(click to enlarge)

       Raymond Pettibon, No title (A look. A …), 2010, pen, ink, and gouache on paper

 
 
 
 
    First, just a note to readers that I’m taking a week’s break from Art of the Day to concentrate on another writing project.
    In the meantime, hope you love this extraordinary piece by an artist I’ve long admired, Raymond Pettibon. This is a fine example of his relatively recent incorporation of color into his process. The maroons, muds and bricks heighten the dark magic of what’s going on between the text and the visual. There’s so much character in the insect’s color: the jaunt upcurl of its right set of legs, the humanlike eye, the fiery & complicated maw. We are regarded with scorn, anger, supplication, confusion, curiosity, superciliousness.
     I think of the film District 9 & of course Mr. Gregor Samsa, howling inside his chitin, but also all the roaches we smash underfoot daily. I think of the universal OK we all feel we have to pinch out the lives of insects and vermin at will; I thin of the way we even use their existence as insults (”You insect,” “You worm,” “You rat”). Despite all evidence of human progress & tolerance & insight & enlightenment we are partly, at core, animals acting within pecking order, taking out daily frustrations and irritations and stresses on whatever smaller things we can, settling often on the tiniest things, bugs, because they’re the un-Disneyfiable, un-Hallmarkable Other, nothing like us at all and all the more dismissable (& threatening) for it.
     Sure we could be like the Jainists (Jainism: Ultrapacifist Indian religion originating sometime between the 9th & 6th centuries BCE) and try and filter our water vessels with screens to keep from swallowing invisible critters, or sweep walkways ahead of our steps with brooms to shoo them away. But this is fruitless — even if we don’t want to we squash the tiniest things, from mite to microflora, by the mere fact of our existence, through our simplest daily actions: the food & drink we consume, the cars we drive, showers we take, stairs we climb, streets we cross. Better to come to terms with honor & understanding & grace that a lived life is inseparable from other things dying and, having done that, try as hard as possible not to kill without provocation or necessity.
     The creature in Pettibon’s “No title” understands all of this and laughs at me for writing it. It’s sure of itself, not scared of me or my shoe. It knows its kind will survive our every diligent effort to exhaust & destroy our planet and render it uninhabitable. It senses every dark tiny dark green stain of guilt we feel & have ever felt upon killing for no reason other than unnameable fear some centipede, beetle, roach, spider. It senses these soul-stains with its antennae. It’s ready.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Please check out more of Pettibon’s work at www.raypettibon.com

 
 
All writing © copyright C. Way / Snailcrow.com 2011

 
    The other night I attended a reading held at Fair Folks & A Goat, a lovely gallery/performance-space/design & crafts shop up near the Guggenheim. The speakers were artists & editors from New Orleans there to speak about two publications: Constance, a lushly-curated photography/art & literary journal in two volumes, & How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide from a Work in Progress (Gisleson Thompson & Burke, Press Street, 2010), part how-to instruction manual, part compilation of stories of New Orleans residents restoring order and dignity to their lives & to their community.
    Both projects arose from the devastation Katrina delivered to New Orleans (& in particular the lower ninth ward, which the editors of both projects counted as home); both are powerful testaments to what people banding together can do to re-define themselves & their neighborhoods when disaster unravels & rearranges everything. And while both volumes of Constance are gorgeous — full of striking artworks & writing submitted by locals after the storm — I hope it’s no slight to the editors of that project if I now turn my attention to How to Rebuild a City.
     So much of the post-Katrina literature & reportage focused on the travails & horror stories, the looting & desolation, the corruption & inefficiency of FEMA/NOAH and any number of governmental acronyms (an enormous swath of which is amusingly & creepily displayed in a periodic table of elements-esque graphic in the book) that vulture-swooped upon the wreckage to pad pockets. These are all vital stories to tell & re-tell, don’t get me wrong. But it’s easy to cross the line separating sober truth-telling from sensationalistic bad-news mongering, and many people writing about/reporting on post-Katrina New Orleans often — knowingly or unthinkingly — crossed that line over & over.
    ”How to Rebuild a City” does not cross that line; it isn’t preoccupied with the tragedy, the pathos. Its voice is something else entirely: an engaging mix of humor, how-to-guide homage & celebration of stories of average folks taking matters into their own hands and making dignified life possible again. The dark stuff is here, no doubt — I think in particular of Karen Gadbois’ story of old beautiful New Orleans homes being prematurely condemned & slated for demolition, & her research into the corruption & mismanagement of the New Orleans Affordable Housing Agency — but it’s not worried over & never delved into except to highlight how people did positive things in response: stories of teenagers getting together to demand that their school bathrooms have lockable doors, toilet paper, soap; folks banding together to clean up and stop people from dumping post-storm debris & garbage into a local bayou; a single woman who loses her business and home, turning tragedy around to become a successful demolition contractor; citizens making their own street-signs out of shutterboard & debris; fund drives to bring back New Orleans blues & jazz musicians who had left the suddenly tourist-less town for paying gigs elsewhere.
    That’s what moved me most: how people fought to restore the cultural & art forces that make New Orleans so vital. So many stories of that process: activists organizing to hold a 24 drawing marathon for everyday citizens, recognizing the need to provide expressive outlets for an emotionally pent-up community (which drew 700 hundred people!); the “Roots of Music” program, which aimed to restore marching band music education to middle school kids (marching band music being so integral to New Orleans’ musical identity) — programs which had come undone after Katrina; Local efforts to restore the rich culinary arts of the city which had been devastated by the storm. And that’s just the beginning.
    Even more striking was how all of this art & culture rehab was done in the face of occasional local opposition: one of the editors spoke eloquently about how some residents didn’t get it, wondering why people would focus so much energy and time on rehabilitating art and culture? There were, after all, houses to rebuild. But the way the editors of How to Rebuild saw it, there was no good reason you couldn’t restore your cultural heritage as a community concurrent with reconstructing homes, streets, bridges, walls. After all, what makes a city? Are its structures really more vital than its music, its sculpture, its carnivals, its poetry, its food, its art, its dance, its soul? What do we live for if not these things?

 
Learn more about “How to Rebuild a City: Field Guide from a Work in Progress” here
Buy “How to Rebuild a City” at Amazon here
Learn about & buy volumes of “Constance” here


 

 
All writing © copyright C. Way / Snailcrow.com 2011

  

     heccccccccc, poppppppplessss (date unknown)



 
    Time to get serious & talk Popples. Popples & Paper Rad, that neon 8-bit troll-troupe whose influence seems to have reached the shores of Santiago. I say this because some beautiful soul identified only as heccccccccc (belonging to/affiliated with Chilean music/ art folke cumshotrecords) has graced us with the above video, a lovely creep-fort constructed from a mess of Paperrady flotsam: heavy Popples cartoon footage, epileptic acid-graphics & danceyspooky synth beats.
    Reminds me kinda of Paper Rad member Jacob Ciocci’s “Peace Tape”, but hecccccccc’s work cuts its own spaz swath. Stuff I like: how “poppppppplessss” keeps it short at 1:49, remains very visually-focused throughout (unswayingly poppling except for the end), & synchs imagery to the beat to great effect (especially at 1:24 and on, where tics on repeat give me that happy back-of-brain warm fuzz). Oh & I really really like the gentle wavy ending of cascading giflets.

    But you’re not done are you? You want more fits & eyelid-jitters. More toxic fuschias & magenta kaleidescopes. So stop putterin & click below, brave poppler:
 

  
 

& that my fronds is how I found about “poppppppplessss” in the first place — Erin from over at mosssleeper.tumblr.com — a lush tumblr-trove of eye candy if there ever was one — sent me this fluxed & smashed-TV version & I went gaaaaahhh in pure joy.
    I’m not sure what it says about me that I can find the above — and lots of stuff like it — a very reliable device for blissing out & catching my breath after a long shitty workday. I’m fairly certain I should be spending more time considering what it means to find pleasure in what amounts to visual static & scrambled porn; or how yesterday’s eye-detritus is today’s peace-out pill. Oh well. I’m just a child of my age y’all.
     Besides, there’s always Bill Viola when I need a good optic-nerve cleanse.

 
 
 
More videos at the cumshotvision youtube page
 
 
 
All writing © copyright C. Way / Snailcrow.com 2011

       (click to enlarge)

       Don Van Vliet, Dirty Champagne, 1995

 


 
    I never imagined him passing. Don Van Vliet (aka Captain Beefheart), gone as of Dec 17. I always imagined him by now as less man and more force, covering the desert with his wild, laughing & life-affirming magic, everywhere & suffusive as pollen, as everycolored dust.
    I remember first encountering Trout Mask Replica. I felt its surging boundless energy, all grinning spasms & fuschia tracers & Howlin’ Wolf rasps & crazy squeals. I was overwhelmed.
    But it wasn’t until later that I felt the power of not just the songs — those spiky guitar lines that felt composed and totally wildly improvised at the same time; that muscular grunting surrealist word-barrage, a mescaline dreamwork language visceral as it was violent — but of his sincerity, playfulness, warmth. I started to get to know his weird-warm spirit. Here’s a poem called “You should know by the kindness of uh dog the way uh human should be”:
 
 

You should know by the kindness of uh dog
The way a human should be
You should feel the wet wood heart of the tree
Wood sap pop like a frog's eye
Open t' the fly 'n the blood of the river
When it ripples 'n clicks like uh waterbell
'n the elephant in his beautiful grey leather suit
Though he's wrinkled he looks smart as hell
'n the turtle's eyes carry bags very well
'n the snake's in shape
He rattles like uh baby 'wears his diamonds
Better than uh fine lady's finger
'n his fangs are no more dangerous
Than her slow aristocratic poison
And he plays his games on uh grass bed
'n uh monkey never had uh guilty masturbation
'n uh monkey wouldn't shit on another's creation
And the fatman cries throughout all creation
'cause he's got uh cold
'n the icebear dives thru blue zero for uh frozen fish
'n the eskimo wears his hide 'n chews his heart
'n the beautiful grey whale oils some bitches lighter
Someday I'll have money 'n I can frame myself
What uh picture I'll be choppin' down uh tree 

 
 
    I didn’t have to dig deep to find in his vast output of song lyric and poetry a huge healthy yawping love for nature, animals, a sincere wish to find happiness in existence, a remorse for the difficulty humans have in connecting and loving, for our collective struggle to grow and progress and maintain our link to all that’s pure and natural and elemental. He may have been a jerk to know, a ranting megalomaniacal ogre in person — and many accounts hint at such a possibility — but I’m not a biographer, I’m just going off his output; I’m going off what he condensed of himself and channeled as best he could through his art. Here’s another bit, this one a fragment from the lyrics for “Space-Age Couple”:
 
 

Space-age couple
Why do you hustle 'n bustle?
Why don't you drop your cool tom-foolery
'n shed your nasty jewelry?
Cultivate the grounds
They're the only ones around.
Space-age couple
Why don't you flex your magic muscle?
Hold a drinking glass up t' your eye after you've
Scooped up a little of the sky
'n it ain't blue no more.
What's on the leaves ain't dew no more.
Space-age couple
Why don't you jus' do that?
Why don't you jus' do that?

 
 
    And the lyrics to “Plastic Factory”:
 

Phos'phrous chimney burnin'
Modern-men's a-learnin'
Time and space a-turnin'
Motor's engine churnin'
fac'trys no place for me boss man let me be

Wind and wave all blowin'
Mountain 'n sky showin'
Bee 'n flower growin'
Boy 'n girl are glowin'
fac'trys no place for me boss man let me be

Minds inside are goin'
Muscle 'n bone are showin''
One thing sure am knowin'
Get a fire goin'
factory's no place for me boss man let me be
boss man let me be boss man leave me be

    I loved the man’s music, singing, poetry, most of all I sensed in him a wide soul, a feverish burning soul, one that I felt I knew, one that kept me company so often in headphones or over speakers, one whose breadth and force I know I’m not the only one missing right now.

 
 
 
 
More of Van Vliet’s art
 
 
 
All writing © copyright C. Way / Snailcrow.com 2010

 
     The image above is known as the Mandelbulb, Daniel White and Paul Nylander’s 3-D rendering of the famous, complex fractal known as the Mandelbrot Set. The Mandelbrot Set was first rendered in 2D about 30 years ago, but it wasn’t until 2007 or so that progress was made in rendering it in three dimensions. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
     To get the full effect, zoom in on the Mandelbulb here, and try this further zoom-in of a section of the bulb here, and others here, the latter links being from White’s site, which offers, among other things, a fascinating history of how the Mandelbrot Set became rendered as a Mandelbulb.
     I once sent the above Mandelbulb image to some friends, without explanation or subject heading, in an email. I didn’t want to frame it with any language that would predispose them to view it as startling, beautiful, awe-inspiring, scary, weird, ugly, ad inf. — rather, I wanted to see what people would feel presented with the image in its absolute is-ness, because for me, nature’s moments of infinite outgrowth & cluster (an incredibly fitting symbol of which is the Mandelbulb) simultaneously inspire all the above feelings and none. The fringes on curly kale, the natural fractal of Romanesco broccoli, the lung’s alveoli, the detail of certain crystals at the microscopic level, the infinite expansion of the universe itself — all these phenomena showcasing nature at her most endlessly dense, whether seen or unseen, implosive or expansive, micro- or macrosopic, all are capable of filling me with way too many feelings to ever hope to catalogue, not all of them pleasant.  (Read More . . .)

         (Photo courtesy of brianbubonic)
 
 
      Richard Dunn died yesterday, June 4, 2010.
      Richard was an actor and comedian who figured prominently in Tim & Eric’s “Tim and Eric Nite Live!” & “Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”. I loved the hell out of the man’s style: a lovable medley of well-timed deadpan, slurs & elisions, cultivated befuddlement, & wobbly sight-gags. His fine-tuned awkwardness felt core to Tim & Eric’s absurdist Public Access T.V. gestalt, and I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that the successes of Nite Live!, Awesome Show and their current project, “Check It Out!, with Dr Steve Brule”, owe at least a little to Dunn’s influence as a sort of gentle, grandfatherly guru of weird. I’m sad he’s gone, as I know many who love Tim & Eric are, and I hope he left us quickly and without suffering.
     Below are three of my favorite Dunn clips. They don’t need captions — those that are down with the Dunn would find explanations reDunndant (bad puns were central to the Dunn aesthetic) — and those that aren’t won’t find words to be of much help.
     R.I.P(ep). Plibt forever.  (Read More . . .)