Casual Walk Documentation

 

Fantastik Exit, Sekhmet Shower, Michief Night

Witch Tree, LA Turrets, Swap Top

Cactus Joe's, Graffiti Discourse, LV Bunting

Swap Chandeliers, Liberace Pole, Curb Music 

From walks around Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Indianapolis, 2019-2020.

Some Sources Sighted

Putting all my cards on the table here, offering up some of the elements that informed my collages, all found hidden in public in Bloomington, IN.


Chairhouse


Star Search


House Broken


Acoustic Views


Frosted Friends


Stylin'


Profilin'

Hopeful Homosexuality

B-Line, Bloomington, IN

Limp

I'm getting lost less, or at least in different places. Feeling the stab of frustration in my gut of failed intuition; looking over the edge of something, seeing the totally unfamiliar- a cliff covered with bramble where I thought there'd be a skyscraper.
The route to Oakland isn't fun underdog, it's just abandoned and blighted. Boarded up storefronts of social services, crumbling concrete steps running into the hills. Just me on the streets.
I'm lonely and getting tired of exteriors. I've seen enough of the ice cream shop with the window display of paper houses. I wish the boy from the bakery with the truck that smells like cake and plays T. Rex would give me a ride somewhere.
Grating vagrancy. Sweat collects in the cuffs of my gray down coat, that Ian says looks like the one Karen Carpenter died in. I piss by the dumpster in the Strip District. The alley smells like fish. Behind me all the windows are black.

Green Glaze

Sick and sweet in the city. Wandering, words winding in on themselves, collapsed creative veins. Stop at a corned beef restaurant with mirrored walls and gold garlands reflecting my ratty hair. Wood studded with head shots of C-List celebrities. Morgan Fairchild's looping scrawl. Slutty handwriting. Ladies in green fringe with whiskey sours.
I run into Stephanie and Gunner going to watch the ice skaters. A glass castle on Market Street and trees clad in black leather holsters. Fake snow like the dry flakes on my donut. We pick through the frosting-smeared trash and get sticky hands.
Maybe I'll steal the plastic peace sign earrings at the cheap corner boutique, buy a pint of pissy bear. Green glass, cloudy piss. Sit at the Oyster House on the long leather booths. Directionless, I turn to absurdity.

Femme Symbols in Iron City

Creepy femme imagery floats through the streets of Pittsburgh like a groovy pink raincloud. BEHOLD! a cabinet of uncanny terrors!

-Disembodied ballerina body parts Hans Bellmer could get into...

-Ghostly hands with ectoplasmic manicures and lousy roses...

-Ceramic flocks of mannequin heads...

And I'm happy to report that the bloody babe performance art scene is alive and well here.

Not pictured:

-Girls in lingerie giving strawberry milk massages
-Bearded ladies burning sage and reading tarot
-A small pile of underpants expropriated from the Warhol Museum

But I'm definitely missing the inimitable women (and not-men) of Bloomington.

Walking Experiment #1

Brad asked me what my New Years resolution was going to be. I paused, considered it. "Drink less," I said. "Exercise every day."
"I hate that," he exclaimed. "Why don't people do more of something they like in the new year? Or stop doing something they hate? Like say 'this year I'm not going to wait in any lines.'"

The Instant Gratification Walk can sometimes be the Rigorous Self-Denial Walk. For a day (or more...a year??), avoid waiting in lines, no matter what. This may translate to shopping at "off hours"...odd hours, to patronizing otherwise unappealing or second string establishments. It may require hastily exiting buildings, or dropping out of ongoing activities.

Have you heard "Nights in White Satin" at 2AM at your local grocery store? As you navigated your shopping cart down the empty aisles, stocking up on cans of coconut milk and baby corn? It feels enormous, like an otherworldy opera, and you're the tragic star.

I can not recommend this experiment if your imminent plans require airline travel or voter registration. If your plans involve bus travel, you will likely be doing yourself a favor by avoiding the experience altogether. It may preclude interactions with any and all forms of bureaucracy. But those can probably wait till next year.
And bear in mind, there are always alternatives and there are always loop holes.

(Thanks to an unknown prop maker at Artist Image Resource in Pittsburgh for the photo op)

Abject Snacks

I get a $2 eggroll and sit outside with it somewhere in the strip. As I peel back the silver wrapper around it the tinfoil seems to hiss:
"Kill yourself."

I eat the thing.
Now its evil is inside me.

I wander around the oriental grocery. A display of flocked orange ponies flick their feathery eyelashes away. But the vacant plastic face of a five foot Hello Kitty meets me head on and whispers:
"You should be dead."

I scan my brain, rerunning my malformed morning routine. Did i take my medication today? How long has it been since I popped one of those tiny chalky chunks out of its foil-backed case?

The medication came a month overdue and in sketchy packaging, covered with a million stamps. The mailman explained that en route from India, my name had been erroneously written in the area reserved for a return address. As he handed it to me, I made a mental list of potential enemies, half-expecting to find a disembodied finger wrapped inside. I could be the butt of some horrible prank. I was relieve to find the drugs factory-sealed, probably not containing anthrax.

The root of my unhappiness is chemical, but it's definitely exacerbated by the material world. The way I keep spending money makes me hate myself.

But Abject Snacks will make me rich. Abject Snacks will be the name of my anti-foodie food blog. There, I'll document the over-salted, hot sauce drenched concoctions that happen at the end of most of my nights. I'll sell a series of cookbooks enumerating the ill-begotten secret ingredients that make the meals. I'll plaster it with filtered pix of cold fries and curry sauce from the refrigerator's depths. Sprouted grain toast from the roommate's secret stash. A squiggle of gourmet mustard.

Abject Snacks will make my problems go away.

McBarfer's Park

What I said in my letter to Matt...is trumped by the sentiment in my text to Ian: "Today Pittsburgh smells like pee and broken stuff."
I've been walking between garbage bars, intermittenly getting very fucking lost. Now so fucked up from a five mile walk that my legs wobble. Feeling like a bruised banana. I ate a cupcake I found in a smashed up box at a bus stop.
I might be dying.
What I said to Matt was that this trip might mark my unmaking. I start out as a hip but poor tourist--buying a beer here, a beer there--but wind up fucking destitute, wrapped in a nest of quilts, leaves knotted in my hair, loitering at the library indefinitely.
My mind is getting weird. I'm responding with interest to catcalls. A creepy hook-up can't be far around the corner.
I'm not sure if I believe in vibes, but I bet if I'm giving any off...that they're bad.
This depressive spike might be a chemical pendulum swing from yesterday's pot brownie. Wherein I merely lay crumpled on a stranger's couch at 3 am, mind racing, so horny I wanted to throw up.
If you believe in ghosts, pray for me.
If you're more practical, send mail and/or money:

EKD
1200 Boyle Street
Pittsburgh PA 15212.

Liquid Compass (WIP)

My joke at work is to stonily insist that I not be addressed with metaphors.

Only staggering literality for me, thank you! I've already asked you once nicely.

But in actuality I can't ignore certain symbols.

The last time he and I hang out is near the causey way at Lake Monroe, while exploring an abandoned waterslide; in a liquid, transitional space, now choked with foliage. That day, we trip through the woods, examining the remains of the Zoom Flume. I slip down the fiberglass incline and land with my boots planted in a leaf-clogged depository.

We wander around a now-rotted geodesic dome home overlooking the lake, festooned with shitty spraypaint. It's another unabashed bummer symbol, this broken utopian structure, bleakly scrawled with Juggalo bon mots. In a somewhat accusatory tone, he asks me How's my eyesight? How bout my internal compass? And has this been an average week for me?

He's referring to heavy drinking in Halloween costumes. This after I'd escorted him through his first drunken hook-up. Am I tugging this kid down a mucky ravine?

It is a relief, in a way, that he is leaving, before he finds out that I am not always nice. He's already learned today that I can not climb a tree. This hasn't been an average week; I haven't picked up a pen. I want to draw with people, to strike a balance between art making and social, to channel a solid engagement with something bigger and longer than myself. But part of me is required to court oblivion, occasionally in costume. Part of me invites in the unwelcome guest, the liquid variable, the destabilizing factor to flood where boredom might root.


(Work in progress, possibly to appear as a longer piece in the print edition of Glob, my anti-blog, forthcoming in early 2013.)

Travel Log

Considering renaming my blog.

Considering festooning my mental landscape with hand-routered sentiments from the hills of Indiana.

Kitsch is a positive word in some parts.

Good wood finds are rare.

POOL

I peed here.

Gainful Employment Dreamscape

Job description:
"Should be comfortable handling meat, post-consumer waste, light lifting. Love of stains and being damp a must (Thanks William)! You supply uniform. Late hours preferred."
Pictures and it never happened.

Tech Grumbles: New blogger format smooshes everything around me.
Also, it took a lot navigating technological red tape just to publish this post which kinda made me interested in class war. I've cracked yr code, IU computer labs! Free the information!

COMPOSER

John Collins McCormick is a multi-talented knucklehead and friend who makes tightly controlled compostions with simple materials in various visual mediums.

His drawing zine is available from Friends and Relatives Records.

He's interviewing me about being a "Woman in Noise Music" for Matthew Himes forthcoming magazine "Chortler." I am just relieved to be included. Results will be posted in the near future.

Summer Smilers

It's fall now.

Frost is on the pumpkin and it's thyme for typin.

But I'm still harvesting a couple summer smells.

***
Sig transit gloria.
Blog reveille.

BE HERE NOW

be here blur


end of the rainbow

Fantasy Fashions

A day of moderate weather calls for fashions designed by 17-year old girls.





Fuck Boris Vallejo, the young mystery babes behind these are my fantasy art heroes.

Feather Float

(Text by Austin Reavis of Idldriv)




Bunch of dumb artists made a mess at the Flower Factory. Or did we make a drawing??

Fair Play

Cellphone transmissions from the Indiana State Fair



The Bear Affair


Lambotard by American Apparel


Typography 101


Because they didn't know how to airbrush Black Cathy.

Train Trax/Trapper Keepers

Spring Break, Greencastle IN

Practice makes PerfectS