Ultimate slow/fast week. I’ll post my good Obama being president joke later. As of right now, it sure looks like I’m moving to New York. If you have a job lead for me, get in touch.

Let the eternal record of my blog reflect that there was a time when Sierra and Zelda and I went to the Lincoln Inn in Essex Vermont, where Sierra showed me how to box step while grizzled country/rockabilly dudes played hard and whiskey sweaty, and middle aged guys with tucked in shirts and blonde girlfriends much taller whisked briskly around the floor. I ate a burger and we talked about 2nd Life and whether Barack Obama puts his hand on his heart when he pledges allegience for the entire night. Zelda said, “George, this is Melinda.” “I’m Tom,” I said. “I’m Rachel,” she said. Later, I walked around the mountain in Johnson, the sun set black-eye blue on the mountains, and we trekked past lit trailers, through the mud of vinegar and shit-smelling cow pastures, and back down across the dilapidated bridge. At a bonfire I took off my sweaters and sat in my tshirt with dry lips and the rims of my glasses getting hot. The smoke blew up and high away from stacked palettes to fierce orange black, and beyond the streetlights on School Ave was the silver sky. On Saturday morning Leah and I left and we stopped at Father’s Restaurant, where I ate delicious fried fish and mixed berry pie in Norman Rockwell desolate green interior/gray deathmask belltoll drizzle outside, old couple sitting in another booth and not talking, and I chewed with the full, terrible awareness that I am not going to drive back up I-89 for a long time.

Now I’m in Brooklyn, where it looks like I’ll live. I watched Hackers with Cory, went for drinks with Katie and Alex, ate burgers and played dominos with Julio and his totally good men’s group, partied with Allen, Kathryn and that extended team, went to Dinner Group where I talked to Justin bald and bearded about the trains and had a staring contest with Alfe and team, and pursued employment and made burritos and yucked it up with Leah almost full time since we got here. I’ve moved my car at least four or five times. In all, it’s been such a fun and fast-moving time that I got over feeling disappointed and insane by the time I had even officially heard the status of my work in Vermont.

They’re hard steps out of the gray area and they ring out loud across many months. BOOM here’s the job I wind up with, BOOM here’s the house I live in, BOOM, it’s 2009, where am I, who am I, what am I doing, BOOM, life sucks, but amazingly, resiliently, it still somehow rules way more.

Past life

I added the Black Dove paintings to the site. Otherwise this is a boring blog marking time entry if there ever was one. Here’s what’s up.

Since last time: In Philly I went to Halloween and saw best band ANGELDUST, went to the World Series riot on Broad Street and saw many stupid and hilarious things, hung out in the dirt at FDR and near the oil cans, and saw cops disperse a crowd that gathered to watch a six story pinata get destroyed by a wrecking ball (actually true).

Where I am: I’m home now. Tomorrow I’m voting and then driving to VSC, where I’ll be until Saturday, and then heading to New York indefinitely with the next schedule consideration of any kind being Monday of Thanksgiving weekend, when my brother gets home, and thus the latest I plan to.

What I’m working on: A new blog, a complete overhaul of the Ospreys web documentation in which I plan to upload, catalogue, and explain everything I have pertaining to the band, and more ambiently (i.e. probably not much until next week), on Test Patterns #3 and my fake catalog with Bocksel. I’m also knee deep in mailout hell, the tormented place on earth where I have to organize and send out all of my Darcone-related packages to everywhere for eternity, while meanwhile I can’t find my stapler anywhere. I’m reading Toni Morrison “Jazz”.

I feel like I need to note before I close that I’m a little sick at being back on square one re: putting in serious hours writing, but that I don’t think I’m making excuses when I say that the total upheaval and temporariness of everything in my life has made it all but impossible to set specific times and places to go and make work. May I read this in January in Vermont and immediately turn to make what I need to.

Giant pinata

Some dog looking at Mikey

For the moment, this was an acceptable way to park

Totaled SEPTA stop, smashed out Robinson, riot cops

The current schedule is to update this every Tuesday with what I’m currently working on, where I am, and possibly a story about a thing that happened.

The above is from a collaboration I did with Loren Erdritch at VSC; she put down the color and I riffed on it. I did two others with her that came alright, and I gave her two color plates that she’s going to do the ink for. Similarly I did two pieces with Leah Wolff, and there are maybe two or three more pending. In all of them I put down one color layer and then she did the second. The two done ones are here:

I mentioned the hanging diamonds thing last month, made from scraps from my work exchange job in the office upstairs; in a similar vein was my drawing game Alpha Symbolia, which I did on thick paper plates that were the cropped edges of the invitations the development office printed out to send to the center’s donors for the big Tibetan flags art show last month. The principle was to see how far I could get without spending more than a few seconds on a given small drawing, with “no repeats or hesitations,” and with the entire body meant to appear as a single unit. That’s below.

I’m doing a table at the 215 Festival on the 25th where I’ll have like every zine I’ve ever made, hopefully the Darcone Triangle books that Mark Price is printing for us, a new Philly junk/joke book, and an old school “doing it the hard way”-style painting/ink book in a mega small edition where I am just going to make five or ten completely original copies and that’s going to be it.

While I’m in town I’m going to Don Simon’s thing at City Hall and me and Jenn Rockwell will be drawing. Me and my Men’s Group will be up to our typical no-good/not-much. I feel like I should reiterate that anyone who wants to collaborate should get started on something and then get it to me with directions.

Alpha Symbolia

The dust blows forward and the dust blows back

I’m in West Pittston, I’m in my parents’ basement.

Trying to relate everything that happens day after day is like drinking, where you can drink a second, a third, a fourth, a fifth drink, a tenth, a twelfth, but then you begin to throw up, and you can’t relate anymore, and you can’t possibly explain what the hell you’ve been doing, or how you’ve got to where you are. I ate a giant meatball sub and watched some dudes eat cinnamon and laughed a ton. I trespassed in a hundred buildings. I watched Simon & Simon, got out of bed to build puzzles and play boggle, drank so much fucking whiskey, had work group, painted, drew, wrote, finished things.

I drove eight gray hours down from Johnson. I talked to Susy, I talked to Cassie, Patrick, everyone. I have a provisional studio setup in my dad’s gardening room. I’m painting, I’m writing, I’m sending out mail, I’m having very rich dreams.

I redesigned dogchirp.com while I was in Church Studio and posted a lot of stuff on there. The plan is to keep posting my blah blah blah projects on here and to post my more finished crap there in the official archive.

The next few days are pregnant with things to get done, pregnant like Sigourney Weaver in Alien, where I’m trying to keep all of the things I have to get done from exploding out of my guts and making a huge mess everywhere. More as I do them. I’ll be in New York on Friday or Saturday; holler if you want to hang out.

My time in Vermont was a massive success. I don’t want to write specifically about things I’m working on as a result for fear of jinxing them. More as the arrows start to come down.

I may have mentioned last time that I finished Cocomo Tales, or at least a working draft of it that I think is good enough to print out and read to everyone, and possibly good enough after one more round of revision to send out after that.

I’ve taken the last two days off from doing writing work and have mainly been painting and drawing. I listen to the Kites record. I started reading other people’s tarot cards. I sent Susy a letter. Leah and I stayed up until 5am doing work, and I freaked out and decided to try to cover the floor of Wolf Kahn in paper diamonds. Open studios happened and David’s art turned out to be awesome. Ricky left a note on my desk that reads “What’s a life when you look at it – what’s a hat if it doesn’t fit? – Robert Creely”. James and I had the fucking ridiculous/hilarious Cynthia incident and our brains exploded. We all went swimming in the hole yesterday. I laughed about the Dugdo thing for a while. I think I mentioned it already but I went to Rosemarie Fiore‘s lecture and her shit was the bomb; note especially the Looney Tunes jams and the floor waxer painting. I worked on my website a lot yesterday and am going to relaunch it with an indexhibit back-end probably this week so I can stop worrying about managing files and just post them.

I’m going to drink coffee and have brunch and then paint until my friends wake up. Then we’re going to the diner together. The weather is horrible. Life is exploding with immaculate potential. It is making my teeth taste like tequila. Everyone here, just like at camp, is trying to get me to move to New York.

My new studio is in this building, Church

I wrote this entry yesterday around 6pm. I stayed awake almost all night. I don’t have easy access to the internet anymore and am posting this now from the laundromat. Open studios are tonight and I’m finishing up here in a second to go back and do some revising.

James and Cara and Leah and I stayed up last night and drank whiskey and played drawing games. I dreamed I was handing James a beer and my hand squeezed my leg and I was startled and woke up, thinking an animal was on me. I sent in an application and drafted a few other ones. I had a great conversation with Howie about how to be a writer. I bought art supplies. I went to slide night tonight. Dinner was delicious chicken pot pie.

I listened to the recent Kites record a lot of times. I wrote a huge thing about it just now that I’m not going to post because frankly it touches way too many of my own personal raw nerves for this, my internet blog.

AJW always says he makes art, and he talks about his art and calls it that. “My art,” or “I make art,” he says. I think in part he says it because it’s over the top and funny, but in part because that’s also what he fucking makes, and that’s the word for it. A lot of people here call the process of doing stuff “making work” or “creating work.” “My work.” Andrew doesn’t drink, and neither do Ben or Christopher. Howie told me he started to have life figured out when he was 30. I am 25. I don’t have a home or a plan. I’m trying to make art. At the very least I make a lot of work.
I don’t have much more to say here today; it’s all going into other things, and I think that’s the best possible report I can give.

Cara

James, Leah

Wolf Kahn state of mind

On tour once we were laying in a long sloping green grass field, freshly cut, full of huge moist chunks of clippings, like slabs of delicious green cake. I was allergic to them and sneezed.

On the bridge walking over from Maverick to my Wolf Kahn space, around eight thirty last night, I became aware that my shoes were wet. I was carrying my sleeping bag and pillow, moving to my new hole. I wondered how it can be that this is now my life, and how everything I’ve worked on for the past four years can all have suddenly become like a distant piece of weather. This thought in a good way, of course – I am writing now at 9am in my studio, after eating a legit breakfast, after making crap until 2am – but in a shocking way too. I spent much of yesterday wondering what else in my life can be remade as I like – my mobile sleep space, my work space, my schedule, my work itself, abandoned buildings, trains, roads – and all I could think of that remains without my explicit decision to hold onto it is my name.

Guiding handgame wisdom for all journeying motherfuckers with planless anarchy lives and shoes that are taking on water =
Concentration (clap clap clap)
Sixty Four (clap clap clap)
No Repeats (clap clap clap)
or Hesitations (clap clap clap)

I slept in Kahn last night with my head by the window. I woke up in a dream just before dawn and got halfway out of bed to start drawing before I realized what time it was. A ripping thunderstorm woke me just after dawn. I dreamed that Leah’s door was covered in strange notes, and that James came into my studio to hang out, and we hung out for a while, and then he left. I watched “The Valet” with him last night. It was pretty funny.

I don’t have much new to report since I’ve mostly been working, except that it looks like I’m going to send probably my Cocomo project and accompanying drawings(?) to <a href=”http://www.annawolf.com”>Anna Wolf</a> for this <a href=”http://www.untitled-a-magazine.com/”>magazine</a> she works on, for January 09 print, and that’s exciting. J Roc and I are also going to do a split art book, out December, but I don’t know any details of that. I’m doing a 40 panel drawing project re: my favorite Velvet Underground song “Some Kinda Love” that I’m sort of terrified to start because I’ll have to finish it, but it’s sketched out and ready to go, and now that I have an art studio instead of a writing studio (though I’m still here as a writer, and spending my majority of time writing), it might happen.

1) I live in Art House Community Center, my studio space is in Maverick Building.
2) I can’t sleep in Art House Community Center because I can’t sleep in beds anymore re: gigantic mental block I developed at camp post break-up, where I would just straight up rather be on the ground in my sleeping bag.
3) I can’t work in Maverick Bulding because there isn’t enough space for me to spread out.
4) I am sleeping in Maverick Building in my sleeping bag in my studio, while showering and storing my things in Art House.
5) I am doing my work by squatting in Wolf Kahn in a painters’ studio nobody is using.

Meanwhile last night we had a grinder on iPod speakers at the fire, and I drank Maker’s and Heinekan from a minikeg. A lightning bolt struck the ground exactly after every step I took today. It was scary until it became calming; until I became okay with the fact that, yes, everywhere I stepped was going to be struck by lightning.

I drove into town. I drew for a long time.

The year was 2008. We had no hopes and no futures. We squatted Danny Kahn I mean Wolf Kahn. Our studio was blank but we worked in it. We wrote text that streamed like blood, we wrote text that streamed like chocolate syrup on fat ripe strawberries, we wrote text that streamed like black clouds on thin windy new england blue sky, we wrote text that streamed like every bad decision our guts have ever quietly held, we wrote text that zummed like a willing, tin guitar.

The year was 2008. Everything rules. Fuck everything.

Crafting a friday from the raw material of a day = gangbuster nuit zonk times. Dear Philadelphia, where are the juice trains now that I finally need them.

I spent all morning yesterday trying to figure out how to write. I got to work through the entirety of my failed city technique, and I now feel like I’ve emerged on the other side of it as a person who is capable of doing what, as they say in Pittsburgh, needs done. There’s a rap that goes “Don’t go against the grain, the grain!” that I keep not heeding in my work process. Like I keep trying to paint with a marker, when clearly all you can do with a marker is go and write on a train. Similarly I keep trying to convince myself that painting and writing on a train are different things, and that one is more valuable than the other, when in fact they are the same thing, and are equally worthless/equally, endlessly worth pursuing and unfolding like perfect fucking brain salad origami. So in writing, I have this marker in my brain, and I keep trying to use it to make a lame painting, when I need to use it to write enormous fucked up things on a train. I’ve always had this awareness in a vague way but in the last few days I feel like a root missing honesty is emerging in my stupid craft, or something, and I am stoked about it. Don’t go against the grain, the grain.

SO anyway yesterday I only wrote like two paragraphs, second shitty day in a row re: material productivity, but I think the slowing down is indicative of, I don’t know, an impending crew change?

Yesterday afternoon I went to the Green River reservoir with Lauren, Laurie and Devon, and it was 100% killer. I got green and swam further than I’ve ever swam before out to a distant island. Water was freezing and the wind slapped waves against me as I swam back. When we returned to the shore, Devon had brought champagne. I melted and panicked about the prospect of whether or not the day would ever be beatable by any other. When we got back we had seafood putanesca  with fresh cheese and bread for dinner, mixed berry pie for desert.

Friday style here was raucous but with a weird, semi-uneasy tone, that maybe I just felt, or maybe was actually there. Many bottles of wine and three cases of beer were transferred into about thirty peoples’ bodies, from 9pm through until about 3am. I convinced James, Cara and Georgia to go to the abandoned building by the covered bridge; when we got there, James and I crawled around inside for a while, and then we came back out. I’m going to take daytime pictures of the boring rubble and garbage inside later this week. On the way back to the fire, 2:30am, the team stopped to go swimming in the stream while I sat on the rocks and possibly napped. Back at the fire, Tenzing was naked, having burned his clothes, and he tried to tell me the drunken secrets of being. Georgia and I rang the gongs in the meditation room for about forty five minutes and then I went to sleep in my studio, somehow convinced that there was no way I could get back home. I used the fake mexican rug from Jed’s shed as my blanket, and my hoodie as my pillow. The carpets are hard and rough but I slept excellently.
I had a great interaction with this old townie Phil today, and I sipped his Hurricane because he kind of called me out on not drinking a beer with him (1:30pm), and I did a lot of writing this morning. I might go to Burlington later for art week or whatever, their local art festival, and then to The Long Trail, which as far as I can tell is the Johnson, VT Doobie’s.

Okay, I am going back to normal work.

PS: Seriously if you are reading this you should try to get someone to buy the painting I posted yesterday, because I am also facing a mounting hilarity re: where my checks are going to come from when I finish this action, and I would like to continue to be able to drink wine, beer and whiskey, and put gas in my car.

A view from breaking into a building to look at garbage

Sparkle rager

A view from breaking into a building to look at garbage

The Elementary School

Yesterday’s tales and worker’s thought after the dramm.

Yesterday I didn’t manage much beyond a few paragraphs in the studio and a good rap with Zelda in the office. I sent emails to people, hung diamonds, saw Harriet Mullen read, partied with James, Howie and Cara at a twelve pack bonfire, walked around and around, went to the meditation gongers’ club, and listened to music in my studio while thick blood dripped down the walls until about 2am. When I woke up this morning everything I had written while I was asleep was gone. Burning piles of cured plywood scrap won’t summon wise ghosts, just cancerous silver smoke.

I’m in a way better mood today after sleeping well and having a fairly productive morning – lots of concept jamming re: outlining and mapping characters in time for the major project. I had a thing at camp with Andrew about designing before producing, and how that’s a thing I never really am good at. I never do a pencil sketch, I never do an outline, and I always have to start over because I skipped those steps. I talked to Hildred about how doing this foundational brain work never seems like its productive, because there’s no correlative output in written text to the X hours one might spend figuring out how to frame the text to come, but it is, because that text can’t happen without it. This problem causes my material-results-driven brain to boil, because I feel like I’m not doing anything when I’m planning, and I can’t produce when I don’t. Anyway this is all by way of observation, not complaint. Since this issue has revealed itself to me in this explicit way, I’ve begun to work around it.

I started dreaming again two nights ago, after a solid two month blackout.

I drew on the lawn this morning for an hour and will likely continue when I get back from swimming. I’m going with Lauren and possibly James and others to a reservoir in a little while. It’s 90 degrees out in northern Vermont in September. It’s after the end of the world; don’t you know that yet?

We got sick of Naples, Florida, so we burned it down.

Masonic temple

Normal bullshit for day three on this weird compound. What a sad and perfect life we lead.

I spent this morning corresponding with various real life team members. I’m working on my critical response to camp and my normal love poems to everything else. I dropped two and a half of the five pages I want to on a normal studio run. Up from yesterday, but still not yet at the point.

I do a work exchange in the development office. Today, I printed out a thousand color copies of an invitation to an opening in support of two Tibetan residents of the studio center, a show with work featuring 100 flags made by new yerk artists. During the painstaking print job I drew 40 copies of my moon lunger against a four color highlighter background with a reverse side reading “How can I hand you a diamond?” thinking that if there’s nothing here I can tag with paint markers, then at least I can literally hang tags on trees or hydrants or whatever. Eleven of the forty are up and I’ve already seen Joy say “Oh what is this a teabag in this tree? Wait it’s a note?” I’m hoping to bomb the rest in the morning and be done with it.

Zelda’s novel was looked at by a serious agent today. She’s been working on it for fifteen years. I felt like this was a good omen.

I swam in the creek with Jessica and then near the covered bridge with Leah and Cara too. The water was cool and the current fast. Twelve and thirteen year olds called each other douchebags in the warm September afternoon sun as we left the first spot. The clouds piled up and thunder rolled.

Five artists showed slides in the church. Camie’s sculpture and Don’s pencil work were both A+.

Magic Hat’s Jinx is in sesh and when I drink it I want to act like an idiot. It tastes like surfin USA. It tastes like I want to pick you up.

My room is third from the right

Tagged

Tagged

The red mill

I rode my bike to the top of the hill to Johnson State College yesterday afternoon and my ass was totally kicked. I walked back down with Genevieve; she was getting Haryette Mullen’s book Sleeping with the Dictionary from the library. I have it now and am going to read it when I get back tonight. I’m about to go to the bar with James.

Nothing terribly exciting to follow, just a quick recounting of the day’s grind.

This afternoon I slept on the floor in my studio for forty five minutes. The sound of the creek outside my window is a serious husher of a shh and I had to lay down and get into it. On a related note, I think I can’t listen to music while I work anymore, which is a 180 from having to listen to music while I draw or paint. Even Strumming Music or that Wada piece were too much for me, and I kept going on soulseek to try to find something calmer – lots of wasted time.

On a related-related note, it’s also been interesting to work on definitively realizing whether I work better at night or during the day. I’ve been doing my project work between 9am and noon and then for two more hours in the afternoon, and each time slot has its unique distractions and advantages, as does working at night. I’m hoping to have my schedule totally perfected by Friday.

Re: actual work/productivity, I put down something like two pages (target is five/day, aiming for about 45,000 words over the course of the month) and a lot of notes for a continuation of the piece I started in May for my application, and yesterday I put down two shorter things that I might continue with. I’m calling that latter project Tales from Cocomo re: my conversation with Allen earlier this summer; it’s a collection of dirt zone boring episodes from real life. I might post them here when I leave if I don’t do anything else with them.

I had a few interesting conversations with people about their processes and about their situations in real life, and how they relate their creative zones to the necessary moves they need to make to make a dollar bill materialize. I also had several good talks with staff people about how they wound up here. More on these things as they develop.

I watched slides with about ten sculptors and painters last night and drank wine and beer. It was a thrill to see that they all do good work, and some of them totally killer. Tomorrow is the first above-ground slide night, and I’m stoked for it. Tomorrow during the day, I’m going swimming in the creek at the spot they took me to after dinner just now, and trying harder at hitting the daily 1500 goal on the main project. It seems to be within reach.

My room

The creek from above

I’m in residency at Vermont Studio Center right now, where I’m going to try to complete a work I started in March, so that I might have a novel to sell as merch on our next band tour, per the joke I have with Mike about that. It is currently my intention to use this blog as a self-awareness check while I’m here, until the end of September.

I just got back from camp. My beautiful soul brother Travis Iurato and I made “Darcone Triangle” and “Forty Useless Prehistoric Computers,” books that are respectively CX #3 and CX #4, CX now being in my brain what my work with Travis is, though we haven’t discussed it. We intend to print Darcone in book format and I expect I’ll be posting Useless Computers here later this week. I also got CX Styles back from him and it has progressed incredibly. David Mahfouda and I wrote letters to each other, Jessica Findley and I made this one morning,

Click here to view the embedded video.

I helped her with this,

Click here to view the embedded video.

And my kids made this.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More video (including Allen’s tableaux vivant and yeti video) at youtube.com/beamcamp. My kids also screenprinted wallpaper, made fake bands and did exquisite sharpie tshirts.

Christi Byrd and I stayed in Brattleboro at Tinderbox and at Hawthorne Valley Farm on the way back down to the city. In Philadelphia I godstormed and watched the trains. Davey bought me a falafel, Ben and I ate crappy cheeseburgers, I bought Mike samosas and myself a tofu hoagie and some oranges, I talked to Blaine but didn’t get to see her, I drank a beer with Kendra and Shanta and high fived Laris, road bikes with Ellen. Amber and Mike hosted; Allen was present for much of it. Jen Rockwell and Bonsky and I hugged. Tony invited me to stay with him in Texas during my travels.

At home before I came here my grampa told me a funny story about a professor he once fired; “Fuckin guy,” he said, “He kept saying he believed in ‘freedom of the mind.’ ‘Freedom of the mind.’” Not much else happened. I slept in the dining room.

This morning at 8am I bought shaving cream, soap, shavers, shampoo and a bottle of wine from the grocery store. Cocomo was playing.

My street (7am)

My house

My street