Tag: art

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Dream Journal

Rocks, Parks, Plants, and Avatars

Driving down what seems like a miniature Hot Wheels freeway in San Francisco, through a rocky little cactus and succulent park. I take what must be a wrong turn and continue driving over the road, but it’s now invisible. It’s disconcertingly like flying between the channel of rocks.

I come out the other end at a corner, noticing a small sedan parked just to the side of the intersection, practically in the crosswalk under a tree and sticking out into the lane. It appears to have been there a while as there are pieces of broken-off succulent plant growing on the street around their car. I consider rescuing some to take home.

Instead, I enter uninvited into the condo-like apartment building, in the tall flat block adjacent the intersection. There’s no lights on inside, and it has a “Miami retiree” vibe. I get lost in the maze of bathrooms, trying to leave feels like going through one after another, in the dim interior twilight.

Once I’m outside, I start writing a note to explain how the invisible road in the park must be fixed, and in the process one of the rent-by-hour bikes that’s always parked on the sidewalk in San Francisco gets knocked down. An older, gray-haired motorcycle-type guy with a goatee, his outfit covered in motorsports logos, reflexively tells me it’s knocked over and I should leave a note. He’s just passing by and doesn’t even seem to have any investment. I gather myself and rush after him and ask him pointedly “why did you feel you had to say that?” He immediately understands it was unnecessarily bossy and apologizes, yet I agree I will leave a note and say I’m sorry.

Afterwards, I use a personal gliding machine to fly directly above the rocky triangle-shaped park. There are huge spherical floating balloons holding up art projects, the work of one artist not long ago. I fly low enough to graze them. In a fit of enjoyment, I fly low over the street, wobbling to and fro between the lanes as I idly ply the neighborhood.

Walking between two fancy houses on the seaside. Modernist concrete right angled things, floor to ceiling windows overlooking long patios which double as piers, covered in tasteful potted plants. I walk between two of them (neither of which I have permission to be on) and observe how their roofs hold up a flat trellis between the homes. (The orientation switches at some point, as if I’d been looking toward the sea, or looking toward the street.) I imagine hanging a certain pitcher plant perfectly in between the two homes, such that it overhangs the walkway.

I am, by this point, also an Avatar Aang type character. A younger girl, resident of one of the fancy homes, lays down on the concrete, bereft of energy. In what I understand to be a friendly gesture, I dip my nose into her exposed armpit. I must’ve been invisible to her before, as she startles and knocks me backwards. In penance I turn myself into a potted plant with tall pointy leaves, called a snake plant. I watch the clock fast forward by a factor of 36, while in the background my unknowing allies search for the Avatar.

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Dream Journal

Outdoor Ring of Learning

A hallowed hall of education, circular ring of open-air lecture spaces. Speakers are a variety of interesting, respectable people I’ve never met before, reminiscent of the BBC hippies documentary I was watching last night. I find myself at one end of the ring, a beautiful “room” with cracked plastic walls, trailing vines, and white columns surrounding an open area.

Nearby is a small art display of four objects, which symbolize struggle, made by a grey-haired female instructor. There are tiny toggle switches that electrify, for instance, a frosted glass chalice (reminds me of an absinthe brouilleur, something I’ve lately been struggling to make/buy). Also a spider plant with a naked root ball — something that looks identical to something the instructor wears in her hair.

One lecturer I listen to intently, to the point I try to record them. Unfortunately instead of beginning to save audio my phone starts playing an ad. I’m quite upset — I don’t want the instructor to think I disrespect them. All is well though, and when I volunteer an anecdote about my own expertise I’m dispatched to fetch an item from the far side of the circle.

I pass through what appears to be the open wall of an under-construction bathroom. There I find a wire bucket of pink toy balls with silly doodled faces on them. My childhood friend, Vince Saunders, has also grabbed a bucket and makes a chiding comment. I shoot back that he’s just jealous that I have bigger balls than him — which comparing our buckets, I do. This, for whatever odd reason, does the trick.

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Dream Journal

Wooden Art Time Machine(s)

Sitting in my dad’s handmade palm-covered Kish structure in my childhood home’s backyard in Cathedral City. Neighbor has situated their patio structure with loud music just over the fence. No saguaro cactus like there used to be.

A wooden bamboo theater, very exclusive. Ticket stand out front and snack bar just inside, barely manned as the movie already started. Dark, stylish, yet still homemade-looking.

My Uncle Mike, Aunt Terry and cousin Spencer come to visit — in a time machine. I ride along with them on their way back, travelling on train tracks laid into the city streets. A car gets in our way during a left turn and this odd jalopy-looking time machine honks and honks — which I remember as both funny and stressful.

Perhaps the same vehicle but shifted pulls up with a large mobile art project newly-made, by an entirely new Chicken John crew. A giant redwood-sized log has been made into a vehicle. There’s a girl I sorta know, light brown skin and dark hair, wearing a revealing onesie with the crotch and breasts sewn to be open. I take some pictures of her, ostensibly of the vehicle though. She’s very friendly and seems pleased I’m interested. Unrelated to this, Chicken comes up and starts spouting some characteristic spiel. I lightly spit in his face (almost missing), he and the whole crew get the message. Hell of a way to get someone’s respect.

An aquarium of worms is being worked on, on the kitchen table. I pull one worm out but there’s actually hundreds stuck together. This is an otherwise barren tank with just a single small fish surviving, the last of several remaindered animals.

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Dream Journal

Nautical Art Show

Nautical group art show. Different boats and boat themed objects. One object on loan from the Riverside County Museum has recently been improved since last time I looked. It’s a polymer sculpted little white boat, a tiny compass underneath a flip-top cap on top of the cabin. But just looking at it bares a kind of threat — it was made by Casey, a much disliked ex of my wife.

As I (with difficulty) attempt to lounge on a craggy rock (with Dana trying to lean back and relax on my leg), another art object is demonstrated by its creator. He’s wrapped a boot in a clever layer of canvas fabric, folding the edges to look like a keel. The patches where the boot boat leaked are only revealed when he points them out.

Watching a lanky latino chef prepare some kind of galley meal, his friend loading the dishwasher at the corner of the stainless steel kitchen. One thing pushes into another, a bin of forks falls over the side but lands upright, luckily. I’m young and eager, and pop up to grab it for him. I observe his internal debate as he tries to calculate if he has enough time to wash a single blender jug.

Maneport Hub, a modern 80s TV show take on the “keeping up with the pirates” drama. See a short clip where a lady is strapped off the gunnels and being hosed down waterboard style. The camera pulls back and it’s revealed she’s just practicing. The files are in a folder, and I accidentally delete the main folder exposing all the sub-season folders and the text entries and the like.

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Dream Journal

Dirt Bike Somersaults & Stamp Art

dark motorcycle

I get my dirt bike working on a family trip to Death Valley. In celebration I do multiple wheelies while rounding a low hill, then motorbike somersaults in the air, finally floating off on a rock. Willam Shatner is there? Or is it me?

An older, liberal stamp artist for the US Postal Service is doing a series on Bob Ross. I’m already sure this predictable pap won’t sell well in the red states, but at least the prototype drawings are good. One has him in an earthworm-like armor helmet, dressed as Trogdor (Trogdor the Burninator?) which I learn is actually pronounced tro-dor.

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Dream Journal

Art Teardown Delayed

Was helping tear down some big art project that spanned a public park. I had the Chevy Nova and a bunch of tools. I was taking down the fence and had the sudden realization that we couldn’t take it all down — there was a giant heart centerpiece that you could climb inside and it’s fence was covered in vines.

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Glot

Dinner Conversation

Preface: over dinner of Buffalo burgers, my girlfriend and I talk internet and art, like we apparently sometimes do. I only get to write down this conversation because I (very non-surreptitiously) recorded it on my marvelous new toy, the Zoom H2. It was kinda fun. I leave you to your own conclusions.

L: It’s gonna be really weird if LiveJournal goes away. At the same time that I don’t use it a lot anymore, I do use it for my BPAL stuff. I’ll have to figure out a new system for that. But more importantly, I don’t know who I’d really be right now if I didn’t have LiveJournal. I made four, five entries a day, for years.

O: If you look at the web as an ecology, when a niche becomes vacant, something comes in to replace it.

L: No, I know that. But you felt the same way about Consumating. You were really sad when Consumating was gone.

O: I did. I did.

L: But this is kind of like… it’s kinda like if your mostest favoritest author died, or if… no it’s like if your hometown closed up shop and everybody left, and all the houses got torn down, even though you hadn’t been there in years. It’s kinda like that to me. The idea of not having LiveJournal to come back to…

O: You know what I was thinking about yesterday? I was actually thinking about dominant art forms—and the idea that there can be a dominant art form. You know, we had renaissance painters in the 1600s, and that was really new, that was the thing. The late 1800s, Victorians, poets were the rock stars. For most of the 20th century, since the 20s, movies have been the dominant art form. Absolutely. We build these huge monuments to them in every town, sometimes ten to a town. We have millions and millions of dollars of our economy tied up in this art form. The people who are involved—actors, directors—they’re huge celebrities, important role models for the rest of the culture. But I was thinking, you know, that particular dominant art form is getting a little played out at this point. The “golden age” was what, 60 years ago? What would be the next dominant art form? It would probably be somewhere on the web. I said, hmm… well, Flickr‘s certainly an art form. Twitter‘s kind of an art form, 140 characters worth…

L: I don’t think it’s an “art.” But, yeah.

O: It certainly is; it’s a form of expression. I don’t think you can paint it otherwise. It’s something humans make that’s different from one other.

L: Not everybody who Twitters is doing it for art, though. That’s what I was trying to say.

O: Whether you do it for “art” or not isn’t really important. I don’t think that Hollywood does it for aaaart. They do it for money a lotta the time. That doesn’t mean it’s not an artistic expression in itself. And I think one of the big things that’s new really is programming. It’s not even… not necessarily what is made, not the art that people do, not the actual pictures on Flickr, or the entries on LiveJournal, it’s how you can actually make that. It’s the website itself. It’s designing that kind of community. It’s designing the interaction. Are websites then going to be the dominant art form? Are programmers going to be our poets? (Is code poetry?)

L: Well, that’s the thing. When you think about LiveJournal, it’s not anything without the software. That’s why LiveJournal isn’t as good now is because they changed their junk. I don’t know if that’s the “software,” but… the… program.

O: That’s right.

L: If we didn’t have the feature where we could friend other people, or see who’s friended you, for example, how would that change the community? How would it change the community if there weren’t communities where everybody could post?

O: When Etsy changes something and you now have a new feature that you never had before, that changes how everyone interacts.

L: So… you get that we have stats on our shops now, right?

O: I get it, I don’t get why it’s important.

L: That’s a big huge deal. You know where your shoppers are coming from. You actually know what markets you should be targeting. Before that… let’s say I put advertising on Modish. Even though I can use my (outdated) Shorty thing, and then I can see how many people clicked on that link… after they click on the link, I don’t know where they went in my shop, I don’t know what they looked at. I don’t know who those people are. For anybody who not using it, they can put up advertising and have no idea how many people are coming from that ad. They can say, “I put an ad on Etsy and my hearts went up 10% that month,” but that’s all they know. And they can’t necessarily correlate that with say, bringing in 50 new visitors, and getting 25 new hearts, and say therefore “this is a good ad.”

O: You can say, everybody who clicked on this ad stayed here about 30 seconds, everybody who clicked on this ad stayed two minutes. This ad’s better.

L: Right. It’s really quite… amazing. Remember I was just talking about having the shop link on Panopoly.org. It’s just so much better. Doing Google searches to see who links to your Etsy shop is incredibly difficult. You’d have to do a search for every single item in your shop.

O: There’s this idea in web media that you wanna build the “best of brand.” Ok, well Etsy has a lot of people. But because of the nature of the internet, you can probably keep the software secret but if the idea behind it actually works you can’t keep that a secret. You could describe Etsy in a paragraph, pay some smart people, and in maybe a month you could have a website that functioned quite the same. You could copy it. So why should these people stick with Etsy, why is this the best? What makes one movie better than another movie in the same genre? The art of it.

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Glot

Arts and Culture

It’s real easy to feel culturally enriched if you’re lucky. I’m lucky I live in San Francisco. Why, just this weekend I went to two totally bitchin’ open houses for artist’s workspaces in my own neighborhood, experienced a dissertation’s worth of great art, and participated in a super-hip book swap where I traded in the original novelization of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi ("dweet-doo-dee-doo-weee-oop," R2-D2 beeped at the stubborn main computer) for the likes of Will Self’s “Junk Mail,” Nick Hornby’s “Polysyllabic Spree,” two short story anthologies, a Charlie Anders book, and a half-dozen other lucky literary insurgents. There was so little effort involved in doing cool stuff it almost made me feel jaded. But then I realized that I realized how cool it was. And then I was fine.