Aim aim aim

TING ting S again. Maybe better? Worse sound. Worse visual…. BUT SO MUCH BETTER WITH THE CROWD. Who are the ting tings? Aliens. Or is it just the song? Good Vibrations meets Johnny Cash?

Imagine

Another crazy hectic week at Frost Street and the Hobbit House. We’ve been underground Trying to build the Sexy Speakeasy and also contend with the outrageous fortune of various recordings and shootings and nervous breakdowns. No rest for the wicked even on Sunday and the open mics were rare form… more later, but here’s the dance card:

Artist's Wanted

I am the son of an abstract painter and graphic designer from Basel, Switzerland and an actress/fiber artist teacher from Long Island. I have always felt that I have one foot in the old world and one in the new. In some very real way my work and life have been an attempt to make a synthesis of the dialectic that is my parents both as people and artists.

I made my first film in the fifth grade and won several national festival awards by high school. I had planned on going to NYU film school, or something when I accidentally discovered writing (a perverse combination of screenplays, Paris, and Hemmingway by way of High School English).. Writing seemed so much cheaper than film and you didn’t have to get all messed up with actors. I spent the better part of five years trying to finish my first novel, “Heroes.” Those characters still live on in some of my projects (though the novel never did get published).

At Brown U., I started to feel that writing was removing my brain from my body and when I started to paint, I fell in love with it, .even though it was a thing my father had quit quite dramatically in my youth. For me, Painting seemed to live between the act of writing and the act of filmmaking and maybe even the act of acting, or at least dancing. It seemed like neutral territory… like Switzerland.

I have spent the better part of the new century trying to make these phases of my life into something of a coherent artistic practice… a new sort of multimedia authorship. I mean to say I want to tell stories. I have managed to get several great platforms in which to experiment: It In Space So Ho, IT IN place (A.I.R at the Institute for the Future of the Book), A.I.R. 17 Frost Street Space. But after spring I am homeless. My dog died, my woman threw me out. It sounds like a joke, or a country song, but

Which Starts Out As A Kiss….

I was sitting on the toilet yesterday trying to pass something that didn’t feel like excrement so much as an angry snarling black dog – a demon wolf, or a great angry sadness called despair. I reached in back of me for the scroll off paper on the tank and found instead The Oultaw Bible of American Poetry. I opened it up to this Jim Carrol poem for Kurt Cobain. Rather than read it, I washed myself and went into the Hobbit House had Dave crank up the P.A. and read the poem aloud to Natalie and Foxy Lady. So what you hear is the first time I ever read this poem. Forgive me the screw ups… I’m going to try to read it again at open mics on Sunday… and I may keep changing this as the Zipperhead animations come on line. This is only a mash up test.

reOPEN mic

Dave is so dragged out from construction and has so much back logged video to get up that he threw in the towel as far as shooting Sundays Open Mics go… SO thinking that the first real Open Mic of 2010 might be a thing we would want to have a record of, I took the opportunity to bust the whole thing up to HD and shot with my flip and HV-30 a bit of each show… Sound is wonky and the whole thing is raw, but I’m sort of raw and wonky too! So F.U. if you don’t dig it and Shout out to Ms. Thing for the lovely glass to look through….it does make the world look rosy.

In My Life

It is a New Year’s Tradition to have a fabulous bottle of wine with the Cohen’s. We ate, drank, sang, drew and generally played around while eating kalbi, cheese and dried fruit, while talking of future plans. That morning I had danced to the same song as was in this video I made with jacob in warmer times and younger years:
Uncle Alex And The Muse

My New Year’s resolution is to literally dance my ass off… but I still like to eat well. Thanks Madame Choi, wherever you are. The drawing is a portrait of Yours Truly by nephew Jacob Cohen.