Back with No BongIt's been a while since my "ball of snot" post, and I'm sorry there has been no posts from me in such a long time. At the moment I have no internet access at home, no TV, no phone. I have a cell, and that is my only contact with outside world when I'm not at work. In a way it's not too bad - I was never fond of the bad habit of turning on the TV as "company" and now I couldn't do that if I wanted to. I have to struggle with a lousy "shower TV" that my ex found in the trash to watch "Jeopardy!" in the evening.
Remy and I have been working our way through some VHS tapes though. We have been identifying what's on them. There are so many unmarked ones - we had a great time watching "Superman vs. the Atom Man" one night, and a couple of nights we've watched George Pal films. I was thinking of how pissed H. G. Wells would have been to hear the words "which God placed here in his wisdom" at the end of Pal's The War of the Worlds" -- Wells was no moralist; he was a socialist and a stubbornly dedicated agnostic. But with Pal - whom I met at UC in 1980 - the moralistic aspect is of equal importance to the investment in visual effects. In "When Worlds Collide" the moralistic aspect seems to take a little precedence over the special effects, even though that film earned him his second Oscar for visual effects. In his treatment of Science Fiction subjects, Pal is almost pietistic and remained, in that way, a little more "Everyday Dutch."
In Septemeber I played the Glasslands Gallery in Brooklyn - big excitement and a thrill for me, though a lot of the people who came were folks from Cincinnati who had moved to NYC. As it was Labor Day weekend most of the New Yorkers were out of town spending time with relatives. In October my car died, and I started taking a bicycle to work, in the process losing 23 pounds. When times suck the worst is when you see the best things from an artist - I have finished at least four pieces in the last month or so and have three in progress. A couple of these things are as good as anything I have ever done.
"Visionaries Are Fucked"Elizabeth Jameson said this, and yes, it's true. In the art and music market, the visionary creator, the artist who always takes risks and strives for the original and new, has no place. This is not only because money is so tight for any kind of project, and in music we can't even figure out what kind of format is most potent, but also because politically everyone is sort of hamstrung; no one wants to take the risk of speaking up because it's so easy to get knocked down. A lame effort like "Wake Me Up When September Ends" seems to be the cutting edge as to what might be acceptable. "Dick in a Box" from Saturday Night Live seems to represent the cutting edge of Satire. How lame.
For me, I'm going to keep doing right on what I've been doing; I don't know where my gift came from, but I do know that in my case trying to follow trends and attitudes prevalent around me is simply not a natural way to work. I may not be able to ply the right contacts with the right material, and so many things I do end up never seeing the light of day. I'll still keep going, though, as long as I'm able, because the voice inside might stop talking to me one day and then it will be over.
Thought for Today "Anyone lame enough to have a name like 'P. Diddy' - if he had friends, they oughtta be friends out of sympathy." - Remy-Elizabeth Lewis