Wednesday, October 29, 2003

the war simmers. california burns. this poor blog is six months old and about the only thing i've managed to get out into world... there are recordings somewhere... eek... 7:42:36 PM    comment []

x. what was 'the empire of dr. bienke'? q. a shambles? let's see... 'empire of the air' was sort of new. when you went out into america their most interesting recreation was 'prairie home companion' or watching those two suits talk about the power of myth. i was a punk who saw the pistols in march of '76. i knew what the power of myth was (i knew there were serious technical problems to be encountered in the 'following of my bliss'). i wanted a mythical framework for iconography. i first started reading the lives of the saints. i was going to paint me some bathtub madonnas. but the tulipomania was upon us. i couldn't keep up with the technology. i couldn't turn the thing back into a regular book anymore than i can ever write regular books. a shambles. eventually just another failed novel. but an 'art' novel. and an attempt to get a hold of the clothespin - the springy kind - the way rauschenberg got a hold of the tire. i was sort of pleased the day i worked out the radio x clothespin connection in my head. and the empire of dr. bienke was always a project i designed with collaboration in mind so i left it intentionally full of holes. so i could build other people's interests in. some things work out and some things don't. john dos passos could still believe in the year of '33 that he might present slices of all america to the reading public. but it was clear by the time i started all unfinished. 3:45:15 PM    comment []

x. i'm sorry. i think i bumped the recorder. q. you know they used to send you with a whole other guy just to run the recorder. x. really? q. yeah. certainly in new york. it was a union thing. have you ever threaded a reel to reel recorder? one of those big ones like on the wall in 'kiss me deadly' ? x. no. why? q. i was just wondering. i was regretting things. i regret i wasn't ready for the 'zine revolution because i sort of enjoyed that. that was when there were 'alternative' coffee spaces. you get your 'zine, you get an espresso, you leer at the girl's pierced navel. feral press maybe? had brought out that book on tribalism and tattoos and stuff and that little girl's navel promised a signification it wasn't ever gonna be able to deliver... you see for me it tends to work like this: pollock is an 'action' artist where his action is mostly defined by the still from that first movie. i'm a poor boy and for me art lives in the documentation. the actual paintings are just by-products. souvenirs. somebody puts them in a room and you drop by to look at them on your way to coffee. to remind you of the movie. which has become now a wired part of your head. it has wrapped itself around your memory and when you see drips of paint on the sidewalk you think 'pollock'. like a moment of silence will make you think of cage... and one might suppose it was the realization of precisely this that drove poor pollock that very afternoon back to drink in the story as i remember it. x. you used to drink a lot. q. yes. drinking was the only part of fitting in i ever fit in. 2:22:44 PM    comment []

x. what do you regret? q. i was detoured by theory from tangibilities, and came to everything sort of late. i was past thirty when i finally began seriously to draw. and then i wasn't intending to draw very seriously. unfinished . . . 12:47:27 PM    comment []

x. art, is art made for art's sake? q. and money for god's? do you remember that song? 'the sparks' ? maybe.. if so 'the sparks' were two brothers... the 'mael' brothers may be... some shit like that.... i remember that i used to see their picture a lot in the jackie office my billy liar winter in dundee scotland because the girl in charge of the fashion pages had a thing for them. they were already old news. a college art band. those with a taste for surreality were demanding a grittier aesthetic that winter... '76... anyway... art is made to remember. but everything is art. highway planners are artists and they are given so much in the way of medium! your nineteenth century aesthetician was conciously an alternative rememberer in reaction to the whiggery made metallically manifest around him. all them choo choos. and all of them headed straight for london. x. what are you trying to remember? what do you want other people to remember? q. forgetfulness? aimless walking? aimless walking would be a good thing for many people to remember because it has become such an impossibility in a public sense in america. you can do it 'on campus', just as there you are encouraged, in a fashion, to remember. i had once marcuse's faith in the university - but i gave it up. marcuse came to america from above, as it were, and at a particular historical juncture when lots of money was flying towards education. x. marcuse came from above? q. i don't know if i've ever read the actual specifics of the marcuse history... but, yeah, from above. however poor he arrived refugee of conquered europe he was a high culture man from a homogeneous land. now he stayed in america long enough to become sort of american it is true... you know i'm working here on the reading of one and a half books and a handful of scattered articles... one of the things i would have people remember was that once it was possible to keep abreast of contemporary thought through the process of what seems to us now a very limited amount of reading... marcuse stayed long enough in america to realize that 'sex' was an essential aspect of the subversion process. outsiders always discover america to be a very sexual place. while being so officially coy. picabia's spark plug girl. 11:16:03 AM    comment []