Sunday, August 26, 2007
Big Hole
If you are a fan of Ironweed Breakdown, you are probably aware of the recently-discovered hole in the universe. Last week scientists at the University of Minnesota announced their discovery of a void a billion light years wide. That is to say, if you were moving at the speed of light, and you left one edge of this thing heading for the other side, you would encounter absolutely nothing, no dust, no Starbucks, no tumbleweeds, no planets, no quarks, no regular material of any kind, and not even any of the more mysterious things, such as dark matter or black holes, in short, nothing at all, for A BILLION YEARS. If you Google "Hole in Universe" you will find all kinds of articles. This is good stuff. Fun fun stuff.
Big Medicine
School only in session one week and already I have a lot of projects to do. Much of it involves drawing, which is kind of cool. Drawing for a living sounds nice at first, but when you realize that it means you have to draw fast, get it right and do a whole bunch of them, well, it is a little less fun that way but still pretty cool. Despite the work piling up I took the kids to Geyser Falls today, to make up for a trip that went awry yesterday when the missus took 'em all the way down there and found the park closed due to rain. Geyser falls is about 75 minutes away, near the Pearl River Resort on the Choctaw Indian Reservation. I actually got to listen to some employees speaking Choctaw, which was a thrill, I didn't know they still spoke it. There were about a half dozen different elaborate water activities to choose from, all of them highly chlorinated. It was very much like Myrtle Waves in Myrtle Beach, SC, but overall more attractive. The artificial beach, complete with cabanas and tons of sand, was impressive but by that point I was so sick of the whole scene I began pestering the tykes for relief: back to the truck and the road home. We moved on to another pool that had a bar (I had no money), volleyball and music underwater. I laid back and watched the Turkey buzzards circle the parking lot, thought that it is nice that the Choctaw are making some jack, and wondered what used to be here on this land.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Everything is going exactly according to plan
Well I have been granted a very nice L-shaped desk and a drafting table in the upstairs studio. I moved all my landscape books up there today and went out and bought some drafting pens, tracing paper, triangles, circle templates, all kinds of cool stuff. I was sitting at my new desk reading one of my new books when my thesis adviser walked in and handed me my written contract! I have to go over it with my agent, of course, but once it is all put away I will be getting paid to go to school, which has been a lifelong dream of mine.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
JUDAS!
I am sure many among you are are wondering how these tattered missives laid at the alter of Truth can be so contaminated by such colorful and thrilling strains of fanciful mendacity… Let me tell you that only a fool believes that the path to Truth lies by any way other than that of a tangled web of lies. It is true that I am a student of a sort, and a teacher, that I inhabit a demi-world that few indeed can understand, never mind negotiate with stylish aplomb as I do minute-by-sweltering-minute here in the heart of Dixie. To satisfy your puerile hunger for understanding let me divulge a secret, a part of my life that I have never told anyone, a small nugget of experience from the mid nineteen-nineties that might begin to explain what exactly it is that I am “getting at” as you all are so fond of saying.
Like all serious artists, I was for a time (some ten years ago) very interested in so-called “performance art” and the revolutionary possibilities such a form presented. I observed in this phenomenon some intriguing dynamics in regard to more outward pushing on the boundaries of what art is, what theater is, indeed what is performance, what is the observer and what is the observed. Undermining this revolutionary dynamic of course was an annoying tendency on the part of performance artists to draw attention to themselves. It was all about the artist and whatever radical or extreme gesture he was presenting to the void. What, I began to ask myself, would it mean if these radical acts were done entirely in secret? Would that not at last and in deed break the bonds between the artist and the void itself and offer reconciliation of a kind between artist and Muse? My first performance piece was a form of communication confined to only myself and my muse. For an entire year I did my grocery shopping with no lists other than those I found abandoned in other grocery carts or in the grocery store parking lot. On the days I found no lists, I bought no groceries. It was a tough year. I can not really express the desperation experienced by a guy walking into a store who just wants to buy some sausage but who instead must restrict himself to “Lettuce, paper towels, tonic water, kitty litter…”
Half way through the year I began another piece: I noticed through my job as a landscaper that the county landfill charged five dollars to drop of a load of brush. This brush was then ground up and left to compost for a while and then sold as “mulch” for thirty dollars a cubic yard. This mulch was highly suspect as such, especially since I was one of the guys dropping off the brush on the front end. The composting process was supposedly hot enough to neutralize all the weed seeds, but I knew that all of the most pernicious weeds of the region (microstegium, Japanese honeyscuckle, English Ivy, Kudzu…) were part of the mix, seeds and all. It was a mulch of last resort. What would it mean, I wondered, if you drove up the road a couple of miles, to J.V. Brockwell’s mulch and topsoil factory in Calvander, and purchased two yards of mulch for twenty-four dollars, and then drove that load not to a client’s house but straight to the dump, and you told the guy at the gate I got brush, paid the five dollars and then backed up to that massive pile and forked that load of shredded hardwood bark right off the truck right there. Why, that would be just so danged asinine, so absurd on its face, it would be damn near psychotic. And as such, indistinguishable from most performance art –except for the fact that nobody, and I mean NOBODY would know that you were doing it! And in the end, you would be contaminating that noxious, weed breeding shit the dump was selling with ACTUAL MULCH, such that, every now and then, some poor ignorant sap would back up to the pile and get loaded with quality product.
I probably spent about five hundred dollars over two or three years playing this little game, buying Brockwell’s mulch and immediately dumping it at the Orange County landfill. Times were hard, I wasn’t making much money landscaping, but I refused to cut the funding on this little project until I had made my point, until I had made it even between me and my Muse. Then one day when I felt the time was right I just stopped. My career as a performance artist had ended, I determined, and I moved on to other things.
I have never told anyone about this. Well, actually, that is not true. At one point, deep in the winter of ’02-’03, I went wandering the halls of the UNC art department, seeking out somebody who understood performance art. My revolutionary sensibilities were still somewhat intact, I guess, but something deep inside me craved some sort of acknowledgement of what I had done. I did not need to know that it was right or wrong, or even that it was art, but I needed to share with somebody…and I thought that the undocumented status of the project was its crowning glory. But the person I talked to (I don’t remember if it was a professor, an associate professor, or what…) was only interested in documentation. Do you have any photographs? Any receipts? Any records at all? he asked. No, no, I said, you see, that is the whole point…it wasn’t recorded, that is the truly radical thing, it is unencumbered by archival concerns, it is a TRUE AND UNIMPEDED GESTURE AGAINST THE VOID. He just shook his head. How can I believe you? How do I know that you did this thing? No record, no art, he said. FOOL! I repled. JUDAS! My statement holds true to a five-thousand-year-old tradition! If a tree does or does not fall down in the forest, and somebody is or is not there to observe…
The gentleman calmed me down and took me into his office for a cup of tea. Here is what you do, he said, let some time pass. Five years. Ten years. Create a web page. A page no one reads. A page no one visits. There, tell your story. Then you can call yourself an artist.
Like all serious artists, I was for a time (some ten years ago) very interested in so-called “performance art” and the revolutionary possibilities such a form presented. I observed in this phenomenon some intriguing dynamics in regard to more outward pushing on the boundaries of what art is, what theater is, indeed what is performance, what is the observer and what is the observed. Undermining this revolutionary dynamic of course was an annoying tendency on the part of performance artists to draw attention to themselves. It was all about the artist and whatever radical or extreme gesture he was presenting to the void. What, I began to ask myself, would it mean if these radical acts were done entirely in secret? Would that not at last and in deed break the bonds between the artist and the void itself and offer reconciliation of a kind between artist and Muse? My first performance piece was a form of communication confined to only myself and my muse. For an entire year I did my grocery shopping with no lists other than those I found abandoned in other grocery carts or in the grocery store parking lot. On the days I found no lists, I bought no groceries. It was a tough year. I can not really express the desperation experienced by a guy walking into a store who just wants to buy some sausage but who instead must restrict himself to “Lettuce, paper towels, tonic water, kitty litter…”
Half way through the year I began another piece: I noticed through my job as a landscaper that the county landfill charged five dollars to drop of a load of brush. This brush was then ground up and left to compost for a while and then sold as “mulch” for thirty dollars a cubic yard. This mulch was highly suspect as such, especially since I was one of the guys dropping off the brush on the front end. The composting process was supposedly hot enough to neutralize all the weed seeds, but I knew that all of the most pernicious weeds of the region (microstegium, Japanese honeyscuckle, English Ivy, Kudzu…) were part of the mix, seeds and all. It was a mulch of last resort. What would it mean, I wondered, if you drove up the road a couple of miles, to J.V. Brockwell’s mulch and topsoil factory in Calvander, and purchased two yards of mulch for twenty-four dollars, and then drove that load not to a client’s house but straight to the dump, and you told the guy at the gate I got brush, paid the five dollars and then backed up to that massive pile and forked that load of shredded hardwood bark right off the truck right there. Why, that would be just so danged asinine, so absurd on its face, it would be damn near psychotic. And as such, indistinguishable from most performance art –except for the fact that nobody, and I mean NOBODY would know that you were doing it! And in the end, you would be contaminating that noxious, weed breeding shit the dump was selling with ACTUAL MULCH, such that, every now and then, some poor ignorant sap would back up to the pile and get loaded with quality product.
I probably spent about five hundred dollars over two or three years playing this little game, buying Brockwell’s mulch and immediately dumping it at the Orange County landfill. Times were hard, I wasn’t making much money landscaping, but I refused to cut the funding on this little project until I had made my point, until I had made it even between me and my Muse. Then one day when I felt the time was right I just stopped. My career as a performance artist had ended, I determined, and I moved on to other things.
I have never told anyone about this. Well, actually, that is not true. At one point, deep in the winter of ’02-’03, I went wandering the halls of the UNC art department, seeking out somebody who understood performance art. My revolutionary sensibilities were still somewhat intact, I guess, but something deep inside me craved some sort of acknowledgement of what I had done. I did not need to know that it was right or wrong, or even that it was art, but I needed to share with somebody…and I thought that the undocumented status of the project was its crowning glory. But the person I talked to (I don’t remember if it was a professor, an associate professor, or what…) was only interested in documentation. Do you have any photographs? Any receipts? Any records at all? he asked. No, no, I said, you see, that is the whole point…it wasn’t recorded, that is the truly radical thing, it is unencumbered by archival concerns, it is a TRUE AND UNIMPEDED GESTURE AGAINST THE VOID. He just shook his head. How can I believe you? How do I know that you did this thing? No record, no art, he said. FOOL! I repled. JUDAS! My statement holds true to a five-thousand-year-old tradition! If a tree does or does not fall down in the forest, and somebody is or is not there to observe…
The gentleman calmed me down and took me into his office for a cup of tea. Here is what you do, he said, let some time pass. Five years. Ten years. Create a web page. A page no one reads. A page no one visits. There, tell your story. Then you can call yourself an artist.
Sunday, August 19, 2007
Cuspid
Spent Thursday and Friday and much of Saturday building a closet in my bedroom. I learned some things in the process, and am pretty satisfied with the result. Today I took the test that goes with my TA workshop online. Astonishingly, the test violated just about every pedagogical principal they tried to get across to us in the workshop. Misleading and poorly-worded questions, a very lopsided representation of the range of topics (almost half the questions regarded how to write a syllabus, which constituted only one of the six presentations) and a whole bunch of questions on the minutiae of sexual harassment regulations (which was not even mentioned anywhere in the workshop). It was a timed test, fifty questions in twenty-five minutes. I have no idea how I did, and felt in the end as if some sort of very strange joke was being played on me.
We are winding down the weekend by watching Robin Hood, the Errol Flynn one, on the television. Trying to explain to my seven-year-old who the bad guys and who the good guys are just drives home to the family how much damage W has done to our nation, our values, our world. The usurper declaring Robin an outlaw, Robin's use of outlaw tactics to restore the rightful sovereign...were I making the movie today I would have Prince John munching on Chex Party Mix and watching baseball on TV. I would have his advisers be corollaries of Rove and Gonzales. But the analogy breaks down: who is Robin Hood? Who's the outlaw? And King Richard the Lion Hearted...who's he?
We are winding down the weekend by watching Robin Hood, the Errol Flynn one, on the television. Trying to explain to my seven-year-old who the bad guys and who the good guys are just drives home to the family how much damage W has done to our nation, our values, our world. The usurper declaring Robin an outlaw, Robin's use of outlaw tactics to restore the rightful sovereign...were I making the movie today I would have Prince John munching on Chex Party Mix and watching baseball on TV. I would have his advisers be corollaries of Rove and Gonzales. But the analogy breaks down: who is Robin Hood? Who's the outlaw? And King Richard the Lion Hearted...who's he?
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Grasshopper
Spent the morning watching twenty-six other graduate students present five-minute segments of simulated teaching. I learned a great deal about propeller rotation frequencies, anaerobic bacterial activity in chicken colons, and the coefficient of drag (which, I must admit, I always thought was a joke, but...) When it came time for me to teach, I am not sure the evaluators really "got it," 
although everyone else in the room certainly did. My topic: Everything You Have Been Told Up Till Now Is A Lie. I did just like the workshop team leaders advised: used eye contact, moved around a lot, varied my tone of voice. Only problem was, I ran out of time just before I was about to bring it all home. I include here a picture of my One True Teacher, a diminutive form with gigantic presence who explains to me truly novel theories about basic existence on a daily basis. Talk about challenging your paradigms...thinking outside the box...especially at six in the morning...we could all learn a thing or two (or eleven) from Mr. Zapper.
although everyone else in the room certainly did. My topic: Everything You Have Been Told Up Till Now Is A Lie. I did just like the workshop team leaders advised: used eye contact, moved around a lot, varied my tone of voice. Only problem was, I ran out of time just before I was about to bring it all home. I include here a picture of my One True Teacher, a diminutive form with gigantic presence who explains to me truly novel theories about basic existence on a daily basis. Talk about challenging your paradigms...thinking outside the box...especially at six in the morning...we could all learn a thing or two (or eleven) from Mr. Zapper.
Monday, August 13, 2007
Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)
another day, another...
Spent the entire day in a workshop instructing grad students how to teach, even though my department has made it clear that I will never be allowed to conduct any sort of class of my own. "Every word that comes from your mouth represents the sharpest and most unadulterated truth," my academic adviser explained to me. "We let you even chat with the undergraduates and it's all over." "Can I show the parents of prospective students around campus?" I asked hopefully, "Absolutely not," several administrators replied in unison. I still have to take the workshop though.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
rodentia
Students back. Found these two weirdos in my tool shed. Ran them off with a pitchfork before the kids could see them.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Turn Baby Turn
A long weekend in Myrtle Beach, getting reacquainted with another side of my extended, blended family. Took a little ride to the downtown area to gawk. One evening with Lil K and Big L and the boyz we meandered a sandy warren of tricked-out trailers, some whose porches and lattice skirts bore a sense of permanance, others recently parked, to get to and stroll the Apache Pier, where the cover had been amped up from the usual buck to three bucks, on account of the "live entertainment," which turned out to be a peppy interracial couple under a mirror ball doing karaoke-style standards such as "Rocky Top," and "Carolina Girls," while aging rednecks either shagged or did the hustle on the slick white dance floor in appreciation. Immediately adjacent to the trailer park loomed a hotel of some fifteen or so stories. Big L and I fed quarters into an anchored set of binoculars in a futile attempt to surveillance the rooms. Back at the cabana the little ones enjoyed the pool nestled just behind the dune. I marveled at a Tassimo one-cup coffee maker. I slathered my boys with sunscreen and dropped a lot of twenties at places like Myrtle Waves and Ripley's Believe-It-Or-Not Aquarium. All in all, we had a blast, then headed back to our little cottage in our little town for the first day of school. One started kindergarten, another second grade. Lots of forms to fill out, lots of things to go over with the boys. Not only does school start on the ninth of August here, the daily start time has been moved up from 7:35 to 7:25. Helping the wife move her office: the woman across the hall left, and now we get an office with a window. I visited my academic adviser and tried to nail down some aspects of my funding, then hustled upstairs to the studio to procure my own desks and space. Back home I whipped out a kick-ass paella using a chicken carcass I purchased in a moment of panic from an Ingles on Exit 24 off I-20 in Georgia.
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