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Some ideas for a screening at this gallery and maybe something else...

Showbeast, Crazy Wave









Kevin Regan, Standardized Generalized Symbol Language









Art of Bleeding, Introducting Art of Bleeding









Showbeast, Mountain of Skulls









Jimmy Joe Roche, YouTube Apocalypse









Martha Colburn, Dispell (excerpt)









Frog, Peeair and the Pill Poppers, 2007









Kevin Regan, Receiver, 2001









Alan Cordell, Obloy Syndrome: "Bluh Bleh" (Bone Gunner), 2007









Paperrad, Umbrella zombie datamosh mistake, 2007









Frog, The Amazing Mr. Slug Performs Stand Up"









Baltimore Shopping Network, Excalibur Remix, 2007

open studio, Fall 2007

Jim Nastics took these pictures. I just came across 'em. He hadn't mentioned that they were online. You never think about all the photos of you out there. There are so many photos of you that you don't know about. How many photos of you are out there in the world? Many of them belong to people you know but what about the ones that belong to people you don't know? Or people you only at best sort of know? What about the times you ended up walking into the background of some stranger's snapshot? When I was in high-school I spent some time playing a game of intentionally doing this. And what about that time some friend of a friend (or the sister of some friend of a friend) took a picture of you when you passed out, drunk, at a party, and they drew a penis on your face with a Sharpie? And what about all the "official" or documentary photos? Photos taken for identification purposes, insurance purposes, legal reasons? And how many of those photos are online? Even if they're online if they're unlabeled it's unlikely you will ever know of them. It's possible that someone, right now, somewhere, is looking at a photo of you. A photo you know nothing about...

That's me on the left in the top picture. I'm talking to Eleanor. I'm glad she came by. With this picture I'm inclined to fixate on my hair more than anything else. I cut my hair off at the end of the year. I'm growing it long again. It will look like this come December. You can spend as much as you want on a haircut when you only get one a year. I'm not sure the stylists like it because it's more work for them and they are getting only a single tip for the effort. So you have to tip well. I know all about this.

In the third photo Chris has his back to the camera. He's talking to Brody whom you can barely see.

Boswijck BBQ

A short note for A. on the topic of circuit bending

Egad! You probably know more about this than I do. I thought people just hack open electronic devices, old synthesizers, toys, things that produce sound and tweak the circuits. I would think you need a minimal knowledge of electronics and soldering. It's low fi engineering, it's hacking, it's rigging. It seems comparable to game hacking to me. You have to be able to deal with the code some but you don't have to be an expert. It's more about breaking things in an interesting way. It's cut and past in a way. It's seems like it comes out of a desire to personalize things. This makes me think of torn jeans in punk or the hippie adornment of jeans or other clothing. But circuit bending seems to overlap with game hacking and maybe that kooky midi instrument stuff (which is all about customizing (personalizing) stuff too but the interface rather, triggers, inputs and outputs). Definitely a nerd scene. All this stuff, I feel, owes something to Brian Eno who owes something to John Cage. It may be the same aesthetic underpinning as prepared instrument music (Keith Rowe, guitar playing for example). And on the West Coast they have the more macho machine sculpture thing that's been kicking since at least SRL. But it is still kind of geeky because you have to know how to do stuff which means you are figuring stuff out and not hanging out. I guess the fact machine sculpture is so much bigger on the West Coast (than on the East Coast) makes total sense. Look at, I suppose, California's history of car culture. Perhaps this is the geographical point where all this stuff overlaps with surfer and skater culture. This is the sort of stuff they are starting to teach in art school (circuit bending, machine sculpture) — since it is more about creative uses of the technology than anything else. I had a class as an undergrad called Machine Sculpture. This stuff is about seeing what you can do with the little you know or can figure out (and not re-inventing the wheel). And that, in a nutshell, is the punk DIY attitude, circa 1977 but applied to other stuff (than bands, fanzines and fashion).

I Saw Genesis P-Orridge Walking Down the Street Last Night

[Genesis was here.]


It was dusk, about 7:45 PM. We were on our way to McCarren Park to listen to Sonic Youth play Daydream Nation to a gigantic empty pool full of cool people. We had waited until earlier this week to try to get tickets so we missed it. It was sold out. We were on our way to the park where we were gonna sit on the grass outside the pool and listen to the show with Chris and a bunch of his friends. (By the way, it sounded good.) But anyway, my wife and I were stopped on Knickerbocker, at the light on Johnson (where Knickerbocker merges with Morgan) and Genesis P-Orridge walked in front of my wife's black car. He looked at us. He looked into my eyes. Should I say he or she? S/he looked sort of like he did on that recent Wire cover, but less like a hooker, and more like that cool old lady that lives down the street who sells you pot and has all these amazing obscure, scary books and stories of living in Morocco and what not. But all the normal kids say she's an evil witch and she likes it like that. It still kind of bothers you though because you are a neophyte and you want everyone to like everyone (even though you are a total freak). Where s/he was walking is technically the East Williamsburg Industrial Park not Bushwick. It's where the loft scene growing up around the Morgan stop is but it spills across Flushing into Bushwick (where we live, a few blocks up Knickerbocker). I wonder where s/he was going? This was my second P-Orridge sighting in the part of Brooklyn that those kids told me is "the wrong part of town, dude" (they barked it at me after spraying me from the fire hydrant as I biked by 'em). The other sighting was while we were switching to the M train from the J train around midnight. P-Orridge and his small entourage sat across from Ivan and I on an empty M train car. They took it two stops to the Myrtle Ave stop and got off. The L train intersects with the M train at Myrtle. I wondered then where they lived. I figured they must live somewhere out here, Bushwick or East Williamsburg, if they were riding the train that far out, to the limits of hipster-land. I doubt I would have recognized him that time but earlier that evening we had attended the COUM Transmissions presentation that was part of that Performa Biennial. They showed some footage of COUM Transmissions performances from the early 70s. It was a casual event. Genesis sat in a chair and talked off the top of his head over what seemed like raw footage.

From 9:45 PM, 7/27/07 to 2:43 AM, 7/28/07

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The thing for me is to try and make things, try and do things and show them to people -- that's what I get excited about.




There is a game afoot here and if enough time goes by I won't remember what it was.

Joey Crack and Chill Will

Who is Joey Crack? I was on my way to the subway a few days ago when I heard all this honking behind me. I turned around to look and there were two hearses. But the honking was coming from the vehicle behind the hearses, an SUV. And behind that was another SUV, blasting music, with a woman hanging out the back seat, driver side window, shaking a Yankees shirt that said Joey Crack at me and this other dude walking down the sidewalk. The other guy was going the opposite direction down the sidewalk and we passed one another just as the woman slowly drove past me. She ignored me (perhaps because I am white, perhaps because I looked nervously away) and shook the shirt at the other dude and said "pick it up!" He sheepishly shook his shoulders at her, a "what do you want me to do" sort of gesture, smiled and kept on walking. The funeral entourage drove past me and I made a mental note to look Joey Crack up on the internet.

What I found on the internet is an article published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on July 2, 2007 which says that Joseph Vargas, known around the neighborhood as "Joey Crack", whose last known address was 353 Stockholm Street (I used to walk down that block all the time, for years, it's right by the DeKalb stop on the L train), Bushwick/Ridgewood, NY, was shot in the chest by Dandre Yelverton (of Hempstead, LI). Jaquan Petty was driving the car. All this happened when Joey Crack was at the car wash getting his 2007 Land Rover cleaned. Apparently he took his vehicle there every day. The article says there's a memorial for Joey Crack on the side of the car wash garage. It also says there is one on the corner of Stockholm and Irving, about six blocks from where I live.

My favorite part of the article is this: "A car wash customer who would not give his name added, 'No one’s going to talk. It’s Bushwick.'" And this: "Like many others in the neighborhood who did not want to speak about Vargas, Will said silence is a form of protection in the neighborhood. 'It’s a Bushwick thing,' he said." Will, according to the article, is known around the neighborhood as "Chill Will."

Chill Will and Joey Crack. I wonder if anyone who knows them will ever come across this? I was just walking down the street and using internet search engines...

(And if anyone tells you Bushwick is the new Williamsburg kick them. At best it's the new Williamsburg if you're talking about Williamsburg, circa 1991. In terms of what they mean, the person who says "this is the new that", Greenpoint is really the new Williamsburg. I know what I'm talking about, natch.)

Just curious...

So, I'm conducting a little experiment. It's rather stupid but I'm bored. Anyway, this is it: against my better judgment I posted a comment on the Matt and Kim photo I had made a favorite of on my Flickr account. I’m not sure how much I like Matt and Kim but they are so darned cute and cuddly looking that I keep wanting to pay attention. I mean their music is not bad. It just does not seem all that original to me and, besides that, it just does not suit my home use needs right now. Heavy, dark and droney does. Even though I have known of the Swans since the mid 80s, when I first read about them in Spin, when Spin was a radically different mag, that actually seemed really cool, originally (Bob Guccione's son started it! weird!), but which ultimately failed,(just ask those who know more about such matters than I to confirm, please), it was during the past two years that I fell in love with them, that is, the Swans. But back to Matt and Kim... I like that splatter video Matt and Kim made. It seems not quite totally original either but done with such gusto! The song is good but perhaps too twee for me. Fucking cuddlecore! Insane. Is that what Matt and Kim are? That makes the video even funnier. Jeez. “They’ve” thought of everything! Well, anyway, against my better judgment I posted that comment on one of my two favorite Matt and Kim photos and I am wondering how many more views on my Flickr account I will get in the next few days because of it. Right now it says 327. I just want to mark that down with a date here. Also, it says the Matt and Kim photo has been viewed 6,371 times. I’m curious at what rate these numbers might increase. Let's watch, me and, er, um, me. That's the first part of this experiment.

And, by the way, that Matt and Kim photo is a portal to something strange on Flickr that I did not know was there! But god bless 'em if they just let it be... But anyway (not that I am into that sort of stuff)... Look on the “x people call this photo a favorite”. There you will notice an account called “with Bikes”. Look at it. Look at “with Bikes” contacts. Browse around. Are these kinky photo swappers? One really appeared to be! It is like those trashy Yahoo groups (with Flickr's much nicer interface) but also oddly more real…? How would you even know? You wouldn’t! But this underscores the fact that I was wondering right from the start about Matt and Kim's Flickr account: did they put the Flickr photos up or their marketing firm? I can’t tell! Can you? What is real…? I have no idea.

Well, anyway, the other part of this experiment is this: if you happen to find your way to this “message in a bottle” from the Matt and Kim photo then post a comment, please. The only way to find this from that post is through a rather indirect route. I am not linking back to it. And I am not linking directly to this. Of course you could just end up here because you know me. In that case please do not mess with my experiment and post a message. I will hassle you and then delete it. I only want messages from someone who went to Matt and Kim, did not know me, and followed the links and ended up here. I don’t care if it takes a year. I am just curious if it could happen. And the reality... Well, anyway... (And I know no one looks at this blog because I’ve had, as of today, 30 profile views. Also, don’t get me wrong. I am totally ok with it. If I wanted to I could post messages on other people’s blogs and get more profile views. I know how it works. I don’t care about that shit here. I don’t care, man.)

Flag Day (1985)

Margaret Griffis took this photo. Isn't it wonderful? When did I meet Margaret? Four or five or so years after this show...? It was when I played in this stupid punk band in Gainesville with Brian and Ivan. I went to see this show with my stepbrother, Kevin. We drove to Ft. Lauderdale from Palm Beach Gardens, where we grew up and, at the time, I had just graduated from high school. This was the second punk rock show I ever saw -- in my entire life (man). The first was Husker Du on tour for New Day Rising at the same place, Fireman's Hall. I remember them playing the entire fucking album. I was in love with that album at the time. They played their hearts out. (I'm still talking about Husker Du). This Black Flag show, however, was incredibly hot. At one point Henry Rollins stopped the show so everyone could go outside and cool off. It was after all South Florida. And I guess the air conditioner was not working...? I hate the heat. I thought Black Flag was better the second time I saw them, in Gainesville, Fla. about six months later. Jill, who I would meet about three or so years later, in Gainesville, Fla., "ripped my tickets." We, as I mentioned on one prior instance in this particular forum, dated and drank barrels and barrels of sweet alcohol together. I was even arrested once! Ivan, who played in said stupid punk band with me as well as another even stupider punk band with me, it turns out was at both of these shows too. I met him three or four or so or something like that years later.

Same snake in both of these these collages...

I made the first image. The second image is by Sebastian Hyde and Kevin Evans. Find a copy of Brian Doherty's book This Is Burning Man and read from bottom of pg 73 to pg 74. The table of contents is also useful. And then look here.

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This bank was between the apartment I lived in and the Pizza Hut I worked at as a waiter. I lived in an apartment on N.W. 9th Avenue right off N.W. 13th St. The Pizza Hut was up on N.W. 16th (I think). I can't remember why I walked to work that summer. I think I was totally broke and something was wrong with my car. I definitely had my white Toyota Corolla station wagon by then. This was the summer of 1989. I made the above protest image that same summer too. I waited tables five nights a week, stayed up all night every night, and slept all day, every day. It's hot as hell in Gainesville during the summer. It's very humid there and the air is unusually still. I remember at the time thinking to myself that it had been a mild summer and then I realized I'd hardly been outside during the day for an entire summer.

I walked by that damned sign for weeks. At some point I started thinking about what sort of alternate sentences I could create using the letters they had used to make their statement. It originally had some sort of loan offer. So early one Sunday morning, on my way home from a Saturday night shift, at 2 a.m. or so, I altered the sign. It stayed that way all day that Sunday. Monday morning they discovered it and returned it to its original dignity -- with the addition of a locked plastic cover for good measure.

As I recall Phil took the picture. I may have a copy of it somewhere but I found it on Brian's MySpace page. And Tom had posted it there! What a trip.

I met Jill in September of 1988. She had a major lasting impact on me in two ways: I learned about the Fall from her and I discovered Re/Search #11 Pranks! because of her (her roommate had a copy of the book on the bookshelf in their living room).

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I got this book from the garage of my step-mother's house on Ilex Circle in Palm Beach Gardens (circa 1983-5). I have no idea who it originally belonged to or where it came from. I carried the book around for years before doing anything with it and then in 1995, the last time I returned to school (when I finally finished) I did a project that used the above image. The image was a page or two inside front cover.

Basically I scanned the image and then converted it into vector art using a "tracing" program that came with CorelDraw. It made this incredibly complex object. I'm actually amazed that my old computer (my first computer) a Gateway pc (with the intel 486 processor) could handle such a complex vector file -- but it could. Was CorelDraw that good? Anyway, I turned the vector soup from the conversion into a bunch of discrete objects I could move around. I constructed the final animation out of this material. It was made one frame at a time in CorelDraw. I would move everything I wanted to move (figuring 15 frames per second) and click "Save As." I did this over and over again. I worked in the dark, mostly in my underwear, for a few days generating all the frames. I did little else while I was working on it. Move everything slightly, "Save As."

My original idea was a little bit different than the animation below. I had planned to create a poster-size printout for each frame and then find some public location to display the printout, one at a time, in succession. I figured it would take a year to "perform" the animation in this way. It would have been an animation with a frame rate of one frame per day (video is typically 30 frames per second and film is typically 24 frames per second). What I was interested in was the idea of the poster subtly changing every day. Would anyone notice these gradual, subtle changes?

I would have then documented this, every day (for the duration), and then turned these photos into another animation.

The final version, the animation below, was exhibited only once, in Los Angeles, 1997. I can never remember whether I made it in 1995 or 1996.

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I can't remember for sure what I was originally calling this project, when I actually did it. I probably called it my "Jack Chick booklet thing" or something like that. I eventually settled on Standardized Generalized Symbol Language. I designed it in 1997 when I was still living in Gainesville, Florida but I made and distributed it after moving to New York. It was the culmination of three or so years of playing with this very standard, very familiar set of icons. I found them in this gigantic collection of cheesy clip art that came with the vector illustration program CorelDRAW. (I thought CorelDRAW was an awesome program, by the way. It's a vector illustration program and it seemed way better than Illustrator. FreeHand, though, according to the cognoscenti, at least back then, was the best 2D vector illustration program. But, anyway...) By collaging the icons into one another I created a set of mutants. I then used them as material in other projects. Standardized Generalized Symbol Language was the last and probably most successful one.

One of my favorite details about Standardized Generalized Symbol Language is that it is designed to be reproduced using only a b/w laser printer and standard sheets of 8.5 x 11 office paper. Very importantly it is designed to use all of the paper. There is no trim. Three equally spaced out horizontal cuts are made to the vertical sheet to create the leaves which are arranged then stapled.

Using a b/w laser printer I made and distributed 2000 copies of Standardized Generalized Symbol Language. They were distributed the way Jack Chick booklets are distributed: I left them in telephone booths, benches, wherever in New York City and London, Winter,1997-98. I was entranced with the idea of someone experiencing the booklet with no context. It's fine with me if only one or two people had this experience.

I did get to witness someone's discovery of the booklet -- once. In fact, unintentionally, I was also a participant. It was late December and I was returning to New York from London (I was there for a week and I left the booklet pretty much everywhere I went). I just so happened to board the plane first so, after getting settled in my chair, I put one of the booklets in the magazine pouch in front of the seat next to mine. And then I forgot about it. I don't know why but for some reason I thought the cleaning crew would find. Well, two or three hours into the flight, I notice in the corner of my eye (I'm reading a book), that the passenger next to me is digging everything out of the magazine pouch. I mean everything. And then I notice that Standardized Generalized Symbol Language catches his attention. I watch out of the corner of my eye as he slowly looks through the entire booklet. I could not tell for sure but he seemed rather puzzled. A moment or two passed and then he turned to me and asked: "Do you know what this is?" And I of course said "No."But he handed the booklet to me so I pretended to look at the thing the way I might look at something I'd never seen before when it is being placed before my attention. I looked at it slowly. I slowly looked through the entire booklet and then I turned to him and said: "This is really strange." And he said: "Do you think someone is trying to scare me?" I said: "I don't know. I hope not." And he said: "Well, I know people in New York who know about languages and I'm going to show this to them." Earlier, when the flight first took off, we'd had a nice conversation about London and traveling in the U.K.