A moment's hesitation

We (I) should abandon all fear. With youth the flow of creativity is unhindered; the only barrier being skill, but with the increase in skill comes a decrease in the flow. You become afraid of creation. More care must be exercised, and more effort must be supplied. Eventually we become so afraid of doing something new that we just stop completely.

We waste our time being afraid of not creating anything, which results in even less than creating crap. I'm going to try my damndest to try and treat the world like a box of legos, a pad of paper and some crayons, or some building blocks. We have more to gain than we do to lose. Crap is better than nothing as evidenced by this post. Nevermind, it's probably nothing.

Late Night Quotations No.13

"Orthodoxy is the death of intelligence."
-Bertrand Russell

"Who wishes to be creative must first destroy and smash accepted values."
-Nietzche

Tick

Do you ever worry that you'll spend your whole life trying to figure out what to do with it? Knowing that the second you start building one thing with it, you start losing the ability to build everything else. I do. It doesn't keep me up at night, but I do.

Z'EV 4.19.07

This is the full audio from an interview I conducted with the legendary industrial pioneer Z'EV at the Empty Bottle in Chicago on 4.19.07. His first appearance in the city in 21 years. We discussed many things including the artistry of the "break core" culture and the house movements, as well as the avant-garde in general and where those sentiments lie in the current creative landscape. A full article with the interview will soon be appearing in the May issue of Thirsty Media. :UPDATE: It did not appear in that issue, and I don't know if it ever will for reasons made unclear to me. Have the fun.



Here's the piece I wrote up to go along with the interview:

Age of Steel

I guess I should be thankful for things like mid-life crises. It seemed like a stupid enough period of your life. You buy the proverbial red sports car, run off with the proverbial blond secretary, and leave the proverbial safe family. If you never got to the point of the safe family, then you have to resort to alternatives like kicking junk, or robbing blood banks. And if you were preoccupied the first half of your life with doing really interesting and creative things, it seems that the mid-life can serve as a chance to get back to your roots. Such is the case for all of the many bands I had the misfortune to grow up after, and the complete surprise and excitement when presented with an opportunity to catch em on the second (or fifth) go-round. Everybody is back together these days. And for an out of place anachronism like me, it couldn't have come at a better time. Naked Raygun, the Effigies, X, Bauhaus, Mission of Burma, fucking Big Black played a show, the Stooges are freaking back together with a new album out, as are the New York Dolls, Goddamn Question Mark and the Mysterians just played here, even Throbbing Gristle got back together. There are parts of me that don't know how to feel about the zombie uprising, but then again, was it fair to have even declared these bands dead in the first place?

Case in point: I got to see Z'EV the other night at the Empty Bottle. Now Z'EV was filed away in the back of my mind in the same place I keep dimitridons, and gladiatorial combat. I'd read about them in books and they sounded cool, but the thought of seeing the real thing in real life is just not a thought you'd ever have. But there he was. I shook his hand. We spoke. There's not only audio, but visual proof that he's still out there. Like finding one more Tasmanian tiger decades after they were supposed to be extinct, there's Z'EV up there, and he's doing stuff that I've still never seen or heard before. The tones that have been hiding inside the shards and fragments of the metal and junk around us are breathtaking. Z'EV has this uncanny ability to bring them out into our world. Just tones and patterns pouring out of this otherwise inert matter that you could probably find in a scrapyard. But these are finely tuned instruments. You really get an impression of the deliberateness of his performance seeing it all live. He sat crouched on his knees, and brought a different song out of each object he had on stage. I've never been so amazed with all the variation of the spectrum of sound as I was the other night.

When we spoke, we spent a lot of time discussing the electronic communities, and the house scenes in which Z'EV was instrumental while living in Europe. What you lose with electronics, however, is real sound. Digital sounds will always remain simulation no matter how far technology progresses. There is something magic in pure sound, and Z'EV is one of the most potent shaman that I am aware of. I am personally glad he's back to doing what he does. After a 21 year absence from Chicago, and nearly as long a time spent away from music and art in general, you need only see him now as evidence that art need not age at all.

Late Night Quotations No.12

"Kings, aristocrats, and tyrants, whoever they be, are slaves in rebellion against the sovereign of the Earth, which is the human race, and against the legislator of the universe which is nature."

-Robespierre

Late Quotations No.11: Famous Last Words

"Shoot you cowards, you'll only kill a man."
-Che Guevara

When told to renounce Satan and accept Christ on his deathbed:
"Now is not the time to be making enemies."
-Voltaire

"So it goes."
-Kurt Vonnegut
(not actually his final words, but fitting.)

Late Night Quotations No. 10

"It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error: it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error."

- Former Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson

Big Time Questions No.7

Can you tell me about an extremely memorable moment in your career?

My favorite moments are thinking up ideas. After that it's all downhill. The actual execution is generally more boring than the idea. Not to say that the end result or the execution are expendable, but you never match that level of excitement as when you get that initial spark. Thinking up pretty much everything we did as YTM resulted in me on the floor of our kitchen or wherever sobbing and crying because I had been laughing so hard. The guinea pig and the banana video especially. Sometimes great stuff can come in the end though. I love that I have those stories to tell now, and I love that I have those pictures to show off. I still crack up every time I think about one of those activities. And it's just chasing feelings like that. Trying to outdo the last one. Humor is one of the biggest motivators for me. I have a fear of taking anything too seriously, so if I can find a way to make anything into a big joke, I usually do. Funny that fear and horror are my two big motivators. I find they're actually quite similar. They are both linked to surprise and being caught off guard. I could happily catch people off guard for the rest of my life. It will always be fun weather they're laughing or crying.

But that's cheating, you asked a specific question and I gave a general answer. Probably one of my favorite moments was "climbing" the "mountain" (or crawling on the ground, if you want to be literal). There was supposed to be a bunch of people for that. It was supposed to be a kind of big thing. And this is a case of the execution being way better than the idea. So it was supposed to be a lot of people climbing this ...grass. But it was a cold and drizzly day, and my friend Matt and I were the only two people who came out at all. We had on these stupid fake beards, and had some frozen Icee Pops up at "base camp" with a little flag that said "Human Beings." And we just decided, "what the hell" and went for it; started our ascent. We got really into it, and we're in character and yelling at each other in these crappy accents and stuff. People were walking by, and had no idea what to make of it, they thought we were out of our minds. Meanwhile we're cracking up and soaking wet, and bloody and muddy, and just gross, and frankly, stupid. We got about halfway "up" and this kid runs up to us and kind of cocks his head inquisitively. I just yelled at him "Kid what the hell are you doing standing on the side of the mountain like that!!" He just goes "oh." and instantly drops to the ground and starts climbing with us. Then a bunch of his friends (all like 5- 10year olds) come running over and start climbing up with us. It was just fantastic. The kids were totally into it. Way more so than we even were at that point. It took us a goddamn hour and 15 minutes to get across that field on our stomachs. We cracked open the box of Icee Pops and handed them out to the kids (who wanted to do it again) which I was totally opposed to. It's amazing how sore you get not climbing a mountain. Anyway, because of the kids, all these other people got really into it, and came up and were joking around and having a bunch of fun with us at the end. Asking us how long we'd been climbing and stuff like that. But it was great. Kids don't have any (or at least a whole lot less) barriers. They can just let go and have fun, or be amazed by something. And they got everyone else to let down their defenses too. I love that we were able to disarm so many people, and trick them into having a really good time by nothing but our own stupidity. That's probably one of my favorite days period. It was a shitty day too, but by just saying "fuck it" and just going through with something, and letting go of everything like image, and comfort, and warmth, and security, and safety (because one of us could have fallen and been seriously injured) I had this great experience. And now it's a great story, and a great memory. If it's art or not I don't really care.It's something that happened, and I was there.

Late NIght Quotations No.9

In honor of the punk I have been steadily re-ingesting in the last few days (Sid and Nancy, the Great Rock n' Roll Swindle, and Repo Man, not to mention various old records) I've got a line up of punk related quotes tonight.

"You've taken my thinking, my means of survival. You thrust in my hand your gun and your Bible. You told me to kill for the Lord up above. You taught me to hate when I know there is LOVE."

- Crass


"Having been there in the 70's in L.A. isn't it amazing that the only ones that mattered are all dead- everyone else is in an imitatative state of a dying animal."

- Darby Crash 1980


"Maybe I'm a prehistoric monster by being an individual. It's highly likely. All I offer to others is their own individuality. Grab it!"

- John Lydon


"I think punk rock, especially for me, was a big middle finger to this whole talent thing."

- Mike Watt

Big Time Questions No.6

Are you able to work solely on your art or must you have another non-art related job to supplement your income?

Well I had a job packing boxes at a warehouse. I quit because I was losing my mind, and months of my life in that place. Now I'm trying to do freelance web design (a skill I've picked up from just playing around over the years) and doing ok with that, but freelance isn't very steady, and I'm really sick of Ramen and grilled cheese so I think a part-time job is in my future. But I like having free time. Free time is more important than anything else to me. I always have projects I'm working on. I have no head for business, so I rarely make any money on anything, but that's because I don't even know how to think about my projects on a monetary basis. I wouldn't know how to begin selling stuff that I cared about. I think life is a far more important skill to practice than art. When it comes down to it, I don't care if I made cool, or interesting works of art, or wrote great stories, or did whatever, I just hope to have had an interesting life. All the other stuff is just stuff you leave in your wake. Evidence or fossil remains maybe. Bits of you with better shots at immortality than your physical body.

Like I mentioned earlier, I also work at a printing studio with a real-life Artist, who is a great guy. I actually have very little interest in kissing ass up the ladder of the art world either, but I would love to infiltrate it because I feel it's a very rigid community, and there is so much more to push against and play with within uptight frameworks like that. So I have a bunch of projects that I would love to execute in an "Art" context, but I don't know if I will ever be in a good position to execute them.

Big Time Questions No.5

You said that you "managed to fall into the age old position of obscurity do to refusal to participate in the "industry" that art has become". How so? What do you hate most about the "industry"?

Yes, I'm afraid it's true. I'm still trying to rise above the position of "starving artist," I hate to fall into such a well-worn rut. I think it's especially hard right now because real expression is kind of up against a wall. There is more information in a day now than anyone could effectively process in an entire lifetime. That does a lot to the collective consciousness. We don't have time for anything in particular, because there is so much else to do and see. Content doesn't seem to matter as much as it just being SOMETHING! Anything and it'd better be now, or else someone else will have already done it. Take the state of Hollywood as an example. Remake after remake. They're even re-making sequels now! But how do we know if it's a re-make of a sequel or a sequel of a re-make? There's no time to think up anything new or exciting, because everything has this immediacy about it. That all feeds into the "art industry" thing. Art IS industry now. The aesthetic of the cutting edge in art have been successfully nabbed by the business interests, and now we get our cool, not just images like it used to be, but VISUALS from industry. REALLY creative kids are working 70-80 hours a week on Coke and Dockers commercials. And there's this belief that advertising is really coming into it's own; that it IS art now, but I don't believe that you can make art when the end result is the sale of a product or a brand. I just don't. It's not anti-mundane, it IS mundane. Cool is so standardized now, that even new cool is expected, necessary even. So business has brought over all the artists, and real art wallows in obscurity. I'm trying damn hard not to sound to cynical about all of this. It's not a "corporations lie to us" type deal. It's just the way I see the modern landscape, and I for one, find it hard to do anything genuine anymore without completely dropping out. The problem probably lies somewhere in me for even wanting to do something genuine in this day and age. Basically, I think it has to be taken back. Art has to move into areas that business won't dare touch with a ten foot pole! And there are plenty of those little cracks in the sidewalk, believe me. But business is fast. I mean they have whole ad firms devoted solely to creating YouTube videos that pass as real viral content, and don't even have an overt ad anywhere in the thing. It's like subliminal culture! Is THAT art? The fact that we don't even know we're watching ad's anymore? Lonleygirl 13 or whatever, she was a campaign. Not a hoax, a campaign! A scam depending on your mood. I don't think art should be about money. I think it should be about information. Conveying ideas or experiences in some way shape or form. Lonleygirl and all those cool motion graphics commercials on TV and the Internet convey a product. The coolness factor is just a means to the end. Art has become just a means to the end.

Tattoo You

I was pondering tattoos yesterday, specifically mine. The images of all the tattoos I never got began to dance through my mind and I realized that everyone has it all wrong. Everyone always talks of the permanence of tattoos, the scars of ink, but that aspect is insignificant. Everything that you accumulate in life you carry with you till the end, these just happen to be physical. But the real intrigue is what you don't have on you. All of those lines that will never cover my skin. Everything that would have been there had I had more money in my pocket on certain days, or had a better idea. The falls I didn't take, the more meaningful symbols which will never occupy spaces already taken up by impulse. The tattoos I wear are mine. Aesthetics are irrelevant. They represent my body in time and space. The ink has taken on meaning as my skin has taken on the ink. And not to wax to philisophical about tattoos, just to marvel at the negative space, and at the opportunities I have had, and will have to be a different person.

Late Night Quotations No. 8

"The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it."

-Richard Powers
Galatea 2.2

Big Time Questions No.4

Your Young Team Management stuff looks like more crazy fun rather than art. How would you classify it?

I would classify that as crazy fun. Unfortunately that project seems to be pretty much deceased. It was the product of a very specific trio of friends and a very specific environment. The spirit is still there, but it's hard to maintain separately. On the other hand, the "activities" we did (i.e. the bird bridge, the guinea pig, the raft, etc...) I would classify as art. My idea of art is anything that transcends the "everyday" art is (or should be) the anti-mundane. So in that sense, I felt that all of that stuff that we were doing was very much in that spirit. There was a huge argument in one of my art history classes at school about Duchamp's "Fountain" and as to weather or not it was art. It was surprising to me how many people were insisting that it wasn't. I pointed out that it already is, weather they like it or not, because it was being discussed a thousand miles away a hundred years later. No one argues or even talks about any old urinal, but "fountain," now that's something! Weather you think it is stupid or not is irrelevant, even though it's a mundane object, it has been made grand by Duchamp, and there's no fighting it.

Two of my favorite "art" pieces, I don't even know who preformed them, but they are magnificent enough to have been propagated to me and from me on, so they must be pretty good. The first one: This guy set up on top of a dividing wall that didn't quite reach the ceiling in a museum . He had some basic provision and maybe a pillow. He couldn't see anyone down on the floor and no one could see him, but he stayed up there for like 36 hours or something. Now many people would argue that because he had not effect on his environment, he didn't actually do anything, but that's the point. Regardless of his effects, he WAS part of that environment for that amount of time. His presence is inseparable from that particular museum for that particular amount of time. There is no way we can know if he had no effect. There is no way we can say that it's not art. It's something. Which made me remember an important designation for my definition, art is something deliberate. It can be arbitrary past a point, but there must be deliberate intent at some point in the process. A leaf that looks like Jesus (or someone else with a beard and long hair) is not art. But if you cut a leaf to look like Jesus, or you find one and sign it, or place it somewhere, I would argue that it has now, officially strayed into the realm of "art".

My other favorite piece of art is this: A man apparently went out to a particular field every day for months and months dressed in a black and white striped shirt. He would blow a whistle and throw out a bunch of bread and feed the pigeons, which would grow in number each day he did this. The months passed and it came around to the first day of football season, a man in a black and white stripped shirt walked out into the middle of the field and blew a whistle, hundreds of pigeons swarmed the field, and had to be shooed away before play can begin. I love imagining one guy sitting in the stands doubled-over laughing, and being the only person there who knew what the hell was going on. I love that he spent all that time operantly conditioning the birds to respond to the striped shirt and whistle. I think that is one of the most perfect pranks in history. Now here's another interesting angle to this story. I only heard it third hand. Who knows at this point what the actual details are, or even if it actually happened at all? And does it even really matter at this point because the story is still going, and has a life of it's own now. Now what's the difference between art and urban legend. This is the realm I like to traffic in with the "activities" we do/ did with YTM.