war – IT IN Place

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.

RPG

alex — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 07:59:38 +0000

I have a dream about Rocket Propelled Grenades and trying to draw the war. It is a dream about a man who has been wounded.

Sputternick V

alex — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 08:26:05 +0000

Free Cash

alex — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 07:57:37 +0000

animated Hell Money essay from the same time as the slide sheet I sent to Dadi Wirz. I just reunited all my hell money. That should be good luck right? Maybe now I should burn it?

The player here is Veho because I burnt most of my megs at vimeo. Nice thing about Veoh is that you can play the vid full screen and it allows you to run longish vids with fairly high rez. I con’t much like the player bar at thebottom, but it’s servicable for todays blog diptyque.

The Video is from today when I dropped the dog off to cut a summer trim (and stop the pant pant) I went walkabout to the park and museum and Library (there to check on possibly showing the Library Project collabs… got to contact the currator). I found the Technology Share Fair for Brooklyn Schools while walking the halls of Brooklyn Museum… I ran into Cash while wanting something to quench my thirst. He offered up lemon ginger ale… it has been the basis of my ever evolving liquids all day (adding coke and lemon juice and wine sorbet and only leaving it for Miller Time).

The music here is from Dave Chapelle’s Block Party CD (from Brooklyn Public Library) and is Mos Def and posse. Bill Batson gave me Mos Def shirt years ago when the Queen kicked me out of the Kingdom and had me Siddhartha sleeping on couches without clothes or money. I always wore it with pride… but am only learning why now. Mos Def is most def…. Busy Bee me. No sleep in Brooklyn.

Orson Whales

alex — Fri, 04 May 2007 04:01:51 +0000

This is more or less a birthday gift to myself. I’ve been drawing it on every page of Moby Dick (using two books to get both sides of each page) for months. The soundtrack is built from searching “moby dick” on You Tube (I was looking for Orson’s Preacher from the the John Huston film), I couldn’t find the preacer, but you find tons of Led Zep and drummers doing Bonzo and a little Orson reading from the Novel for a failed Italian T.V. film…… makes for a nice Melville in the end.

Cinqo de Mayo I turn Forty. Ahhhhhhh the French Champagne.

Another Green World

alex — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 14:05:19 +0000

Another vlog while I scan and scan. This remix has a lot of Goddard clips and a Brian Eno mash up. The drawing is a finish of a Carloine VK start from The Library Project. Stangely today Moby Dick came on TCM. I missed, however, Orson’s Sermon.

The Ring of Fire

admin — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 21:37:14 +0000

First two are mine (old Ali drawings as gif) then Bellah, gundunasu, and Azul dc from the library. The V2 is an american rocket that we took from Germany along with Werner VonBraun.

The Legend of a Swiss Bomb

admin — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 20:20:42 +0000

There is no reason to believe that the Swiss don’t have an atom bomb. They, like Israel, have a surplus of physicists and metalurgists, as well as a long running and U.N. supported civilian atomic energy program. The kind of stuff America ships it’s subsidized Utah mined Uranium to and that gives a nice waste product: Plutonnium. Yes that kind of Plutonium. The stuff of the Nagasaki bomb. The question is: givien Switzerland’s stated Neutrailty and Defense Policy of “Cost of Admission”… a defensive strategy. Would they feel the need for retalitory (MAD stryle ICBMs)nukes, or more likely Tacticle nukes? The later could be used to detonate mountains and damns to make the alps a sort of monumental Midevil type defensive fortress… with burning water in place of hot oil and walls and parapets the size and comprised of literal mountains. It is widely known that Israel has had the A-bomb and possibly the H-bomb since the sixties. It has always denied it for the purposes of appearing to be living up to various treaties regarding atomic energy and nuclear proliferation. The U.S. China, France, Great Britain, and the former Soviet Union all looked the other way. What is lest discussed, is the Legend of the Neutral/ Swiss and possibly Swedish bombs. Let us not forget that the Swiss and Swedes make an awful lot of first rate weaponry. The Swedes having the Saab aerospace industry, infact make one of the world’s most sophisticated and lethal fighterjets, the Griffin, etc. The Swiss also have one of the fiercest airforce’s in the world, flying figheters from all the major compainies with the theory that they can use the parts from and repair anything they shoot down, or capture. If you are going to build the worlds most elaborate warren of bomb shelters and you believe you can survive an Atomic War in Europe? Would you still want to have your own bomb? I think you might just to wave the stick, but you wouldn’t want to show the stick.. just leave it under your coat like a sheleighlei (sp?)

The idea occured to me as I watched a documentary on the British strategy at Yrpes. The British held an ugly little bulge for two years. The bulge provided three positions (front side and side) from which the German artillary and snipers could fire at the British. On the surface, it seemd like a tactical disaster, but the whole time, the British were using the world’s best coal miners to dig mine shafts under the German trenches (high on a strategically key ridge along the Somme) then taking six weeks to fill the tunnels with high explosive and then at three in the morning on June 6th 1916, detonating the entier ridge at Ypres – creating the world’s largest man made explosion on earth up untill that point and maybe untill Hiroshima. It killed 25,000 German Soldiers in seconds (burrying many with their heads sticking out of what had been trenches… the earth squeezing in on them like a vice). The British rushed in and took 3,000 yards of terrain, including a third of the ridge. It seems like peanuts in a post Blitzkrieg world, but was a monumental shift in the theater of WWI…

a truley demented act of human Folley… the war to end all Wars… and the Gods Shrugged: “HA”.
The books here are finishes of starts by postrme1962 for the Library.