Limits of Life

This report, which I read about in the NYTimes, is about whether alien life may be based on chemistry that doesn't rely on carbon, liquid water, etc - all the things we assume it must. It is an example of a report that tries to be very broad-minded, challenging it's own assumptions, and attempts to discover it's unknown unknowns. It also casually throws in some philosophical references that one would not see in a NASA report (such as the claim that the human mind is not skilled at coming up with truly new ideas, or that the the definition of life requires looking at what "definition" means as much as "life.")

I've been writing up a project that involves a skit about aliens, and this report is inspirational.

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?

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.

kookoo pan-opticon-asaurus prime

huuh?

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

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.

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!

Shiva-Shakti

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.