My REAL website is here:

Friday, June 29, 2007

Recipe: Twice fried Plantains with Mango Mint Chutney

This dish isn't like 123go superfast, but it's pretty difficult to mess up. The Plantains are like junkfood from a universe where junkfood is all-natural and not unhealthy, and the chutney - well, it has never met Mr. Plantain before - it's sweet and sour and hot and salty. You know - all the tastes. Make the chutney first because it needs to be refrigerated. It keeps pretty well too. These recipes are enough for a generous side-dish for two people.

CHUTNEY:

1 Mango
1/4 small onion
1 jalapen~o
1/4 cup mint (from your garden)
1/4 cup cilantro
1 T olive oil
dash cinamon
1 clove
tiny dash nutmeg
1 lime or lemon
brown sugar
salt

Cut up small and smaller: onion and jalapeno (the trick to reducing the spiciness is to remove all the seeds and perhaps the "veins" - the white bits inside - I remove them when I'm sharing the food with my mother, but it's better with some spice to it...)

Heat oil and spices (not herbs) in pan for 30 sec (don't let oil smoke). I also put in some cardamom and turmeric 'cause I love it.

Put in jalapeno and onion and 2 dashes of salt (1/8 tsp?) - stir fry for 3-5 mins until softened but not caramelized.

Meanwhile, cut mango up pretty small, and the mint and cilantro. Don't skimp on the mint!

Throw the mango in (you might want to find the clove and get it out first)

Stir-fry for 1 min, then add mint, stir-fry for a minute more.

Remove from heat an put in ceramic bowl, add cilantro, a big pinch of brown sugar, and squeeze in the juice of one lime.

Mix it all around, and put it in the fridge to cool. OK!


TWICE-FRIED PLANTAINS:

I used sweet plantains. If you want to try regular ones, tell me how it went - they cook longer and are harder. You will want to deep fry plantains very hot - that's why you can't use vegetable oil - it will end up smoking, and if you turn it down it will end up greasy.

2 plantains
Crisco or high-smoke oil
red chile powder (not the super-hot kind), or chipolte pepper powder (I like the smokey taste of this)
cumin
salt

Peel and cut plantains into 1 inch long bits. Don't cut diagonal, cut strait!

In a fry pan (a wok won't work well) pre-heat crisco until very hot, but not smoking - it should be about 1/2 an inch deep so that when you add the plantains they will be pretty much submerged - if a bit of plantain starts frying as soon as it hits the oil you are ready.

Fry the plantains until light brown on one side, flip, fry 'til other side is brown. Use tongs!

Take them out, put on paper towels to soak up oil.

While still hot, but not burning hot, take a big thick glass cup or something and smoosh them down until they are pretty flat. You know, stand up like cylinders and then flatten them down like thick coins. Don't mash them so hard that they break. This is the fun part.

Put them in the fry pan again and fry until golden brown all over. Don't let them get too dark brown - they have sugar so they can burn easier than potatoes.

Really shake the oil off when removing, and put on paper towels again.

While still hot, shake on chile and a tiny bit cumin and a little salt.

EAT WITH CHUTNEY!!!!

What it means to be angry

This post is an exploration of some negative emotions, but it is not a crazy or depressed post. I sometimes think too much about politics, or the unappealing side of how humans act, and it makes me angry and frustrated. Sometimes seeing that other people see the same things makes me feel a lot better. But sometimes it makes me feel awful. If it's going to make you feel awful to see a bunch of disturbing videos, then you shouldn't watch the videos in this post, and I'll try to post something a little less one-sided some other day.

For some reason I was thinking about being angry today. I don't know how, but it ended up thinking about how angry the music I used to listen to was. Of course, now I can take a step back and see how even a group like Skinny Puppy is a pop group. I would have never admitted so before. Not that I disrespect them, but just that I can see the pop element in everything. That all content that is purposefully presented to an audience has elements that attempt to make you like it. Even if it works by opposites - for example, trying to make sounds that absolutely nobody will be able to stand is an attempt to appeal to people who absolutely hate appealing sounds (I distinctly remember looking at an avocado while I was thinking this.) Anyway, I still love some of that music - Skinny Puppy is amazing. It seems funny to have a deep nostalgia for something so dark. But I guess that comes part-in-parcel with being a citizen of a nation that worships death and destruction. I was listening to that song "Testure" which is about vivisection (quite a catchy little tune actually). I don't mean to be ironic - I am just thinking back to when I was younger and I would let myself get so angry about these things. But it's interesting - the marketing of anger was so big when I was a kid. What am I trying to do here? Transcend? But I don't want to do so ironically. Focus on my anger? I hear that can be... unhealthy. Whatever - it's a freaking blog.

I didn't have a blog when I was a kid, so I guess this is the kind of post I would have made back then. You know - gym class sucks. But of course, YouTube wasn't around. Too bad - I could have had much more detailed nightmares.

Skinny Puppy songs (selected for song, not video) (Skinny Puppy is... hard to like... but it is good.) Oh - these videos are all super-disturbing, but some of them are also beautiful. I should add that cEvin Key, the singer, is a pretty amazing guy - very positive and intelligent. These songs come from as early as 1983 - the sound might not be as high-tech as it would've been if recorded today, but there is something really powerful about the sampling and drumming, and of course the vocal style.

Testure (this is an absolutely terrifying video about vivisection so you might want to think twice if you want to sleep):

Smothered Hope:

Dig it:

Inquisition:

the choke:

Worlock

tin omen:

Spasmolytic:


Anyway - the song "Testure" begins with a quote - I looked it up, and I found a movie by the guys who made "Watership Down" Here's the first part, and it goes on to have the whole movie. This is an AMAZING movie about dogs and about death:


After you watch it, make sure to go here.

Again, this has been a presentation of the angry young me who doesn't come around much. It's been fun. But angry fun. Actually - what the hell am I doing? When it gets late it's like I'm on autopilot. Feel nutso now. Wonder why? Duhh... But I don't feel DOWN - that's the thing - just like, small you know.

curating videos

I've done all the work for you.

In the course of making friends for Perceival I have been contacting a lot of different folks on YouTube. There are some quite nice videos there. I have been noticing a trend, a style, or visual aesthetic. It has its roots in all kinds of experimental video, but it is also distinct to YouTube. These videos combine trippy, blinky, colorful, highly processed images with a focus on the abstract body, psychedelic enhanced personalities, post-ironic self-help, and uncanny situational comedy. Plus video feedback. Plus Or something. Actually I don't know what I'm talking about. I put a lot of these videos into a playlist - it's still all kinds of raw and unfinished, but I'm presenting it anyway:

MAX-A-MILLION

What I want to know is - do you see anything in these videos - any similarities or themes? Or am I crackers? (I mean, about this one thing in particular.)

It has blinky lights, sorry. Due to a new leaf that is turning over, they are falling out of favor with me, these strobing things, but for a while I was chasing them. Why I wonder?

Thursday, June 28, 2007

ICED COFFEEee

I read about an iced coffee recipe in the NYTimes. It said that it is less bitter than regular iced coffee and I was excited to hear this because my stomach is so fucked up. Less bitter is less badder (which means better).

This is a 12 hour recipe:

Take coffee, put like one scoop per half coffeecup of cold water into a mason jar or you know something with a lid. And put the lid on.

Let is sit out for 12 hours at room temperature.

Then pour the coffee out - it said to use a sieve - but who has that? I tried just pouring it out real slowly after not having disturbed the peace.

Into a coffee filter.

Then into a glass.

With ice. I smash ice with the back of an icecream scoop. Smash! Because the coffee is really strong lots and lots of ice is important, and you have to wait for it to melt. If you are in a hurry you should probably splash in a little water.

I added a little milk, but no sugar.

The point is that it isn't as bitter because the tannins don't dissolve at low temperatures (I just made that up!).

But it has lots and lots of caffeine - not enough to stop the earth spinning on it's axis - but who knows how much caffeine that would take?

This coffee will enable you to travel back in time through taste. It made me realize - you have to build a dock so the boat can pull up. Maybe automatically every six months, or at the beginning of a time of changes.

Next time I will try it with cardamom.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Saturday, June 23, 2007

GUILDED NAISSANCE!!!

I'm so happy to announce that my suspicions about my brother Chet were well-founded. The "Guild of Birthdays" project that he has just embarked on has already scored major points - the first song he has recorded "Gift Horse" by Cara Beth Satalino is not only a pretty crazy song, but shows the clear stamp of Chet's recording style - a delicate balance of clear and mud. Clear as mud. Mud made of magic crystals. But dirty magic. Or something.

Anyway, I've already plugged his site, but I'm going to keep doing so, so you might as well just bookmark it and check in everyday the way I do:

www.guildofbirthdays.blogspot.com


CHESTER GWAZDA

Friday, June 22, 2007

new perceival ... again

The project has been going pretty well - I've been rather busy completing this last video.

Please find it and the others at:

www.perceival.blogspot.com

The comments keep coming, slowly but steadily. They are coooooooooool.

Wednesday, June 20, 2007

new evidence: the trialectic DOES exist!


I found this image here.

Do you see the trinary code?

I made up the word "trialectic" for some bullshit reason in a previous post - obviously it didn't take much brain power. After seeing this picture I googled the term - 727 hits, as opposed to 28 for "triolectic." The first spelling seems to attract stoned philosophy and literature students, christian religious kooks, and nonsense devotees, whereas the second term seems to attract people who are interested in Psi, stoned philosophy and science students, and fans of an obscure kind of three-team football.

I found some images while looking up this words as well. Here are some of those students:

They look so clean-cut! But don't be fooled While you just see a book, this is what THEY see:

Oh no! No wonder they think things are so complicated. What should I have for breakfast? Better consult the ol' trialectic diagram:

Oh no!

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Monday, June 18, 2007

pull-bat meets baby bunny

Hikikomori - pull-bat: literal mistranslation (?) from Japanese of my obsessive antisocial behavior...

I had a nice time today with a baby bunny. Well, in human-years I suppose it is more like a "tween." I consider this little sit-com a great victory and probably the most important thing I will do today, but then I don't have my priorities strait cause of this pull-bat thing.

I was reading the NYTimes on the back porch - it's quite sunny and a bunny seemed not to notice me as he was searching for carrots (bunnies are always looking for carrots, but they'll take clover as a next-best option). Then she saw me as I was reaching for a banana (they are vaguely carrot-shaped). She kept on trying different ways of looking at me. Bunnies have eyes on the sides of their heads and very little overlap of their visual field. They tend to eye something with one eye if they are casually checking it out, and both eyes if they are trying to figure out how far away it is (cause of depth-perception, a subject I know nothing about.)

When she was looking at me I decided that we were going to play a game - I was not going to scare her and she was not going to start and run away. It took a lot of effort to act naturally like a non-violent herbivore because humans are the most violent and disagreeable species, but I tried breathing casually and looking at the back yard as though all the plant life were food and not focusing on anything more meaningful than that, ignoring (or rather not having interest in) the things that a human would focus on. You know, not making any sudden moves. It took a lot of mental concentration and ignoring that my foot was falling asleep... Eventually the bunny rabbit decided I wasn't dangerous and went back to hopping around without a care in the world. At least until a squirrel came around. Then that bunny was out of there like pk-kyaooownnng!

I don't know why they say "chicken" to mean non-courageous. Bunnies are pretty much as skittish as they come. Anyway, I guess their metaphorical meaning has been monopolized by another aspect of their behavior. But I've not seen any of THAT going on in my backyard... Anyway I really admire their commitment to non-violence.

Saturday, June 16, 2007

What I've been oop too

Hey y'all!!!

I am very excited as I am gathering my stuff to go out to California to start my life over as a twisted and bitter east coaster on the sunny slopes of Berkeley. A snake in the grass, a wolf in the hen house. EASCOAS! Oh - I'm just satirizing the differences between the coasts here. I'm not actually going out there to start trouble. Well...

I have been quie busy this week preparing a proposal for a two-person show at PLAySpace Gallery in SF which is affiliated with CCA (The super-cool art school out there that I came this close to going to...). I am working with Dina Danish, a woman I was introduced to by the head of the MFA dept at CCA because he thought there are many similarities between our work. And there are - but mainly excited because there are a lot of differences in our working methods as well and I think I have a lot to learn by working together.

We put together a proposal for a show called "Howwa we ana - However we wanna." The first phrase is Arabic (Dina is a native-speaker) for "you and me" and the second is my misunderstanding or mistranslation of that phrase. If you've ever written a proposal for anything, you might know that it is a lot of talky-talk; a lot of putting vague ideas into words. I actually quite enjoy this - it imposes a rigor and demands that you find solutions for every aspect of the project. But I also find that it can limit the meaning of the project; I believe that if an artwork does not go beyond the words used to describe it, then it is NG - no good. It was a demanding week for me, but fun! In the end, it remains difficult to describe what we are going to be doing...

The project's main focus is the process of "getting to know" someone. It specifically looks at methods of knowledge - how you learn about who another person is, the initial innaccuracies, vague impressions, and fantasies, and then the process of correcting and refining your impression of the person through rational understanding of their personality, habits, life story, and way of thinking. There is also something more subtle at work in this process, a sense of identification, of compassionate and sympathetic innate knowledge, of love, and perhaps something more mysterious than all these things. Although I'm not sure about that last one - I think there's more than enough mystery to go round without recourse to ectoplasm and PSI waves.

Oh - I reserve the right to completely change everything I just said. Course.

There is a lot more to this project - I have really left out the main conceptual concern as well as any description at all of what the project will end up looking like - is it painting? Video? Topiary? And I didn't explain how it makes sense within the context of my earler work, but I do think it is a logical extension of the concerns with the viewer that show up in "R.E.L.A.Y." and Preceival - though can't say how right now. That's cause I want to hook y'all to tune in next week. Seriously! This project is going to be super-awesome and I feel confident that I am taking a giant step fwd. Yay!

Dina also has a blog, one which is much more interesting than this one. I think you may be able to see that we have some interests in common, so I don't need to spell it out for you. In my imagination, dear readers, you are all hyper intelligent. And I think you are! You are! In real life you are!

Dina's blog

BTW - The Perceival project is going swimmingly. A lot of people have watched the videos and the feedback seems mostly positive. I am a little disappointed that people have not written more, but I knew from previous experience that it is diffucult to get folks to spend their time doing such things (there's still lots of time before the exhibition...). Besides, the pleasure I am taking in reading people's comments overwhelms any negative emotions - people are absolutely brilliant and fun! If you left a comment - THANK YOU!

I have not had time this week to work too much on the new animations. But there are two under construction. I am very much enjoying writing the music as well. I am only going to make a few more - I won't be able to once I move to CA. But it's been fun!

I may drive down to Georgia tomorrow. Georgia, USA, not the former Soviet. Wish me vroom!

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

GUILD OF BIRTHDAYS


This post is officially the formal "coming-out" party for my brother's new MUSIC PROJECT and accompanying BLOG:

GUILD OF BIRTHDAYS!!!

Chester is, as many of you know, a freaking musical genious and one of the most lion-hearted dudes ever to wear a thrift-store T-shirt.

Chet had this really amazing idea for what to do with his time this summer - he is going on a "tour" - but not a performance tour. No, he is putting all his recording gear in his klonky Volvo and going around to record as many bands as he can fit into a tight summer schedule. His philosophy is simple but spot-on brilliant. Every band has a myspace page nowadays, so very few of them even try to get a recording contract and they never see the inside of a recording studio. Of course, Chet is very keen on the home-recorded sound, the kind of lo-fi that adds flavor and atmosphere, but a lot of these recordings end up just sounding flat. But Chester has got the skills to melt the hills, if you know what I'm saying. He could record a mosquito fart in a Jumbo-Jetts vs Cyber-Elephant all-night marching-band rugby Bang-A-Thon.

He's already started recording, and he's got a bunch more lucky ducks lined up, which is great for them because Chet is a freaking sith lord with that record-button and they are going to be among the first to be blessed with his sonic grace.

The blog is pretty cool - he's been updating regularly and there's already a good deal of sound and links up there. It hasn't manifested the mystery yet, but it's certainly passed the point of diamond in the rough.

So put it on your links list and check it out from time to time. Support the creative and shun the mindless drones and perhaps you will die a relatively painless death.

Friday, June 8, 2007

kundalini

I love these images not because I am an expert on Yoga, alternative medicine, or Indian culture, but because they form a self-sufficient cosmology of form. They have an internal logic that is self-justifying. Each part of these images is meaningful and can be explained in terms of its relationship to the other visual elements of the picture, and its meaning in the system in which it was created. But anyone who is not interested in or knowledgeable about kundalini yoga and or tantric chakras or Ayurvedic medicine can still see the beauty in these images.

In projects past and present I have tried to acheive this level of sophistication and self-sufficiency. Of course, there are major differences - I am trying to invent a personal cosmology of form, whereas these are the product of many individuals, an entire vast history of medicine, religion, and culture. Also my cosmologies are not "about" anything, but rather relate more to the "misunderstanding" element when an uninformed viewer looks at these kundalini images. However, because my images do not refer to a pre-existing system of thought, there is no "misunderstanding." Someone who had knowledge of kundalini-yoga could listen to my interpretation of these images and tell me where I was "wrong." But I cannot tell a viewer they are wrong when they interpret my images. I can perhaps say - no, I intended this or that - but when we look at intention we find I might have meant one thing at one time, and a different thing as I was finishing an image off, with some tangential thoughts in between, and a fourth interpretation when I re-visited the image later, with much forgetting and revising. Yes, intent is not a single fixed thought, but a weaving of many threads of thought. Perhaps if all the possible threads are brought together, including the threads created by the viewers, we may see that they HINT at a "complete" interpretation, but this is all there is. There is no universe of perfect univeral form that Plato hints at - though I deeply identify with this idea - it is certainly an instinct that is essential to a mind that operates through the use of symbols.

Anyway, this is really nothing new, but with Perceival I am attempting to create a series that puts this process of interpretation on the surface.

I also must admit that some of these forms appear in my art just because I dig the shapes- the interwoven snake, the mandala-type symbols, the geometrically-enhanced biomorphisms, anything lotusesque... What is the appeal of symbols from a different culture? Does a lack of familiarity allow us to project our own meaning onto a symbol? Some of these symbols succeed in communicating part of their intended meaning even though we are unfamiliar with their cultural background. How do they do this? Is it the universal part of human nature? Some of the symbols fail to impart any meaning. Why? What is the role of orientalism in my regard for these images? How does this process work - to regarding something as an "other" culture and fictionalize it? How is this process negative? How positive? Is it possible to see orientalism as something larger - not only as east meets west, but a basic human instinct that we see in everyday situations - the process of dealing with the unfamiliar, the role of fantasy in everyday life, the urge to find a new way of thinking, the fascination with new visual forms?

Some of these images are from the book "Kundalini - the arousal of the inner energy" by Ajit Mookerjee, given to me by the great teacher D- B-, and others by the great teacher G- I- (that one's easy - bugle passages? frugal scrimmages?) I recommend this book.








Click on these images and take a look!

Thursday, June 7, 2007

new perceival


I finished yet another of these monsters. It's on the site:

New perceival video...

This one has a "partner" now in production. They are both heavily based on the music and simpler than before - in terms of the number of frames and Foley. This doesn't mean that my computer let me off the hook - many many mysterious voodoo glitches and gremlins. That's why I worship the great vengeful mandelbrot teddy bear of destruction. Just kidding - I worship Parvati Shakti.

I noticed that YouTube changed it's look when embedded - it's now more complicated and intrusive. I don't think it entirely ruins the site, but it is a bit of a bummer because it kind of reduces the impact of the site design. Worse yet, they seem to have introduced a new type of compression that uses frame re-ordering. Sounds technical - but just means the animation look less smooth - like it gets "stuck." Or something. Which is too bad, because I had worked hard to make the videos look good on YouTube, and I think I'd had it figured out.

I can't lie - I'm awfully frustrated by this process. I think a lot of the challenge of being an artist is how boring and frustrating a lot of the work can be. Or perhaps this is just the computer's revenge. Anyway, this project is fun, but it's also a pain. That's what U was saying with doublethink - engineering communication to produce a desired effect in an other's mind involves doing a lot of the work for them - this is why this project is not avant garde - it is a kind of popular art - like a soap opera. Next project I'd like to work in a much more direct way, more physical, less computer, more improvised, more self-involved, less edited, more conceptual, less entertaining, less pop, more personal, more embarrassing, more drunken, less precise, less kind, more loud.

Tuesday, June 5, 2007

double halves

I promise this entry will be short and easy.

I've been spending some serious time on YouTube writing to people whose videos I like - trying to get them to pay attention to me. Pay attention to me! Waaaaeeinnhh! Waaaaiyngh! (I just realized that this is one of those words it is impossible to write - the nasal "wah" noise people make when imitating a babies whiney cry?)

Anyway - there is a "blog" function on YouTube and so of course I had to test it out.

my youtube blog

Note that I just started doing this so I only wrote about a few videos.

There are some problems with the YouTube blog:

One - you can only display two entries on your homepage. People often look at your homepage, but rarely go on to follow links. This is too bad - if for some reason it needs to be automated, there should be at least 5 or so, but it would be best if we could decide how many to display.

Two - it only lets you display a short paragraph. This is consistent with the rest of YouTube - as though they were trying to keep the dialogue dumbed down to the kind of sloganistic blurbs so common on the mainstream tv news. This is a bummer because there is a lot to say about some of the videos.

Three - the videos are played smaller than they would normally and without the option of enlarging them to fullscreen without navigating away. Bloggers don't ever want their readers to navigate away.

I think YouTube has a lot of problems in general. One of my videos (in another account) is "flagged" even though it does not violate the terms of service (it's a political horror movie). There is a lot of censorship, the compression is a serious bummer, the view counts and number of messages in your in-box are not updated in any kind of rational fashion, the featured videos are not curated well, the advertizing is offensive (in that it's advertizing), etc. But I'm only giving a crit because I love YouTube as a new kind of media.

I know this is nothing new, but I'm over the fact that I can find (whatever I want), and am engaged in a kind of more focused search - I have been chasing down experimental drawing and poetry videos and discovering dozens of creative people who are doing something worth watching. I think YouTube is an invaluable catalyst for change in video art, and brings creative people together to share their work. Amazing. I also feel like there is a cerain kind of aesthetic being promoted among video artists on YouTube that relates to the format and context - well, actually a number of different new genres (an obvious example - the new genre of watching the creation of a digital drawing emphasizes the process of drawing rather than the finished product in a very direct way - nothing new perhaps to people who have been to art school, but that the general public would find this interesting is an absolutely beautiful positive sign!). Has anyone explored this in depth I wonder?

So, that was "short and easy" - excuuuuuuse me! Broken promises...

Sunday, June 3, 2007

DOUBLETHINK


I'd like to talk a bit about the concept of DOUBLETHINK from Orwell's "1984."

Orwell invented the term to describe a system of political thought. It was intended to be a criticism of how dishonest and mind-crushingly anti-human totalitarian systems could be, and as such is deeply insightful. But I would like to discuss doublethink in terms of normal thought, as an everyday phenomenon that affects us constantly. Political doublethink is a terribly dangerous but unfortunately quite routine part of contemporary American politics, media dialogue, and national culture. However, in this post I would like to focus more on the concept as a personally-defined philosophical term related to my own artmaking and investigations into the working of my own mind.

In Orwell's "1984 doublethink is defined as -
"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

And further as -
"To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies."

"His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy; to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved using doublethink."

This of course seems quite negative, but if we take it out of the political context, he is basically criticizing DISHONESTY. It is no coincidence that all the world's religions have some kind of moral injunction against lying, and Machiavellian systems of power-worship praise lies. More powerful to me, from a non-moral point of view, is that lying is mentally exhausting because it means having to keep track of two conflicting models of reality - the one in which you were at a boring business meeting in Washington and visiting your imaginary buddy Phil, and the one where you were in Miami with Ashley and you got a D.U.I. for which you will have to return to court. This means that your brain needs to create two simultaneous holographs, run twice as many cost-benefit analyses, and simulate an alternative limited system of false emotional responses. There are many points where the two models cross over, some of which are highly contradictory, and these lies often become unraveled. But what is amazing is that we generally have no trouble doing this, and in fact are doing it all the time, constructing elaborate fantasies about ourselves and our place in the world even when there are no risks or consequences. We do it when we put our faith in irrational systems of thought like religion or, to look at it with less of a sense of institutional critique, our own system of faith, whether it is a personal spirituality, or our best "rational" interpretation of the universe's workings taken from contemporary science. So in a way, doublethink is equal to lies and fantasy, or more deeply, to the construction of a personal identity, a sense of self. Seen this way, it is not such a negative concept because people are not computers, or rather we are not logical computers, but ones that run on emotion and fantasy. I don't think this is such a negative thing. Rather, I think it would a bad thing to deny our own nature. Fantasy can be beautiful, and emotions should be experienced and all this still leaves some room for rational thought.




I have long found truth in this quote by Walt Whitman from "Song of Myself" which relates directly to Orwell’s take on “holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously” -
''Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)''

Of course - I can believe and say two things that can be logically proven as mutually exclusive. In fact, I'm doing it all the time. What Whitman describes as "multitudes" I think of as an accurate way of describing how our mind works (I'd like to talk more about this, as related to the recently prominent popular science books of Daniel Dennet, Steven Pinker, and others, but perhaps this is another post..). Basically, if one quietly observes one's own mind one can hear a thousand voices, all competing for the limited space of awareness. Not one ghost in the machine, but an infinite set of homunculi. Each of these is a potential "you." Some of them have very tiny vague lives that last only one cycle of the mind's high-frequency vibrations, others have very long runs. They jump in and out, they merge and diverge, they die and come back to life, they grow as large as a house and shrink down to become a potent little virus. They go off and hide for a long time and then burst back onto the scene at unpredictable times ("drawn back from oblivion" as Orwell said). They change themselves completely, amputating parts of themselves without batting an eye. Or alternatively, they refuse to change, and would be willing to destroy the entire world to avoid losing a tiny piece of themselves. As Orwell says, the world of the doublethink mind is "labyrinthine."



What I find most interesting is the final sentence in the quote above "Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved using doublethink" - You can't understand doublethink unless you use doublethink to think about it. It is essentially a mystery cult. Doublethink is not a political ideology as much as it is an altered state of consciousness. You can only understand an altered state of consciousness in an abstract, intellectual way until you have experienced it for yourself. The "trialectic" I discussed in the last post is an artificial example of this - we can talk about it, but it remains opaque at best, or perhaps just wrong. Or we could talk about altered states brought about my drugs, but the most interesting example is the Zen concept of enlightenment - what is called satori or kensho (meaning a glimpse of satori) - the state of awareness described alternately as mindlessness and mindfulness, as awakening to ones' own buddha-nature, etc. This state of mind is routinely described as unexplainable and that the only way to understand it is by experiencing it.

So doublethink is a very particular state of consciousness, but (and this is the main point here) I would like to put forward that doublethink is the most common state of consciousness, the one that most of us human animals are in most of the time. I am talking not about Orwell's conscious and deliberate method of telling deliberate lies to construct a politically, ideologically acceptable public persona/avatar out of fear from the government, but rather a more subtle process that may be unconscious, but is essentially the same - a process of constructing false selves as motivated by social pressures. The "double" in doublethink is actually the mental identity about whom we would say "that is me." This is the construct who controls not only our public persona, but who decides what thoughts will be allowed though the gate to be incorporated into our self-conception. Of course, like all our ideas of self, it is actually a patchwork of many selves, but we work very hard to maintain the illusion of wholeness and continuity. If this illusion of self is disturbed the result can be terrible mental illness and unhappiness as the mind tries to meld the shattered bits back together.




The "singlethink" ("originalthink?") implied by the term doublespeak is not single at all. In fact it is infinitely multiple, decentralized, tangential, and does not congeal into a unified whole. The mind can stop clinging to the simulated double self and enter a state of consciousness where it can function without the pretense of a centralized self. I am saying that mindlessness is an alternative to this sense of self - one that we are in fact constantly experiencing, though we usually deny it automatically.


I'd like to relate this to the process of art-making with which I concern myself every day. When I am deep in a fantasy, when I am applying myself fully to solving a particular challenge, when I am communicating fully with another person, and especially when I am drawing I often enter a meditative state where I breathe differently, where all my mind is focused on where the pen touches the paper, where I am simultaneously fully aware of what I am doing, and not conscious of what I am doing. I am not claiming any kind of special enlightenment. I have spoken to many people who have experienced something similar - whether it is while playing music, walking on the street, writing by listening to the conversations of imaginary characters in one's head, swimming in the ocean, or mowing the lawn, there is a state of full engagement and involvement where obsessive self-analysis, self-censorship, and even self-consciousness seem to disappear, though other people have characterized it differently and some have disagreed with me about my conclusions (as well they should...). My conclusion being that this is the same thing as kensho - a glimpse of buddha-nature. After all, zen monks during sesshin - the week-long retreats where the most intense meditation and striving for enlightenment are undertaken - do physical work every day. There is a tendency of Americans to regard Eastern meditation as mystical, mysterious, and incomprehensible. To orientalize it. In a way this is disappointing, but it is also a wonderful celebration of the excitement of the other, and is a natural result of the meeting of two cultures. But in fact kensho is an everyday occurrence - I'm not talking about "unconscious drawing" to reach the "subconscious" or some kind of magick communion with spirits or possession by muses or buddhas. I often feel the terrible stress of maintaining a false self slip away as I am washing the dishes.

For the past week I have been having a frustrating time "promoting" my most recent project PERCEIVAL. I have written many emails to my friends and to strangers whose work I admire, constructed websites, etc etc. This is a very heavily social exercise, one that involves thinking about how people are going to feel when they read what seems like a very egocentric communiqué. Editing letters to create certain thoughts in the receiver, trying to engender a certain impression in their mind. I don't think that I am being more manipulative than anyone else doing these kinds of PR activities that are a natural part of an artist’s activities and the world in general. This is simply how this kind of activity is carried out. Indeed, all of the writing on social networks like myspace and public forums like YouTube is like this. In fact all letters, all writing, all art. There is always the element of considering how the receiver will interpret the work and therefore the element of considering how they will think of you, the social element of all activity, the constant simulation of conversations with the abstract "other." This is what makes communication possible, because without this editing not only would all people drift deep into their fantasy worlds to become incomprehensible egocentric maniacs, but there would be no shared referents, indeed all language would disappear as it depends on agreeing on common rules and sounds. But this simulation of a self that is acceptable to others, the relentless self-censorship and analysis is essentially the most exhausting and often negative aspect of the doublethink state of consciousness. Sometimes the doublethink is worth the energy - communication is one of my ideals - I have an irrational faith that it is "good." But this week I have sometimes found it to be tiring and unproductive.

Recently I wrote this in an email to my friend Dina -
"I love reaching out to other people with my art, to make my art live, but it pulls me away from the secret core of my own truth."

She asks me what I mean. I think communicating with other people is what art is all about. I put the ideas together in my mind, I plan out a project, I create an artifact, I create a cloud of ideas that inform the artifact, I somehow show these things to other people, I become involved in the dialogue (even when I try to remain as passive as possible - as in Perceival). I actually do love each aspect of this process - it enables the art to "live" - by which I mean it enters the sphere of public consciousness where it can compete freely, take up meanings I could never have imagined, perform functions it was not designed for, be copied and mutated, evolve, devolve, and die away. But I think that the core of the creative process is the act of creation that is not at all concerned with all the doublethink necessary to launch this process. I referred to this creative process as "the secret core of my own truth" and so fell into a common trap - a romanticization of the process of creativity as well as reinforcing the myth that there is a self who creates all this art. But again, this "trap" is not an entirely disagreeable place to be. I don't wholeheartedly disapprove of doublethink and I really want to feel my irrational emotions, not throw them away.

For all this, don’t forget the most advanced level of doublethink as described by Orwell - “That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness…”

Friday, June 1, 2007

Smart talk about art

I don't like it one bit.

I'll try to be cogent today and while not breaking from my endless litany of complaints, I would like to set more positve goals, even if they are not attainable...

I've been doing a bit of "promotion" for the Perceival videos. By this I mean the most minimal things like writing my friends on YouTube and informing some of the writers of art blogs that I sometimes frequent. I'm not so enthusiastic about this because I'd rather be, you know, drawing pictures. But the promotion is essential if I want more than just my closest friends to see the work - I worked hard on the videos and I'm not embarrassed about saying I think they're worth watching.

Anyway, there is a trade-off when making art in being self-involved vs thinking of the people who will receive the work. Between being specific to your own thought, following your own fantasies, investigating your own ideas in your own personal language, not censoring or editing your thoughts, not worrying about embarrassment, vs. thinking of the presentation of the work, how your viewers will see and interpret it, whether they will be able to understand your intent, giving them ins and clues and editing out the obscurity. It is easy to say "The most private artwork IS the most universal artwork because everyone thinks specifically, and lives a private life, so the personal IS the universal." I'm not saying that statement is wrong. Just that it is an oversimplification. Sometimes the private is not universal. Sometimes it is obscure, un-understandable, wrongheaded, opaque, etc. Sometimes you SHOULD be embarrassed about your private thoughts, some thoughts are not worth sharing, sometimes you need to change yourself, make yourself a better person. There are also those who say "Creating a work and editing it so that people can understand what you are trying to say imposes a rigor on the work that CREATES specific thoughts in the mind of the viewer, that enables specific communication, so in fact the universal IS the specific." Well, again, yes and no. Sometimes following a specific fantasy is really worth it. Maybe the viewer has to really work to figure it out. But I for one like throwing myself against a wall sometimes and I like to read things and look at art where it is clear that the creator doesn't care to lend me a hand. That is, as long as it is absolutely brilliant and enthralling. Of course, the willfully obscure, the obfuscated, the silent water that don't really run deep - these are awful.

Where was that narrative again? Oh yes - smart talk about art. The Perceival project is "interactive" in that it asks people for a simple opinion. This might be too simple to call "interactive," but I am really serious about it. It's not by any means theoretically or technically complex enough to call it "media art" and it isn't a revolutionary form of interactivity, but it is occuring at a place in the progression of my own artmaking where I am really paying attention to the response to the art. This is, after all, a very basic part of communication - in a conversation you talk, then you listen. I'm trying to be honest, not groundbreaking. I'm not claiming success yet though.

Anyway, in the course of doing all this promotion bullshit I have gone to some blogs and followed lots of links in the hopes of finding some random stranger who might dig the videos. Because I am excited about showing my work to people! That's why I make art! But it's like going into the city - the world is so huge, there are so many people, and they are all doing their own thing. Oh my god the world is so huge. It's overwhelming, so I get overwhelmed. Pretty simple. Now, in this way I used to go to galleries and get absolutely overwhelmed by how amazing and profound everything I saw was. But now I'm a little more jaded and I judge pretty harshly - partially as a way of protecting myself from this kind of mental short circuit that would leave me feeling yucky. But also because I've seen a lot of the tricks and I'm getting used to them. Not that I don't see great stuff.

And it's the same on-line. I see a lot of trickery. The thing that really gets my goat is the language used to talk about art. I'm not talking about the "big words" - for there are art words that us artists tend to forget are not everyday words - like "aestheic" "intention" "authority" "postmodern" "intervention" to name just a few simple ones. I think these words are just like "spanner" "plumb line" "compressor" and "OSHA" are in construction. Words we use at work. But I really enjoy talking to people about what my art means without using these words because it challenges me and lets me know that I'm not just playing a big game like a bunch of carpenters who sit around sharpening their chisels all day but never build any cabinets. And so I don't disapprove of these words. In fact, I love these big art words because they enable clear communication. Receiving a specific thought is absolutely grand.

The words I don't dig are the ones that make art seem fancy. Names of museums, galleries, cities, artists, institutions, movements, writers, theories, and all the specific noise are thrown around like they really mean something. Like they are so impressive. Not that I don't want to learn more about all these things, but I want to really learn about each one, bring it down to the understandable level, find out what is believable about it. But when they are all thrown at you together it forms a giant network of borrowed significance with absolutely no feet on the ground. And then there is often money, fame, parties, flying to far off places, the rituals of meaningless social excitement, the subtle and not-so-subtle signs of power and oppression. Don't believe in yourself, artists, writers! Don't think that someone else's meaning is going to do anything for you! What do all these names matter? What does it matter than I live in New Jersey, that I am skinny, that it is sunny, that I have had shows here and there, that I am going to such and such a school? It seems like interest in these things is a distraction. Hit your head with a rock and it goes "thump" and it feels like a tap or it can really hurt. Breath in and out and it feel very similar to anybody breathing in and out.

I've been watching a lot of interviews on YouTube. I like interviews with musicians. A lot of my art is based on a theoretical structure I take from music. Of course it's a mixed up metaphor, Music is danceable. Art is seeable and rememberable. Sensual pleasure leads to a meaning you can invest yourself in. A meaning that is accessable by anyone. What I like about musicians is that they talk about how things sound, what people do with themselves, what they think things mean. And they do it without referencing anyone else. Because nobody really falls for "this music is good because so and so says so." People can see through that pretty quickly because music is profoundly sensual. Not that all music is instantly accessable through emotion, not that there isn't music that is opaque but worht investing in, not that there aren't profoundly interesting stories that open up new music to a host of complex thoughts and theories and interpretations. But I like the language, I like the relationship of the creator, the product, and the receiver. I wish art were more like this.

There is nothing more profound than a simple simple statement. I like heavy sounds. I like quick and catchy melodies. Robots are cool. Baby pandas are cute. Sharks are dangerous. Blinky lights are trippy. This painting is scary. This is stupid. This is amazing. That hurts. I feel great. I'm falling in love. I'm losing my mind. Not that I'm thinking all of these things, not that the words accurately descibe the reasons for the truth in themselves, but they are profoundly and honestly felt, and worth thinking.

You can't trick me with decorative language, you can't be impressive by trying to be impressive. For me all this complicated noise just falls flat on its ass. And I think it hurts as well. There is not an elite group of people who are better than other people because they are better educated or smarter or more successful. Anyone can master their life and bloom. And even the fanciest talkers can be absolutely miserable and hollow. I just want some acknowledgement of this. I just want some humility.

Malinowski, the social-anthropology guy, made two discoveries, the second of which is often ignored. The first was that primitive societies were not primitive - that they were just as socially complicated as the Western society he came from. The second is that the rituals of our own society are the same as those in the Trobriander Islanders he studied, just dressed up a little different. It is important to remember that we are all trying to feed ourselves and advance ourselves socially to find mates. The Trobrianders had an elaborate system of exchanging what looked like useless shell trinkets but were actually a kind of currency of social class. Duh duh duh. It's important to remember than art is just like this to an extent. And an element of hocus-pocus shamanism as well. But there is also something else. Two things - some for true shamanism, some shells and leather straps that are worth looking at because they are beautiful.

Not that I dislike analysis or specificity. I'm always trying to be more specific, to tune my brain more accurately to the world in order to see clearly so that I can choose the correct course of action. But it is essential to keep one foot on the ground. To remember that we are animals. From this point we can build a believable conversation.

I know that I am a hypocrite, but that is OK - I can hold many conflicting thoughts in my mind without them cancelling each other out. Perhaps the real problem here is that I am jealous of people who can write better than I can, who are producing better art than I am, who have more exciting lives than I do.

We might be able to think maybe half a degree of magnetude more accurately if we really really work at it, but we can't think differently. Like people who say that the dialectic is bullshit. No, it is a truly profound way of thinking. I wonder if aliens think dialectically? What if they think trialectically? Is that just nonsense, or is it another way of thinking that is un-understandable to us? For us, up is the opposite of down, or maybe for some boddisatvas and little kids it doesn't matter. Those are the choices. But for these aliens, there is up, down and jubjum. And Jubjum is the opposite of up and also the opposite of down. It's not sideways. That's enirely differnet. Sideways is less the opposite of up than down is. There is hot, cold, and jibblejoo. There is smart, dumb, and ijji-jee-jee. There is vague, specific, and ujutt. There is man, woman, and jeemutt. There is happy, sad, and quim-ijji. And quim-ijji isn't much like feeling OK. It is more like, I don't know, quim-ijji is to happy as jubjum is to up. But it's equally like jubjum is to down. But completely unlike either of these things. Cause of the trialectic.

So I can't understand the trialectic. Maybe that's cause I've got an Earth-brain, or maybe that's because there is no such thing as the trialectic. It's really impossible to care too much, cause I've got lots of dialectic thinking to do, and a little zen-mind thinking to do and I'm pretty much fully-booked with that.

But what I'm saying is that the profound is just a very slight complication upon the very simple. It's very close to home in terms of the full range of possible interpretations of the universe. So don't let tricky signs make you think there is a world of thought undiscovered by you. There is a world of undiscovered thought, but it is undiscovereable.

My god!

I am the piss of a embronic dust-rag!!!!!!!!

I will never ever ever ever go out into the world and be able to pretend that I am really comfortable in it.

WELCOME!
GO AWAY!
WELCOME!
GO AWAY!
WELCOME!
GO AWAY!

Yes, Thunderstorm. Yes. Yes. Yes. Booom! Yessssss.

Nobody will say anything smarter than that!