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Years
No Direction Home 36/36
Its been an interesting year from a personal perspective as it relates to interactions with the real world and the meaning I derive from my interactions within it. I’ve got to try my hand at a number of things in the contexts of business management, steel based manufacturing, labor intensive production, art promotion and now some time running a local gallery as a boutique business.
What I’ve already realized is that our culture values art fairly low, well below heat, food, clothing, dental care, and so on. All things considered, its valuation is probably about where it needs to be. The romantic flights of fancy in our youth about what art owes society and what society owes the artist are an inside joke when they are remembered at all.
Making it is about the only part I enjoy, getting it somewhere is a ginormous pain in the ass. For instance, this summer I’m leaving behind a pile of paintings on old slate shingles that could probably each get about $5-10 at a yard sale and a small pile of metal sculptures. At this point, after some hands on gallery selling and self promotional experience, I’ve realized that just leaving them in a pile somewhere is the easiest, hasslest free way of dealing with it. They might even do something useful someday like mend a leaky roof.
The only thing I’ll make an attempt at monetizing in the future is turning some of the visual crap I make into a print image service at foliotwist or redbubble. Any other way takes up too much time given that I’m also trying to take designing and implementing a fluid dynamic water system for a permaculture farm in Thailand and help manage my brother’s manufacturing business.
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End of Broadcast (35 of 36)
… a bite to eat, I returned to find that tumblr ate half the text and left a half digested word at the end of the post. Thanks to Tumblr, I now know ‘how will the could end.’
Long story short, Tumblr sucks for text and I like to write. So, if you like the art, follow me as I take the same old programming to a new broadcast channel.
That is the conclusion of the Shotwell Art Project, I am resuming art blogging at www.AmericanCrackpot.blogspot.com
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Rewind (34 of 36)
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Afterthoughts (33 of 36)
(* If you are watching ‘No Direction Home’, click ‘new’ to see deleted footage and extras.)
May 9, 2012
I’m sort of a pain in the ass now. I let all my vehicular paperwork lapse, intentionally so as not to pay the intermedium fees for maintenance on a non-working asset, but now the others were helping pay those fees as I cruise around scrambling after paperwork. The task is made immeasurably harder by the fact that I lost my California license somewhere south.
My sister was joking about the DMV and how unhelpful they are. I have a situation that would shorten this process from weeks to days if the DMV here were willing to call one there. Earlier, I got a swift rebuttal at the suggestion. I get the fix though, with a job like that, every other person has their paperwork in a half-assed mess, and the last time you tried to help, you ended up talking to some addled mind who seemed to know less about their information than you, and thanked you by hollering at you and hounding you for more help later.
The neighbor situation here is equally dire. The poor woman is a cry for help next door. You can see it as soon as you see him, one of those things. It puts out an uncomfortable vibe to live next to that. Some things seem so hard that is must be impossible to do alone, but that’s precisely why they seem that hard, its only possible to do them alone. Just because some impossible things are only possible if done by oneself, it does not follow that all impossible things are… so don’t go trying to fly solo. I have to hope she gets out of there because no one else who needs to can. Really, why should I even care? But I do.
At least I got my taxes done, late for the first time. That one caused the most looks of alarm, like for just a moment the thought of being late without filing a 1040 extension before the extension deadline would invite an armed raid crossed their minds. I didn’t ever bother to actually register my company, which I could have written off at least several hundred dollars of expenses on. Have some pride, man. I’d rather wait until that little venture pays before investing any resources into making it “official”, or I might end up with an on the record lifelong business that carries zero assets, zero growth, zero loss and zero revenue for its duration. An epitath.
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(* If you are watching No Direction Home, skip the preview by clicking ‘newer’)
(32 of 36)
That’s reassuring.
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The day after Mark from accounting had told Ken about Gene S. Dio, he was gone. His personal belongings, pictures of his kids, dog, a signed picture by the former Chicago Bears mini-legend Refridgerator Perry, etc. remained in his cubicle for a week, like a shrine. Ken had at first wondered why Mark didn’t get his things. Had the cat and mouse game he’d played broken him completely? Then it dawned on him, they locked Mark out. They had bumped his card out of the system and Mark couldn’t get past security, that’s how they got rid of him. Eventually a janitor came by and cleaned the desk out wholesale, dumping everything in a garbage bin, including the paper work books that he signed an agreement with the company that stated everything written or drawn in the books were their intellectual property.
The first week after Ken accepted the mantle of Gene S. Dio, he began messing with things. Cautiously, at first. He would later say that he started small and grew into the role.
Ken figured the line between earnest and ironic was somewhere around 18 points. He felt bold when he went all the way to 26, then bolded the text for good measure.
"You’re headed the right way!" blared his ad copy for the commercial bank. Ken couldn’t remember a single instance in life when he had to be screamed at that he was going the right way. He usually got screamed at when he did something dumb like drive the wrong way down a one way street. “No way this gets by the quality control checkers,” Ken giggled to himself.
"Did you see that bank copy!?", he whispered to Janet at lunch. Dio had struck again! Ken daydreamed about a course of action that might get Mark’s job back by invalidating the unstated premise of his dismissal, even thought about emailing Mark, but then he remembered that Mark seemed, well, not happy nor relieved, but relaxed about the outcome.
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No Direction Home Script (31 of 36)
“The videos from Decoded are at the beginning of each chapter—a feature I like because they don’t interrupt the flow of reading. In the videos, Jay-Z sits at a desk and tells us that rap is poetry. It’s nice to see him step out from behind a persona…” -David Byrne
No Direction Home is an existentialist travelogue performance art piece whose goofy premise could only work within the bizarre social context of the internet. A lot of people I know wanted me to give updates about what I was doing in Thailand and elsewhere, an impossible request, and NDH is a fulfillment of that request.
I got the idea after reading something David Byrne, former frontman of The Talking Heads wrote on his blog about Jay-Z’s digital media book. In the book, Jay-Z appears on video and talks about his work. Byrne commented that it was nice to see Jay-Z come out from behind a persona. Very interesting, the idea that Jay-Z appearing in a video in the context of selling a book about his music is not a persona seemed… questionable. Moreover, the notion that Byrne himself, a working artist who uses his web blog as part of his artistic endeavors, was not behind a persona as he wrote his entry also seemed suspect.
The opening page at 846Route14 is supposed to give the feel of flipping through channels, the first image is a cable tv menu with the name of the program. “Whats on the news today?” -click. As you scroll down, you see the title image, as well as a movie looking review and synopsis. From there it becomes a choose your own multimedia ad venture story. This is a choose your own social media adventure travelogue; you can get the art, fiction, movie, pictures, in whatever dose you want.
If you click ‘Replay Movie’, meaning replay the story, it does not refresh the page but takes you to the second scene in the movie, you are in the actual movie and in control of your experience. (What do you think of the art and sequential narrative?)
There are choose your own adventure style instructions at Shotwell (If you are watching no direction home, do this…). As you click next through the images by clicking next, you are seeing a low frame rate narrative movie. It is a silent movie with a very low frame count and you have to turn the pictures, but its a movie if you can accept the premise that you are seeing a visual narrative as portrayed by actors (including myself.)
My contention is that we are never being real or authentic, we are all actors playing to scripts in our heads. We are never out from behind a persona, because that is all there is, even in our most personal dialogue. To exist within a narrative is to adopt a persona. A persona is neither a good nor bad thing, it is a thing.
My actual experience as a person is represented in the artifacts left behind by my various lived in personas, writer, artist, photographer, friend, husband, etc. It was up to me, the person, to stitch them together into a coherent personal narrative. My fictional premise is that they together portray the reality of my life as I remember experiencing it in my various guises or roles that I play in daily life.
However, it is also important to keep in mind that all of these things are helpful for memory and experience, but that they can ultimately all be open to interpretation as can whatever lessons one may have drawn from those experiences that were derived from previous interpretations. We often revise our memories, details about out experiences become more or less important over time depending on how they continue to matter to us. When we reinterpret the lessons we learned from those experiences as we also revise our personal stories within those experiences, then we are maturing.
I felt squeemish about moving to Thailand when someone expressed their support for the notion that it was some journey or pilgrimmage (someone used that word). The calculus was very simple at one end, my wife’s family were half way around the world as were mine, I figured that I could just as well be a stranger in a strange land there as here, but she could be closer to her family. I asked her about it, she said yes, so I figured out a way to get myself to go and give it a shot. The point is, it has nothing to do with any sense of journey or ‘finding oneself’ and all that noise, but its kind of hard to shoot that bullshit down with an easy remark that doesn’t sound flippant or disrespectful to someone just trying to be sympathetic and supportive for presupposed reasons. If you interpret travel to be a meaningful, symbolic experience then I get it, but it doesn’t objectively matter whether you are going camping nearby or visiting some other place of the world, what matters is what you are doing day to day. If I wasn’t making the art I made on this trip, it would have been something else and of a different character, but really what’s the difference - its all the same old shit.
Post script
The entire project is compromised by my non-fiction writing. I never read fiction and I’ve never thought much of writing fiction. It seems like a lot of work for very little aesthetic reward. That is no excuse, I may try something like this again, or more likely, not put a written piece of the work at the heart of an entire project. I made a lot of rookie mistakes, grammatical issues related to over use of pronouns and adverbs that I am going to cull through. That is not an excuse, but an up front evaluation of the entire slideshow project. Without quality product to anchor something like this, the entire piece is compromised. I acknowledge that, but I’m working on my basic writing ability. God I love my life.
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* That’s reassuring. (30 of 36)
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No Direction Home (29 of 36)
* For those following the movie No Direction Home, continue the story at www.846Route14.blogspot.com
This is the cover for the story I was working on. I blew it all out in rough sketch in the first few days we were here, then I had to take a few passes at revision to beat it into shape. It was real rough, and still is, but I wanted it to read like a movie, and a movie only gives you so much information.
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(Dedicated to) King and Queen of Hearts (28 of 36)
I needed something for this story I was writing called No Direction Home. I couldn’t think of a painting I had that could fit as a header for one of the chapters. I shot out of bed, drew it out in ink and painted it up. It was exactly what I was looking for without being overtly related to the written material. The carpet is directly from the Khmer Ruins geometry I was just working on.
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Spirit House (27 of 36)
Wanted to take the rough wash to an end point, sort of like putting the line drawing - transparent lens all the way out of focus by intent.
Art available for donation, sale, or interesting trades.
Contact me at www.mccro8@gmail.com.
I have an online book project called Big Dada too.
www.conepost.blogspot.com
