Glob Dream

I'm in Liv's childhood house. She's a teenager in a dramatic neon get-up, weilding a brush made of wires stapled to a wedge of plywood. She snaps the brush like a whip, dripping a soapy sheet of bubbles. She hangs the suds across a grid of strings like wet music notes. She says it's a John Cage homage but I'm reminded of Ray Johnson's performance where he berrates a cardboard box with his belt. At some point I can't stop myself from eating a melted VHS that's turned into sticky sweet rubber, but it starts to coat my throat and fill my sinuses so I have to make myself throw up. Also babes with fleshy backs playing guitar solos they're desperate to finish like orgasms.

***

Today furtively combing the web for "Kathy Acker Puppet Adaptation," (I swear I didn't make this up, that I read about it somewhere!) and organizing my gallery of modernist bummer public sculpture for a slideshow presenation coming soon.
Art rule: If your sculpture sucks, make it big. If it still sucks, paint it red.

Cemetery Sketchbook

Blind contour renderings from a visit to the 7th Street cemetery in Bloomington, IN made with Nicole last year, during a brief flurry of drawing in exotic locations. To be included in Glob.

Also check out a small crop of new-ish collaborative drawings uploaded here, including highlights from the Self-Destruct Breakfast Tour, 2013.

Closer to Glob(?)/Grinding Process

Glob is scattered again(?). I left scraps on Amy's laptop. I've got looseleaf sheets in a light blue folder. Other bits are epehemeral--littered within the walls of this blog!- or spread across several journals.
I'm not sure when or how it will condense, coagulate into a comprehensible whole.
I haven't had the head for it the last few days, too hungover to connect the dots, dancing and drinking in between Soma shifts before the chemicals can catch up with me and crash. Monday I wrap myself in a neon afghan and moan on my bed...a drained day off and a milestone birthday looming uncomfortably ahead. It is a painful day to assess my progress. I sip from a jar of soymilk and earl gray the color of panty hose in a plastic egg and listen to Head Like a Hole to ease my troubled mind.

Me: I will write in my notebook till the world explodes
Ian: I will draw the NIN logo in yr margins

Permeable Membrane

Hour upon hour of the loosest of structure--huge blocks of unscheduled time-- means plenty of chances to attend to my studies.

E. Grosz in "Bodies and Cities": A body is organically/biologically/naturally "incomplete." It is indeterminate/amorphous, a series of uncoordinated potentialities which require social triggering, ordering, and long-term "administration."

J. Kristeva in "Powers of Horror": The Abject "exists on the border but doesn't respect the border." It is "ambiguous, "in-between," and "composite."

Glob has a permeable membrane.

Apocalypse Party

I wanted to get cornered at Friday night's party so I sidled up to the girl in the hat who said she was an "oversharer." I said "Tell me all your problems, spare me no details." Delineate the intricacies of your OK Cupid profile. I would have loved to listen to that kid explicate the plot of Red Dawn all night, in real time, give me a grueling play by play. I just felt desperate not to indulge myself in interiority.

There were still solo minutes spent staring at a blackened hog's head. I touched its eyelid. It was rock hard and crispy. Punks in pelts and fur hats with markered knuckles farting around a tiny fire, pumping the keg in the garage. Hesher guys with doofus glasses crouching around the coffee table. Staring at the wet black floor, at the couple making out against the wall, in the kitchen a guy slurping a long loose noodle of meat. "Dude, let's Lady-and-the-Tramp that!" Earlier the boy I was kissing with rolled off the floor mattress to go to Food Not Bombs so I was already feeling awkward.

What did that hatted girl mean? "Oversharing's" the only thing that's interesting, the only thing worth doing, making misery malleable, transforming Abjection into content, turning anger inside out. It's all adding up: Glob as an unfixed, messy mass, abjection as radical subject matter, writing the body. Everything I've read lately has discussed and/or colluded with this point: Kate Zambreno's "Heroines," Megan Milks' essay in Mildred Pierce #4 on Dodie Bellamy, Barf Manifesto, and the Bulimic text, Lies journal, "Zippermouth," "Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices."

I wrote my outline for my Glob talk ("Fake Danger") last night and it looks totally insane.

If you want a tightly organized essay on T.S. Eliot's use of Greek mythical symbolism in the Waste Land, click here to unsubscribe.

Anxiety Cut-Up (with Anna Kavan)

I'm in residence in Pittsburgh at the Cyber Punk Apocalypse, indulging my whims. Today I attempted a Burroughs-style cut-up with an existential excerpt from my journal and a selection from "Ice," by Anna Kavan, a bleak surrealist novel I'm currently reading. I took the liberty of changing some tenses and inserting punctuation.

***

Knowing that there's just no good reason, the wearer's head was uncovered: her bright hair shimmered though thoughts all march toward the same destination. She had come too far and must hurry back. By night in the dark forest, fear was the climate she lived in, and metaphysical matters- psychic energy and the 9000 days she'd been alive--hurried on as fast as she could.

If she has ever known kindness to fall down, evolutionarily unwriting once became really frightened, terrified of being overtaken like silver fire, chain breaking prevented menace. The crowding trees unnerved her, of non-control in the universe. She said eleven Hail Mary's a day--glimmering in the forest. She feels better.

For your occupation of Planet Earth, for the fjord, failed to see it, lost her bearings and self. I shouldn't be alive. It's a dangerous hole, shutting her in. It was late, after sun, or it's an experiment. It would have been different.

After completing this task, nothing will happen, which always seemed full of obsession, anxiety, and "vibes." Something else from thought patterns. I think I try to prevent myselves into black walls, set. She said if she was nervous the conjecture is that in the deepening dusk every horror could be expected.

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.)

More Fake Danger

Greg and I are in a maze. Running seems right. He's sweating whiskey and looks crazy, hay hooked into the fur of his sweater. I'm crashing into cornstalks, trying not to twist an ankle in my party shoes. We're running cuz there's no imminent danger; we have to invent it. My lungs sting. I'm puffing and want to give up. We've managed to weave ourselves into an unfamiliar place, twisted till we're dizzy.

I wanna lay in the mud laughing till the crows come pick the skin from my bones-- a dumb city kid. Leave me here.

This is why he was handed the map, I guess. I've got passivity written all over me. When my friends dunk me in the pool I just go limp. I imagine my last wet guffaws bubbling to the surface: You guys really got me this time! The corn maze just illuminates my greater flaws and our first wold woes. We make conflict where there is none, navigate insane mazes of social bureaucracy, flashing polite hand gestures to other bicyclists, alerting them to our next moves. In the vortex of my brain chemistry, manic depression is the only minotaur.

Meanwhile, back in the maze, my companion is illuminated from within. We work well together--until he gives me a shove that sends me flying far afield. Whatever, we all die alone. On my knees in the mud I make a call to my workplace, lucky to get service out here. I've got a feeling I'm going to be late.

A pod, a glob, a canal, panama

This blog has been floating like an occular speck away from the realm of the visual for awhile now, so linking to this podcast hosted by my friend Ian Matthews (of Zamboni Soundtracks (R.I.P.) and sometimes the attractive Zamboni Tumblr) just puts a finer point on it.:

EPISODEZERO

But the pendulum will swing heavily into physicality soon enough. Weightless flight through glistening strands of interwebs will be wrapped in meat and musk, clogged with intricate coils, curdled...and other qualities not associated with digital media.
As hinted to in our conversation, I look forward to birthing GLOB: A Critical Journal in Three Dimensions into the world.

GLOB will dissect facets of the embodied experience, the heavy, the tactile, and all that which can't be effectively transmitted on a blog. The smell on your hands, the dirt under your nails, in/accessibility, geography, self via space, the interior and exterior, facades, defaced.

I hope to collect submissions in various media, leaning toward the written word, (essays, poetry, short stories), but am open to and eager to work with other media.
DEADLINE: June 1, 2012.
Please send questions, submissions, etc. to my floating headspace:
extremeappearances@gmail.com
or
EKD
1418 S. Monon Bloomington IN 47403