op-ed by artist Joshua Rizer] from Chandler Simpson on Vimeo.

Taboo and the modern male conundrum. [interview with artist Joshua Rizer] from Chandler Simpson on Vimeo.

A Dish Better Served with Michael Caine

2010-11-06T14:18:00.003-05:00

Both The Horseman and Harry Brown are essentially revenge films, but with different motivations and quality levels.

Harry Brown principally starts Michael Caine, who is one of those actors who can nearly make a movie watchable entirely on his own. He plays an elderly, retired widower who’s life is comprised of having a few at the local pub and playing chess with his equally elderly friend. Their poor neighborhood is plagued by gangs of vicious, sociopathic youths that keep everyone in a shamed state of fear. Both their youth and their brazen fearlessness of the law serve to make Caine even older, widening the gulf between his generation and the one twice removed beneath him. (He fishes a cell phone from a boy’s pocket at one point, then tosses it back to him, saying, “Make it work,” left behind by today’s technology.)

There isn’t a lot to say here. Someone he cares about goes down at the hands of this vicious gang and we then discover Harry Brown is ex military. The rest of the movie is obvious. What’s different here is the character’s age. This isn’t Mel Gibson or Liam Neeson going out with good hair and physical prowess, this is an old man who arguably has even left to live for than younger vigilantes in other movies. Also, while on the one hand absurd, his age makes him the perfect, unassuming candidate for taking revenge as no one suspects him. The writers have managed to offer the character scenes in which he uses his senior citizen guise to best his enemies, never asking us to believe that he will overpower them or outrun them. The character uses his age to bumble and dodder into situations where he can use his training.

It seems more appropriate and gratifying to have an older character go postal. He is avenging a death, but also making a statement and a judgment upon the latest generation which has gone completely off the tracks. He’s also making a stand against his own obsolescence. It takes more courage and more conviction for a character of this age to muster the balls to take on violent gangs. For Steven Seagal or Dwayne Robinson to jump into the fray creates almost an unfair fight on screen. You watch Michael Caine and put yourself in his shoes-could I take on a pack of wild dogs now, much less at seventy? I was reminded greatly of Rocky Balboa, which seemed predicated largely on an older model of human being coming out of retirement as much for his own reasons as he was unable to stand by and watch the youth of today immolate itself in apathy. Whether the script contained it or not, Caine manages to pull sympathy and vulnerability out of his character with his basset hound eyes, always on the verge of liquifying with either tears or age.

Furthermore, this movie pulls no punches, which seems bold in light of the character’s age. He kills. He isn’t sorry. There’s a scene where he infiltrates a drug den to purchase a weapon and it’s very reminiscent of Clarence Worley dropping in on Drexel’s living room in True Romance, although the scene in Harry Brown makes the one from True Romance seem PG. These kids are soulless constituents of hell, not merely hold up artists or belligerent rebels. Herein was also an unflinching commentary on the current generation. They aren’t misguided or morally confused, they are worthless garbage.

The Horseman is an entirely different animal, a very bleak, if not depressing revenge flick. Father loses his daughter to a drug fueled, ghetto porn shoot and decides to dispatch those responsible. From the outset these are uncomfortable circumstances. Also from the outset, it’s difficult to get behind the father as we wonder how he allowed his daughter to get to this point if he loved her so much. He seems, by grief and guilt, as complicit as those he’s doing away with.

I don’t recall one scene of subtlety. The director/writer simply hits the pat xylophone notes of revenge with a rudimentary mallet. We have the requisite flashbacks of the father recalling the daughter he’s lost. Then we have him barging into an unsuspecting perpetrators residence and dispatching them. I had to give this movie some points for its grisly nature. In trying to get names, the father puts his subjects through some creative tortures that fall more in line with what a father might actually do with both that level of rage and no experience in interrogation. In short, he gets wickedly, gut wrenchingly creative. Air pump is all I’m going to say. By its end, the movie was a grisly downward spiral and I’m not sure I was prepared or looking for that kind of experience.

I also couldn’t turn it off as I was interested with how cheaply it seemed to be made. No tripod shots, with fake blood and edits that omitted the need for experienced fighters and makeup. Also, amidst the deplorable content (We’re dealing with a group of guys that make street level, drug induced porn with desperate girls.) there was an endearing spirit whereby the film seemed to be made by, young, inexperienced teenagers. There are repetitive fights, each of which resembles one another as though the makers were behind camera, saying, “Yeah, then he hits him with that stick. Again! Yeah! Then he kicks him!” It’s not a bad film exactly and shows you don’t need a lot of money to get something done.

Unfortunately, the movie undermines itself. By the end, the father has managed to put another young girl in real danger with morbid consequences and again, there isn’t really anyone to root for. If you’re going to expose the viewer to scum of this caliber, we need to really be behind the vigilante, cheering for him, relishing the deaths of villains but the landscape here felt more like an earthbound Hell with one human catastrophe taking out his failure on the other demons. Points for an unflinching lens with unknown, low budget means. Points subtracted for taking us on a trip we don’t really want or have any reason to go on.

What Did You Expect?

2010-11-05T11:46:00.001-05:00

oh,
is it getting difficult?
they have meat hooks
and nets dragged across depths you didn’t even know you had,
overfishing your very spirit.
they have satellite surveillance.
they have expiration dates on your family and friends.
they have the shadows of what is irretrievably behind you
and the shadows of what is irrefutibly before
and your light can’t scatter either one.
when it comes to the school of hard knocks,
you’re a loser drop out.
they have made your cells ground zero
for a spiritual malaise that
makes corporate domination
look like a frontier flour mill.
i’m talking about the colorless, odorless
culture inhaled with every breath,
skull fucking your mind,
the one that’s bribed and blackmailed six billion consituents.
i’m talking about the force fed overdose
of any moment
that makes you want to stomach pump your chakras and
guzzle charcoal flushes.

oh,
are you feeling a little empty?
you’ve shot your very marrow,
lifted your leg and sprayed spinal fluid,
stem cells,
rolled your glands from the bottom up
like tubes of toothpaste
and spunked on nothingness
to the hard core porn of greed and desperation.

oh,
are you not feeling like you used to?
the earth is a kind of alien centrifuge,
being made up of
cyclical patterns,
the earth a potted plant with no bottom, a botanical experiment,
all of it designed to spin a product we are not capable of appreciating.
the earth is a pottery wheel at the hands of space of time-
if we are not careful
we’ll end up a stupid ashtray or
coffee mug for mother’s day.
god has made us in its image
and likewise,
we imitate him
with whatever molecules
we have at our disposal,
relinqushing effort
and also squaring off
as if we were rallying
against some terminal idea
that wants to give up and let go.
eating only ghost meat
and phantom jerky,
we’ll prove the FDA
doesn’t know what the fuck it’s
talking about.
this crescendo you’re tying to conduct
requires a ridiculous amout of thrust
to fight earth’s gravity,
to leave the atmosphere of mediocrity.

oh,
are your little wings withering,
your little pixie body phasing out?
they don’t believe in you anymore?
you don’t believe in yourself?
you need some applause.
well then you better
start clapping
you fuckin’ fairie,
clap.

Mouth's "Form and Funktion"

2010-11-04T11:02:00.005-05:00

Mouth
Bass- Zach Rizer
Guitar- Jeremy Anderson
Drums-Stephen Gunn

I have the incredibly good fortune of liking my brother, liking music, and really, really liking those two things put together. This is one song from their recent after party show at The Crosstown Station.

I'm a real dick about music, I just dislike virtually everything I come across, for all of the same reasons I disapprove of most art and we are all fed up with movies. Somehow, music has escaped the scorn with which most people view commerciality, with teens and twenty somethings are still buying into the corporate-backed band of the week, so long as its labeled indie or singer songwriter, as if a record label couldn't possibly take bullshit and label it truth?

I guess this is why I find myself surprised at each Mouth show, having such a great time and genuinely loving the jams. Anyone might think it's just because it's family, but if that's all it were, I wouldn't be posting this. I really like this shit, and I don't like anything.

This is a great example of Mouth’s slow burn. Often when they start, they disarm with simplicity that has a listener saying, “This is fine. This is good.” Then it doubles on itself and scatters unexpectedly. Four minutes in, this piece really picks up but you can’t skip ahead or you lose the delayed gratification. This music demonstrates expert showmanship. Each of these musicians is accomplished, (check the solos starting at 55 seconds in.) but runs talent through several filters including approachability, digestibility and entertainment. The listener is lulled in, passing through the common, unremarkable gasket of a, “band,” only to find a few minutes in that they are immersed in a knitted geometry of sound. They do not lead with talent, but finish with it. The listener experiences a beautiful 180 which leaves them with the most pleasant of musical experiences, the unexpected. You don’t expect to hear a disco beat from experienced musicians and you don’t expect to hear real cinematic, pensive beauty from a jam band.

As is probobly the case with many bands, one really needs to be there to appreciate it. I often watch the crowd at these shows and see women enraptured, see men punching each other when the beats pick up, with unsolicited exclamations of, This is fucking badass!

And yet there’s no elitism on stage, no sour, “band musk.” After all the times they’ve played these songs, Mouth probobly doesn’t even know what they have, which disarms the
audience, inviting them in, as does the almost self-effacing practice of taking a comlicated chord structure and shoving it into a techno/dance beat.

In short, go see them. The next time I invite you out, come along, or we're not friends.

In the Works...

2010-11-04T10:47:00.004-05:00

a few pics from one of the short films i've been working on with my brother, Zach, although these things can't get done without every single person involved. I riffed on an idea Jason Ryberg threw my way and a year later we're finally getting around to it. Three or four original songs in it, can't wait to see it done. Should be finished within the month...

Aaron Baker

Jason Ryberg

Some suspiciously familiar characters lurking in the background, making this short a piece that stands on its own as well as a potentially supplemental yarn from The Boss universe.

The First Rule of Jackass 3D is, We Should Talk About Jackass 3D

2010-11-04T10:26:00.001-05:00

Yes. I laughed. I guffawed. I cried, No! But there was more going on in this film than pranks and pain.

Subjecting oneself to danger and depravity appears to put the abuse into a different category from frat house hazing or simple moronic stupidity. To me, Jackass often appears to be a zen alignment with life, a parallel path, albeit fast track, to breakdown and degradation. This is the human being putting affront and debasement up front and center, acknowledging the horrors of age, gender and bodily function, rather than concealing them with the narcissism of health or the fraud of image. One can be of two minds about the various scenes. There’s plenty of scatological pieces-either these are stomach turning juvenilia, or they are reminding us, in our face, that this is what comes out of us, this is what goes into us. There seems to be an underlying, reductionist element here, to remind us all of what we are really made of, what life can become, and to then beat the insult of age and illness to the punch by degrading the self beyond what nature can conceive of.

Steve-O drinking a sweat cocktail could either be simply disgusting or a commentary, a literal distillation reminding us of what we absorb, what we take in from other people in a figurative sense. Think you’re breathing air right now? You’re also breathing other people’s exhaust, their odors, touching the residue left behind when your friend or family last touched the thing you’re holding. Steve-O tops this, takes it nearly to its most concentrated form. What could nature throw at him after drinking the dew from an obese ass crack?

This is Fight Club without the high minded philosophy, accelerating self-destruction without all of the seriousness. In fact, the cast’s self-depricating schemes and laughter makes them in some ways more enlightened than a Chuck Palahniuk nihilist. (One wonders how long a Tyler Durden would last getting his teeth pulled by a Lamborghini or taking jet engine propelled shoes to the face.) The abuse, the trials of life or in this case, a movie set, does not deserve a sober locking of the philosophical horns, but rather buffoonery and giggling. On the set of Jackass 3D, being punched in the face or dropped unexpectedly into a pit of snakes is par for the course and we might be able to take a cue from this on the “set” of our lives.

I was reminded of rites of passages, the horrific and abusive trials some cultures have put their people through in order to pass them into adulthood and historically, we might not look at these trials as barbarism and only culture. With Jackass 3D, (Whether they realize it or not.) I’m not sure they’re making a quick buck with punching gloves and pissing on one another so much as they are passing themselves, graduating into a person that lives with pain, lives with the question and accepts that which they cannot change. Are grown men in bikini briefs exhibitionist clowns or have they stripped down to a visual vulnerability as well as a physical one? Is someone getting hit by a steer an idiot or just a different version of an old timey sword swallower, a trapeze artist working with mass and velocity instead of balance and gravity?

I’m not suggesting that these guys set out to accomplish these things. I’m only saying that these elements are there if you want to look for them and it’s too easy to write this crew off as merely Jackasses. In a time where every symptom has a medication, every blemish a cover, every function a floral smelling antidote, many of which stall the individuals understanding that things are fragile and finite, we might welcome and thank these circus performers, these gladiators, these traveling troupers that do not sell cure alls for life, but instead remind us there are none.

Halloween, XXX

2010-11-04T10:20:00.001-05:00

I like Halloween. I think it’s a fun, let me say that before I start sniping. I’m not so much dissatisfied as interested in how it’s changed.

It’s fascinating to think that the joy of costuming used to be about getting ghoulish. Halloween has always been about dipping into the dark side. Dressing up used to be more monstrous, about getting ugly and nasty and wounded. It was one day where we were likely to dress down, the opposite of glamour.

It’s strange then, how appropriated Halloween has been by adults and further more, how very adult it’s gotten.

I stopped by the costume shop and could say that fifty to seventy percent of their stock revolved around making women sexually titillating. It doesn’t matter if you want to go as a fairy tale character, a victorian socialite or a neanderthal-if you’re a woman, chances are you’ll be wearing stockings and a very short skirt. Essentially every conceivable costume has been cross bred with the french maid. It’s interesting that when our deeper minds now think ghoulish, we come up with promiscuity instead of monstrosity. Many older, time tested costumes seem to deal in the subject of predators: vampires, werewolves, devils and the like, now replaced by a different type of predator: the sexual one. The fearful appetite has been removed from external threats wherein we dealt with the occult and mortality and we now highlight if not glamorize the internal appetite. The darker part of our psyches now scream genitalia instead of fangs or hooves. There seems to be a real impatience with theater here, as the more traditional costumes had subtext. The vampire is of course a sexual character, locking its mouth on your body and draining you. The werewolf, like any animal is a nod to our baser impulses and most specifically, our sexual ones. Frankenstein might be an acknowledgment of how imperfectly we were formed, that those who made us had good intentions without sufficient means. The current costume trend has just bypassed that entirely, bored with symbols and metaphors, cutting straight to it’s about sex so I’ll look sexy. This reminds me of reality television, removing the story completely and sticking the camera in the fights, the sex, the winners and the losers.

To be fair, I saw tetris pieces, a completely dignified Zorro and an Ace Ventura. It’s not all bad, although even these have taken on the quality of a fetish ball whereas Halloween used to feel ritualistic as though we were making an offering of ourselves to the things that might eat us.

The horrific and the occult used to be made up of things that were not human and now the grossest thing we can imagine is a woman endowed with some arachnid cunning, someone who’s power and trap is her very vulnerability.

Men are often the same, going as porn stars, tennis players with socks in their shorts, I even saw an Oscar the Grouch with a large, furry green penis. Here there is a deformed glee in debasing the innocent, in reducing the professional and suggesting that whatever you are, it comes down to appetite. In this sense Halloween is still about our darker sides, but currently the model for darkness is no external beast whom we flee, but instead a very human internal smuttiness that we embrace.

A Little Bit of the Old Ultraviolence On Bronson

2010-03-21T12:12:00.002-05:00

Bronson, based on the true story of Michael Peterson, the UK’s most violent prisoner, opens with a very self-aware introduction by the character followed by footage of him prowling a small prison cage nude, shadow boxing, readying himself for combat with guards. In a sense, you almost don’t need to watch the rest of the movie, this footage more or less embodies the rest of the film, although it’s definitely worth finishing the piece for elaboration.

After being sentenced to seven years for robbery, Michael Peterson took the name Charles Bronson, after the American action star as he felt it better represented his barbaric and potentially famous nature. All in all, Bronson spent thirty years in solitary confinement.

Bronson makes vague and vaguely unsuccessful attempts to suggest that violence might merely be a slightly more visceral expression of antiestablishment. Returning often to scenes showing Bronson pacing either cells or less glamorous cages, we are left to see him as something of a captive spirit, perhaps kept down by powers at be. In one scene, Bronson, in a kind of Hannibal Lector heroism, selects a prisoner far more despicable than himself as the victim of his rage. Furthermore, there is a brief movement in the movie showing Bronson’s flirtation with art and a prison instructor that takes special interest in the work, calling Bronson a “genius.” Here again is the implication that perhaps his rage and behavior was simply a misdirected extension of brilliance. There are multiple scenes depicting the character as potentially tender, perhaps needing love or a level of attention the world is incapable of supplying. Again, his brash personality coupled with a violent, imposing physique often imply that this character was a colossal engine to which the world is unqualified to fuel. Nevertheless, it makes for interesting study to suppose that gratuitous violence might be just another take on a personality too big to fit anywhere. In this respect, his violent outbursts might be akin to Jackson Pollack’s frenzied painting or Charlie Parkers fevered playing. While this is an interesting suggestion, the viewer can be certain that the actual prisoner’s motives and violence bore little resemblance to nobility, justice or selectivity.

Tom Hardy as Bronson delivers a truly crackling performance, channeling bits of Daniel Day Lewis’ vibrant authority from There Will Be Blood mixed with Robert Carlyle's vicious character, Begbie, from Trainspotting. On screen, he has a truly terrifying, riveting presence. By riveting, I don’t mean the hollywood hyperbole, but rather that his intensity bolts the viewer down in anxious anticipation. There are several segments with Bronson quiet, grinning from underneath his old timey strongman’s mustache, toying with his captors expectation of another violent outburst and the viewer is likewise anxious, wondering if this will this be a rare glimmer of decency and humor or will it be another sociopathic eruption?

Part of the films ability to unnerve is a result of the direction, which, if you were told Stanley Kubrick was back from the dead and helming this movie, you would believe it. Slow, clinical camera work often set to classical music eerily offsets the ferocity. (It might even be too derivative, not just of Kubrick, but of other things. Bronson at one point demands music in exchange for a hostage and the guards play the same opera piece used in The Shawshank Redemption, leading one to wonder how much of the conceptual fabric was original.)

At the end of the film, I felt as you might feel walking through a zoo, seeing giant beasts behind bars, either wondering at majesty, horrifying at captivity, fearing or dismissing bestiality. It ends as it began, with Bronson stalking the emptiness of his cage and this image has the quality of a painting. We could say that the cage is life. We could say that his nudity indicates that uncompromising behavior will strip a man of everything in the end, everything but his fists. There are several conclusions to walk away from Bronson with, but I couldn't help seeing it as a statement on compromise, that when the bills or boss or prison guards come for us, it might do well to remember Charles Bronson, naked and oiled up for minimal friction, screaming Come on, you fuckin cunts!

Rolling Exhibit

2010-03-19T15:59:00.003-05:00

my tags got stolen so fuck it, just hand drew some. notice the way i used form, shape and composition to create a subversive visual fabric.

Absurdly Insightful (On MOON)

2010-03-19T13:36:00.001-05:00

MOON is improbable. Directed by David Bowie’s son, Duncan Jones, MOON tells the story of a lone miner/astronaut (Played by Sam Rockwell) harvesting the sun’s energy. On a solitary outpost located on the moon, Sam Bell is forced to confront themes such as identity, self renewal and self condemnation. This is yet another film whose central conceit I cannot divulge here, but rest assured this is one of the more solid films worth watching to emerge in a long while.

Aided by a bulky robotic companion, GERDY (Voiced by Kevin Spacey, doing a bit of homage to HAL from 2001.) Sam Bell is close to finishing out a three year contract harvesting new solar energy which is routinely launched back to earth. The closer he gets to the end, the more he appears to unravel and the character arc is one that can only be told by science fiction. GERDY displays its mood through a tiny screen with a yellow happy face on it, shedding a blinking tear or frowning. One would think that in this future, a robotic companion might have more articulate sophistication that simply using texting emoticons. One also might think that in this advanced future, more than one human being might be required or at least desired to man an entire mining operation, no matter how advanced the technology, but this is the beauty of science fiction: it can put people and conditions in situations that other genres simply cannot. This is a what if story, a speculative yarn that is uniquely qualified to talk about identity. Strangely, metaphor, allegory and symbolism posses an inverse property, that the more outrageous the scenario, the more precise the commentary.

MOON is a high quality entry in the desolate space drama, bearing similar aesthetics to Solaris and 2001, while being much more personal and accessible than what are often overly cerebral, existential stories too arcanely coded to understand. Sam Rockwell is by turns scary, hilarious and endearing. Clint Mansell turns in another haunting, beautiful score. I highly recommend this film, immersing yourself in the improbable to learn a little more about what might be possible.

Eulogy: on LOST (spoiler free)

2010-03-01T19:39:00.007-06:00

I’m going to say it now, because I may not be able to say it later: LOST is the greatest, most ambitious piece of entertainment created to date.

I’m saying it now because I don’t know how I’ll feel at the end of this, the final season. I suspect I’ll feel like everyone else will the day after the last episode, unsatisfied and depressed. I feel prepared for it not being what I want to be, but only because I understand this is the nature of endings. In really good fiction with well drawn characters, there is a little bit of life and death whereby we don’t really want it to end despite how badly we want answers. There is probably no ending that would satisfy, no unification that would make me okay with this six year long ride coming to a close. So, the day after, chances are I’ll be nit picking and grumbling and irate just like everybody else, so I have to praise it now, while it’s alive, while I still love it. (This is extremely hard to do without disclosing specifics of the show, but I'll try.)

I call it a piece of entertainment, which sounds like damning by faint praise, but it isn’t. I say this for a number of reasons. One, I suppose, is because it’s episodic, because the nature of the televised beast is to string the viewer along through commercials and seasons to maximize profit. In and of itself, this is not necessarily an evil thing. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone proved long ago that episodic, sponsor driven entertainment can still contain important content. I also call it entertainment simply because it is so entertaining, designed as a bracing float trip with humor, intrigue and people the viewer cares about. But there’s nothing wrong with entertainment and no reason it can’t also qualify as art. (I would argue that most art could do with a little more entertainment thrown in.) In the case of LOST, entertainment is a widespread vehicle through which important, complicated ideas can be digested. This is proved by the show’s popularity among all age and gender brackets, which becomes especially impressive as the later seasons began to unravel their mysteries in arcane suppositions that I would expect to turn off the common viewer. After each episode of LOST I find the most unexpected demographics chomping at the bit to learn the meaning behind numerology, archetypes, mythology, symbolism, literature and, well, everything, as no other widely digested piece of entertainment has ever attempted to address. And herein is the primary source of my respect for LOST, as well as my argument against those who do not care for it as well as my preconceived pass for a likely unsatisfying ending: no other piece of entertainment has reached so high. True, in reaching for top shelf material, we sometimes see the armpit hair of the show-there are hits and misses, character inconsistencies required to propel the massive cast and the colossal story forwards, but I have to allow the show its misfires given the story it is trying to tell. Currently, the viewership is so wrapped up in the mystery that we are generally unwilling to betray the gift horse, such is our desire for answers. Still, over the last two seasons, as the sprawling story began to reveal some of its mechanisms, there has been more and more grumbling about the direction it has taken as well as the outlandish events that have taken place. I have two thoughts on this.

One, what would an audience want instead? Another season of 24 or another medical drama clone? LOST is outlandish, the brushes painting this story are fat and wild. The story is off the page, so to speak. While I personally enjoy this sort of tale, it’s hard to understand how people aren’t appreciating this ride as opposed to another Law and Order spin off.

Two, this is fiction at its best. This is what it does, take us somewhere we haven’t been, show us a permutated version of possibility and speculation. Again, this is an alley we haven’t been down with television before-widely, most audiences are being broken in to this kind of material with LOST. (All the more stunning that it has been so successful.) The X Files has been the closest thing to it, which was still narrowly popular among sci fi fans and even The X Files managed to alienate its fanbase by stringing them along a mysterious path which clearly had no ending in sight. (LOST was reputedly written backwards with a clear, intended ending planned all along.) In fiction, we have to allow for a bit of absurdity. Symbolism and archetype aren’t meant to be taken as reality-they are compressions of concepts, shrunk wrapped in a format we can decipher quickly. Films are also compressions of life lessons. Even, if not especially action movies. An explosion is not an explosion, it is a compression of conflict captured quickly on screen. If you could compress your entire life, all ts failures and successes into a two hour event, it might contain explosions and gun fights and car chases, but these story devices are just that: devices. Take Die Hard, where at the end John McClane ties the fire hose around his waist as a tether and leaps from the exploding high rise, dangling many floors above the earth. Absurd. But it isn’t and it is about reality. The event itself is an exaggerated compression intended to inform us quickly about ingenuity, courage and faith.

LOST has these same moments and absurdities, but the show is telling us about mysticism, hope, things greater than ourselves, reality, spirituality, loyalty, everything that fiction should be talking about. As a piece of entertainment, the show has instilled fans with a sense of wonder that even some jaded viewers have been unable to deny. Not since The Matrix has such a speculative pry bar been jammed into the collective unconscious and I have to wonder what work could possibly follow the breadth of this show.

Finally, it will be the category of entertainment under which the ending will pass with a universal shrug and I fear the show will not be celebrated for its ground breaking ambition and high caliber of story telling. I may find myself among the disgruntled, orphaned fanatics left behind in a desert of entertainment. I may be mourning too much to sift back through the miracle of it. I learned this from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series (Which the producers of LOST have acknowledged as a major source of inspiration.) and I learned it from The Matrix trilogy. (Both of these endings were bungled, but really, how could they have ended so that we would be happy?) We love the mystery and we hate it. We want to know but we want to keep knowing. When we want something to stay alive there is no way to really celebrate or be happy about its passing. In a few months, I’ll be kicking pebbles and cans as I walk around, drafting letters to the creators on how the show should have gone out, but right now, I have a few sweet months left of LOST and I wanted to sing its gospel. In a few months I may be moved to denounce its blasphemy.

the show goes on. and on. and on and on and on..

2010-02-22T10:32:00.001-06:00

another sunday night of bass n paint.

another sunday night from Josh Rizer on Vimeo.

"MAN-GST"

2010-02-17T16:49:00.002-06:00

March 5th
First Fridays
The Late Show
1600 Cherry
6-10
all new oil paintings dealing with male angst

Valentine’s Day 2091

2010-02-15T09:14:00.002-06:00

She ducked into the passenger seat after a long work day, purse, empty coffee mug and gym clothes wadded up in the crook of her arm.

“Happy Valentines Day,” I said.

She squeezed my hand. “You too.”

She fumbled in her purse, retrieving a package of Tim Blake’s Fire Hot Jerky. “I’m starving,” she said, trying to rip open the vacuum sealed package.

“We’re going to dinner, you know,” I reminded her. I pulled away from the curb, heading for home. “You’ll ruin your appetite.”

“I know, I know, but I’m so hungry, besides, have you seen this?” She asked, holding up the package. Tim Blank’s picture was printed on the packaging, thumbs up, with studio set lights in the background, along with the title of his latest movie. “This is the special edition jerky, made from the set of High Society. A shameless tie in, I know, but I had to try it.” High Society was about a talented albeit broke chef with a heart of gold that wins the affections of an airline heiress. Consequently, the studio had cloned Tim Blake and made a limited edition jerky from his hands and face as part of a promotional campaign. She put a sliver of Blake Jerky in her mouth and chewed.

“I don’t understand people’s, women’s fascination with that guy. He can’t act. Besides, it’s Valentines Day, remember. You might be ruining a surprise, eating that,” I warned.

She stopped chewing. “What. What is it. Tell me. Tell me!”

“Nope, you’re going to have to wait and see,” I said.

She faced forward again, bottling her curiosity and fed herself another strip. “I heard Niko Fontana’s Cool Ranch Jerky got recalled, something about a miscombination in her cloning plant. Turns out that while fans thought they were eating delicious Niko Fontana, they were actually digesting a dangerously mutated version of her. Can you believe that?”

“It’ll make the collectors happy though,” I commented. “You know my buddy Matt? He collects all the recalls, thinks they’ll be worth something someday. He’s got a whole closet full of famous meats and celebrity dairy products that, for whatever reason were pulled from the shelves. Remember when Cole Preston accidentally fell into the jerky stripper and his fans were actually eating him instead of cloned meat? Matt actually has a factory sealed package of Cole, uneaten. He thinks he’ll retire someday off of it.” I reached into my coat pocket and handed her another package of meat. “Here, if you’re so hungry, have this to tide you over.” She took the package and looked at it. I read her mind. “Sorry, it’s plain. Impulse buy at the hardware store, but at least you won’t pass out from hunger.”

She tore it open and tried a strip. “Actually, this is quite good,” she said, chewing away.

“On the subject of celebrity gossip, did you hear that porn star, Jack Hoff is trying to put out his own label now? He wants to clone porn actors and make jerky from their, uh, parts. Can you believe that?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “ but that’s just gross. People’s obsession with stars knows no bounds or taste sometimes.”

“Yeah, “ I agreed. “On top of that he’s calling it Jerk Meat, of course.”

Shaking her head, she tried to swallow quickly for another sentence. “I forgot to tell you, Tracy from work? Her fiancee is taking her on one of those tours of the meat plants for Valentines Day. Apparently they let you walk the pastures with the cloned stars, too genetically simplified for autographs, but still, you get to rub elbows with them in a second hand sort of way. Isn’t that cool?”

“It is. I wish I’d come up with that. Now my gift just pale’s in comparison.”

“Okay,” she said, “I’ve played cool for long enough. You know I hate surprises. Just tell me. What is it?” She was grinning and chewing.

“You really want me to ruin it? I was going to wait for dinner. I don’t want to ruin it.”

“Come on. Just tell me.”

“Okay,” I said at a stop light. I turned to her. “You’re eating it. It’s me. I’m the surprise.”

Squealing, she stomped her feet on the floor of the car. “You’re kidding! You are not serious! Are you serious?”

“I am. I’ve been saving for a long time. Wait, there’s more!” I said in my best game show voice. “I actually took some cell swabs of you from the bathroom. It’s actually a blend of you and me. Our own jerky! We’re mixed together forever.” I couldn’t contain my pride.

Laughing out loud, she came clean. “I have to tell you, I was afraid it was going to be another vacation or a car or something. This is really special. It really has meaning. You are the sweetest man I know.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek softly.

“Happy Valentine’s Day, baby,” I said.

Avatars, Forgeries and Pirated Shams

2010-02-11T12:07:00.004-06:00

I’ve fallen out of the habit of using an ipod in the car for some reason and when I’m not listening to the same song over and over for two months I’ve begun to listen to the radio, just for it’s unexpected, unplanned quality. As I scan the stations, I come across modern pop/rock stations and there’s a certain emptiness about them that’s been grating on me that I’ve been unable to identify. (Besides the terrible quality, but i’ll save that rant for some other time.)

I’ve noticed that there seems to be a tremendous quantity of sad songs, of candy coated sentimental pieces that want the listener to believe the performer is in the most authentic of heart torn failures. While love songs go back to the beginning of human history, there’s a new quality that’s disconcerting.

We’ve seen a trend of valuing the singer/songwriter again, of so called “indie” music as a backlash to commerciality. It’s important and obvious to note of course that this trend is but another marketing push of commerciality, that large labels have created dummy imprints to put out indie music, just as 90’s grunge bands were also supposed to be a genuine article in answer to the commerciality of the eighties. Even pop songs that don’t necessarily claim to be indie sport an overly sensitive, faux intellectual attempt at keen observation and thoughtfulness.

I am finding that the fixation on “ends” to a romantic affair reflect the consumers desire to make an epic of their life. Despite the resulting pain of a failed relationship, I believe the modern lover almost seeks a tragic end so that it might punctuate their life or create a dramatic end to something that is otherwise typical and ordinary. To closely examine and fixate on the tragedy of endings is a verification that the relationship itself warrants a larger than life funereal. The epic ending, the extremity of pain implies an epic relationship and an extremity of feeling in an age where the opposite of said experience is often the case. One gets the feeling from these songs that the listener is almost in giddy anticipation of the end, of the gossip and the drama of it. Unfortunately these songs are no more than sonic clip art recombined in various permutations to make the listener identify with a sense of loss over something that was never worth very much to begin with. A romantic puff piece created in a studio laboratory is no more an indication of a sincere experience than a profile icon or avatar is of a whole person. These tales of woe more closely resemble the vapid talking heads of political cable shows, except that they are spewing jargon regarding supposed love.

The ending is easier for the modern listener to attach to as the end more conveniently marks the experience than does the blood, sweat and tears required to make something work. Again there is the suspicious sense that the consumer can’t wait for a sad ending as it’s the only confirmation that anything was ever there at all, being that most contemporary relationships contain so little mercy, compassion or understanding.

On the opposite end of endings, we have creation, which is most crudely represented by sex and so we also have a crowded entertainment arena that worships sex as merely a means of gratification and superficial theater. Sex would be the opposite means of validating a relationship, an exclamation point to signify that something special is happening, thus, the more sex, the more exciting the theater. Frequent sexual encounters are no longer seen as promiscuity, but rather simply episodic. Finally we have a show like Grey’s Anatomy which is almost exclusively made up of either sad endings or sexual encounters, completely eliminating any of the significance or importance of all the other things that happen in a daily relationship. In most shows or songs or situations, if a person goes to a bar to lament the loss of love, it is more a dramatization, a reenactment of what they believe they are supposed to feel than the the feeling itself.

Herein we see the contemporary misconception that understanding pain reflects an unflinching intellectual or emotional eye, that someone who can rub their own faces in the mess they’ve made possesses a more brutal and comprehensive state of mind. What we’d hope is that a strong and caring mind might better be able to understand how to make something work, rather than understand the forensics of it all ended. Similarly, a character that is able to blast through lovers and sexual encounters is seen as sophisticated or worldly. We celebrate their strength rather than any ability to solve, fix or dedicate where true grit is found. The personal power is largely described by one’s ability to discard or destroy. You see this in online singles ads and we saw it frequently on MySpace, where girls might wear sexy or revealing outfits coupled with the addendum Please do not write me asking for my phone number. Here we saw a staged opportunity to bask in the glamour of being desirable while also maintaining the dramatic empowerment to deny that which others seek. Similarly we see many current songs who’s main focus is a strong person walking away, leaving a loser/lover in the burnt rubber tracks of an enlightened partner peeling out towards bigger and better things. Here we see how a breakup is used, how other people are used to punctuate a singer or character’s belief that they have grown up or turned over a new leaf. The romantic relationship is reduced down to a publicity stunt used to sell the reinvention of a very small minded and unempowered individual.

It makes one despair to think that this is the coal people are shoveling into their furnace, a band that wants to be like The Cure or the band that wants to like the band that wants to be like the band that wants to be The Cure. It’s frightening to think that people are emulating the show that wants to be Sex in the City that wants to be feminist porn. Copies of knock offs of frauds.

the furnace

2010-02-09T08:26:00.002-06:00

my brother zach on a looping pedal w/bass and me going at a canvas on a sunday night (i keep looking at the computer for a reference photo, not vanity)

The Furnace from zach rizer on Vimeo.

Self-Satisfied

2010-01-12T22:42:00.002-06:00

i wasn’t happy about it,
asking him for his picture.
he carried one arm in a sling.
he held his help sign in his teeth
and it was difficult for him to stoop down.
i told him i needed a reference picture for a painting
and he was kind about it.
he showed me some folded up pictures in his pocket
of the art he used to make,
a Saddam Hussein chest of drawers vivisected by
worn creases.
i gave him a ten spot and some smokes for his trouble,
for letting me photograph him like wildlife in front of passing cars.
the drivers kept both hands on the steering wheel
at the stop light,
cowed,
staring ahead as i talked with him,
shook his hand.
they couldn’t get a green light fast enough.
i'll be them
tomorrow.

Josh Rizer is: Irritated With the Whole Thing (on Twitter and Facebook)

2010-01-07T16:25:00.003-06:00

Twitter and Facebook are classic and sinister examples of things being repackaged and resold to us that we already have or don’t need.

What has happened is that our least interesting moments and habits have been put in the spotlight as opposed to our qualities and fulfillment. On both Facebook and Twitter, things like eating, being tired or getting ready to go out have been made significant. Besides furthering the insulation of human beings, besides making people unnecessarily self aware of every little thing that they do, it markets our habits and our most basic low level functions back to us-we have essentially been sold sleeping, being sick or making car repairs as though they were new, significant activities. This takes the focus of a person away from achievement, from goals, from real change and makes life’s most banal and weary tasks into events. It is a multiplication of grade school gossip, repackaged for adults. People see this as an expansion of communication when it is really a micromanagement of, a highlight of those things which make us very ordinary. It makes a triumph of inconsequence so that we are less likely to pursue real accomplishment. Updates and status reports are like pacifiers or charity through which we feel a sense of expression while our actual lives are filled with less and less of it all of the time.

As fashion and cultural movements become the currency by which we are able to live, that is, food and shelter have been solved so that in the new life cycle hierarchy we must be culturally and socially linked in order to be relevant, we see a hoarding instinct of moments, just as a caveman might have stockpiled nuts and fruit. If funny photographs and freshly minted music make a person socially viable instead of warm clothing, then we see large harddrive digital cameras with their owners reviewing pictures before they have time to become history, we see tapes and tapes of video footage featuring events of very little importance, we see digital music devices crammed with more music than a person can ever listen to, let alone enjoy. If a cynicism or a lamentation about the days trials is the way that we relate to one another than we see Twitter and Facebook as a cache of these meaningless experiences.

Additionally, as the individual says goodbye to substance and becomes more concerned with performance we see the last gasps of people accumulating these little facts about themselves, as a squirrel will gather food before there isn’t any left, as a deathbed patient might become preoccupied with last rites. The diabolical fact of this phenomena is that it is not personal information at all-it is common. It takes away personal development, it last of all promotes real self-actualization.

Even a blog really can have the same cheap gratification, posting random thoughts, blips of insight rather than attempting more pressing or laborious endeavors, such as a novel or a painting or self-betterment. It again encourages randomness and idle navel gazing in lieu of reaching for top shelf thought and pattern recognition. So stop reading this trite garbage. Go out and live a little. I know you’re going to make dinner. You know I’m going to be tired tomorrow. I know you’re broke. You know I’m going to love or hate the weather. Being that we don’t know how many hours our bulbs are rated at, what else is going on?

Drift

2010-01-07T16:04:00.001-06:00

the snow is better
and i am better on it
using sloppy math
and carelessness
which becomes an arcane precision,
slingshotting around bends,
factoring unpredictability as a variable
into inertia, momentum, velocity and intention.
the snow is more like it,
losing footing on the silt
and paths that people have made,
slipping in the sediment,
dodging the shoveled barricades of mess
thrown up to make way for petty traffic.
this is how it always is,
on foot even,
in the summer even.

so and so told me a story.
by the time they felt commiserated
i was already into the next frictionless slide,
into the next soft drift,
onto the next thing.

A Thousand Years From Now

2009-12-31T10:38:00.001-06:00

the falling snow makes a very rapid
and short lived
amber.
a very very quick anthropologist
might make something of the
foot prints and tire treads
and trash briefly preserved there
if it weren’t for the eraser of tomorrow.
future classrooms might study the bustle of streets,
the cohesion of goods and services,
the well oiled class system,
never realizing
our spear heads are currently behavioral,
our ceremonial masks are carefully crafted faces,
our customs something we must pass,
like airport security,
like muster,
more than something we live.
they might find some styrofoam,
some flasks,
and many bodies buried straight and alone
and they will never know what happened here.

The Mummies

2009-12-31T00:19:00.003-06:00

there they go
embalming themselves,
running down the street
with tights and water bottles,
running from and to something.
forty years from now they’ll take off the wrappings
and look great
with nothing.
earth is a gerbil wheel,
i guess.

Human Cannonball Paradox

2009-12-31T00:18:00.001-06:00

profundity is cliched now.
(retro is itself retro.
eras were distinct,
then recombinations
of distinction-
retro will soon be recollections of encyclopedias of
mash ups.)
insight is merely a stunt at this point in time,
an exploit of the truth,
of what simply is,
that which is buried in garbage
such that it calls for a cutting new brand of back hoe to clear.
the veneer became armor,
and then
mile thick strata,
demanding a wicked, cutting edge
auger
to tap the vein,
requiring a brand new utility
to strip the years and layers
of poor taste
and dated wallpaper.

impressed?

Lupine

2009-12-31T00:17:00.001-06:00

the little pills i take are
white,
small moons in low dosage
designed to innoculate me against
the pull
of animal orbits.
they are bringing it out in me again,
by the tiny pin pricks of their eyes
which suggest dead and far away light.
by the pale and bloodless satellite of their faces,
by the colorless and anemic constitutions,
by the feeble gravity which
just barely
drags at the bloodstream without the benefit of seduction,
by the weak and pitiable fact that they
can only be seen
when all light is absent,
by their theft of second hand sunshine
which substitutes for low voltage fame,
they make me grow hair and fangs,
and howl
again.

The Joke's in You (a short story)

2009-12-20T17:56:00.006-06:00

What is the difference between a black man and Batman? The cursor waited, blinking.

Shaking her head clear, Vicki reminded herself of the time. The cameras and motion sensors she’d nullified would come back on line in less than five minutes. After loading the de-encryption card, she’d hammered away at the keypad, blazing through files and documents until she came to what she had been told, and indeed it was, simply labeled, The Secret.

The room itself was fashioned much after the mind of a male, after the obnoxious phallus of the military, all shiny metal and steel reinforced concrete, flattering itself with the vanity of high tech security, telling anyone that gained access they were of the utmost importance. Somewhere in the computer terminal she sat before was the arrogant seed of all of man’s rape, holstered in this steel bikini brief of narcism.

She’d gained entry using two skeleton keys: one, a pair of contact lenses with universal retinal access. Two, a grafted pointer finger print with the same VIP right of entry.

Vicky Shoemaker had been at this a long time, working her way into the underbelly of American Government, which, as suspected had little to do with America or the United States, but rather a much lager, shadowy global cartel of power.

Being a woman, she’d not had to work twice as hard but rather be twice as hard, leaving no doubt as to her resolve. In knowing her enemy, she had become her enemy out of necessity, climbing the military ladder until, in order to preserve her cover, she’d been forced to order hits, sanction massacres and endorse the status quo. Like the military, she’d had to consider a greater good and a mission, to expose the most guarded workings of a corrupt global alliance once and for all at the expense of her personal ethics. Along the way, she’d mimed against the glass ceiling because that was they wanted to see. She’d had martinis with the right people and maintained a personal life she cared nothing for. Put up with the women’s hypocrisy and the men’s filthy water cooler jokes, watching them make themselves out of arrogance and piety all the while calling it a strong sculpture of stone. Sent forth by a privatized watchdog organization, Vicki had become the parasite inside the mole, passing spies, moles and double agents like they were standing still.

Finally, thirty two floors beneath the earth, Vicky had entered the Vault in which all the secrets were kept, the one that made classified dossiers look like tabloid rumor, the Vault that would purportedly render the most outlandish conspiracy theory wishful thinking.

Her palms were sweaty, her brain wide open, dilated at an emotional level, ready to put an end to assumption and doubt.
She clicked on the icon and the question came up.

What is the difference between a black man and Batman? The cursor waited, blinking. She applied crude decoding drills, using her training to scan the sentence for subtext and reordered meaning. She followed the prompt and typed what?

The computer answered A black man can’t go into a store without Robin. And that was it. She sat in the chair staring. The cursor was no longer blinking, without prompts or cues. The whisper quiet door behind her opened and closed. She hardly turned so absolute was the implication. She was caught. It was over. And The Secret was literally a joke.

“Well, you’ve found it,” the General said. “Our most closely guarded information.”

Vicki swiveled in the chair, prepared to meet the barrel of a gun when the General simply depressed a button, taking a seat on a slide out metal bench.

“You thought there’d be more, didn’t you? I did too, but once you understand the true meaning, it will all make sense.”

“I suppose you’re just going to tell me the meaning?”

“I am. I’m dying to share it and even if we didn’t kill you, which we will, no one would ever believe you.” He crossed his legs and smoothed his pant legs. “You see, humor is the primary carrier for information and control. It is very similar to magic tricks and misinformation in that it uses sleight of hand and misdirection, creating a suspense which opens the mind to the final suggestion. Finally, the joke that triggers a laughter response, thus emitting dopamine pairs a positive experience with negative information. We are able to suggest racial stereotypes, indifference to the disadvantaged and callousness to both injustice and scandal. Most commonly we encourage misogynistic aggression with jokes, as you well know from the lunch room and watercooler lounge. In fact, many of the jokes you heard were specifically planted to induce doubt and shame in you which is what allowed us to read your behavior, sussing out your true motives. Romantic comedies make light of infidelity and the loss of meaningful relationships. College comedies make light of the latest up and coming bankrupt generation. All of these methods eventually encourage the cliché, What else can you do but laugh about it? which implies that the victim is helpless in every way but to take a positive stance on that which is negative.”

Vicki was slack jawed. His confession was ludicrous and diabolical. It seemed, in itself, to be a joke. She had the strangest feeling that she was the butt of a prank or candid camera scenario.

“Think of late night talk shows,” he said, ”we assault the unconscious at the end of the subject’s weary work day when their minds are dull. The talk show host delivers jokes which largely consist of government impropriety and celebrity misconduct. This converts outrage into acceptance and by association implicates the viewer for laughing at the misdeed. These shows of course take the now open mind, the guilty mind and reward it with celebrity celebration which trains the mind to seek gratification in glamour which in turn fuels the commerce of buying and selling. But I digress. The principle tool here is the joke, such as the one you read on screen, designed to dilute the righteous person’s reaction to the racial injustice. Most efficiently, the joke spreads very quickly making for rapid dissemination of the implanted idea. Write a good joke and it will travel the earth faster than a bullet.”

The General unholstered his sidearm.

“Here’s one for you. A woman, working deep within the government shows up day after day to work the incinerator, piling bales of documents into the fire. Every day, a high ranking officer strolls by, sympathetic to her hot and hard manual labor. One day he strolls by and she’s crying, right? He asks Hey there, what’s the problem? She wipes her eyes and says Everyday I load heavy bales into this incinerator for long hours and little pay! I have no human contact! All I want is a hug! The officer looks around, finding the area empty and says What the hell and he gives her a hug. The next day the officer is making his rounds and comes upon the woman. She is crying again. What seems to be the problem now? He asks her. The woman replies All I do is work and I have no time for relationships. I haven’t kissed a man in ten years! The officer again looks around, making sure they have privacy and then he kisses her. The next day the officer comes by and yet again, the woman is still crying. Jesus Christ, what the hell is the matter now? He says. The woman replies I’ve been at this so long, I haven’t been fucked in fifteen years! So the officer again checks for privacy before pushing her into the incinerator. Now you’re fucked he says.

Vicki grinned.

The General shot her.

Whoah! is Me

2009-12-17T00:23:00.004-06:00

the truth of the term
wisdom teeth struck me,
as in the pain of knowledge crowding,
in rows and rows of of overkill,
of canines,
of incisors
packing the brain
in a masticatory crush,
with so many teeth
that they exceed the available meat to chew.
the word wisdom struck me,
as in kingdom,
as in a dominion presided over by wisdom,
complete with a feudal heirarchy of willful ignorance
and subjects in revolt.
in this case wisdom presides over its domain with a reign of informed terror.
the word disease struck me
as in a dislocation of ease.
we have learned
to associate the word
only with contagion,
with viral infection,
but in the truest sense of the word,
negligence is disease,
a harsh look is disease.
the Right to Carry a concealed firearm
became legal in Missouri in 2002,
but really it happened a long
long
time ago.

Mythologized

2009-12-12T02:19:00.003-06:00

all day long is thin ice
and i’m wearing diamond tipped, steel carbon skates.
my figure eights sink the other skaters
into fishing holes they are not qualified to escape from.
the edge all day long is a balance beam
from which the dismount could go either way.
i have a death defying
bungie cord heart,
elastic enough it allows me to sink,
to brush rock bottom with my fingertips.
its just like Operation,
moving through the crowds,
looking for the heart of the matter
and trying not to trip their buzzers.
some people’s greatest triumph today
will be walking slowly through an intersection,
obstructing traffic during a green light.

i came out of retirement for the fourth time today
but the media has tired of my story.
i am the mountain
who’s scale they will climb
and cheer at my summit,
claiming the peak as their own.
i am the brick wall
against which they will tag
and be proud of their renegade vandalism.
i am the vinyl stall wall
where they will leave their obscenities and hatred,
thinking the notes are anonymous.
i have the unique blood type-
positive/negative,
which rejects all donors
wanting into my bloodstream.
with villain after villain
making run after pass
after siege,
it’s difficult not to be the hero.

“Outlook Not So Good”

2009-12-11T12:24:00.001-06:00

they tell you it’s going to be hard.
we’ve been warned, i suppose.
they don’t tell you,
they can’t tell you
that bitter analogies will fail,
that nothing can represent life’s hardships
more than the life itself,
that when you have to dig down
there will be no answers,
nobody
and no way
but to till your own soil,
to overturn the richest part of yourself
until is spent entirely-
within the average three cubic feet of a human body
we can only rotate crops so many times
before its earth is barren.
they warned us
that it would be hard,
but not that we are barely trained pilots
at the wheel of genetics,
of rearing
and circumstance,
that our best efforts are a plastic toddler’s
dashboard with a pretend gearshift,
an ineffectual steering column
and a bulbous red noise-making horn.
in this respect they were unable to warn us
that the very life
that would inevitably get hard
would barely be our own,
that each of its complicated movements are
merely
left over ricochet from the big bang,
that we are shrapnel coming to rest,
that all of civilization,
that people’s finest moments are merely the
flopping of fish washed up onto an
unsuitable environment.
they told us it would be hard,
but not that
we would be turned against ourselves,
that we would resent atomic structure
while being made of it,
that consciousness was merely
the latest Malaysian sweatshop
from which to mass produce evolution.
they told you it would get hard,
but not that they had purchased their lab coats second hand,
that they were magic eight balls,
fortune cookies and
dime slot animatronic psychic dummies,
that there is no precedent for managing
agony.
they tell us it will get hard,
but were unable to predict
that hard
would eventually entail
no reason,
no love
and no point,
that strength would become baseless
and counterintuitive,
that life would eventually
consist
of muscle memory.
the only reason i’m still here
is because i remember it.

Fraud

2009-12-10T21:20:00.002-06:00

she was tiny with long gray hair and spectacles.
probably lesbian.
she stumbled over to the bar table
and started-
it wasn’t one sentence,
it wasn’t one paragraph,
it was whole pages!
i mean, whole pages!
she slurred for the forth time,
gesturing with what must have been her fifth or sixth beer in hand.
she was a scientist.
she worked for the united states government.
it’s fraud against the united states government
she said for the fifth time.
sorry to take up your evening
she said for the third time.
she wobbled, drifted like a balloon on a string
tacked to the floor.
there was nowhere to look.
this is a five hundred and seventy one page document
with who knows how much fraud and plagiarism in it!
i can’t just stand by while someone attempts to fraud
the united states government!
i’m a scientist!
how could they think this would get past me?
it wasn’t one sentence,
it wasn’t one paragraph,
it was whole pages!
i mean, whole pages!
i was drinking what was maybe my
third beer,
thinking about how often people plagiarize time,
as in taking other people’s and passing it off as their own,
but i didn’t say any of it
so that i wouldn’t
be guilty
of
this.

The Ever Lovin Outtakes

2009-12-09T12:50:00.001-06:00

outtakes from "The Boss" from Josh Rizer on Vimeo.

The Boss

2009-12-08T10:17:00.004-06:00

Well, this was over a year in the making and is without a doubt the hardest thing I've ever done, but it is done. This draft is not the absolute final version that should exist in a couple of weeks, but it's damned close. (for instance, the laser beam that sticks out like a sore thumb will be removed...)There are lower register sound effects that can't be heard on laptop speakers, so, if you can, watch it with external audio. everyone worked for free and gave it their best. the music is all original and local..well, it's done anyway.

THE BOSS from zach rizer on Vimeo.

Responsible to a Fault

2009-12-04T09:40:00.000-06:00

the family questions
the promises are broken
the warrants are issued
the bills pile up
the panic lines deepen
the reality becomes unstable
the health declines
the dog howls from neglect
the eye is nearly put out
the grandfather dies
the movie is done.

Versus

2009-11-14T01:31:00.001-06:00

a mother and son walked
a flat dog past my house.
the animal in me stood in a way
that might be off-putting:
one hip out,
hands flat on the porch railing
as if she were a parade for me
so i shifted the animal’s stance to ease her instincts.
the animal fidgeted in line
at the post office,
feeling the leash of time and space.
the animal is panicked about its resources,
about the debt that affects hunting and gathering.
the animal is convinced of the truth of its body.
the animal is afraid of other wolves
victimizing its form, its loves and its assumptions.
the spirit shushes all of it,
being merely the wick between the flame and the dynamite
and the cosmic comes through,
here,
again.

Delivery

2009-11-11T11:23:00.001-06:00

either a higher power continues to provide
or we are just made suited to whatever nourishment yields us.
either way we find a role.
either way, it’s a decent enough salary
with shitty benefits.
i’m just a mid level badge.
im just the go-between
between whatever larger forces are at work
and art,
occasionally corrupting the message with my fingerprints wherever possible.
i’m just a courier,
an actor between what the director
and directives have ordered and whatever your camera perceives.
eventually,
i guess they will shoot the messenger
when i am forced into retirement.
until then,
i need you to sign
for
this.

The Sun Through the Trees From the Train

2009-11-11T11:22:00.001-06:00

the trees divide the sun into stop motion slats,
into a golden strobe,
into tattoos of backlit blood against my closed eyelids.
the train carves on through the woods,
the sun
flipping through a staccato rolodex of landscape,
and we are selected as contacts,
from time to time.

Lay Off the Kool Aid

2009-11-06T00:33:00.001-06:00

God is Jim Jones.
Parents are Jim Jones.
Culture is Jim Jones.
salvation is coming.
damnation is coming.
drink this.
eat this.
buy this.
do this.
be this.

read this.
I am Jim Jones.

Analogy

2009-10-30T01:47:00.003-05:00

women wait for the dogs of men
to come back.
they wait for them to leave.
women wait for the dogs of men
to learn new tricks,
to roll over,
to be housebroken.
women wait for the dogs of men,
mongrelized from both mother and father,
to become pure of heart if not pure bred.
they wait for them to wag more,
bark less.
women wait
for the stick to return.

Closure (a Halloween short.)

2009-10-25T20:34:00.002-05:00

Elizabeth Stark was a cunt and it was as simple as that. Matthew Stark had heard the shortest distance between two points was a straight line and so the quickest path between his wife’s monstrous behavior and understanding it was, for him, to call her a cunt.

Granted he never called her as much to her face-she would have had his head (although that scenario ended up quite the opposite.) and made their children pay dearly for it with more emotional scarring than any child’s brain was meant to endure.

From her covered ankles to the blouse, buttoned everyday sharply to the neck, she was a cunt. From her graying beehive hair, organized away so that she could attend to more sadistic matters to the gash of red lipstick which falsely advertised passion but only looked like blood, she was a cunt. But finally, it was the kids. From the gruel she forced them to finish, (Every furnace in that bitches life, literal and figurative, had been a frigid disappointment.) to the one size too small clothes she shoe horned their vigor into, she was a cunt.

Matthew had met many a husband that seemed able to dismiss such a similar wife over port, a pipe and cards among friends. Although Matthew doubted they shared a comparable caliber of suffering, he was regardless unable to let Elizabeth’s reign go unchecked.

As it happened, those button up blouses, cinched up in fashionable asphyxiation were what gave him the idea. After time he no longer saw them as clothing or fabric doors slammed against his affections, but rather where the shirt stopped and the neck began he saw a seam, a dotted line intended for cutting.

And so, one night he crept into her separate bedroom where her sleeping garments were also sealed up around the neck and he used that guide as a template to remove her head.

The final insult had been that Elizabeth had not been sent to an everlasting maze of purgatory, but instead it was Matthew who, after dying in his sleep at age seventy-one with what he believed to be a clear conscience was now roaming the halls of his home as a ghost.

Still more insulting was that his livelihood and also his home had been a Goddamned mortuary (This had made for simple disposal of her body some one hundred and forty-nine years earlier.) and not one of his stiff clients was compelled or commanded to stay around and keep him company. No friends, no adversaries. Only time.

Only once, he had seen the passed on shells of his neighboring German twins who’s doorstep had been the recipient of many a bag of flaming human feces and when their ghosts appeared, they were still yelling scheisse!, stamping at the ground, trying to put out some everlasting prank of shit.

Finally, the only company he kept was the living, a new family occupying his old home, still replete with a defunct elevator and embalming room, secret passages by which the deceased had been transported so long ago. At last, some community and yet he was unable to converse with them. (Hadn’t it always been this way, even when he’d been alive? Oddly enough, back then he’d found his company to appear quite dead and now the roles were reversed.) Still, all this would have been tolerable, just watching the three-dimensional television of their lives if the family staying there didn’t so closely resemble his own.

There was the patriarch, developing hobbies and busy work as tiny vacations, almost like split realities to deny the truth of his family. There were cultural differences now certainly-every moment for this man’s family seemed hard packed with red tape and finish lines so that they were constantly exempt from having to look at themselves, but the same old routine was still there. The children, still, to this day frolicked in the secret tunnels while avoiding the embalming room entirely. As Matthew drifted through the walls, through the partition dividing family room from kitchen, through the guest bath and into the master bedroom, there, toweling herself as if to sand away her own heat, there, making the bed tight as if to wall it off from passion, there, setting the thermostat always lower and lower, there, ordering each day like a dress rehearsal for high society, there was the cunt. Now she was named Holly Worthington.

Holly dressed herself, all her clothes like starched upholstery removed from furniture no one was allowed to sit on. Matthew followed her through the house, trying to tip over her precious mirror, shatter the photographs of her parents, anything to help this family have some sense of justice. This was one of the few talents Matthew was capable of, occasionally becoming solid enough to swing a chandelier, throw a phone off the wall, lock and unlock doors. Once he’d managed to seal her inside of the very panic room she’d insisted on and the children had giggled and covered their mouths with joy. Once Holly was free though, she’d only blamed the children for locking her in and so Matthew had tried to temper his haunting.

He followed her past the front door, which he could hardly ever see. It was obscured by some concave energy as if in a dream, as if it was even less substantial than he. He could never focus on it or think of it properly and certainly never reach it. Windows were the same way, erasing any chance of exit. He hadn’t seen the outdoors in a century and a half.

He followed Holly up the stairs where she snooped on the children's chores, making sure they had failed in some way that she could call attention to. She patted down throw cushions no one would ever use, put things away, always putting things away on each pass through their home as if her ultimate goal was to finally have their entire lives in storage. She moved to the empty elevator shaft and slid the gate open. This was some kind of voodoo gift for Matthew. There she was, standing in front of the drop, staring into the dark throat as if it defied her manicured obsessions. She scowled into the gloom, as if deciding against it, as if she might set her kids at scrubbing away the murk, polishing light into it so that they might learn to work without accomplishment or reward. Matthew was directly behind her. He placed his hands against her and pushed, but they only went through and out her breasts. I can do this, he thought. I can save these kids and this father.

He collected himself which was no small task, not only because of his insubstantiality, but more because he had forgotten himself, what it meant to feel or try. Books were one thing, a human form another. His effort was akin to something like sexual endurance, reaching down to the core and pushing it out onto another body, insisting the person at the other end feel his intent. He placed his hands again at her back and this time felt a pressure there, like opposing magnets wobbling towards one another. Mrs. Worthington reached around and scratched at her back. Matthew saw his fingers becoming more opaque, certain that he could muster enough will to do the deed, but for some reason dropped his arms at his sides. He realized at once that his life had been primarily made up of contempt for his wife and then with the planning of her doom. Now, in the afterlife, he had not progressed, still basing himself around the object of a cold hearted woman and he wondered if his identity had not been lost to death, but rather an obsession in the acts of others, an externalization, an out of soul experience consumed with righting things that were beyond his control. This had been his mistake before: staying. It wasn’t that he’d tried to make a difference, but rather that he’d stayed always expecting things to change, thinking he could earn what he’d wanted. It wasn’t closure on the situation, but on himself.

He walked downstairs, through the bannister, past the children playing hide and seek, a game mostly inspired by the cruel rule of their mother. He walked through the study, where Mr. Worthington was making one of his kaleidoscopes. Matthew approached the front door on instinct, finding that it was no longer obscured by any arcane, curved wavelength. He walked through it, out onto the front lawn and continued walking, getting on with the rest of his death.

The Jesse James Museum, Loose Slots, Fireworks and Other Wonders Through Open Missouri

2009-10-23T17:42:00.002-05:00

there was the tight cursive of trees at the horizon,
clouds miming against the invisible door
of the atmosphere,
land delineated by brown and green slashes
as though god had laid a straight edge at each farmed boundary.
morality warred on the freeway-
either you wanted God or you wanted adult entertainment.
special plots of unmolested woods
crowded either side of the road,
growing dark in broad daylight only ten feet into their crush..

concrete crop circles took me in to a local convenience store.
i walked my smoke away from the pumps,
watching old pickups pull away
in slow motion drag races,
leaving sprawling dust behind
and then i looked through the window
and saw there behind the counter
what i believed to be probably the prettiest girl
in local school,
working the register at a filling station.

It’s the Swagger of It

2009-10-23T17:39:00.001-05:00

this is hell.
right now.
in plain view.
demons dancing in the skins of family and friends,
in no danger of arrest.
it’s the plain sight,
arrogant in your face of it,
the absolute power of it without need
to apologize or disguise itself
or even name itself appropriately.
the flames naming themselves ice water,
the devil calling himself god and damning you for your decency.
its the black Ops infiltration of it,
how they’ve worked sleeper cells into your best friends,
your romances,
your kin and kind,
remote cameras into the privacy of your anguish and
penalized you there for your weakness.
its the self sabotage of the latest ardor,
them launching a surface to air missile
just to watch your needy dreams
fall flaming to the ground.
the tv is still on,
the light tower still flashing on the horizon
and the cat is still blinking
as if to remind you
that every little death of all your moments
leaves no mark on the world.
it’s the corporate espionage of it,
using love and hope to steal your advances and innovations in spirit
so that every time you go to battle
you will need to have newer and newer tricks,
flashier and more sophisticated means
of calling a horse a horse.
the poison calls itself medicine,
the dead screech in a facsimile of life
and when you try to seek damages for liability
they will point to the surgeon general’s label
printed down the side of their latest fashion,
they will remind you with a total glowing satisfaction
that they never lied to you,
that they were upfront about their true forms.
women are still chatting on the street corner,
men are still spartan creatures,
unembellished and unsophisticated.
children are still fired in a kiln of deprivation
as if to say,
hell is in no danger of revolution.

Not So Territorial

2009-10-23T17:33:00.000-05:00

i have been a fire hydrant for the men.
kittens have rubbed against me,
less in a display of affection
than marking their scent against a thing.
i have been a diaper for children
in adult costumes
who have yet to learn
not to shit where they live.
it has been brought to my attention that,
in running through the briar patch,
i only look for thorns.
it has been pointed out to me,
in the Tunisian desert,
that a thimble of water is never enough.
am i angry, bitter, jealous?
sure i am.
i have to walk to the restroom every time i want to piss.

The Dark Ages: A Tragic Play in Two Acts

2009-10-14T10:27:00.002-05:00

Cast:
Dad
StepMother
Brother
Young Man

Act One

Scene fades in on a common suburban kitchen. Dad and StepMother are seated at the kitchen table. Brother and Young Man lean against the counters with their legs crossed exactly similar. Conversation is already in progress.

Young Man: ...It’s nearly impossible for me to find the line in a relationship whereby I honor myself while still giving the other person the full benefit of the doubt. It’s rdiculous that I should find myself having to craft some diabiolical scheme.

Dad: Hey, you know what, son? Don’t call her for three days, then she’ll be all over you.

(Brother rolls his eyes.)

Young Man: I really don’t want a relationship wherein I have to scam the other person into giving me decency, reciprocation and consideration.

Dad: I understand that, but just think about keeping your options open, there’s a lot of fish in...

Young Man: I like to think we are people, not appetizers Dad.

Dad: Hey, it’s like your GrandFather used to say, “They come by like street cars.” (He sits back smiling, folding his arms.)

StepMother: Oh, come on. That’s not an appropriate thing to say. We’re not in the Dark Ages anymore.

Young Man: I cannot believe you just actually said that Dad.

Young Man steps outside for a smoke, kitchen fades away as does a heated debate about gender roles. Outside, an urban bustle is taking place. Women’s heads are on the bodies of spiders, others strut in unflattering shuffles with large fans of peacock feathers. Men lumber about in suits, recline with martini glasses, each of them possessing an excess of body hair with pronounced brows and jutting jaws. Two of them fight and grunt over a computer terminal, threatening to tear it in two. A mock pterodactyl swoops across the stage. The Young Man drops to his knees in anguish. Fade to black. End scene.

Act Two

Fade in on what is clearly a new and different day. The sun is out. A lone phone rings on a coffee table for an uncomfortable period of time until StepMother storms into the room.

StepMother: Young Man you come pick up this phone right now! It’s been ringing off the hook for three days now!
(There is no response, to which she sighs and shakes her head, answering the phone.

StepMother: Yes, he’s here, he just walked in, let me get him for you. Young Man!
(She yells and the set rattles with her impatience. Young Man enters at a slow walk, almost as if he is much too old for his years and fears the call. He takes the phone, slumping into a chair. His face does not change.)

Young Man: Hello? Yeah. Yeah. I know. Sorry. I’ve been really busy for the last few days or I would have called. Really, you’ve missed me? You’re dying to hang out? (His voice saddens. He slumps so that the audience can no longer see his face.)

Young Man: I’d love to.

End

Size Queen

2009-10-14T10:24:00.001-05:00

its really big of you,
how you keep yourself free.
it takes a big person
to swear off commitment,
to take multiple lovers,
sexual or otherwise.
it takes a giant head
to see good in every
threat
it requires a grand perspective,
an elevated point of view
to minimize the terror
and it takes thick
determination
to embody all the ways
you were maimed
and wield them in turn
as your own zen detachment.
it takes an engorged, twelve inch ego
to believe that you can circumvent pain
by running into it with open arms.
you’d have to have an extremely well hung
ball and chain
to jump into open waters with that baggage
and assume surrender will bring you air.
it takes a big head and a giant shoe size
and really large hands to make human beings into
your playthings.
i just ran between your legs,
out and away.

Costumes

2009-10-14T10:17:00.001-05:00

it’s Halloween again.
the simple gourds have taken
cutting edge tools to their faces,
piling blown out wax lumps of identity within.
they scamper across the streets,
climb the stairwells,
stockpiling WMD’s like acorns against
any possible winter threat to their delusions,
scattering when you try to touch them,
leaving one to toss scraps and bread crusts of significance
in an attempt to simply lure one close enough to love.
they have taken knitting needles
and embroidered their trip wires into
Home Sweet Home plaques,
into collegiate sweaters signifying their
oblique allegiance to concepts
and never ever people.
they are full of hay and straw,
perched over dead crops of glory days
and always potential energy,
warding off any notation
that their faces are but burlap sacks
puled over their forms
by a higher being they cannot afford to consider.
look at them on the scrawny, knotted broomsticks
of their pipe dreams,
cackling,
flying into padded walls like fish that do not register anything at all
when you tap on the glass tank
of their insulation.
the vampires are clamped onto one another
in a circular 69 of feeding,
each thinking they are more than a perfect system
of cycles.

i tried on a Buddha mask,
a halo
and devil horns.
i don’t know what to go as.
i went to the super store,
but the human being costumes were all sold out.

Liver Failure

2009-10-14T10:16:00.001-05:00

trying to convert the poverty to wealth,
the drought to water.
trying to help the romantics see their fantasy realized,
trying to convince the help
that they are making a dent in me,
the destroyers less guilty for their indiscretions.
i drank too heavily from possibility,
mixing it with the merciless pharmacology
of what cannot be
and tonight
Germany, Japan, Italy
and you
are attacking multiple fronts
and i cannot do it
and so it has passed right through me
to here.

Bald

2009-09-30T13:43:00.001-05:00

fashion deprives us of high collars
to turn up against the cold.
liberal behavior denies us the chance
to salute the captains of our experience.
(if there were any.)
we used to have shamans,
but only drunks now.
we used to have mystics,
but only quacks now.
climate control denies us hats
to remove
in honor of anything.
(if there were anything honorable.)
western abundance nulifies the need to really keep
company.
urban sprawl has spread behind the curtain
and we have no mystery to investigate.
phones have robbed us of the opportunity
to answer a friend’s knock late at night.
security does not allow us to defend ourselves,
manners do not allow us to offend ourselves
and the glamour of the now
steals our memories of the glory days.
(if there ever were any.)
sophistication amputates any recollection
of our former, feral selves.
and we are shaved wolves
without the right to shiver.

Resistant Strain

2009-09-29T22:58:00.001-05:00

i’ve realized
the people,
at this point,
are only opportunities for me to express anger
and anger is only an expression of fear
and fear is a resistance to assimilation
by the universe
and appropriation by the universe is love.
unfortunately ,
my cells were made with a high degree of belligerence,
so please do not love
or punch me
or relate to me until time melts me down
into slag
where upon i will finally
kiss you
at last.

ArtPrize2

2009-09-24T19:59:00.004-05:00

The following pics are from the first official day of ArtPrize, although it will continue on for three weeks until the final winners are chosen. These are just a few of the best pics, of the pieces that I saw, but there were hundreds more I never got to see. The scale of this event was unbelievable...

ArtPrize

2009-09-23T00:03:00.006-05:00

Got into this thing called ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, MI. it's the biggest art competition ever. there are 1200 international artists-first prize is 250,000 bucks. i don't know how to describe this place-every single business, including the streets and building walls, are venues for the competition. i walked the streets and every bar is crammed with artists sizing each other up like gunfighters. there are billboards taken as ads for individual artists requesting your vote, the bar staff all wear tee shirts lobbying for votes. I've never seen anything like it and the art is actually great. The following photos are taken from the night before as people were still getting ready for opening day...click on photos to make 'em big.

this is in the lobby of my hotel.

just one bar alone features 100 artists.

this thing is huge.

the museum without any participation at all. typical.

an outdoor install still taking place at 1 am.

another early morning outdoor installation.

as of yet unveiled...

got started like this-stalled dead on the highway for an hour. people turned off their cars, got out and talked to each other. very surreal....

Mass Grave

2009-09-18T16:18:00.000-05:00

burned a tank of gas
and a pack of smokes
with my dog in the car.
she’s in no condition to stick her head out the window.
she’s lost some weight-
weighs about seven pounds.
to say she’s a little dusty
would be a gross understatement.
any car was always too small for her-
i can’t imagine she’s too thrilled about squeezing into a piece of tupperware.

we cruised around the people in their pine box lives.
we threw cows blood on them
for their inhumane treatment of themselves-
all the confined cages
and forced feeding.
we spit on the beasts for wearing human pelts
and screamed murder
for their self-induced slaughter.
the dog of course had no idea what was going on
when i gave them all my condolences.

Perspective

2009-09-18T14:34:00.000-05:00

burned foot working the clutch.
wet and crumpled face in the wind
with a box of ashes and a
consolation card as my copilot.
nothing new about that.
joggers were out.
license plate in front of me
said
FLYFSHR

at least there’s always someone
worse off
than me.

The Latest Iron Clad Stop Gap

2009-09-18T02:11:00.001-05:00

make no mistake about it-
the high rises are merely unrefined stripper poles
around which father time and mother nature’s big butts swing.

i've filled the abyss up
a dozen times or so just for sport.
i’ve snatched the trumpets from angels
and shown them how it’s done.
i’ve been lashed to to the mast of the masses,
come up just fine on bread crusts
and self-immolated in protest
of my own invulnerability.

i don’t know how to tell the cultural enthusiasts i already had my yogurt for the day,
that there are more probiotics
in an empty room
than in all of life’s courtship.
i do not know how to explain to the chess players
that i can see their lives
twenty moves,
twenty years out.
i don’t know why i always lose myself around other people-
my voice gets higher,
i get shallow
from throwing buckets of myself
on flaming fear.
i don’t know how to stop apologizing to people for
their failure.
they always mistake my tourniquets
for gift bows,
they always mistake the heart on my sleeve
for dated eighties fashion.

you can cast a net
and drag the streets,
finding scads of bodies-
forget the fingerprints and dental records-
their hearts and minds have been surgically removed
making them impossible to identify-
more specifically they have no identity
and i can tell you with forensic certainty
where and when their crimes occurred-
there are no signs of struggle,
indicating an assailant close to them,
most likely their own reflection
which has both twisted motive
and questionable alibi.

through the panorama
of the wind shield
i noted that life is largely porous-
gaps between cars,
space between buildings,
holes in thought
making a veritable cheese grater
that
we are pushed across
and it just so happens
i’ve been tempered in meat lockers
and trials by fire.

Everyone is fashionably early
with monochrome ambitions-
i do not know how to stop writing reviews that exceed the movie.
i’ve tried to fashion a conclusive anthem,
a coda
to this life
but what would you have me say about this
white room
with no windows and doors
beyond some attempt at
immaculate perception.
finally i’ve had to raise one leg
and piss on the other,
marking myself
with myself
to shake the termites off,
to let the hyenas know i’m spoken for.
now i’ll vanquish.
they take forever to die.
they piss and moan until the end,
like i used to.

the last thing i ever wanted to be was strong.

Paint the District

2009-09-10T11:35:00.004-05:00

Got a painting selected as one of several banners displayed in the power and light district as part of the Paint the District program.

the banner was taken from this piece:

Much thanks to Chandler Simpson, who appears to be doing this for little to no gain, and congrats to the other featured artists:

PAINT THE DISTRICT Featured Artists by category

VIDEO
Josh Rizer

FASHION
Gabriel Garner

PAINT
Marcia Cohen
Jonah Criswell
Zac Eubank
Ryan Koenig
Josh Rizer

SCULPTURE
Ryan Haralson
NerdBots

ILLUSTRATION
Hannah Hurrle
Kevin Howdeshell

MIXED MEDIA
Jackie Denning
James Jukes
Trenton "TJ" Matthews
Kale Van Leewen

Mercy

2009-08-29T03:00:00.003-05:00

if you get high enough
atop the city
you can see its bald spots and
sweat stains,
the large air units
spinning
like locusts stuck in the plumbing and piping of roof tops.
it’s hard to know what to do,
where to take the all weather vinyl durability of yourself,
how to get yourself into life
and how to get life into you,
which activity
and which place and which person
will help you crack the vault of your chest cavity
and where you’d spend the riches
even if you did.
it’s hard to decide
how to avoid being another
mindless commuter
pushing through the turnstile of a woman’s crotch,
how to dodge all the goofy swashbucklers
calling Har!
swinging their silly rapiers below the waist.
it’s a mixed bag,
being a placid body of water
as there are two types of people-
the few who will admire your natural beauty
and the majority who will throw rocks
into your concentration.
regrettably,
you have no choice but to set an example by your viscosity-
it’s difficult to get riled up
when you seek your own level.
it’s hard to come out of your shell
when its curvature
is the entire canopy of the sky.
the cars seem only carapaces
around the simple spirits of people.
down there,
it is so easy to maneuver around
slow traffic,
but i won’t make anything
of that.

Mirage

2009-08-29T02:54:00.001-05:00

the soul requires refrigeration.
it is no romantic inferno.
it does not burn.
it curdles easily
and if it ever be stoked to higher temperatures
than it is a crematorium,
a boiler room
in which we incinerate the boogeymen
delivered to it by the six senses.

i do not mind the coolant of isolation.
i do not mind keeping the spirit
at a chilly, blue butane 20 degrees celsius.
i do not mind the cluttered wilderness of civilization,
the busy, howling nothingness.
i might even enjoy being the only one here,
my will power erecting me every moment,
the only two eyes scanning the wasteland
on my vision quest
where frankly
i hope not to come upon a talking cactus or wise,
dutch speaking coyote,
but rather a woman to commune with
as
i am on my knees
beseeching the public
and media
to unmake me,
to again make my genitalia
unlike
a hungry fang
with venom sacs,
to unmake woman from
an armor plated flower
requiring a stethoscope
and a thiefs ear to know the click of the right combination,
to do away with melanoma
and allow the sun to simply promote the manufacture of vitamin d
with she and i beneath it,
effortless,
charmed,
doing the bidding of our original father,
modifying his message hotly as we pass it
back and forth,
as we pass the
big bang
back and forth
into one another’s laps
as often as possible.
see,
i do mind my balls and chain heavy with munitions,
i do mind a bundle of C-4 in my nuts and no chance of love,
i do mind wrenching the shower
hot as i can stand,
pretending that it is love.

Courier

2009-08-29T00:29:00.000-05:00

in chicago,
the wind purse-snatched my warmth,
crumpled it up and kicked it
down the street.
on holiday
in that city,
again i had the notion of
being a smuggler
among men,
each of them hard, old school
customs agents
with an overdeveloped sense of reality
to whom fantasy is hash
and fiction is an illicit hallucinogenic.

as a trafficker
with a suit case heavy in graphic novels,
i have to exude confidence.
i can’t hesitate to show my ID,
to belly up to a bar of shots
or dangle openly at a urinal.

these guys,
there’s something halfcocked,
loose cannon
about ‘em.
maybe they’re independent security officers,
hired mercs,
dying to get you alone in a room
and cornhole you to opera
or make you eat your favorite book,
but i’ve been here
many times before
if you count every single waking second of my life.

poverty has shook me down in lonely rooms,
customs has snapped a latex glove over it’s many
pointy fingers
and by customs i mean traditions,
reporting on your progress
with strangers
or trying to break the ice when
an acquaintance is frozen solid with fear.
someone, somewhere
always has the power to insist
that you bring in a stool sample
so that they can check for balloons.

what i’m carrying,
it isn’t revealed by ultraviolet light
and it doesn’t trip metal detectors
or show up under x-ray.
still,
they hate it.
the K9’s can smell it but they lied for me
while plain clothed ATF agents
wearing ball caps and athletic jerseys eyed me,
whispering into miked collars.
i’ve lost my prime directive
and so have you,
each of us sleeper cells
activated unexpectedly by music, film and print.
each of us off the reservation,
going rogue
and ronin.

the only ones that ever made it across the border
never send care packages,
instead they become Colombian drug czars in their own right.

oh, here comes another one-
his hands are bigger than mine,
he knows more,
she’s meaner,
she’s prettier than me,
he makes more money
and they are trying to write the passwords to
my
passions
like bouncers working the doors in my head.
he/she/they have mastered a subtly brutal interrogation
that leaves no marks
but i made it back to K.C.
i never begged.
i never sweat.
i wore black.
i drank openly on the plane and smiled broad.
here you go.
smoke up.

Dr. Frankenstein 2009

2009-08-24T12:41:00.002-05:00

the coming storm
made electrodes of us on the streets,
arcs of erotic threat
forking between any two contact points.
being overly grounded
to some regrettably stable chunk of iron ore
i was headed home alone.
at two-thirty one am
the elevator
mumbled its deep Buddhist mantra.
Dr. Frankenstein got on at floor number 5,
wearing a green polo with green ball cap spun backwards,
bermuda shorts.
he pushed 27.
i was going to 32.
what’s goin on he asked.
his eyes were beat up from stimulants and barbiturates,
red and milky like so much blisters
raised from the angry skillet of his brain.
not much, i answered, headin to bed.
no tits and ass tonight? he asked,
no. no tits and ass tonight. i replied.
you should come back to my place,
i got coke and a couple hookers coming over he promised.
see you there i said.
he got off
and back to his apartment
where he would take
his favorite parts of those hookers and
make them into what,
for him,
would be an ideal abomination
and they would give themselves up as
donors to his lab,
their bodies already conveniently segmented
by tan lines
and surgery scars.

i nestled into cool sheets,
troubled by villains
and their easy ecstasy.
around three-thirty two am
i saw a thick trident of lightning
which i assumed to be powering
a room
on the twenty-seventh floor
where a burly young professional
grunted, spurting onto his brainchild,
forasaking the iconic exclamation
completely.

The Exxon in Us

2009-08-24T11:59:00.003-05:00

If one considers the condition of the world and realizes that the world is only an expression of collective humanity, one must realize real change can only be brought about via an internal shift in human behavior. Attacking the external world blindly only creates a dog pile of band aids without cleaning the wound.

If we look at environmental pollution, arms races, agricultural tampering, we must see these things as magnifications of traits that exist inside of us-that is, the human existence might be the small opening of a bullhorn, the external world its larger, wider projection.

So, environmental pollution is merely a magnified expression of the way we leave issues unresolved around us, an emotional procrastination and lack of cognitive hygiene which eventually poisons the things we require to live: our spirits, hearts and minds.

Military stockpiling or arms races are obviously expressions of rabid fear and distrust: the underground bunker filled with rows of radioactive ballistics exists in a smaller, but no less toxic supply inside of us. We have so many defense mechanisms, so much aggression and poisonous cruelty that we could argue human beings are predominantly made up of these weapons, more than they are made up of peace talks or negotiation or even identity.

It is easy to see how the things inside of us became pesticides and genetically altered tomatoes and corn filler: we try to falsify love, to get it bigger, better and faster at the expense of its primary function which is to nourish. Breast implants are a willful placement of oil slicks within the chest cavity. Professional lives take on a gridlocked bipartisanship between earning leisure at the expense of leisure which is collectively expressed in our locked up politics.

As a culture or country, we throw money at problems which expresses our desire to just have someone else do it. We see this in people wanting solid relationships without willing to be solid themselves. I’m not trying to solve world hunger by suggesting there is a famine within our minds, that would be an oversimplification, but rather I’m saying that, in the name of health, we can learn about our interior lives by studying the way they are expressed in the world. I’m not very interested in marching into society’s ills. I’m more interested in marching inwards, acknowledging that a sick culture comes from sick people, that it’s not just ad executives and republicans that lead the world astray, but rather a collective malady who’s recovery requires first and foremost, a disarmament in order for conciliation to begin.

This piece could largely be an unnecessary repetition of the deservedly popular Ghandi quote: Be the Change You Want to See in the World, except that I am interested in viewing the physical world not as a convenient metaphor, but a literal materialization of our interiors. We could take feelings like hate or fear as formless in the mind and say that nuclear weapons are these feelings made real as governed by the laws of physics. Such an implication has the ability to alarm us and report accurately on our species’ critical condition. Diagnosis seems especially important to me as we mostly want improvement without any personal inconvenience. More importantly, many of us will by hybrid cars or fill our recycle bins but are extremely resistant or even ignorant of the notion that we might need to renovate our dispositions. This requires, unfortunately, a much more holistic and thus unquantifiable faith in the universe. This would mean that on some level, we must accept that a bigoted right wing President was not only put there by our votes, but possibly manifested to some degree as a projection of our collective consciousness. This is not to suggest that daily meditation can immediately bring about world peace, but only to remind us that we, or you, is the only thing you have power over and that perhaps it requires more change than a New Year’s resolution. Perhaps it is required that we love fundamentally different, trust more, help more and stop running to put out fires while we are ourselves engulfed in flame.

The Attempt

2009-08-17T23:47:00.001-05:00

the words only assemble,
they convene.
they cannot shatter
and are thus inadequate to impart ruination.
you see?
there’s another sentence that says you see?
there is no way to expel this rage,
this rip through my chest cavity,
this sense of hemorrhaging marrow
and spirit.
no way to communicate the inconsolably angry
thing with back hoes for fingers
and a roll cage skull
that would wade into the populace,
vaporizing innocent and guilty into red mist
with each low torque swat of its hand.
no way to make the words resemble
a ravaged body
covered in deliberate, slashing X’s,
a gory tic tack toe of bloodletting
used to drain all the viper’s venom
expert in each of the six senses.
there’s no realistic way to put the simple people on trial
as accomplices to mediocrity
and hang them dead,
texting smiley emoticons in answer to their bulging eyes.
no way to ventilate that thing
whos girth now exceeds the
gasket of my mouth-
no way to burst their bubbles
like you’d lance a boil,
draining away the infected puss of their split personalities
and split realities.
no way
to cough and spit and gag and vomit up my interior completely,
to totally renovate the stained shag carpet of the soul,
filled to the height of its fibers with human dandruff and stiff with grime.
no way to bring the world up to my level,
to punish it in the eye of a hurricane twirling caveats and exceptions and contradictions and mutants and mongoloids and jargon.
no way to truly love my worst enemy,
just to retract it
and watch them stumble through this stinking cafeteria
trying to find a shred of decency among the idiots and the inmates.
there’s no way to write a sentence that feels
like placing the bottom feeders
on top of the population,
watching them saw and hack and raze their way back to the depleted,
spent toast of the earth’s crust.
no way to write a sentence that says our skin
is but a paper bag,
our tissues a padded cell against which we will punch and rage,
that
our ribs are a cage
and our hearts want out.
no way
to fail the one track mindless
out of the school of hard knocks.
no way to visit crimes back upon nature or to
hold anyone accountable
for
beauty becoming
flank, haunch,
shank and stool.
i wanted the words to jackknife and T-bone
and fold upon themselves like an Amtrak train,
pile them up, send the honking angry traffic of the rat race
into the computer,
onto the page
so that paper would never be the same,
and the internet would be a ragged birth canal
and the audience would run to save me,
leaving notes underneath my wiper blades that say
come back,
i still love you,
but spotlights scan the clouds tonight as
if the gods needed apprehension.
they are still at large.
and this is only another
god damned poem.

Intrologue-New Show

2009-08-04T19:22:00.003-05:00

Have a show of all new, all different material on Friday, August 7th at The Mercy Seat Gallery, (16th and Grand.) including a live piece done in the style of the series by Melody Hoskins. The show goes from 7-10. Love to see you there!

Show description:
This is a series done in the style of late seventies, early eighties comic books. The intent is to use crude renderings, a limited color palette and confining panels to mirror the ways in which we are inadequately equipped to define, defend, and free ourselves from the banal situations of day to day life. There are thought bubbles included with over the top exposition to exemplify how the authenticity of our interior lives is often trapped inside the fraud of our physical lives.

example: "
"Wolffe," 12 x 12, oil, acrylic, oil pen on board

Another Day of Story

2009-07-27T16:31:00.006-05:00

waking up provides some kind of
coded
Foreshadowing:
dropped keys, spilled coffee.
then a blistering song
or a good chapter
suggests hope,
providing the day’s
Narrative Hook.
all of my arch nemesis
are encased in family and friends
and small moments that
my heroes code prevents me from
slaughtering.
more or less anything and everything serves
as
the
McGuffin
allowing a coworker to throw
a
Twist of Fate
at me,
necessitating that
i counter with
a
Second
or even
Third Act.
often my adversary
will weaken me with exhausting bouts of
Exposition
to a story i do not wish to know.
they deny the
Metafiction
of it all,
their reinforcements arriving in hordes,
requiring me to generate several
Narrow Escapes,
raised like poker plays.

Flashbacks
reveal a history of stalemate-
Flash forwards
promise more of the same
while waking
Dream Sequences
contain coded keys to fuzzy victory.
meanwhile,
every moment seems a brilliantly conceived
Deathtrap
as if my
Quest
were made of only
Chase Sequences.
fortunately,
my days are
syndicated,
serialized
and
sequelized
with never ending promise of
Rebirth.

this
Proairetic Code
against the swarm
is typically only a
Red Herring,
the actual villain having been installed in me long ago,
coming from the inside.
this moment
is my daily
Realization
of the
Twist Ending,
making known my enemy’s
Master Plan.
often,
there is no way to combat these turns of tides
but to have faith and wait for the
Deus Ex Machina,
who’s play i shall not reveal here.
i’m concerned you won’t come back without the
Cliffhanger.

Meanwhile,
the
Plot
goes on
suppressing me
and the
Fourth Wall
is bullet proof glass.

Cut and Dry

2009-07-27T13:56:00.002-05:00

on the DVD The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

As many times as I’ve enjoyed the anti-hero, rooted for the bad guys to get a taste of their own medicine, there’s something vaguely upsetting about it, as though decency has grown weary of rising above decay. In a social analogy, it might be a bit like the nerds being co-opted by the football team, betraying their strengths and taking steroids in order to meet brute, stupid force head on. (I am reminded of a Kansas City football player who called himself Spider Man, making the web slinging gesture every time he completed a play. This was sad and ironic as any comic book fan knows that early in Spider Man mythology, Peter Parker’s greatest tormentor was Flash Thompson, a football player.) George Lucas was quoted as saying something to the effect that gray areas spread until the black and white is gone, suggesting that moral ambiguity is a corruptive force that ends up making everything acceptable.

Sometimes you want Wolverine or Hannibal Lector.

And sometimes you want Steve Wiebe in The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Kong is a documentary specifically about a rivalry over the world record in the eighties video game Donkey Kong. I was firstly reminded that documentaries don’t need to feature a man that swims in lava or detail the climbing of Everest by an athlete with only one internal organ. Half of the challenge, and the fun, of documentaries is discovering compelling material in unlikely places. Kong was such an unlikely soil for entertainment that you might have a hard time believing I was close to tears and on the edge of my seat by the films end.

As usual, specific detail would ruin your journey through the film, but it’s important to imagine that this film isn’t really about Donkey Kong at all, but rather, if you dare, good versus evil. Clearly defined. No gray area.

In following the reigning champion, the documentary reveals one of the most despicable characters ever captured on film: vain, greedy, devious and probably fraudulent. Billy Mitchell seems to have been cultivated on the underside of a rock and represents the deplorable way in which the guy on the bottom is very quick to step on others if it means grabbing the spotlight. This man was obviously the misfit the couldn’t wait to displace others as soon as he managed low wattage fame through his Donkey Kong record. As he strokes his shiny black mullet, Billy exemplifies his supposed work ethic with, “If your in second place, the view doesn’t change. I wanted first place. I wanted the view.”

The challenger, Steve Wiebe, couldn’t be more of a classic underdog if this movie had been a piece of fiction. (The director Seth Gordon wisely saw this and capitalized on it. The film features music from both The Karate Kid and Rocky III.) Wiebe is self-doubting, humble, family-oriented, coming off a string of unrealized dreams and failures.

The polarity of these two real life characters only creates contrast by which the viewer remembers what used to be on either side of the gray area: integrity and faith or greed and corruption. The film reminds us that hard work, confidence and decency can pay off, that we shouldn’t be embarrassed or ashamed by that. The object in dispute, something so small as a digital score on an out of date game reminds us that everything material in life is a McGuffin, a plot element to move the story around which we are tested. Finally, it challenges the viewer to call out the Gray Area, demand that it quit playing both sides and choose a path.

It IS there

2009-07-23T20:42:00.005-05:00

On the DVD Noise

Found another surprise in Noise, a single DVD jewel case at the video store I gambled on. Not quite a gem, but maybe a polished stone you find in a creek.

Tim Robbins plays David, a New York family man with a beautiful wife and child. His corporate job, his sex life, even the cohesiveness of his family unit all become eclipsed by an obsessive intolerance for noise, specifically focused on the automobile alarm. (Don't think Pi, think Falling Down.)

Most interesting is the film’s prosecution: presenting noise as a physical assault, which by proxy puts all the intangible irritations of modern life on trial: inconsideration, empty values, callousness. The car alarms could be people, bleating to be heard in their over indulgent self-destructiveness. They could be useless technology, burying us in bells and whistles that only complicate instead of simplify. They could be entropy, the endless division of systems into loud sediment and jagged rubble too fine a grain and too numerous in quantity for the human mind to withstand.

What I found especially appealing was the film making the perversity of modern times a real, external problem rather than a failing to cope on the part of David. As his obsession threatens to ruin his marriage, his wife says, “You need to see a therapist,” to which Robbins replies, “This is not a psychological problem, it’s sociological. It’s political!” This implies that radical times call for radical measures. Robbins ends up wearing a hooded sweatshirt, prowling the streets for any car with a screaming alarm. He vandalizes them and leaves stickers or typed letters informing them they have been judged by, “The Rectifier.” The ongoing argument is that David is not mad. The world is.

Later, discussing one of their daughters friends, Robbins says of the child, “She’s sexy,” to which his wife says,”David, she’s seven.” David replies, “She’s sexy, it’s not my fault.” Here again is the suggestion that there is a reality to which we are subordinate whether we like to admit it or not. Much of David’s accusation lies in people simply accepting their environments, in fact denying them, rather than doing anything about them. Early in the film, David’s recurring impotence is inflamed by a car alarm outside. His wife begs him to let it go, holding his face, kissing it and saying, “It’s not there, it’s not there.” He tries to resume, but says, “It is there. It’s there.” David’s obsession is only obsessive in comparison to the sedentary nature of the people around him. There is an underlying argument here against willful blindness, ignorance and the general denial towards the state of modern life. David’s daughter compares the city’s sirens to the sirens in The Odyssey, suggesting that David must tie himself to the ship’s mast as Odysseus did in order not to, “wreck the ship,” by the power of the, “siren’s,” call. Here again the question is raised as to whether the responsibility lies with the individual to manage the onslaught of the physical, external world with Buddhist calm, or is the world so intolerable that it can only be withstood if the participant is physically (or chemically.) restrained?

We live in a time where everyone is yelling to be heard and responsibility seems to indicate that we not yell or add to the din, thereby denying our own voice or satisfaction. Noise gleefully suggests that we not yell, but rather take a bat and bolt cutters to the source.

The Concrete Floor

2009-07-23T17:41:00.001-05:00

women have their glass ceiling
while we men have difficulty
getting to the basement of ourselves.
we want to come to rest at the bedrock of our identity
as best foot forward
becomes an awkward equestrian shuffle
after time.
we want to hit the cool
cradle of
rock
bottom
and sleep there
without a thunderhead of failure
only to find it sealed,
like a radioactive isotope
in three foot thick
concrete flooring,
the world comprised
of mostly
never ending ladders.

Run In

2009-07-18T01:42:00.005-05:00

i was buying
around a gallon
of chocolate syrup
at ten-forty-five P.M.
found myself in line
behind two young
women about the night life.
one was wearing shorts that seemed to have been cut from a pair of tightly tailored military pants,
legs torn away at the bikini line.
the other had a black party dress on,
thin legs
or scrawny depending on your tastes,
knees like knots in a rose stem,
pretty if you liked severity.
military bikini looked back and smiled.
they paid for something
and the party dress turned to me, wobbled drunkenly on the hooves of her stiletto heels.
she curtsied,
teeth dyed grey from wine,
pointer finger and thumb pulling
the bell of her dress dangerously up and away.
“excuse me sir, but we were wondering
why you are buying that large container of chocolate syrup on a saturday night?”
i fake laughed
and tried to run a thousand watt smile
off the AA battery of my spirit.
“tell me first what you think it’s for,” i asked.
“a sexual situation?” party dress whisper/slurred.
“that would be a long night,” i said, looking at the hefty 48 ounce jug.
“it’s fake blood for
a movie shoot,” i told them.

we passed again in the parking lot.
“last chance,” i said.
“for what,” they asked. “to be in your movie? will you pour
fake blood all over our chests?” they asked.
i sighed, without completely understanding why,
like i’d just watched the evening news.
the world is a hell
paved in
thriving,
green astro turf.

Boss About Town

2009-07-13T15:03:00.001-05:00

The Boss prequel is in the works...

Blast from the Past

2009-07-06T20:36:00.004-05:00

Christ. This is from fifteen years ago. Technical pen. 18 x 24.

you can click it to enlarge...

Crying Remotely

2009-07-02T13:49:00.002-05:00

On the graphic novels The Surrogates and I Kill Giants

In The Surrogates, a graphic novel written by Robert Venditti and illustrated by Brett Weldele, a future population lives out their lives through humanoid replicas of themselves. These duplicates are younger, healthier and more attractive, allowing the operator to stay locked away at home, living out a happier, easier life through virtual remote control.

Suddenly, a shadowy figure with glowing eyes is discovered to be stalking the streets, destroying “Surries” by way of electrical shock. As a result of the perpetrator’s humanitarian campaign the main character, a detective assigned to track the vandal, loses his Surrogate in a struggle with the culprit, now known as Steeplejack. This altercation leaves the detective naked, having to suddenly live out his days through his actual body while ninety-seven percent of the world goes on operating via remote control.

As a parable, I saw the surrogates as representations of our attempts to go on being who we wish we were instead of who we actually are. When the detective asks his wife to actually have dinner with him as human beings and she refuses, (or rather, her surrogate refuses.) in fact looks down on him for wanting a lesser experience through flesh and blood, I was reminded of the embarrassingly transparent ways we attempt to armor ourselves and convince others that we are strong. It could have retread the tired issue of authentic life threatened by a virtual existence but instead suggests it is not the computers that threaten our quality of life-it is our willful barricading of selves against criticism, rejection and trying.

Unfortunately, the concept doesn’t go as far or deep as it could have. Knowing the premise before hand is to know the books highest concept. There are interesting social implications peppered throughout, but none that stay with you. I would like to have seen the smoking gun in this book placed in the hands of a population too afraid to live their lives fully as if each day were a clean sheet of sketch paper we are afraid to vandalize. Still, the cutting edge concept reinforces the fact that comics are on the brink of becoming consistently, irrefutably important material and should anyone doubt the relevance of a story about electronic, vicarious living, I’m about to go lose several hours to online gameplay right now...

On the issue of the comic book medium as important source of information, I also just finished I Kill Giants.

I’m still wiping my eyes.

Unfortunately, since I try very hard not to reveal anything about the guts of any piece I might reflect on, it’s difficult for me to tell you much about why exactly I loved this book, but I haven’t been so touched by a graphic novel since I read Blankets by Craig Anderson.

I Kill Giants, written by Joe Kelly and illustrated by JM Ken Niimura tells the story of Barbara Thorson, a grade school girl obsessed with Dungeons and Dragons, troubled by quick wit, isolation and completely absorbed by fantasies of a a world around her threatened by giants, which she believes to be utterly real. Think Calvin and Hobbes, PG-13.

This book does a wonderful job of showing the power of fantasy, both as an emotional outlet for a troubled existence, but also portrays the imagination as a connection to the possibility that there might be more to our lives than we expect. Barbara’s fantasy world doesn’t have to be real or imaginary--the giants, the fairies, these are the symbols that allow her to relate to the world around her. A skull and crossbones on a dark bottle of medicine doesn’t mean there are skulls and crossbones in the jar, it would only be, symbolically, how we come to understand that the contents were poisonous. So is it with Barbara.

The need and importance for such a system can’t be illustrated without first showing a world so harsh, unacceptable and confusing that it requires such a complicated legend in order to navigate it. This book does a wonderful job of telling and illustrating isolation, the horrors of school and how godforsaken life can sometimes be. The suggestion here is not that Barbara is crazy or escapist but rather that life has pushed her to that point.

Joe Kelly’s writing is smart and simple, but perfectly paced. Paired with JM’s black and white drawings, (almost a blend of Japanese Sumi-e brush strokes and anime.) I Kill Giants gently hits all the touchstones of a tight little film. As I was reading, I was thinking How long before the animated adaptation?

I can tell you Barbara’s personal mythology has to do with something she does not want to deal with and similarly, I have this same problem. There are certain things I don’t know how to understand and so I don’t think about them. Turning the pages, I was calling out No! or Oh Hell! being forced to go through Barbara’s experience with her, periodically breaking for more kleenex.

Without understanding where it is headed, the beginning can be a little shaky and the illustrations can be difficult to understand if one isn’t well versed in comic book layout, but nevertheless this is the kind of book I want to put in people’s hands to show them what they might be missing in the world of contemporary comics: provocation, entertainment, instruction, healing.

Bad Soil

2009-06-28T12:28:00.004-05:00

I’m wondering if an attempt at internal contentedness is, as a pursuit, a fixed game from the outset. Psychoanalysis and psychotherapy are largely concerned with exploring the unconscious and marrying the conscious to it after making both hemispheres aware of one another and harmonizing their intent or efforts.

What interests me now is the idea that these two, “entities” are so separated, their functions so different in a modern environment that they are almost separate personalities warring against one another, possibly accounting for depression, disease and fatigue.

It seems to me that the conscious mind is the portion created to deal with reality-that is, it is the delivery and execution of unconscious motivations. In a car, we have the combustion of the engine, the mystery of gears and chemistry, but it is the aerodynamics of sheet metal, the adhesion of rubber tires that execute the function.

So, what if the real purpose of a car becomes showmanship? Take the Hummer or Ford Excursion who’s purpose is arguably not utility, but presence and imposition. (Hummer’s ad campaigns made no effort to disguise this. They accentuated it.) At this point, the car’s function is no longer locomotion, but appearance and status. From this standpoint, the aerodynamic sheet metal, the paint job, the chrome have become more important than the engine, than the original function.

Frighteningly similar, the human being’s motivations or unconscious desires are less relevant today than the human beings personality, claims, possessions and so forth. This phenomena role reverses the conscious and unconscious: now we attempt to retrofit our unconscious motivations and internal impulses to match the needs of the conscious mind who’s original duty was to carry out the commands of the unconscious.

(I’m imagining a personality who undergoes trauma such that a separate personality is created. Imagine if, instead of treating the original damaged identity, we came to nurture the splintered identity, thus making the original obsolete.)

An example of this might be a man or woman that, at an unconscious level desperately needs love. Intimate, compassionate, tender care. Because of a calloused world that might devour a compassionate person alive, an individual might shut those desires down and attempt to retrain them into something fast paced, mercurial and cold in order to serve the demands of day to day life. From this standpoint, the human mind is turned inside out by the vacuum of reality, making the starving needs of the unconscious into something unfashionable, weak and out of date instead of fundamental and innocent. (L.L.)

(I am reminded of a story about some particular military bomb whose explosive heat ate the oxygen at such an instantaneous rate that victims lungs were pulled out through their mouths by the suction of the air. Imagine this happening to your unconscious.)

(Another example might be the disturbing trend of medicating the misery and warning signs of the unconscious, muzzling it in effect so that the surface personality can more easily go about the day, as opposed to an ideal model where we alter the surface to serve the deeper mission.)

This would explain the growing examples of personalities dominated by tics and pathology-the unconscious torn from its placid housing and put to work in the labor camps of the social, professional arena where its needs are both more disguised in order to project strength, but also more visible as any object might be when floating close to any surface.

From this standpoint, mental health seems like an unfair pursuit for the modern human being. Asking a person to get in touch with their unconscious and understand their own motivations and behaviors seems futile if the operating system of the deeper mind is out of date. Getting back to the car, we can, after weeks of knocking, get under the hood and check the dipstick. Yes, we know it needs oil, but there isn’t any oil left and the world does not care if the car is knocking, only whether or not it is shiny.

My purpose is not to rail against health--I’m all for it. Sometimes I wonder if it isn’t another facet of pressurized performance to place on a person that simply cannot be achieved, thus creating more anxiety and unhappiness. Happiness is arguably the most important pursuit, but does it fly on a day to day basis? Does humanity still traffic in happiness or only shirts and shoes and cars that say it? And here is where we are set up to fail. We might be encouraged to find happiness, but only within very narrow parameters. That is, what if an individual’s version of happiness is to leave or reject what is comfortable? More to the point, it seems we are prompted to find happiness in a profitable and efficient fashion, if you get my meaning. In this respect happiness is taught to be a faculty instead of a condition.

All of this brings an important question to mind in an individuals pursuit of happiness: which identity seeks peace, the surface or the unconscious? (Because it would require entirely different plans of action, different expectations, different lives lived.) Does a person want a more harmonious blending into family, friends and society or do they want a clearer definition of self regardless of the consequences? (I realize they may not be mutually exclusive, although fertile ground yields good crops whereas the best seed in the world can go nowhere with bad soil, and so it seems more important to start with the unconscious on up.)

Each of us deserves a shot at finding some kind of peace but we should understand the parameters first, the corrupted playing field, the angels with discordant horns and devils with large, foam pointer fingers waiving in the stands. Most importantly, a person needs to make a decision and a distinction first: which self wants what?

K.C. Chemistry

2009-06-23T20:40:00.001-05:00

i’m wearing a rubber monster suit
called Kansas City
and the zipper’s broken.
the news ratchets up color coded alert levels
as if the sun itself were a suspicious character
trying to move a Haliburton Case through the outer atmosphere.
an old man waiting for the bus in wet clothes
claims people are passing out at the metro stops.
a woman at the bar was
flushed and shaking as she reached for a cool drink
as if the heat had just braced her,
just shook her down in the broiling toaster slot of an airless alley.

i’ll admit,
car upholstery’s like black asphalt.
the sun maces me with hot sauce every time i open my mouth.
my bottled water’s
scorching,
like flat pepper spray.
every pile of anything is steaming compost.
the cars go by tinted
and refrigerated.

roll down a window candy asses-
it’s only life,
turning from a liquid
to a gas.

Anti-Possum

2009-06-22T08:26:00.003-05:00

instead of X’s on their eyes,
they’ll double cross you.
instead of rolling over
or
playing dead,
they’ll roll over on you,
play you.

we are not alive,
only animate,
a mobile ecosystem,
each of us containing a bit of
rock
water
air
weather
and code.
all of life’s prismatic permutations
are only protective coloration,
four dimensional models of false
eyes printed on a monarch’s wings.
look at the puzzled and complicated climates
of your neighbors and parents:
all of the accomplished
like leftovers
left out
in the modular tupperware
of their sophistication.

in a desperate attempt to avoid obsolescence,
you can poke humanoid matter with a stick
and it will pretend to be alive.
the possums, by contrast, are
a little more grounded in their gambit.

X X

Dent Removal

2009-06-19T02:01:00.002-05:00

On Creativity

I have had this fantasy where the things that I do not like about my face are dents, hit and runs from day to day monotony. Were I to push back against life, I could pop them out like plastic car bumpers.

The idea is that there is an internal pressure, a personal atmosphere, and an external one. Similar to deep water divers, a suit or situation is required to maintain a relationship between external and internal pressure. If sociological input is a form of weight pressing in upon our psyches, then our internal pressure must equalize and exert in order to avoid barotrauma, or pressure related damage.

So, the length of my skull, the tiny nose, the soft chin, the little lips are simply crumple zones exploited by external insistence and were I to merely live correctly, these imperfections could be reversed, to say nothing of all the psychological impairment. But this would require an internal pressure that at least equals if not excedes the external stress of the modern zeitgeist.

But how can one do this? Advertisements, films, politics, news, fashion, fads, the collective inertia and the forces these create in collective human consciousness and human industry crash against us with one-hundred-tsunami-a-second frequency. One could call the speed and frequency and impact of these forces a sociological crush depth such as that found far beneath the ocean surface.

There is no answer but art.

Art provides the most powerful exertion of the self on reality, as art, by nature, is comprised of an individual’s perception versus what the collective has created. If an individual can lay down a journal entry, a drawing, a playing of a music track that holds more significance than a relationship or a work shift, then an individual has taken the first step in applying their beliefs against the canvas around them. (A larger tool in this arsenal is denial and rejection. These behaviors are commonly seen as malfunctions in the psyche, but, arguably, they are the first step in enforcing a person’s, “personal reality,” over the, “consensual reality,” of the collective consciousness. [See: Clive Barker, Shadows in Eden, 1991])

If I could travel the earth lecturing, I would comment on the underestimated, undervalued power of creativity. I don’t think people really appreciate it’s self actualization properties which in many regards far exceed that of other professions and endeavors.

Most of the time in the arts you are taking reality and restructuring it to your liking. Let’s say you are a filmmaker and you want to stage a car crash. Coordinating the event might be comparable to other professions, aligning people and places to a common goal. But then comes the crash, where the materials of reality are reconstituted for the alternate purpose of the artist. Think on it: cars get us to work, to social gatherings, teens are mowing lawns to save up for them, people are hauling goods and services in them, they are the capillaries of our human vascular industry and here is a filmmaker destroying these symbols and rearranging them to his or her own ends. On film, reality itself has been reorganized into a new reality. At this point, the artist is in control, not the environment.

What I believe we lose sight of more and more each decade is how subordinate our individual realities are to the world around us. Buying power and technology lull us into believing that we make choices and have an effect when in actuality, we are mostly cheap newsprint passed beneath the presses of social inertia. We very seldom are dictating our own environment--instead it usually decides us for us.

Regrettably, this property of insisting one’s self upon their surroundings does not often resemble a messianic demonstration of mind over matter. This is not often a, “chosen person,” bending reality to their will, but rather a frequent practice of delinquent fantasy which does not result in bounty so much as a tally mark, a spoonful of dirt in a tunnel of personal freedom. In this regard art is not a job necessarily and its purpose doesn’t have to be good or to make money or even to make sense anymore than a four mile run or a healthy meal or any other form of self-improvement or maintenance is supposed to make sense. It is a respiratory act, a relationship with the outside world.

I recently came back from a road trip. On this trip, I stuck my foot out the window, into the sun. I was alarmed by it’s pale, milky appearance. How it, and I, had been under the damp, dark rock of habit for so long that it had lost color. I couldn’t help but look at the passengers/drivers moving by me, thinking of lines in a grocery store, audiences in a movie theater all resembling villi, the hair like digestive filaments that line our intestines for absorption. I thought of wiggling crowds at a concert waving their arms like a barrier reef of human polyps catching and eating whatever business puts in front of us, atrophied into sophisticated mouths.

Very disappointing to find we are more absorption than production--not because products matter but because our souls atrophy and bald into terrified receptacles rather than flags we might punch through the crust of each day. Opposable thumbs aren’t made for holding remote controls or credit cards, but pens, guns and mirrors featuring reflections defiant in their autonomy.

A Dirty Job

2009-06-14T07:25:00.002-05:00

today,
Einstein would be endorsing Obama.
DaVinci would be preoccupied
with patents.
Plath would be taking antidepressants,
circuit lecturing on creativity.
Bukowski would be a regularly embarrassing
and perplexing guest on Letterman.
Hemmingway would fall prey to the buglight of television,
writing occasionally for Time magazine,
his shotgun left on the top closet shelf.
the Beats would be ignored.
today, the President is the heart warming,
feel good blockbuster of the decade.
Shakespeare would be amiable, charming
and buried
as one of a million NPR celebrity interviews.
Hunter would have just wrapped
Fear and Loathing from the Thompson’s,
a reality television drama.
Van Gogh would have expensive head shots and a spotty resume.
Beethoven would collaborate with Sting.
Salinger would be on
I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Outta Here!
Charlie Chaplin would vacation with Brad and Angelina on the French Riviera.
Pollock would be the number one Google search.
Pavlov would be pushing buttons.

it’s up to us,
i guess.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

2009-06-11T00:38:00.003-05:00

on Gran Turino

As a film, Gran Turino functions great. In spite of it’s paint by numbers formula, it’s easy to get behind Clint Eastwood. He’s iconic and he uses that to wind up the viewer and also expand his library of great one liners and memorable scenes. His growling warnings and filthy mouth are almost too much, almost over the top but stop just in time to create a broad, indelible character. I felt myself wanting to applaud Eastwood for acting in and directing a film this harsh, considering the age he’s at. I can, without naming names, think of other actors or characters taken out and dusted off only to appear tired and hammy. Eastwood is angry, brittle, ferocious. There are several laugh out loud scenes. Bad guys get what they deserve. The movie is clean and effortless, much like a perfectly refurbished Gran Turino.

However, and this is a very big however, I had the luxury of watching this film as a white guy. See, Eastwood’s character, Kyle Kowalski is retired military. He served in Korea and he is openly racist. This is meant to be part of his character arc. We are intended to watch him change, get from racist point A to some other, more evolved point B.

One problem I had with this racist angle is the same problem I have with feel good, uplifting handicapped movies where a handicapped or mentally retarded person does great things or falls in love with another mentally retarded person. It does a disservice to the lives of handicapped people and their caretakers. Retarded people do not turn out like Forrest Gump. They get their diapers changed and require operations. Likewise, racism is never this neat. The people around Walt tolerate him, seeing him as a crazy old man and their modern sophistication seems to conveniently keep them from being scarred, which doesn’t seem fair to the painful truth of being discriminated against. I don’t think it’s a healthy message to suggest to people that if a person turns out good in the end, it makes them a sympathetic character regardless of their moral indiscretions. If following a racist’s story arc is okay, why not a rapist’s tale, whereby in the end he befriends and cohabitates with the women he has attacked? It would never fly.

Furthermore, as he goes through his transformation, he becomes the White Knight, another movie trend that disgusts me whereby the Caucasian villain is taken in warmly by his enemies (The Last Samurai, Dances With Wolves.) and then he must rise to defend them, to save them from themselves which furthers the notion that these people are primitive, defenseless and hopeless. There is a subtext suggesting that these people really are inferior or at least incompetent in some way. They must be punished, then schooled, then saved in an extension of America’s tough love as a global police force.

Additionally, as Eastwood is on the downhill slope of his path, we begin to see him trade good natured ethnic barbs with his Italian barber and an Irish friend. Eastwood, as a director, is backpedaling out of the character’s racist origin, suggesting oh, he treats everyone this way. Suddenly he’s not racist, he just gives people a hard time, the suggestion being that if you treat everyone in a negative manner, no one is allowed take it personally. I found the transition from slurs to good natured ribbing to be a little dangerous.

Eastwood befriends an introverted Hmong boy in order to save him from the perils of youth gangs. There are numerous scenes with Eastwood calling the boy a pussy, telling him to man up, that he has no balls. Now, I realize the cantankerous old veteran from another generation is supposed to be charming and I realize he’s supposed to be filling a missing father figure role for the boy. Again, there is an alarming transition here. In the beginning Walt calls the boy a zipperhead in their first meeting and he means it exactly as what it is, a racist slur intended to hurt. Well into his relationship with the boy, he is trying to introduce him to manhood by asking him to trade vulgarities and racial slurs with an italian barber, the idea being that aggression and swagger will bring him out of his shell. This bothers me in three ways: the incredibly prehistoric notion that men must behave this way and also decency being equated with being a pussy. Secondly, the boy’s quiet demeanor seems to be largely cultural and so Walt is, in effect, the big American missile coming in to destroy the village of this boys heritage. The common perception that a nice person must be weak is disgraceful.

I often think of this: I used to work at a coffee shop which employed Tibetan monks for a short while. They had walked across the Himalayas for freedom. This one in particular, named Tsitum, spoke no english. When I addressed him, he blushed and smiled and had difficulty maintaining eye contact. He spoke softly, moved gently. He was unmarred, unspoiled and my very presence as a westerner seemed abusive even when I was at my most polite.

The last thing I wanted to do was teach him how o throw a football. I dare say I was even fascinated, envious and reverent of that spineless, gook pansy.

Reverse Engineering

2009-06-06T00:24:00.004-05:00

On Monster Road and Crumb

Reverse engineering is the process of looking at an item and trying to figure out either how it was made from the finished product backwards or simply trying to replicate it.

In many ways, we could equate this to how most of us manage our lives emotionally. We are born into a life already up and running without any instructions on assembly or operation. We observe and try to imitate what we see. All our understanding is gleaned literally from working backwards.

All of this came to mind watching Monster Road, a documentary about Bruce Bickford, a little known underground stop-motion animator. The film is equally concerned with the painstaking detail of his work and also the family life that may have pushed his focus into such an extreme form of personal fantasy and meticulous obsession.

Having finished the movie I was instantly reminded of another documentary, Crumb, about underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. While Crumb is a far more interesting ride and over all a better, more entertaining film, these two documentaries may as well be conjoined twins. The similarities are startling as they relate to and support the theme of misery producing art or artists. Both of these men had several brothers and both lost one of their brothers to suicide. Both had extremely domineering if not abusive fathers. Both Crumb and Bickford have strange, mumbling cadences and demeanors, almost autistic levels of introversion. They share artistic fixations: for Bruce Bickford, it was the repeating theme of little men fighting big men. His films were filled with sliding scales of dwarfs turning into giants and vice versa. Robert Crumb was obsessed with sex and large, overly curvaceous women. They both seem to operate in spite of a dangerously fatalistic attitude towards life, Crumb sharpened and hateful, Bickford numbed into a meek, childlike state.

Comparing these two films, one wonders if these men’s focus is merely a laser-like compression of their terrible childhoods or if it was a quality they already possessed which would have reared itself either way? In the case of Crumb, Robert’s brothers are equally if not more fascinating and damaged. There are examples of one brother’s hand drawn comic books eventually being overcome by graphomania, the characters crushed and squashed by larger and larger bubbles of dialogue. The other brother, after producing his first painting suffered an epileptic fit from the significance of the experience. Now, were each of these men strangely gifted with a potent link to creativity or were they each only equally abused to the point that they had no choice but to express themselves as a method of ventilation? Both?

Neither are very happy films, particularly Monster Road, but they are, in my opinion, more authentic portraits of artists, or more authentic artists. Neither film was really about the product of their creativity or their method but rather how the act was braided irreparably into their lives in such a way that it was a respiratory or vascular act. The world changed them and so they changed the world back, at least in their creations. One can’t help but think of American Splendor, a biographical account of another underground comics writer, Harvey Pekar, who may not have suffered the same terrible childhood, but who’s irritable disposition left him no choice but to create comics detailing his frustrations.

I tend to agree that necessity is the mother of invention. If creativity is largely invention, then we must need to do it, but why? Nothing creates necessity like pain. It forces us to move, change or create. I’m sure there are creators blessed with a divine desire to make things, informed by a benevolent muse but for most artists, it is a mind faced with unbearable or unacceptable realities which must be reimagined or reverse engineered into a more sensible configuration. From this standpoint, art is not a hobby nor a profession, but a method or appliance, such as the Socratic method, Occam’s razor or deductive reasoning. Art isn’t always just something we make. It can be an arcane method for understanding life. Crumb and Monster Road are fine examples of art as a parry, as therapy, as a crutch, as armament and most fascinating, as a renovation of reality.

The New Gun Control

2009-06-02T11:41:00.001-05:00

on the George Tiller slaying

"Sorry pal. All faiths now require a background check and two day waiting period."

Mixed Blood

2009-06-01T11:09:00.003-05:00

It KILLS me that I didn't get sound on this, (used the laptop camera and didn't check the built in mic.) but the following video features my brother, mother, stepfather, father, stepmother and myself all getting drunk around a ping pong table late into Saturday night. I don't know what to make of this unusual gathering, but in the meantime I'm calling myself lucky.

family from Josh Rizer on Vimeo.