dream – IT IN Place

Where Is My Mind?

alex — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:49:12 +0000

What’s he thinking? I had a whole conception of it around four something in the morning when the birds start to sing, but it’s all gone now. You tell me. The song for the night was Where Is My Mind?

Black Shirts

alex — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 16:21:46 +0000

drawing lots of maps towards Hub these days. Here’s one from a few months ago actually. I have a strange ability to be working on things long before I know I’m working on them. Also I had a nightmare last night.

I had a strange and powerful dream last night. I was visiting friends in the North West (maybe even Alaska?). It was in some America of the future, a realm where the war on terrorism had become domestic and the Feds were everywhere in their black uniforms. I remarked to my hippy type pothead North Western friends about how strange it was that the feds would choose a uniform that so completely quoted Italian Fascism. They didn’t get the black shirt reference and we all went out to eat and drink some spectacular beer: a lot of laughter and joy and little talk about the war. Later I was walking through the snow filled streets when a strange vehicle hovered out of the sky and landed in front of me. Two Feds got off and started casually talking to me. I asked them about the machine. They said it was a snowmobile. I said, Snowmobiles can’t fly. They assured me it was a snowmobile. They asked me if I always walk in the middle of the street. I said, no, but the snow hadn’t been cleared from the sidewalk (if there was one) and I was just trying to get back to my friends’ house and that I was visiting from New York. They wrote me a two hundred dollar ticket for walking in the street, but they expected immediate payment in cash or credit card. I told them I didn’t have that kind of money on me and that I don’t have a credit card.

They hand cuffed me and took me off to the station. I was interrogated for a long time by a senior Fed who had a sort of Judge Wapner / Dick Vandyke kind of charm. We talked about the Twin Towers falling and what New York was like at the beginning of the war. We mentioned the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. We laughed. We commiserated. I didn’t mention the rebels in the hills, or the mortar attacks that I’d heard several times while visiting. I explained again that I was an artist out here for a show and staying with friends and didn’t have two hundred dollars and couldn’t afford a lawyer (I didn’t want to scare my now elderly mother and try to get a hold of hers’…. even though I knew that one good call from Msrs Stein would have squashed this thing that was clearly a form of extortionâ€¦the black shirts were raising money to keep fighting in the hills through illegal taxation: parking tickets, speeding tickets, trash ticketsâ€¦. Even tickets for walking down the street). He said, “You say you are an artist? But I look at you and I see crummy clothes. Cheap, dirty shoes. A beard. Long Hair. You aren’t an artist. You’re a bum. I don’t like bums. I put bums in jail.”

With that, the arresting officers grabbed me by my arms and hoisted me up into the air. I started screaming in panic (I knew that falling into a Federal jail was much harder than getting out: the Federal jails had all been gitmoized). I screamed, “Put me down! Let me stand up. Up Up Up. I just want to stand up and be free for two more seconds. You can take me to jail right after. Just let me be free again! I want to be free again!”

I awoke in a panic.

Sleeping Persona

alex — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 20:37:27 +0000

I lay in bed dreaming up dialog for the talking head animation and dozing off and visiting with those long dead. At least in that sense, people never really die all the way.

To Sleep. Perchance to Dream

alex — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 19:25:28 +0000

Slept the sleep of angels, or devils, or I don’t know what. No dreams on Friday, or Saturday, but this morning I played an elaborate image organ of my own unconscious construction. It seemed to mash up Hip Hop, punk, and classical music into some strange animated sound and image. Most Def by way of Beethoven… it was fun all morning as I came in and out of sleep.

Hanging Myself

alex — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 03:52:25 +0000

Not funny really in this time of Infinite Jests, but maybe it is really exactly how I feel. I mean in the sense of eternal return, or Metampsychosis, or however you spell it and whatever Joyce was talking about…. I’m hanging the show. I feel like a worker… in the Marxist sense of that word: working on the ladders with the back into it. I mean to say that hanging a book is a physical act. I’ve been training for it like a boxer at the gym.. but my fucking thumbs are still weak for the push pins and the map pins and the pins and needles and needles and pins…..feel like a carpenter… feel like Christ crucified… stigmata on my thumb. LOL. music here is some odd Brian Wilson post Smile mid mad period song. Fucking lovely and perfect fit for my raw time lapse. More to come…

Fetal Position

alex — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:27:24 +0000

We are all hanging out by the evening blue pool under the flower blooming trees when the planes appear over head. At first I can’t tell the explosions from the blooming trees. It’s all so colorful and the slow silver shine of the planes caught in the search lights.

Cough Cough In

alex — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 21:29:07 +0000

I awoke in the middle of night. The dog was coughing; that phlegmatic cancer cough of hers and it made me open my eyes and I coughed too in the blur of a heavy breeze moving the trees blue the light through the window in such a wind shadow way that I saw it as a ghostly figure floating over the bed and I became terrified that it was death coming after us – that the we, or she were coughing towards the coffin. It took a while to fix my eyes.

Sleeping In

alex — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 03:21:15 +0000

We are all on the beach at night when they start setting off the ordinance. Who knows where they got a hold of it, but they are far enough off shore that it is hard to see the great plumes of water rising into the air – fifty? a hundred feet? It reads as smoke or clouds, but then there is the roar as the towers of water collapse and seem to walk towards us on the beach like gray giants, lumbering out of the ocean and the dark. It’s marvelous and haunting until they start shooting the ordinance closer and closer into the waves and the towers of water react randomly; seeming to skit around our heads like giant snakes, bursting forth at impossible angles and pouring down and we panic. I dive into the sea and swim over to the harbor police and tell them they have a problem: very well armed lunatics, having way too much fun for a beach party.

Under The Back Seat

alex — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:26:17 +0000

I am driving around with my hand searching in the back seat of the car. I slide my hand below the seat and feel something smooth and warm and I am wondering if it is flesh, or leatherette. I feel around the area untill my finger touches lips and the mouth opens and tries to bite off my finger.

Thrown from the Dream Throne

alex — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 16:40:49 +0000

I had more elaborate dreams last night, but in the morning they escape me. Here’s the end of yesterday’s.

A Night Out With The Whores

alex — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:01:37 +0000

The pretty young one has the idea first, but the ugly and the old and the plain all go along with it. “Let’s have a dinner party,” she says. “Just a few friends at a restaurant some place downtown; away from the little bar and all the beds.” She’s so cute as she says it and so full of naive vitality that it convinces the whole bitter group and they set about making lists and reservations and raiding closets to find the right outfit; something classy, something that doesn’t scream “Whore!”

I get talked into going. I don’t know why. I never could afford the brothel, but I know the pretty young one from when she was an “art student” and I had wanted her then and I suppose I still want her now, or I’m at least fascinated that she has capitalized on what I felt was MY desire. I had wanted her. Now everyone wants her. She’s the star of the whole whore house and it makes me feel strange. Do I have common taste, or was I simply ahead of my time? It’s like a song you love until it becomes a hit and then everyone likes it and you pretend you never liked that song but still you tap your toes when you hear it.

She had on a purple short shorts number when I saw her and she made the night sound like an erotic dream. I told the wife I had some dumb thing to do at the gallery and she barely listened because she had some dumb thing to do with her idiot friends and I wasn’t even invited and it pissed me off to the point where I nearly announced: “I’m off to dinner with the whores. Don’t wait up!”

I smiled to myself and beat it down to the back room of the restaurant where some of the girls were setting up decorations; streamers like it was a child’s birthday and I take a seat next to the large brunette with the curly hair and she jabbers away asking me all sorts of questions about what I do and how are the paintings coming along and frankly I feel at a loss. It puts all the onus on me and I can’t turn the conversation around because I know what she does and I can’t very well ask her how’s the fellatio going and how are the johns coming…..along. At least I can’t sober. I order a whiskey and slip out of excitement into irritation.

Not only my mind, but my bowels. I Never should’ve had Indian food for lunch. Gurggle gurggle. Then the “boyfriends” arrive. They wear little leather jackets like toughs do in the movies and they sport elaborate, ugly tattoos and speak in dees dem and doze. I can’t imagine what the hell any of us will have to talk about all night. Why had I agreed to come? SHE isn’t even here yet. I drink down the whiskey and resolve to get drunk when my stomach constricts and I quickly run off to the toilet.

A whole gaggle of men and women fall out of restroom door, laughing. “Now this is interesting,” I think. “Some sort of cocaine orgy right here in the bathroom.” Pity I missed all the fun. Pity I’m about to shit myself and I rush through the door only to find that It’s one of those gender neutral restrooms they have now, with one common sink area and separate stalls for both men and women. No orgy, no cocaine, just too cheap to put in separate bathrooms. They’ve spent the money instead on an elaborate decor where you have to climb a sort of pyramid of box shapes to get to the toilet. It’s way up there near the ceiling. It looks wonderful, but not when you actually need to crap. It’s a god damned obstacle. I get to the top and drop trow and let out a symphony of shit just as I hear HER laugh down by the sinks. Suddenly I realize that this will not be a night of erotic heights, but rather an evening of humiliation and embarrassment… but still I love her laughter. It makes me nostalgic for the days when I thought that I alone wanted her that she was my own mystery; back when I thought I loved her, back before I was a hack and she was a whore. Then the whole room starts moving, like a train leaving the station and I’m clinging to the toilet; terrified that I’ll be the thrown from the throne and topple down the pyramid of useless decor, shitting myself at her boot clad feet. Then I wake up.

Conversations With Myself

alex — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:20:24 +0000

Recently, I’ve had cause to want to point out the documentary bits out of my last couple of shows in Portland and New York. They were extruded onto the blog in bits and pieces several months back. I thought it might be nice to have them all together in one entry so that I could just forward that link to people. It becomes something like a four channel video piece if you can play them all at the same time, or a story if you play them in order. The box gif is new.

Tales of Brave Horsecookies

alex — Fri, 30 May 2008 18:46:42 +0000

When I finally get back to my loft, I find an enormous box at the foot of the stairs. It is addressed to me and of course the elevator can’t be found. I wrestle the thing up several flights and I feel like Buster Keaton, when I notice someone filming my progress. My whole building has been invaded by a company of film players. The actors are all over the building pretending that they live there. They are even pretending to live in my studio where I push the box and ask someone what’s going on. The Camera then comes through the corridors and up the stairs in one long continuous shot as the drama unfolds in real time. There are intimate acts and gunshots and people I know and people I don’t and everywhere is the set, everyone are the players. Reality and fiction are completely blurred and I end up with a fairly large scene in the movie. Apparently the climax of the picture is a big wedding party on the outskirts of town and the whole company and I are loaded up into coach buses and taken off to the location/wedding/reception. When we get there it looks like an Italy I know from the movies of the early sixties: a few new modern housing blocks in a field of brick rubble and tall grass. They’ve set up a tent and strings of holiday lights and a fashionable band that I don’t know, but I think I’ve heard of starts to play and we all eat and drink and dance in the intermittent showers that cast a cinematic sheen on all the edges of brick. I am no longer sure if I’m an actor, or a person; did someone get married, or make a film… anyway it’s a pretty good party.

Teach Reach

alex — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:14:05 +0000

I am on the campus of a modern university; so modern in fact, that it has a satellite campus…literally. They have built an enormous space station that serves as a quiet library to study in, etc. I’ve gotten it into my head to spend the night up there and watch one of the Star Wars films. When I get to the quadrangle with the space elevator, I find a pavilion displaying an exact replica of a soviet era atomic bomb. It’s all there, but the plutonium. I’m curious to see this once top secret object. An artist/engineer has set up an elaborate machine to render the bomb in various shades of molten silver. The silver is applied by a complex robotic arm with an old flibert head paint brush clamped to the end of it. I start talking to the artist and he convinces me to go get my video camera and document the process of painting the atom bomb in shades of silver and tarnish. As I head back to my room, a terrific storm blows up and all the students scramble. I take my shoes off and walk home in the puddles. I won’t take my camera out in the rain and I’m certainly not riding up to space in eighty mph winds. I’ll just watch Star Wars at home, or better yet get blown around the campus and wade in the puddles.

From a Whimper to a Scream

alex — Fri, 16 May 2008 19:02:17 +0000

The killer is beneath me – maybe coming through the floor, maybe the mattress. I am being tossed around like a coin and the killer’s hands keep coming at me and I fend them off until I scream at the top of my lungs and awake. She says, “What was that strange noise you made?” and she imitates it and it sounds like a little blurp… a whimper… a small animal in distress, or as she puts it: “a little girl.”

“A Monster,” I say, still too asleep to explain that it’s a serial killer with a whole back story that is already fading in my consciousness. She starts to laugh at me and mock my mouse like sound that made it all the way from the terror of my unconscious to the comfort my waking bed… albeit without the volume. Hidden in that little whimper somewhere is the all the horror of life and death… or someone else’s idea of a joke.

Istanbullshit

alex — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:22:01 +0000

Somewhere in Istanbul there is a wall around the ancient part of the city. The houses in the city were made of wood and have all rotted away. I suppose it was dry rot as Istanbul looks like the desert and the thing of it is that with out all the little wood houses against the ancient stone walls, the walls have started to lean perilously inward. We are part of a group that go to see the walls before they fall. I think how funny it is to care about the walls, when the city they once protected has already turned to dry rot. I invent a cocktail with milk and some strange exotic yellow liquor. You pour the liquor into the milk and it just gathers in the center of the milk like the yolk of an egg. I call the drink a Humpty Dumpty in honor of the walls of Istanbul.

Campus Taurus

alex — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:40:01 +0000

I am visiting the campus of some university and I go to the art department, which is in a large modern building. The ground floor is a well lighted, airy, white wall gallery. It is full of people coming and going to classes and studios upstairs. As an art show, someone has put an enormous real live black bull in the lobby. I know its art because it’s dressed in a well tailored orange suit. Someone asks me if I’d like to ride the bull. It’s very tame I’m told, but when I get on it of course starts bucking all around the lobby. Everyone scatters and I dismount. They apologize and ask me if I’d like to join a tour of the campus. I say, “I’ve already joined a taurus of the kick ass” No one thinks it’s that funny, but I’m self amused and I go walk my dog around the park-like university. I turn my head for a minute and she gets off leash and I run around for hours looking for the old dog. Seems there is a lake in the center of things and she’s gone swimming.

Camera Club

alex — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 16:00:08 +0000

I’m at a meet up of Flickr, or Vimeo types: camera people. We are running around some strange, beautiful city shooting pictures and films and video. I use a strange digital camera with a pencil long lens shaft. It’s fairly small, but you can shoot thousands of pictures.

Ace of Hearts

alex — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 17:25:07 +0000

I carry a stack of portraits of every man my woman has been with before me. Someone sees the pictures and wants to buy them which puts me in a quandary. I was planning to burn them.

In Hospital

alex — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 16:22:41 +0000

I am allowed to use the studio of a collector’s son who has gone off to Berlin. The studio is a two room cottage behind a hospital. It has a good wall for painting on, but I spend a day just being quiet in the space. Later I find all the drawings the collector ever bought from me in a stack in the closet mixed up with some pages of notes and sketches from the kid in Berlin.

Cathedral Eyes

alex — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 19:21:09 +0000

I go to a cathedral to sketch the architecture and I notice a large portrait of the Virgin Mary done in a contemporary style. The background is all black and the face is abstract and colorful with eyes made from LCD display and they change colors and shape and become video, etc. I notice I’m alone in the church and overcome by an urge, I steal the Madonna off the wall and walk it back to my studio.

Airplane Salvage

alex — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 04:16:07 +0000

I go to visit a friend in Oregon… not Portland, but the second city; something like McClintlock… Not a real place, but he has a house overlooking the river and seems to be doing very well. He says he works in Airplane Salvage. It’s a bit like the deep sea divers who search for gold, only he finds airplane crashes and salvages all the crap in people’s luggage that gets scattered around the disaster. I say to my friend’s father, “Must be a lot of drugs, right? He must be going after the drug planes that run out of fuel and ditch with tons of cocaine?”
He assures me I am mistaken… “Those planes never crash,” he says. “These are just regular planes.”

Are there really that many plane crashes? Have I been missing something? I wonder.

The house is like one huge art installation, with moving bits of welded steel sculpture and lighting effects and a stage for performance, people are playing music all about, and dancing, and I try to shoot this “set” with my video camera and the father gets very upset. Later I find the father has rented the swimming pool for a Porno shoot. I don’t think I trust the father at all. I put my camera down on what turns out to be a burlap bale of Columbian Cannabis. McClintlock is one strange town.

Redream

alex — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:23:26 +0000

I Found this image linked to my blog…. apparently randomly using a drawing of mine and few other things on flickr to create a “dream.” I found it interesting that it showed up while I was doing all these dream images. This is the website: drollic dreamer. I guess you type in a phrase and program searches images and smashes them into a dream image. I don’t know that I love the results, but I felt I should honor the coincidence.

Dream 3

alex — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:11:54 +0000

Then in the chaos, they are separated and he flees the city with a small group that includes her sister, just back from studying in Poland, or was it Estonia? He avoids the little Estonian in deference to his love. But in the days that follow and the fears of the journey, they walk closer and laugh at nervous jokes and she hides in his coat when the wind blows and takes his hand at a sudden noise. Then they are often walking hand in hand. Nothing more has happened. She is pretty. She has a small frame, but an out sized personality; a bit of a wild child. She tells him stories of using her mother’s prescriptions to FedEx strange herbal drugs to Estonia. “They got you very high,” she said, “But also helped build Amino Acids…. so it didn’t feel like vice.” He smiles and nothing more has happened, but he has fallen in love with the sister just back from Estonia. He can’t help himself. It’s like the one sister has nudged the other sister right out of him. “What a mess,” he thinks and then he realizes that they are all going to die under the foot of a giant lizard. He kisses her beside a burnt tree. More happens.

Dream Weaver

alex — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:43:11 +0000

Last night I had the strangest dream. I did a painting performance for JFK up in Canada. He didn’t look like JFK and he was too busy with politics to care much about my paintings. I offered him one, but he declined and I sort of agreed with him. One was too loose and the other too stiff. Later I went to some impossible Xanadu of a mall that seemed rendered in digital post production. The place was ornate and enormous and I got separated from my group from the JFK event (I think they were Hong Kong Chinese). I realized I had no idea where I was or how to get back to the hotel when I ended up walking through a sort vice court (like you have a food court in a mall, but this was all liquor and drugs and in the lower depths of the mall). Someone snatched my wallet and I chased him into a bar where the entire cast of characters there began a theatrical negotiation. If I agreed to give them 25% of the cash as a “reward”, they would return the wallet and I could even take part in the drinks they would buy. I didn’t think there were many options and I agreed and a man dressed like a brown leather Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland brought me my wallet and cell phone in paper bag. Someone was looking for me from the event, but I decided to sit down and stay a while with this looking glass menagerie of drunken thieves.