Bungy Notes

Of Monsters, Copyright, and Control

2012-01-27T09:28:00.000-08:00

Even as the semester gets off to a more hectic than usual start, I still find time to maintain a presence on Instagram. The iPad has truly become my portable electronic "sketchbook," with photo editing and pixel pushing replacing my usual pen on paper practice. Mourn that if you want, but I embrace anything that keeps my creative brain engaged and active...alive!

Lately, I've found the horror fans on IG who like to edit with a darker sensibility (see especially the hashtags #appnormal and #horrorclub on IG). I have a long-standing interest in horror as literary, theatrical and cinematic genre. There is something enticing to me about a surreal aesthetic as visceral as it is playful, the gut-pull of gore and gross. I subscribe to the notion that it is better to work these dark fantasies out on the page and stage, in words and images, than it is to do so on ourselves and each other. Let us let off the fetid steam of our shadow-selves in art rather than actual violence. Let us contemplate mortality as much with dark fantasy as with bright myths of redemption; let us not imagine these are mutually exclusive possibilities.

But there is something nibbling at my soul with my recent practice that yearns for some explanation as well as illustration. Lately, I have been reworking a lot of images found at the open-source vintage photo archive, IndiCommons. These images are in the public domain; they are expressly (though not primarily) made available for the aesthetic and ethic of Remix Culture. What I do here with these images is not illegal, in the strictest sense.

But is it defensible on other levels? What does it mean to take the images of real people I have never known (but who are likely meaningful to their surviving descendents) and rework their visages in a grotesque aesthetic. Is this a kind of "piracy," a visual violence and semiotic transgression that so much copyright or defamation legislation is meant to prevent? How would I like it if my image were similarly distressed and presented as the proud accomplishment of someone else's twisted imagination?

Let me answer that last question first: I welcome it! I would be flattered. And even if I were disturbed by the tenor of the edit (say, mocking my sexuality with homophobic stereotypes), I still welcome that impulse played out with pixels rather than, say, a tire iron in a back alley. (Caveat: Here I would, however, mark a murky but important distinction between disturbing imagery and visual defamation targeted at an individual or minority group.) But I don't simply say this as evidence of a cavalier attitude about my own image or some narcissistic notion that any publicity is good publicity. I remind myself that, despite our best proprietary efforts, we always have so little control over what is done with our images, our words, and what we think they mean when we release them into the chaos of our shared interactions with others. Anything that reminds us of that fundamental truth in a regular, deep-knowing way is important.

This practice of using what we find, to me, is a central tenet of Remix Culture. This practice is not necessarily a form of piracy or visual defamation; rather, it is the way human creativity has always worked. The notion of authorship and artistic ownership is a relatively recent invention of humanity. No, I am not advocating that one simply take someone else's work and slap one's name on it and claim (and therefor profit from) it as one's own. However, reworking an idea or even the work of someone else into something new is what we do, have always done, as a species with a highly developed sense of social organization. Call it memes, call it culture! We not only create, we recreate -- we recycle the dead, sometimes before they are even dead.

If you are disturbed by these images not so much because of the tropes of the horror genre but because of the sources they are built from, take a lesson from the strangeness you feel. Think about the images you have put out there on the Web -- images of your children, your loved ones, your vacations, your home, yourself. Know that in sharing them you have released them to the myriad practices of humanity; know that you have no control over how others are not only viewing them, but using them. In some dark dungeon, some monster may be drooling over your image, seeking ghastly and uspeakable pleasures in ways you don't want to think about.

So. Stop posting? Stop sharing? Try to figure out ways to lock your works up so they can only be viewed and used the way you intended? Yeah, good luck with that. Do so, and you may very well limit your ability to share or even view in the ways you have become accustomed -- you may well find yourself endorsing draconian and ill-conceived legislation like SOPA and PIPA. And the thing is, even if you do so, the monsters will still be out there, lurking -- feeding their (our?) dark desires in so many other ways.

Rather, let go. Don't stop worrying about the monsters, necessarily, but be more vigilante about them when they actually come out of their dungeons, when they threaten real damage to you and/or your loved ones. For sure, try not to give them your address! Share online only that which you would share in a public space. Don't be seduced by illusions and false assurances of control. Stop worrying about what others do with images, with words, that stopped being "yours" (if they ever truly were) the moment they were released into the public. In your efforts to protect yourself, don't confuse the monsters with the artists...and try always to be the latter.

As for the laws regarding rights (copy- or otherwise), respect them or suffer the consequences. This is always the case, even with stupid laws. But fight the stupid ones. For they, too, create monsters.

Variations on a Starbucks Coffee Cup

2012-01-19T20:29:00.000-08:00

I've been playing around on Instagram, where a new friend (@ashcroft54 who blogs at http://ashcroft54.com) posted a picture of a Starbuck's coffee cup and invited edits of the image. We call these invitations "challenges" or sometimes "pimps." It's a social media game that has been nourishing my soul lately. Here are a few of my edits:

My first inclination was to transform the logo into something else. The first thing that came to mind was the biohazard symbol. Don't know why, exactly. I like coffee. But it sometimes seems like a "toxic brew" to me. What followed? Well, something mutant-like, of course. Tentacles made sense. And from there, it only seemed right to tweak the visual style toward comicbook.

The next day, I was still captivated with the idea of tweaking the logo and seeing where that took me. I also felt the need for a visual pun. I grabbed an open source image of Kara Thrace (a.k.a. "Starbuck") from Battlestar Galactica. I then tweaked it into a few shades of green and a coffee-chain-esque art nouveau style. A few Cylon light-effects later and I had my take on a Starbuck Starbucks. So say we all!

Next day and I felt the need to keep the logo but lose the cup. I spent a lot of time isolating the logo and looking at it. Finally, the idea of plankton came to me, and I knew I had an idea worth playing with. It was also fun adding some different colors and offset depth to the flat green Starbucks logo.

Today, I started an edit based on removing the cup entirely and working with the grid pattern on the table top. Once I had the empty plane, I was at a loss for what to put on it. Then I happened to turn the logo upside down, and I saw the pig face in it. The rest was simply a matter of pulling that image out and giving the overall composition some engaging texture.

I am finding as the semester winds up that digital graphics are a way to relax and get out of my school brain. I'm loving the edit communities on Instagram. It took a while to find them, but now I am addicted -- which may or may not be a metaphor. But I love the touch screen as a tool and toy for seeing and re-seeing with my fingers. And in the end, they take me to magical places where creepy is most definitely cool.

New Year, New Possibilities

2012-01-02T10:48:00.000-08:00

No question, 2011 was a bear of a year! It was a year of overcommitment for me, and I let too many things fall by the wayside as I struggled and failed to meet too many of those commitments. It was a year of loss, a year of struggle. It had its high points, and they were great. But it had its deep, deep lows -- as much in the broad strokes as in the specific moments.

The year began with forcing my mother to deal with deteriorating mental capacity that required putting her, against her will, into a home. It was soon followed by the sudden death of a close and young colleague, who went from diagnosis to death from cancer in under a month. My old friend, writers block, returned with its usual neurotic and hard-to-explain-to-others inability to write in certain contexts. It brought an unwanted friend, an excruciating difficulty with responding to students' writing that made me not very good at my job. It was the year I had to go on strike to protect that job, and in the process engaged in a polarizing social drama on my campus. And it was a year where economic downturn served as the cover for retrograde policy on all the things that matter most to me and should matter most to all of us.

But pain and frustration were not the only qualities of this year. After all, it began with an engaging and successful social media art project that earned me a few lines in an ARTNews article this summer. It was the year I had a regular comic strip for a few months until the collaborative blog died a mysterious death. It was the year I used my cartooning and other talents to great effect for that strike effort. It was the year I figured out Instagram and found an amazing online community of similarly-minded net artists. It was the year I published an art comic in a literary journal. It was a great year for travel and performance: Maine, New Mexico, North Carolina, Louisiana, Alaska. It was the year my mother got a little better and managed to move herself into an assisted living community more to her liking.

I came into the holiday break flying on fumes, exhausted by the good and the bad of it all. I made a minimal effort at holiday celebrations with the ones I love most. Mostly, I hid in the bed covers, watched movies, and made art for my Instagram feed (the images in this post are a result of that holiday "labor"). I avoided leaving the house and going onto Facebook. I told myself this was all necessary, that I needed the time off, the serious down-time. I told myself it can't be all bad if I'm making art, right?

The New Year is here, and I hope it will be better than the last. I have a sabbatical coming (hopefully) in the second half of it. I have arts projects (performance, comics, digital graphics, etc.) planned that I think will be fulfilling. I get to teach a graduate seminar this spring that I am very excited about. And at the end of the year looms the next great global fantasy of the end of the world -- or its great awakening into new consciousness.

I write this today on my lunch break in my office at school. I am digging in to try to catch-up and get over the the damage done last semester and last year. But I pause to breathe, to resuscitate this blog, to make it my companion again for what I think, I hope will be a truly good year. We are, all of us, damaged a bit by this world. We are all of us making the best of it. I remind myself that, while my end-of-year time of rest was needed and welcome, little else is achieved from isolation. If 2012 is going to be a good year, we are going to have to make it so together. So, I am back, rolling up my sleeves, ready to get to work.

Call this the art of living.

Consider that an oblique yet hopeful resolution.

Been a While

2011-10-22T21:03:00.000-07:00

There's a total meltdown at school. We're days away from a potential strike. And yet somewhere in there I find the time not only to do the usual semester overload of work but to enjoy a little art exchange on Instagram. Enjoy a few pics from my exchanges there. And maybe I'll find a way to get back to Bungy Notin' too.

From my Instagram feed (these are all made with applications on my iPad):

And if you are interested in the labor conflicts at SIUC, I'm blogging now over at Deo Volente. "God willing," I am finding appropriate and useful applications of my digital skills there, as well.

Things are Cookin' in Fairbanks

2011-07-25T00:26:00.000-07:00

The Summer Arts Festival is half over and even though we've only been at it a week, I feel like I've done enough work for several months. I'm not burning-out yet; this exhaustion is a good feeling. It is truly a saturation experience. We're talking about and doing work with poetry, fiction, and essays. We are also working on a handmade book compilation of some of our shorter pieces. And somehwere in there, I fit in with some performative, embodied considerations for art and writing. We burn our candle at both ends, it will not last the night -- which suggests an even faster rate of combustion, considering how relatively nonexistent the nights are up here this time of year.

Let's imagine for a moment that the students (er, "registrants") aren't exhausted and over stimulated; let's posit that we are helping draw connections between this mixed bag of offerings. We are in the thick of it all with one week to go. For sure, anxieties are high. "Surely, my writing would be further along," some posit, "if not for this book project." Others choose not to engage embodiment and performance. Most of the folks here are participating for their own "enrichment;" who can really argue with their choices not to engage in certain dishes at the buffet?

But for those who are? I think there is a rich synergy that is happening across our various activities. How often do writers think about composition not as wordcraft but as the aesthetic placement of "objects" on a page? Turns out the good ones think about that a lot. Certainly the book making process encourages them to embrace the materiality of reading and writing as well as acknowledge both (a) the layered process of production and (b) the need to commit and commit quickly to decisions in a collaborative project ("first thought, best thought," I tell them).

I also tell these folks a little about my process. How I work an idea in multiple media at the same time. Try writing about it. Try drawing it out. Collage some photographs. Improvise a monologue. Find a gesture. At some point, the idea settles into what it wants to be: a performance, a poem, a painting -- sometimes all three, sometimes all at once. But always the different ways of approaching the idea influence each other -- call this a kind of "lateral thinking."

I know, for some this approach is profoundly uncomfortable. What does waxing a car really have to do with karate, Mr. Miyagi? But when you relax into it, when you trust the process, you discover that pretty much everything plays a role in creative expression, whatever the medium. Even a walk in the woods is part of the writing process (in my experience, often the most important part).

Of course, so much creative energy can ignite a fire...and sometimes that is not so good in the woods. Metaphors have these tricky ways of becoming material. This weekend there has been a large wildfire blazing in the woods south of Fairbanks. I know our creative sparks didn't light it. But that tang in the air is a reminder about what happens to energy released on fertile ground, where tender awaits to ignite.

I think our students are lighting a different kind of fire...if they can just get over their fear of matches. And their belief that rigid categorical distinctions will keep them warm, or keep them from getting burned.

At the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival

2011-07-17T23:12:00.000-07:00

I found my way to Alaska again. This time I am working with the creative writing faculty for the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival. Curious turn of events (networking and chance) how I ended up with this gig: it turns out writers (some of 'em, anyway) are interested in more than writing. I am interested in the embodied nature of writing, in trying to understand it not only as a cerebral craft but as something that involves our entire being.

So, that makes me the exercise and "invention" guy. I'm the one (but not the only one) who will get participants out of their chairs and moving about and then reflecting on movement as something that also happens on a page.

Sitting in the auditorium at the openning kick-off of the festival, I am struck by the richness of the arts in this far north little town. The breadth of programs in this 30 year-old festival includes lots of music (classical, jazz, world, celtic, opera, etc), a little drama, visual arts (painting and photography), healing arts, some dance, some film, and creative writing. But I also struggle a bit with identity "crisis" -- where do I fit in this mix? I, a cartoonist, solo-performer, poet, blogger, social media artist, seem to ride the cusp and cracks of so many of these "fine" arts.

And so I land in the creative writing program, but this is unlike many creative writing programs. Here we not only practice poetry and essays in writing circles, we also make handmade books and (thanks to me) explore stage pictures and dynamic movement and improvisational sound production. And I'm pretty sure the participants are eager for the opportunity. Here, on the frontier, there circulates a rich community of folks eager to create and to combine, to explore in new ways, to abandon rules and conventions, and to set out into new and uncharted territories. God love 'em!

But so, how will it go? Well, time permitting, I'll check in with my perspective. But if you are curious, you might follow one of our "students" (an accomplished science fiction novelist) at her blog where she will be (I believe) filing daily reports of what she learns with us. I hope we don't let her down; I'd hate to become the model for a vile alien parasite in a future novel. A writer's revenge is never something to be taken lightly!

Self-Pic and Primates

2011-07-13T20:00:00.001-07:00

So, I've been fascinated for the last week or so by this picture. It's a self-portrait. The macaque took this smiling picture of herself. Sure, one could use this to start a conversation about authorship of a photograph, as some have.

What engages me, though, is the expression. The practice. The photo fits so many of the genre formulas of the self-pic. That this monkey can reproduce recognizable codes without apparent access to knowledge of and intent to produce a photograph matters little (to me, anyway). This is what we do with cameras (or stinky whir boxes that flash and go click). I prefer those pictures where we forget we're making pictures, anyway.

So here I look into the eyes of a non-human Other and see something recognizable. Rather than being freaked out by the "uncanny" (as if the macaque is a strangely animated thing), I see joy and wonder. And a big toothy smile.

When we aren't treating our primate cousins as nuisances or exotic entertainment, we amuse ourselves with stories of their vengeful rise to power. How much nicer it is to look into the eyes of the Other and encounter both similarity and alterity. If our guilt (so few species have really benefitted from associating with us) leads us to fear, that is at least understandable. But I think regret is better than fear -- regret for the missed opportunities. What vacations, parties, rituals, or adventures might we have shared, with or without the camera?

In this case, it's all about what makes you smile.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

A Resurrection with Toons

2011-07-13T06:57:00.000-07:00

Page from "Vacation on the Moon"

A little over a year after I made it, "Vacation on the Moon" appears this week in print in Palooka 2. That's actually amazing turnaround. For a short abstract(ish) comic I made in the wake of a visit home, more therapy than an honest attempt to make art anyone would want to publish, that work has gone farther than I dreamed possible. But then, I guess our best work comes from dark places and serves other purposes than "just making" something.

The "therapy" part worries me, though. I've spent much of my career cautioning folks about engaging in therapy publicly. Beware, I tell the neophyte public speaker, of going places with an audience you are not ready to go -- they are not paid to listen and be kind. To the experienced performer recently enamored of confessional narrative and the chance to air personal pain, I remind: there has to be something more to your story than just what concerns you; it needs to reach a broader audience and speak to some level of shared experience. Even if therapy is not a "scare word," we should at least remember that, for it to work, all parties involved should be aware they are entering a therapeutic context and consent to the "treatment" -- we record this wisdom with impressive concepts like "norm of reciprocity" and "expectancy violation."

"Light," a one page comic.

So what of my little comic? I made it in the week after a summer visit to my parents with my partner. Those visits are always hard, all the harder for being such a cloyingly sweet concoction of pleasures and pains, memories and loss. Yet there was a new specter last summer, coiling in the shadows and conversational pauses. My mother seemed, well, different and not quite all there. And my father, separated from her for nearly twenty years but still a good friend, seemed to be disappearing into his own isolation and the consequences of limited human interaction. It was a visit about being (and trying not to be) horrified at what age is doing to my earliest loved ones; it was a visit about struggling to be present, to be visible as I am in the face of those with failing eyesight and faulty memory and too many preferences for who they think I am (or should be).

"Crepuscular Avuncular," some recent digital art.

Returning from that trip, I buried myself in ink and pages. Words came reluctantly, but images flowed. Inspired by abstract comics and poemics, I wanted a language that resisted narrative and certainty but could still be (productively?) about something. Mostly, though, I was flailing in a kind of despair, reluctant to get out of bed, uncertain about pretty much everything. So was born "Vacation on the Moon," and after a few pages it caught a kind of momentum that is hard to describe but beautiful to experience -- a "high" one could spend a lifetime chasing. It moved quickly from sketchbook to digital processing to finding a suitable publication venue. With the relatively quick news that it was accepted for publication, I felt something in me shift, perhaps waking, perhaps reminding me it had always been there. This is, in part, what art (visual, verbal, tactile, etc.) is for -- not just in the making, but also in the sharing.

A little over a year later and those pages seem even more prescient. My mother is now diagnosed not with Alzheimer's but with vascular dementia. She now lives in an independent living facility with in-home care, though getting her there was no easy task. The dementia and its complications came on her with a vengeance in late fall, and the holiday season required a difficult family intervention. So much of the conversation in the family was retrospective sense-making, looking back for signs and wondering if we could or should have intervened sooner. I look back at "Vacation on the Moon" and see in it the pre-tremors of a major quake, full of harbingers and warnings.

"Klexmur, Alien Reporter," a weekly comic originally
published at the now defunct Black Magpie Theory.

I look in the back of Palooka at my cheeky bio and wonder who that guy is. It points readers to this blog if they want more. And yet, this blog hasn't really been a home for my musings and art for several months. I've been around. I've found Tumblr and its preference for short-form ("micro") blogging and reblogging. I've participated on more than one collaborative blog -- I had a weekly comic strip on one (that is now shifting to another). I was the primary coordinator for a social media performance/art event that, ultimately, landed me in the pages of ARTnews this summer. In other words, I've been keeping busy...just not here.

Recent "Self Portrait"

I think that is about to change. It is time to come back to this blog and let it be a home for art and contemplation. Maybe also to let it be, in some small and responsible way, a kind of therapy. But rest assured, I know that these confessions must reach a broader audience, speak to some sense of shared experiences.

Let me know if they do.

iPad Comics

2011-05-24T07:24:00.001-07:00

It happens. My work with an academic schedule inevitably reaches a point where I don't have the time or energy to do the sorts of things I would like to be doing. Then, finally, the semester ends, and I get my life back -- only getting back to those personal projects is as difficult as, well, getting a jump on the next semester.

I've been recuperating with my newest gadget/tool/toy -- the iPad! As a relatively recent convert (about 4 years ago) to digital art and graphics pads, I was at least partially interested in the potential of touch screens for producing art, and more specifically, comics.

So, these pics are some initial doodling around with the Art Studio app. Nothing like a completed work yet, but I see the potential. And the drawbacks. I've purchased some premium apps, but none of them have the functionality or quality of my usual software tools (Photoshop, Illustrator, Manga Studio, ArtRage, etc.). Still, they aren't all that bad, either. And the iPad is definitely more portable.

And in that spirit, I am also making this post via the iPad in hopes that blogging with this gadget is something else I can begin to do regularly.

I've had my week of not showering and staying away from anything that seems too much like work. As I turn my attention to prepping a summer syllabus (and well, not), it also seems like time to get back to those things that matter to me...like this blog.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

1000 Hours: He Is Still Not Alone

2011-05-14T16:02:00.000-07:00

The above gifs are compilations of a "project" I've been participating in over the last month-plus. Around the world, folks are keeping vigil for the "detained" Chinese artist, Ai Weiwei. They regularly post to the internet pictures of sunflower seeds, their number marking the hours since his disappearance. As of 10:04 a.m. this morning (Central Daylight Time in the US), it has been 1000 hours since Ai Weiwei was seized by police. To date, no official charges or explanation for his seizure have been provided by the authorities. Nor is he the only artist or outspoken citizen to be seized in China in the last few months.

"Sunfower Seeds" (2010) Ai Weiwei

The choice to use sunflower seeds to mark the hours is in reference to his recent installation at the Tate Modern in London, Sunflower Seeds. In that work, Weiwei covered the floor of a gallery with 100 million handmade porcelain sunflower seeds. Among other themes in the work, the installation represents a dialectic tension between the individual and the masses -- each seed individually crafted yet part of a massive carpet on the gallery floor. In other words, we are always simultaneously unique individuals and part of a collective; we draw our power from both.

"Sunflower Seeds" (2010) Ai Weiwei

I first became aware of Ai Weiwei's work through @Platea. (A few folks involved with that international social media art collective actually work with Ai Weiwei.) Weiwei also works with social media, sometimes as art and more often as activism (though, of course, usually as both). It is this combination of social justice, social media, and artistic practice that attracts me to his work. His plight reminds me of the importance of freedom of speech and the need for a citizenry to be able to hold its government accountable. Perhaps wrongly, too many of us hoped that Ai Weiwei's international celebrity would protect him from abuse at the hands of his government. 1000 hours into the collapse of that hope, it is tempting to give up...to admit defeat.

But there is something about his work and this project that suggests otherwise.

"Study in Perspective" (1995) Ai Weiwei

The international outrage immediately after his disappearance may have lessened, but it has not gone away. For me, the slow accumulation of days, photographs, posts, and seeds in a jar speak to the power and importance of Weiwei's work: the vigil builds its own momentum, becomes its own daily practice, a regular contemplation of freedom and its abuse. There is something visually appealing in each individual photo, but also an increasing power in the mass of them -- a power exponentially greater when multiplied across the world. By itself, my little vigil is nothing much -- less than a discarded seed on a concrete floor. But it is not by itself -- nor is Ai Weiwei.

5/1/2011 7:04 pm CDT: 698 hours

In posting these images each day, I keep my tally of the accumulated hours and end with the phrase: "He is not alone." In the word-economy of micro-blogging, this phrase references much: that Ai Weiwei is not the only one unjustly held by the Chinese police; that there are people in the world who care about him; that we are all connected; that we are all in this world together.

I am fortunate (today) not to be held secretly in prison by my government. But as Ai Weiwei and too many others remind us, that is far from an assured or permanent condition. Freedom requires those with it to fight for it and to fight for those without it. In big ways. In small ways. Everyday.

5/14/2011 10:04 am CDT: 1000 hours

Will iPad Make a Difference?

2011-03-28T23:38:00.001-07:00

So I got the new iPad. You think it will make a difference? Will I get back to posting more regularly? Let's hope.

As usual, the academic year ratcheted up its obligations. Add to that my commitments over at Black Magpie Theory (despite the hopefully temporary downward turn in content production and readers over there), and I haven't been doing much with this blog. You noticed, right?

Well, April is the cruelest month -- and it isn't even here yet. It will be a challenge to keep up here even with the new gadget. But I'm liking it. So there's that.

How's that for a post that says basically nothing.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Crackers Neck Rd,Makanda,United States

Sketchbook Scans: Origins of Klexmur

2011-02-12T10:46:00.000-08:00

First sketch of "Alien Reporter." Does not have name yet.

I am about twelve strips into a weekly comic I publish over at Black Magpie Theory called, "Klexmur, Alien Reporter." It's been a life-long fantasy of mine to create and publish a regular comicstrip. If you've paid attention here, you know I have more than a passing interest in comics. I also approach my work from a performance studies background, which holds (at least in some versions) that the best way to understand something is by doing it. So, several months ago I weaseled my way onto the collaborative blog Black Magpie Theory with a promise to write regular commentary and try my hand at political cartoons.


1st Klexmur cartoon as envisioned in my sketchbook.

About a month into that gig (can you call it a "gig" if you are providing the content for free?), I hit on a concept for a regular strip: What if a reporter were an alien, providing an "alienated" perspective on both current events and our journalistic practices? It's not exactly an original idea. As I note in the accompanying commentary for that first strip, Strange Horizons lists "An alien observes and comments on the peculiar habits of humans, for allegedly comic effect" as number 16 in its ever growing list of cliches it doesn't want to see in submitted S/F stories. Meh. But this was a collaborative blog focusing on Left-leaning political commentary. And did I mention that we don't get paid for the content?

Klexmur has an earlier ancestor in my web presence. Back in the 90s I used to be active on Vampyres, a listserve (remember those?) devoted to academic and popular interests in vampires. The postings there were pretty evenly split between academic discussions of the vampire in films and literature, announcements and reviews of new publications, and the creation of "fluff" (on-line vampire fiction). Whether a critic or a fluff writer (most participants did both), the norm on the site was to take on a suitable vampire-themed posting persona. I chose the mysterious persona of "The Gray Adept," who overtime was revealed to be an alien ethnographer studying subaltern vampire (and other supernatural) communities on Earth. I pay homage to this origin in the Klexmur series with this comic; at Vampyres we actually produced a long collaborative fluff saga about the dire consequences of what happened to a vampire who made the mistake of trying to drink alien blood.

My original plan for his name.

Klexmur owes much to The Gray Adept, although in the absurd world of comics, Klex can be "out" as an alien without raising eyebrows (although he did once get arrested in the Nevada desert). Originally, his name had one less vowel. Something happened in my first post, and I accidentally added the "e." I originally left it out in a rather oblique reference to Superman: "Mr. Mxyzptlk" is one of Supe's oldest nemeses, a visitor from the 5th dimension who's vowel-less name is a bit of a pronunciation mystery. I wanted Klex to have a similarly alien name. However, when I made that first posting error, I was amused with the other Superman reference in his name -- "Clex" is "slash" fanfiction in the Smallville Superman mythos that imagines explicit sexual encounters between Clark Kent and Lex Luthor. Klexmur already resonated with fan-produced web fiction. I haven't played around much with queer themes in Klexmur (yet!), but they are always potentially there, lurking in the name. Klexmur, by the way, has already interviewed Clark Kent (or, at least as close as he can within copyright infringement).

Sneak Peek: Klex does Palin drag!

As of this posting, I am at about #12 in the Klexmur series. Who can say if I will be able to keep it up? I have a deepening appreciation for the time it takes to do a weekly comicstrip. And of course, BMT seems to be at a bit of a crossroads, either encountering a seasonal slump or sputtering towards oblivion. The Klexmur images here are scans from my sketchbooks. For the strip, I tend to write out script ideas and loosely plot them out in rough panels in a notebook. The comics themselves are produced digitally, working back and forth between Manga Studio and Photoshop. It takes about 2 hours (sometimes more) for me to produce a strip. Given the other demands on my time, this is sometimes a luxury I can ill-afford.

But I like this little guy. Creating Klexmur comics is truly a labor of love. I remain convinced that we need to constantly remind ourselves to take a step back and consider what we are doing...and how we are doing it. Darko Suvin famously announced the defining attribute of S/F as "cognitive estrangement," a particular kind of "alienation" (Suvin directly references Bertolt Brecht's "A-Effect" with this idea) that encourages us to consider present conditions through a distanced lens. I think comics provide a similar function, although with a different stroke. And Klexmur? He lands his saucer right where these two forms meet.

Evolution: Biological and Political

2011-02-06T10:24:00.000-08:00

Digital Art Piece I made for SIUC's Darwin Week art competition.

What a curious week this is, beginning with the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan (today) and ending with the 202nd birthday of Charles Darwin (this coming Saturday). Two potent figures in the theory of evolution.

Darwin gets credit for "inventing" the theory. Others deserve some credit in there, but Darwin's observations and conclusions are as good as any to give originary credit to. His was an elegantly simple claim, really: that species change to adapt to their environments. This change happens over long period of times and is driven by forces of natural selection.

The concept of "survival of the fittest" was subsequently bastardized and taken up by many as scientific evidence of might-makes-right and only-the-strongest-survive social policy. Call this Social Darwinism. Borrowing from Puritanical views that Nature is "red in tooth and claw," here were images of competition where greed and brute force drives the success and failure of species. And if species, why not groups of people?

More recent thinking in evolution finds compelling evidence for altruism in species development -- that life in its drive toward ever increasing complexity experiments with, among other things, interspecies cooperation. Survival of the fittest depends as much on cunning and scavenging as it does on brute force. Find a niche and occupy it. Evolution is driven as much by genes being creative as by some desperate need to survive.

Odd to think of Reagan as a champion of evolution; in truth, he is anything but. He famously participated in a failed 1972 law suit as Governor of California to force public schools to teach creationism alongside the scientific theory of evolution. In the White House, he made similar proclamations that evolution is only a theory and that creationism deserved at least equal time if not greater attention for its moral, religious value. Reagan's Creationism would evolve into "Intelligent Design," a bastardization of scientifically nuanced speculation in service of manufacturing support for the Biblical explanation of life on the planet.

And yet, many of Reagan's own policies showed a certain preference for survival of the fittest and withdrawal of any assistance for the weak. As Governor of California, he decreased funds to state mental facilities, turning the mentally ill out onto the streets to fend for themselves. For five years as President, he failed to mention publicly AIDS or provide any Federal assistance for AIDS research. When in 1986 he was finally forced to address the issue, he haggled with Congress to keep AIDS funding low. Perhaps like others on the Religious Right, he saw AIDS as divine retribution or a "natural" cleansing of an unwanted biological trait (whether intravenous drug use or unprotected gay sex or blood transfusions or...). His Tickle-Down Economics embraced a model that suggested the poor and middle class should make do with the leftovers of the rich or get rich themselves -- a kind of economic Darwinism, that.

If Darwin's evolution is primarily about the passing of traits (or genes, in the common parlance) from one generation to the next, the modern political scene shows a much more accelerated evolutionary cycle with memes. A meme is an informational pattern that travels culturally; some evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins posit memetic transfer of information as the true evolutionary advantage humans have over other species that depend mostly on generational genetic tansfer of information.

But memes are tricky. Consider that Reagan raised taxes 11 times during his Presidency, nearly tripled the national debit, and grew the size of the Federal government [cite]. Consider that he was the first President to make the US a debtor nation [cite]. Consider that he advocated for abolishing nuclear weapons and chided Israel for preemptive military attacks [cite]. Consider that while he arguably ended the Cold War with Russia, his backdoor funding of foreign wars (Iran/Contra) and future terrorists (the Mujahideen that would become, in part, Al Qaeda) planted the seeds of our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet somehow he has evolved into the darling of the neoconservatives and the Tea Party -- an image of Conservative values, a deficit hawk, a no-compromise champion of small government, a symbol of US might-makes-right foreign policy.

But then, that's the difference between a gene and a meme. A gene is biological information at the molecular level that transforms slowly across eons and generations. Those changes are tested in the environment. A meme transforms more quickly and shows incredible capabilities of developing rapidly into myth, an organizing narrative whose fidelity to reality is not important. So today, many will celebrate St. Reagan as they call for magical deficit reduction and smaller government and US exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, all while ignoring the benefits they reap from the government they so want to destroy or Reagan's much more questionable political record.

Let us hope genes win out over memes in the end and evolution provides an answer to self-destructive, congenital stupidity. Or perhaps, from a systems perspective, that is what the global ecological collapse we seem to be entering is all about...

Make Art Anywhere and Any Way

2011-01-22T16:00:00.000-08:00

It's been a week since the conclusion of @Platea's Tree-Blog project. The final map of the project turned out quite nice. I also made an animated GIF of the project map which demonstrated how the tree grew across the week.

It's a week later and I have been consumed with work of other varieties - the administrivia of the start of a semester! Still, I find myself wanting to bask in the shade of that art tree, to put to work some of the skills I learned from the process. Here, then, is an idea born out of the Dada chance game, "The Exquisite Corpse," and the fun of animated GIFs. Enjoy.

On Stillness and Motion

2011-01-14T10:48:00.000-08:00

Scurry from Jonny Gray on Vimeo.

[Elements of this video come from here and here.]

A tree has movement. It grows. But it does so slowly, in ways that are almost impossible to see with the naked eye. Meanwhile, around the tree, things scurry and run, fly and fall. The tree, itself, marks this continuum of motion with a grounded trunk and branches that must not be too rigid, that must wave in the wind: stillness at one end and movement at the other. But even that rigid trunk has a little flex to it. And in some cases, trees have been known to walk. I am not talking about J.R.R. Tolkein's Ents (although they are very cool); I am talking about the walking palm trees of Costa Rica. What a wonderful and strange world we live in!

So, if we view stillness from some frames of reference as a kind of motion, can we also see motion as a kind of stillness? Perhaps when the motion is contained within a stable frame? Is that stable frame the space around the motion? Or is it the way we interpret the motion -- as cyclical or goalless or imperceptible if you observe it from far enough away? Perhaps we most transform our sense of motion and stillness through interaction, through the work of working together even when we are alone.

This week I have been working with collaborative art on-line and the metaphor of a tree. I've been thinking a lot about things that change states and our resistance (sometimes) to that movement, even when it is unavoidable. I've been interested in the desire and dread to fix things (art, people, work, etc.) in place, to own them, to not let them go. And I have been thinking about the remix, the ways in which things are constantly made into other things and how that is both a violent and a creative act.

The two pieces I borrowed in my video above resonate for me with this tension. Craig's sound piece is generated from a program that translated the data of a still photograph (the "Anarchy Tree" of the original @Platea trunk post) into a MIDI sound file, which he then processed and mixed with other sounds (including the woodpecker soundfile from the trunk post). In other words, the stillness of image literally becomes the temporal movement of music. Similarly, Deborah's "Green Man" video series plays with the idea of the fixed camera focused on the fixed tree in dynamic relation to the movement that goes on around the tree and a medium meant to capture images in motion. I wanted to put these two pieces into dialogue, adding a bit of my own video work in keeping with the Tree-Blog aesthetic.

Even documenting the Tree-Blog event has had its own dialogue of stillness and motion. The map is, in some ways, an attempt to fix the ephemeral, or at least provide a guide to its murky trajectories through a variety of internet terrains. As I have made the map of the Tree-Blog project each day, I have constantly had to adjust it -- shifting branches to accommodate other branches, re-clustering nodes as they begin to interact, adding in posts I missed from the days before. In other words, the growth of this tree (even as map) has not been a simple linear path, but a constant shifting and reworking. Growth, like evolution, is not precisely linear. Seemingly fixed positions have to shift. "Permanence" is a fiction, a concept created by fantasizing humans that doesn't really have a corollary in nature.

@Platea is a collective of artists who explore what it means to make art on/with/through social networks of digital information exchange. We tend to favor Twitter as the location of most interest (as revealed by the "@" and our catchy subtitle, "tales from the stweets"). But if Twitter is the medium of choice, then we truly do embrace the digital scurry -- the frenetic motion of short messages, streaming information, and posts with rapid expiration dates.

Even so, we also concern ourselves with documentation of our projects. We take care to make clear attributions for borrowed works and illustrations. Some of us make clear statements that our contributions are copyright protected and are not available for others' use. Others are interested in using social media to "crowdsource" work that will appear in gallery installations and/or be sold. That is, there are elements to this work that don't want to be ephemeral or lost in some undifferentiated network of exchange.

All of which is simply to say, we constantly negotiate this tension of permanence and flow, the lasting and the ephemeral, the individually owned and the collectively enmeshed. I hope this Tree-Blog experiment will not disappear too quickly into the ether of the net; we have certainly tried to document it. But all trees -- even the old giants -- one day fall. And I have a suspicion that our Tree-Blog may prove to be more a mimosa than a sequoia. But hey, out on the "Alkaloid of the Month" branch, Jason tells me dried mimosa root is a moderate hallucinogen -- so at least there's something in there to help keep the visions coming.

Thanks to all who have checked in at my blog this week and taken a chance to participate in @Platea's Tree-Blog project.

No Argument

2011-01-11T15:13:00.000-08:00

I must not argue with her,

I tell myself.

Just listen,

Be present,

Tell the truth.

She is losing so much:

Not just the car

And the independence it represents,

But the ability to read,

To connect,

To recognize.

The gaps of memory,

Fill in with stories

And fears

Leading to "spells"

Of paranoia.

Impossible things

Seem possible to her,

Or at least seem preferred alternatives

To the missing

Time

Checkbook

Faces

Medicine

Money

Words

Life.

I do not argue with her,

Evidence being too fluid

When experience cannot be shared.

She forgets reasons

But not the slights

Nestled deep

In the family tree.

They are her only weapons

Fighting a family

Fulfilling her fears.

I want to tap that fire,

Turn it away from dread

and focus it on creation.

Lose inhibition, Ma,

Lose the internalized editor,

The constant critic,

The doubt and the depression.

Lose anxiety;

Let go of concern.

Lose the illusions of identity

and embrace the you that remains.

But she cannot choose

the gaps.

And I cannot fathom

her suffering

despite my listening and

commitment to empathy.

This is a truth

I cannot argue with her.

[This post is part of the @Platea "Treeblogging" event. It draws on work found here and here. It also connects with my life and the lives of those close to me. Sometimes the tree is a family tree.]

Tree-Mixing and Tree-Blogging

2011-01-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

What I Saw from Jonny Gray on Vimeo.

Our little tree is off to a slow but steady start today. I am most consumed by the opportunity to use this project to learn some new skills. The "mix" I have made as soundtrack for this little video is first baby-steps, to be sure. But those steps took some considerable time today. Time lost, in that I might have been doing something else that needed doing. Time gained, in that in addition to the "object" I created, I learned some new skills.

This is Shiva's dance around the trunk of our tree, the acknowledgement that every act of creation is an act of destruction. To note this is not to dismiss destruction, not to embrace or excuse the buzz of the saw and the drone of the bulldozer. But it is to see those things as having, in their right measure, a place. Was John Muir concerned about the loss of any great sequoias, or the rate of their loss and for such trivial gains? From time management to resource extraction, the question is rarely either/or but how much of each at the expense of the other.

We make art together, in this project (and always, really), but we also still make art alone. What does it take to make something and know that someone else might unmake it? Is art, as we are perhaps most familiar with it, too invested in its own preservation as the lasting product of the lone, inspired creator? To (re)mix is to engage in a violent act, the making of something while breaking something else. I look out the window at the gnarled branches of a tangled wood; I look at the warm and knotted patterns in my floor boards. A tree -- as branch, as plank, as wooden spoon -- knows this fundamental truth about transformation and creation. It sometimes burns with the knowledge.

This video and post drew inspiration from here and here.

Getting Ready to "Treeblog"

2011-01-08T14:27:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I've been away from the blog. I don't think I am alone in taking a holiday hiatus from blogging, but this time the cause was even more pernicious. Let's just say my holiday visit home was fraught with more drama than usual. Parents age and sometimes they need extra care...that they resist. This was a holiday of intervention, which means it was no holiday at all. I don't mean to be coy, but I honestly don't think I am ready to blog about it. If ever.

So, instead, let me give you a heads-up for the upcoming week that will likely see a lot of activity on this blog and several of the others on which I participate. As I've written about before, I am a member of an on-line performance/art collective, @Platea. Next week, @Platea will be conducting another on-line event for which I am the primary architect. The project is the eighth @Platea happening to date and is titled, "Treeblogging." This hyperlink will take you to my write up of the protocol as well as to a little meditation on why folks interested in art and the internet might find the image of a tree interesting and resonant.

The general idea of the project is a pun on "reblogging" (Tumblr) and "retweeting" (Twitter) while adding an element of "remixing." On Monday (1/10), I will post to the @Platea blog some open source material (text, jpeg, sound file, etc.) that others may use to create their own art and post it on their blogs, Flickr accounts, YouTube accounts, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, etc. As the tree of interconnected and mutually inspired artworks grows, folks may sample not only from the original material posted at @Platea but also from the works others make from that material.

If you play along (and I hope you will!), be sure to follow the protocol for linking forward/linking back to your work. I'll be tracking folks' contributions this way and building an interactive map of the happening, posted daily at the @Platea blog. You can use that graphic to follow the works others are making and the links between them.

The mapping may get beyond me...the territory always exceeds the map, after all. But it is the effort that counts, right? And I am looking forward to burying myself in this art project as the perfect tonic for a difficult holiday break. At least this promises to be a more fun engagement with connections and reinterpreting what others have said...

The Number Thirty-Two

2010-12-11T16:30:00.000-08:00

Occasionally someone asks me, "What's your favorite number?"

You know, like we are supposed to be partial to an amount. I favor a quantity. I heart a point in an order. I have an intense connection with an integer.

But it is not so hard a question for me to answer. My number is 32. I've known it is "my" number since about the age of 13 when, at a summer camp for boys, it kept appearing to me. Or rather, I was attuned to it. Whatever. I just kept seeing it everywhere. After a while, my cabin-mates would tease me about it. They kept seeing me see it. On lists, on packaging, in prices, on road signs, in books, in winning scores, etc. Maybe a few of those manifestations were camp pranks on their part, but not all of them.

And then the big summer finale: the last night of camp was a "banquet." Not exactly formal (boys' summer camp, remember?), but still a little more pomp for the circumstance. And on the table-setting placard, there it was: The camp was celebrating its 32nd summer of operation. Creepy, eh?

Okay, maybe not. There are such things as coincidence and serendipity. The occurances of 32 faded after that summer, but I knew from then on that I had an association with a number. It became my go-to answer for "what's your favorite number?" or "pick a number?" And, as it turns out, it is a powerful number to have associations with.

First, some math: 32 is 2 to the power of 5. It is both twice a square (16) and half a square (64). It is half a square (again, 8 to the power of 2) and half a cube (4 to the power of 3). It is the sum of the first three positive integers raised to the power of themselves. It is also a Leyland number, since it is a possible answer to the equation x to the power of y plus y to the power of x. And finally, it is a happy number, which is a bit more difficult to explain but, you know, I'm happy it's happy.

Then there are the mystical associations with the number 32. In some traditions, 32 C.E. is considered the year Christ was crucified. In the Kabbalah, God is said to have made the world in 32 phases. Hence, in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, there are 10 emanations (Sephiroth) and 22 paths between them resulting in the number 32 -- the paths are usually numbered starting at 11, so the last path ("Tau") is the 32nd path. In several psychic practices, the 32nd Path is considered a link between the physical and astral plane and is the route shamen and psychics take to practice extra sensory perception. 32 is also considered the occult opposite of 23, another powerful number about which whole books and films (bad ones...with Jim Carey!) have been made.

32 is the temperature in degrees Fahrenheit that water freezes at sea level. It is half of a chess/checker board, representing your home territory. It is the number of completed and numbered piano sonatas by Ludwig von Beethoven. It is the size of a databus it bits (i.e. 32-bit), and so carries some significance for computer graphics and programmers. It is the number of teeth in an adult human, including "wisdom" teeth. It is the number of pages in the average comic book (not including the cover).

Yeah, yeah. It's a number. And numbers line up with things in the universe. And this one lined up with me when I was 13. So maybe that is, well, "lucky." Maybe that is a reason to favor it.

After that summer, I didn't really think much of it until I approached the age of 32. I worried that I had been given some sort of cryptic premonition. Was I gonna die? Make my fortune? Change the world? Only, my 32nd year came and went and nothing really momentous happened. Soon, I put it out of my mind again.

And then, well, lately I've been seeing 32s again. Noting them. They catch my eye. And mostly I wonder, what's that about? Visiting UNT in Denton, TX this last week, a fellow artist/scholar suggested a comic book I should read: "Promethea" by Alan Moore. This was just a friendly suggestion for a good comic; we hadn't been discussing my number mysticism. There are purposely 32 issues of this comic. And it discusses various occult traditions, including the 32nd Path. And when I read this gorgeous and smart comic, I thought, "Oh wow, here it is again." Only this time the numerical manifestation was a little more charged; this time it came with some meaning attached. Not exactly answers, really, but a little more confirmation of the number's relevance in mysticism and art.

Maybe it is odd for a 45 year-old man to have a favorite number. Maybe it is odder still to see cryptic messages from the universe in a comic book. But then I realized: It's been 32 years since that summer when the number 32 came to me. So, me? I'm listening! And I am looking for the path. Outside tonight, the temperature is falling to the freezing point and the first winter precipitation is sticking to the trees. And I feel a little bit like half a square and half a cube. And God help me, this number does make me happy!

San Francisco Bound

2010-11-12T04:41:00.000-08:00

Well, children, it's happened again. November rolls around and it is time to head off to the National Communication Association annual conference. This year, it's in San Francisco, the city by the bay. And I am so looking forward to visiting the town and seeing old friends in my profession.

Here's what I will be up to:

Presenting a paper on doing environmentally-themed solo performance.
Presenting the Christine Oravec Research Awards in Environmental Communication.
Participating in a four-year-out planning roundtable discussion for Performance Studies
Contributing to a panel on thinking beyond the digital frame, co-sponsored by the Performance Studies Division and the Visual Communication Division.

More on that last one. Several of my friends and colleagues at different universities got this crazy idea to see what you could do with a digital picture frame. Thinking outside the box, so to speak, of what these increasingly ubiquitous image tools might allow. In my case, I have worked with two and the random slide show function to create an ever changing poem (there are 170 possible combinations of images and words -- below and above are three possibilities.)

In and around the presentations will be the usual school recruitment parties (the recession hit ours pretty hard this year), meals with old friends and colleagues, and the occasional opportunity to go see the city.

Since the conference butts up against our Thanksgiving Break, I will be sticking around for a few extra days. But this Pomo Homo Nature Nut isn't planning on spending the extra time (sans partner) in the Castro. Instead, I am heading down to Big Sur for a little backpacking and Kerouac.

All of which is simply to say that I will likely not be posting to the blog next week, but I will follow the week after with a full report of my adventures -- intellectual and wild and all the wonderful possibilities of combining those two.

We've Been Down This Road Before...

2010-11-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

...but maybe the familiarity offers more dread than consolation. Will we ever get off this cycle? Off the pendulum swing between the Parties? Out of the continual blame game and the reaction formations that follow? I take no comfort from stolid reminders that this is what happens in midterm elections. I try to remember that it could have been worse. I take some small solace from the realization that more Blue Dog Democrats lost their seats in this election than the truly Progressive ones did, although in the grand scheme of things that means that both parties have moved more toward their poles. I don't expect anything but partisans slinging threats like stones for the next two years.

The thing is, I thought we were actually getting somewhere. It's frustrating that the accomplishments of the last two years get so little play in the media and hold so little traction with the voters. Yeah, maybe jobs needed more attention than health care. Yeah, maybe excessive eagerness for bipartisanship in the face of an obdurately obstructionist opposition led to health care reform that was a flawed sausage of a bill. Sure, there were plenty of missteps and errors along the way. But there were also tax cuts. There was also some credit reform. The most offensive bailouts came under the guy in charge before, and much of the rest of the other government rescues have (a) been paid back and/or (b) clearly prevented this recession from being worse than it could have been. While unemployment is bad, the rate of employment and recovery has clearly turned around since the new guy took over.

Was Tuesday night really just about taking it out on the janitor because he didn't clean up the trash from the last eight year's frat party fast enough? The beer kegs and swimming pool made of jello shots weren't government overreach, but the request for more cleaning supplies and a couple of dumpsters somehow is? But hey, hangovers and the regrets that come with them cause the most anger, right? It's easier to scream at the guys making that racket picking up the bottles and cans than it is to get mad at the now long gone host of the bacchanal.

Forgive me if I am under the impression that the folks who were throwing down at that party and the folks complaining so loudly now are, in large part, the same people. Not all of the ones making the most noise (in either instance) are the ones in control of the party or the response. But they sure do wave a great misspelled sign, don't they? And if they cross a line into racism or head-stomping violence, you can always blame it on passion that exceeds their educational opportunities. ~~Critique~~ Note the latter and you announce yourself an elitist. Elitists are always such party-poopers. We hate them, right?

But see, I have a feeling that the Republicans and their new-found populist energy in the Tea Party are headed for their own difficult tensions (finally!). There's a storm brewing in the Old Boy's Club. The rabble are not likely to behave, and the establishment has rules of conduct it insists upon. When no one was in power, everyone could wave signs and offer promises of support. But now that there is actual power on the table, now that they run the House, they can no longer just sit back and say no. They can claim an adamant posture of defiance, but now it has to come with policy they actually put forward. And while they could agree on hating anything the black guy and the white woman came up with, they will find it a little more tempestuous coming to agreement about what they want to put forward.

And all of that would be just so amusing to watch if there weren't consequences, if there weren't lives on the line and bodies in the road. They say their primary goal is to make sure the black guy won't get elected in 2012. They promise to repeal that monster of a bill on health care. The say they will stymie any and all climate bills -- either because global warming is a hoax or because now is not the time to act given the economy and all. They say they will cut the budget, and yet we've yet to hear (ever!) exactly how. It will be harder to put words to action when they will be responsible for the blood that flows -- either because they are holding the scalpel or withholding the sutures. And while the dead don't vote, their surviving relatives do. This is a lesson they have had to learn before. This is a road they have taken us all down before. Why do they never learn from their past? Why do they keep taking us on the same dead end detours?

We've been through storms and blood before. It is part of our national heritage that we have survived these times, even when the debates turned violent. But at least, in those times, there was debate. There was a sense that we could make arguments and assess them on their merits. We could put them one against the other and let the best answer emerge in between. What happens when we replace those reasoned and structured arguments with meme manipulation and (poorly spelled) sign waving. What has become of a country where politics is played like sports, the loudest side winning in the pep rally? Point out not just a flaw in an argument but a demonstrably false claim of fact, and they say, "so what?" Too many times I've read that the Tea Party specifically and the bulk of voters generally don't care about facts. I am asked to accept this observation as fact, and the evidence is overwhelming that it is accurate. But shouldn't that as much as anything else scare the living shit out of us? I hear claims in these days after the midterm elections that "America has spoken" and that the Republicans have their second chance if not a mandate. But when I listen to what America has said, I find the arguments incoherent. These are the boozed and bamboozled crying out for an aspirin and for mommy to make the pain go away. They want their country "back" but not forward -- except that they have a very skewed sense of what back would mean.

The ultimate problem as I see it (and it crosses demographic and ideological divides) is that everyone wants the quick fix. No one wants to deal with consequences beyond blaming them on someone else. No one is willing to do the work or make the sacrifice to solve the problems. Instead, we'd rather cast Others as the monster and then find the magical solution that will vanquish them forever. We cannot see that we are all, all of us, vampires looking vainly in the mirror for a monster and unable to see our own reflection. To speak this truth is to join the "blame America first" crowd. It is to deny our Manifest Destiny of exceptionalism, our supernatural state as Super Power. We are all too happy to be the villagers with pitchforks and torches -- we embrace that mob mentality as the essence of democracy. And we scream all the louder when confronted with the sad fact that there are no external monsters and there is no magical antidote. We scream in part in frustration. We scream mostly because we know the screaming will create the monster (or summon someone who will). And once the monster is confirmed, the magic bullet has to be out there too -- if we only scream loud enough and long enough to find it.

We've been down this road before. Maybe we will change course, but probably only to go down it again. As we are learning all too well lately, the infrastructure of our roads (and our collective souls) suffers from this abuse. We cannot stay on this cycling route forever. We are driving our once mighty empire into its final days, not like heroes riding off into the sunset, but like frightened children facing the dark. We scream and poke at each other. We rant and stomp our feet, sometimes on one another. When we should huddle together and support each other, too many of us claim the primacy of individual freedom and head off to get lost in the dark alone. It's okay. They know if the made-up monsters don't get them, the group will take them back. And if they do somehow make it through the night, it will be that conveniently invisible hand coupled with their own self-evident self-worth that is responsible for their success. Day or nght, we are filled with delusions. Sadly, it is those delusions that fuel this car, regardless of who is driving and who is in the back.

And no one, apparently, has a good road map or knows how to read the signs.

(Note: These are all unmodified pictures of road signs near where I live. One of them is the road I live on.

Care to guess which one? I am betting it's probably not your first guess.)

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-30T10:17:00.000-07:00

Greetings, friends. 'Tis the season of the ghoulish and macabre. Which is to say, for most of us, our favorite holiday. The veil between worlds is at its thinnest in the time of Samhain. Restless spirits wander the world, ready to make mischief and play tricks. And ain't that a treat?

I've always enjoyed the transgressive holidays, which mostly means Carnival and Halloween -- those times of the year roughly coinciding with the equinox when we celebrate excess and our darker drives. The globe shifts on its axis and it seems like we are willing to contemplate less ordered, less constrained ways of being. Ignore these seasons at your peril. At the very least, we all need an opportunity to blow off a little dark steam.

In Carbondale, the university used to shut down the dorms and send the students home for Halloween. We have a bit of a reputation for riots. That's going a bit far, to be sure, but there is always something in the air. Maybe when you put on a mask you feel like you can get away with anything. Maybe we all crave a little chaos. Anarchy rules, with most of us preferring Aleister Crowley's abbreviated version of the Witch's Rede: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." The full Wiccan Rede comes with a bit of a caveat: "These Eight words the Rede fulfill: An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will." Something worth remembering when the spirits of the night encourage you to throw a brick through a storefront window. Or worse.

I prefer to let the call to transgress manifest in art. Costume parties are a fun opportunity to build a concept onto my body. Cards and posters are a fun opportunity to play comic arts. We used to decorate our house, but have let the workload eclipse this opportunity for seasonal play. Still, every now and again, I hang a Blair Witch cluster of sticks and bones in a tree around town -- the simplest decorations often being the creepiest.

It's a beautiful fall weekend, folks. Don't let this day and night pass you by. Carve a pumpkin. Celebrate the harvest. Light a bonfire (but be sure to tend it). Play dress up. Play a gentle prank. Dance skyclad in the moonlight. And when the devout hypocrites accuse you of inviting Satan into your heart, remind them that most of these rituals are about tricking him into passing you by. He prefers the shriveled hearts of those who forgot the divine charge to "judge not lest ye be judged."

More Cartoons and an Origin Story

2010-10-20T07:31:00.000-07:00

The unfortunate combination of obligation and procrastination is impacting my ability to keep up with the blogging, so it looks like another week of delving into the sketchbook for comic art. Meh. That's not cheating, right? That's just its own form of sharing.

And in the spirit of sharing, I thought I would respond publicly to a private question from a friend who follows my blog. "Why Bungy Notes?" she asked me. No big mystery, there. "Bungy" (with or without accompanying digits) has been my profile name of choice on the internet for almost two decades now. Way back in 1992, when most interactions were text based and we used to meet strangers in "tallkers" and "bbs," I chose Bungy as my moniker. Up until sometime in 2000, it was my secret identity. When I was doing stuff on line and didn't want my name attached to those activities, I was "Bungy."

But why Bungy? Back in those early days of the net, before pic and video sharing were so easy, there were plenty of us inspired by the writings of William Gibson and other cyber-punk authors to imagine the Internet as a virtual site where you could reinvent yourself. Moreover, that reinvention need not be tied to reality; the only limits were those of bandwidth and imagination. I used to go to a purely text-based gay talker and engage in cyber-sex with strangers who may or may not have been men on the other end of the line. At that time, there was a pretty even split between those men who wanted to hook up IRL and those who just wanted to play on-line. There was a middle crowd eager to move to phone chats, but I pretty much fell into the latter group.

There were other differences as well. One of them involved those who were tied to reality and those of us who were not. Again, I fit into the latter group. Long before Second Life came on the scene, there were plenty of us involved in collaborative fantasies typed out in textual format. And some of us, recognizing that this was fantasy, chose a more dream-like and surreal approach to our fantasies. "Bungy" was a misspelling of "bungee" and references both my desire for extreme experiences (like the extreme sport of bungee jumping) and my desire for flexibility in an on-line identity. Even at that time, most gay men greeted each other in the fantasy world of on-line encounters with a request for "stats." I often gave impossible stats for my height, weight, and genitalia proportions. I could bend in impossible ways. I was stretchy, expandable, and quite very odd. And therein arose my subtitle: "Be flexible. Be strange."

If video killed the radio star, I think pics and vids killed the surreal on-line chatrooms. Oh sure, there's the visual buffet of Second Life. I tried that for a while. But I found the menu options somewhat limiting -- I had to choose my strangeness out of a box. I either had to know how to code it myself or work from a bricolage of someone else's fantasy materials. And I was kind of offended by how the whole Second Life experience was invested (literally) in creating a real economy with Linden Dollars. Plus, all those graphics tended to jam people's systems. It was too odd (and not in the good way) to see so many prepackaged avatars standing in a crowd and still using the old talker/chat-room conventions to spin out fantasies.

Anyway, "Bungy" remains an on-line name for me. It is who I am on-line and who I have been for coming on two decades. I still haven't actually bungee jumped, but that is something that remains on my bucket list. One day. And for the record, in my head I hear the "g" as soft. I am aware that it can be pronounced with a hard "g" and be an adjective for something that smells bad. That amuses me, since so far smell is one sense we haven't added to the virtual experience. I also recently learned that "bungy" is a derogatory term for a man from Bangladesh. Who knew?

Some Cartoons

2010-10-12T10:57:00.000-07:00

In digging around for a blog topic this week, I thought it might be fun to share some cartooning from my sketchbooks. These are scans without any real digital clean-up. If they seem small on this page, click on the image for a larger view.

First, let me be perfectly clear: I am not a professional visual artist or cartoonist. My professional training is in communication. And while I have some undergraduate design courses under my belt and a long standing hobby of drawing and painting, this is not where I earn a living. I starting teaching courses in Visual Rhetoric several years ago, and a favorite unit in that class is on cartoons (particularly political cartoons). Part of my training is also in Performance Studies, which suggests that doing is one of the best ways of learning. So, I took a hand at making cartoons. They may look simple, but they are harder than they appear. Kind of like haiku, that way.

I also share a certain amount of frustration with the scholarly literature of visual rhetoric. Many of these folks do not produce visual messages (of cartoons or other varieties). Not that critics have to be practitioners, but I think there is a great value from actually doing work in the phenomenon you choose to theorize/criticize. My admiration for editorial cartoonists went up exponentially when I tried to make a political cartoon. In addition to the craft of line-art, there is an economy of expression in the one-liner. It ain't easy, and I appreciate these artists' craft because, in part, they have to make it look easy. In my own teaching and scholarship (as well as my performance work), I learn so much from the doing, and I have learned so much from doing cartoons.

So I admit, with some pride in the fact, that I am an amateur. French cultural theorist Roland Barthes similarly claimed the status of amateur and defined it thus: "The Amateur engages in painting, music, sport, science, without the spirit of mastery or competition[...] he establishes himself graciously (for nothing) in the signifier: in the immediately definitive substance of music, of painting[...] he is – he will be perhaps – the counter-bourgeois artist" [Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 2]. My interest in comics and cartoons is, as the root of "amateur" suggests, in my love for them. I am happy to make them as an act of exploration and appreciation. I am happy to share them in a non-competitive, non-commercial spirit.

The images on this page are from my sketchbooks. Most are from the last two years. They are some of the better pages where I think I hit on a message and an image with the cartoonist's economy of expression. Believe me, they are surrounded by pages and pages of less successful attempts.

I am currently cartooning for the collaborative blog, Black Magpie Theory; you can find some of my attempts at political caricature and commentary over there. And of course, I also create original art comics for this blog, experimental comics, poemicstrip, and occasionally Abstract Comics.

Famous Album Covers

2010-10-05T06:58:00.000-07:00

"These initiation rites have been monetized. My social network ate your Web 2.0. Hang pierced from a tree and call it a film festival. Cunning like a conservative news network. Your dreams are in violation of international copyright laws. You will be persecuted. Upgrade now or perish. I used to read books; now I read faces. I have an ambient awareness of birdsong. He painfully pricked his skin with pixels. Practice safe file transfer protocol. Silence equals relief."

In the course of sharing digital artwork here and at other blogs, I caught the attention of and was invited to contribute to the blog, "Famous Album Covers." I love the concept of this site: album covers of fictional bands. That is, using the format of album (now CD) covers as an inspiration for producing art.

The blog includes the following opening description of its purpose:

Perhaps the greatest art movement in America is the series of album covers generated from the 1960s forward. Perhaps it isn't. Here it is though. Some of the most famous album covers you have never seen.

For the art historians out there, yes, Pop Art has British beginnings. And no, I'm not going to look beyond the technology of the phonograph to discover that the Mesopotamians had the first album cover. Sorry.

Can't a guy get a word in edgewise?

Lately, when I post to the blog, I like to include a playlist with the album, the list of song titles and running times offering its own kind of poetry and an interesting interaction of words with image. For example:

01 Goony (3:15)
02 Alpha OMG (2:17)
03 Nixon's Confession (18:30)
04 Pay to Pray (4:22)
05 My Tarnished Agony (2:37)
06 Error Message 401 (3:20)
07 Why Were We Thinking? (2:54)
08 Partial Funding (1:10)
09 You Gum My Spirit (5:02)
10 Mother Whore (2:06)
11 My Own Private Taliban (3:32)

01 Sine Qua Non (3:17)
02 Labial Fold (4:13)
03 STFU (2:37)
04 My Own Private Eye To Hoe (3:32)
05 Ball Sweat and Pantyhose (3:23)
06 Send In The Clowns (4:13)
07 Dead And Buried (3:23)
08 Outrageous Fortune (5:06)
09 Sylvan (3:12)
10 For Ani (5:12)
11 Clown Shoes (2:24)
12 Vibrate (3:47)
13 Brick By Brick (4:13)
14 Title Wave (2:17)

01 My Mom Just Wants Her Bomb Back (3:17)
02 Daughton Park (2:20)
03 Claws In Them Paws (3:15)
04 Shit Eating Grin (1:35)
05 No Mushrooms (6:23)
06 There But For The Grace of God (5:10)
07 The Secret Garden (3:13)
08 Ruthie's Request (1:54)
09 Tan Your Hide (4:20)
10 Crisis Hotline (7:33)
11 Walk With Me (3:15)
12 Call Your Father (2:27)
13 Labor Is For Life (6:11)
14 Daughton Park (acoustic) (2:25)

And then sometimes, I provide no playlist:

My partner makes music on his computer. In the last several years, I have followed my visual sensibilities in the tools and networking possibilities offered by this increasingly digitized world. He has pursued his considerable sound sensibilities. In all of this, we share an interest in intermedia and the DIY ethic -- the potential of new media to open up creative possibilities and cultural production. We can get a bit utopian in all that, if we are not careful: Viva la remix society. Take back the systems of production. Free the imagination from the prepackaged and prefigured. Explore together the unknown territories of truly free expression.

Maybe "Famous Album Covers" contributes to that dream. Maybe it just shows how we are all tied to the forms we grew up with. It's a complicated world. But the important thing is that we are all producing and letting our creative sensibilities flourish.

"It Bleeds, It Won't Be Contained"

2010-10-03T07:36:00.000-07:00

So, I spent my Saturday making a comic as part of the "24 Pages in 24 Hours" create a comic project. It might have been an indulgent use of a Saturday, but I had fun doing it. Well, mostly. About halfway through the afternoon, I really wanted to quit. Even this morning, my shoulders are tense and my back is sore. But then, that could be more a result of struggling to upload the work to Scribd this morning. Grrr. Stupid, dumb internet connection!

As the note at the end of the comic states, I made this comic in a 24 hour period from 8am Sat (10/2/2010) to 8 am this morning. I did use, in the composition, some scans from my sketchbook and some clips I've digitally created before, but the concept and the composition (as well as the digital clean-up) happened all yesterday. I also did a fair amount of fresh drawing yesterday (hands very sore!). The comic is a (possibly problematic) mix of poemics, cartooning, and some abstract comics. Mostly, though, I just tried to stay in motion and produce the work in the time allotted.

Enjoy.

It Bleeds, It Won't Be Contained

Here is a link to the comic in case the embed breaks (as they tend to do!).

More on Cross/Walking

2010-09-30T04:46:00.000-07:00

I'm still working on the best way to share video documentation of my recent performance, Cross/Walking. But until then, here are a few stills from the recent production. I begin the performance with a brief introduction of themes about place and space and the practice of place-making while "rappelling" along the stage edge. This piece is titled "Enter/Cross/Exit," and ends with me off stage and a vibrating rope stretched across the liminal space between audience and stage -- "a trace of a crossing from entrance to exit."

The logic of the show as titled suggested taking on Christian faith and what it might say about environmental advocacy. I walk a fine line in honoring Christian faith without proselytizing. My point is that the cross, as symbol, is something we all share -- believers and non-believers alike. The idea of carrying it, literally or symbolically, as a pilgrimage of sorts resonates as a way of, well, "walking one's talk." I use this particular meditation to explore ideas often expressed as "Creation Care," a deliberate attempt to challenge belief among some evangelicals that to be Christian is to be anti-environmentalist or that environmentalists are only pagan, nature-worshipers. As I've posted elsewhere on this blog, my own faith skews more toward agnostic or interfaith than Christian (I was raised Unitarian). So my goal in this section of the performance is to try to speak to Christians within a discourse they value about the lessons in their faith tradition to be good stewards of the earth.

That said, I am also aware that a lot of bad things have been done in Christ's name, and that the symbol of the cross has too often been used as a weapon more than a symbol of love. I don't shy away from that fact in this monologue. How could I? But since the show is about process-oriented rather than object/product-oriented thnking, I am more interested in what people do with their faith and symbols. This leads me to do some things with the symbol that create some, well, challenging images. But lest we think this is only a provocative image, my partner informed me about a practice by a military contractor to inscribe the cross in gun sights, including codes referencing Biblical verses.

Following this section of the performance, I transform the cross into an easel and do a section titled "Trip/Tychs." There is an embedded pun on "trip" in this section as I travel between images, telling and sometimes improvising prose-poem stories that connect the images. I also link to the idea of the triptych as an altar piece. The power of three images together is their interrelationship. So, I use the triptych to explore connection, as well as to interact with the audience.

I follow this piece with a mock lecture by a character named Dr. Nathan Jogary. He describes an expedition to an "impossible mountain," using and referencing slides that have nothing to do with what he is talking about. Or, well, in a kind of chance aesthetic, the relationship between what he says and what he shows is abstract enough to allow audiences the productive, imaginative space to make their own connections. The images in this faux-lecture are digital artworks I have made for abstract comics and asemic writing.

Finally, I end with a meditation with the audience about connection while passing out a rope that slithers through them, hand to hand, like a snake in the grass, like a winding path. I use the same rope that I used in the opening monologue not only to neatly tie up the performance, but also to untie the performance and rupture the exit. The last moment of the performance involves me exiting through the theatre entrance, dragging the rope with me, creating a kind of path to the outside world. The last line (which trails away as I walk away): "It exits and becomes an entrance which becomes an exit which becomes an entrance which becomes an exit which becomes..."

[As I noted before, I designed this show to be portable. If you are reading this and would like to bring this show or my earlier piece, "Trail Mix," to your community, contact me at jmgray32(at)gmail(dot)com. I am deeply committed to using performance to spark dialogue about environmental issues. I can couple this performance with a lecture or series of workshops on performance and environmental advocacy.]

Note: Special thanks to Christi Saindon for the photo-documentation of this performance.

"Cross/Walking" Opens Tonight

2010-09-23T17:04:00.000-07:00

This image is the program cover for my newest solo performance, "Cross/Walking." I'm sitting here waiting to go to the theatre to get warmed up and set up and ready to go. I want to be in the right performance head-space, but I am also getting bored out of my mind waiting. So. Why not blog a little about it?

This show is a mash-up of interests particularly near and dear to me. First, I am a scholar of communication with particular interests in rhetorical studies and performance studies. For me, performance is both a mode of sharing and a mode of exploring. So, a lot of my work actually involves creating public events where I (alone or with others) share performance work exploring a wide variety of topics. But I also teach classes and run workshops where we use performance to explore phenomenon using a variety of protocols -- sometimes called "experiential learning" or "performative pedagogy."

I also have a strong interest in visual communication, with a particular interest in comics. I think there is a natural connection between some of the ways performance works with images and words and the ways comics do. I am also "drawn" (ha!) to the idea that comics are a particular kind of literature -- images in sequence bearing a closer relationship to literature than, say, film. But as comics theorists (they exist!) note, there is something going on in that space between illustrated panels ("the gutter," so to speak). A comics artist works creatively with that empty space so that the reader does interesting work in making the connection across panels.

Finally, I specialize in scholarship about environmental communication, including how we engage in public discourse about the ecological systems that support us. In environmental communication, we note that how we talk about nature, ecosystems, etc. is just as important if not more so than what environmental science usually tells about the same. I am drawn particularly to the role visual messages (from 19th Century landscape painting to pictures of the Earth from space, from films to activists' "image event" protests) play in shaping our understanding of environmental issues and motivating our action.

"Cross/Walking" deals with the intersection of all of these interests. The central thesis of the show is that we, in the US particularly, tend to be object- or product-oriented. We focus on things, objects, commodities, etc. I believe a positive shift in environmental awareness requires us to be more aware of processes and relationships. Using that idea of the "gutter" in comic strips as a staged visual metaphor, I encourage the audience to do the work of making meaning between images. In one piece in the show, this involves me telling stories between random illustrations of everyday objects, taking cues from the audience as to what images to use and how to combine them. In another, I give a mock lecture about an exploration of an "impossible mountain" that includes slides -- that have nothing to do with what I am talking about (I use a lot of my abstract comics in this slide show). At one point, I pass a rope out and through the audience so that we are literally connected by a material object.

Another theme of this performance is how difficult it is to talk about particular experiences (in nature, in performance, in our everyday lives) without relying on common and shared experiences. But, I argue, this also robs the experience of its particularity. So, recognizing that we transform spaces (pre-existing territories) into places (particular sites of personal meaning and experience) through our actions and communicative operations there, I encourage the audience to be less concerned about the difficulty of sharing particular connections to particular places than with the practice of place-making.

And if all that sounds too heady, then consider this: I rappel across the stage edge, I improvise narratives at the audience's direction, I carry a cross on a pilgrimage, I transform that cross into a gun, I amuse with puns and jokes, and I wrap it all up with images that echo and transform. And all in a little under an hour.

Should be fun. Let's see how the opening night audience likes it.

Checking in on Poemics

2010-09-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

A Poemic in the style of Satu Kaikkonen

It's been a while since I've shared some of my poemic work on this blog. When I am not doodling political cartoons and commentary over at Black Magpie Theory, I also noodle around with experimental comics forms, including poemics, abstract comics, and asemic writing. "Poemics" is a term coined in 1991 by Alvaro de Sa, a Brazillian poet who considered poemics a "metalanguage of poetry." While this origin locates poemics as an outgrowth of visual poetry ("vispos") and concrete poetry, contemporary poemic artists explore a variety of hybrid possibilities between poetry and comics.

When I stumbled across Piotr Szreniawski's poemicstrip blog a little over a year ago, I recognized a literary/art form I had already been exploring with a local arts collective, BAR Corporation, as we made conceptual art comics for the SIUC student newspaper. Working with Piotr and other poemic artists, I've contributed work to collaborative artist book projects, an up-coming issue of Xerolage, a forthcoming essay on connections between experimental comics and performance art for the Polish comics journal, Zeszytow Komiksowych, and had a multi-page graphic poem accepted in the journal, Palooka. And all that more or less just in the last year. Whew!

All of which is simply to say that poemics and experimental comics have been very good to me. I encourage you to check out the work being done at some of the blogs in the list over there on the right, or to follow the hyperlinks in this post. Copied below is some of the work I've been contributing to the poemicstrip blog. Enjoy.

In response to a prompt about "visual technologies"

Working with asemic writing

In response to a prompt on "fashion"

An homage to the collaboration of e.e. cummings and Krazy Kat

A poemic haiku

A love poemic for Valentines Day

"Cross/Walking" Performance

2010-09-16T07:09:00.000-07:00

When I am not doodling about on the internet, I am constructing and critiquing environmental messages, often through live performance. Next weekend (9/23-9/25/2010) my current solo-show, "Cross/Walking," will be part of a double bill of solo performance in the Kleinau Theatre on the SIUC campus in Carbondale, IL. I am happy to share the evening with Hunter Fine's media-immersive installation performance about urban nomadic practices. Together, both shows deal with movement and sojourning as important cultural and meaning-maiking practices.

My show, "Cross/Walking," is heavily influenced by my study and production of comics. I am particularly interested in the work readers do to make connections between panels, filling in the "gutter," so to speak. The deeper environmental message of the show is that we live in a culture more focused on objects than their relationship, more interested in products than processes. Utilizing a variety of performance experiments, I contemplate how we might shift our consciousness to focus more on systems of interrelationship than objects in isolation. My previous solo show, "Trail Mix", had a similar concept -- that, using backpacking as a metaphor, we might find connections and coalitions between different progressive issues- and identity-politics, demonstrating particularly links between LGBT/Q and environmental concerns. Building on that show, "Cross/Walking" addresses a more abstract but perhaps more foundational concern in how we, particularly in the West and specifically in the US, perceive our relationship to the world and each other.

If you are in the area or ever wanted to come to Southern Illinois, consider dropping by for the show. Or, if you have access to an arts community that can bring in performing artists, I have carefully created "Cross/Walking" so that it can easily travel. I also still have "Trail Mix" in my repertoire. And, with either, I am happy to provide an accompanying lecture and/or workshop on the ways art and particularly performance intersect with environmental advocacy and concerns. I keep the cost of this work low and am happy to do it for little more than the expense (travel, lodging, some tech, etc.) of bringing it to you, or even a charitable donation in kind to an agreed upon local environmental or LGBT/Q charity. If interested, contact me at jmgray(at)gmail(dot)com.

On Being Industrious

2010-09-12T17:55:00.000-07:00

We've outsourced and

crowdsourced our output

but we still think there is an away

out there

out of sight and

out of mind.

And I'm trying to stay productive

in the mash of obligation

meets innervation

meets innovation

in a tired nation

bent on its own alienation

from itself.

Because a moratorium is arbitrary

even after a slick summer of tar

and chemical rainbows on the gulf?

Because safety is a secondary concern

when there's a bottom line?

Because the economy's in the tank

when the gas that goes there

costs too much?

America, the bottom line

is not the only line.

You'll realize that

when you have to stand in one.

You'll see that

when we've crossed yet another.

It's a picket or a battle,

I think?

No wait.

I forgot my lines.

I went up.

And I'm running out

of resources

to draw from.

But I'm still drawing.

We share that, right?

Buy a Quran on 9/11

2010-09-08T21:07:00.000-07:00

Yes, I admit it. I am sickened by the plan of certain Florida pastors to burn a pile of Qurans on 9/11. I certainly think it is their right to do so, and I don't want to get in the way of that right. I think it is wrong; I think it confirms for the rest of the world (but particularly much of the Islamic world) that we are not the country of religious freedom and tolerance we sometimes like to claim that we are. But, of course, part of religious freedom is allowing others to do stupid things in the name of their convictions. I suppose if zealots will content themselves to burn books and flags and dolls instead of shooting people or setting off bombs where people pray, maybe that's a better way to act out their frustration.

But I still want a way to register my disdain for those who would rather confront the world with hate, and for those who would justify their hate by claiming it is a legitimate response for the acts of others' hate. I want a symbolic gesture of my own that resists perpetuating cycles of violence and revenge.

So my plan on Saturday is to purchase a Quran at my local bookstore, to carry it with me that day, and to read it in public. I do so because I am not afraid of a book. I am not afraid of a religious tradition. Yes, I know that that book has condemning things to say about my queer sexuality. So what? I live in a culture saturated with another book and its followers that believe similar things about my difference.

I've heard too many complain that no moderate Muslims spoke out against the 9/11 attacks. This claim is patently false. That you did not hear them doesn't mean that they didn't speak out. That people persist in believing an absence of voices crying to be heard is more a sign of their willful deafness than confirmation of their beliefs. But the real question in the near future may be, where were the allies of persecuted Muslims when this country started putting exemptions on the First Amendment? Where were the outspoken non-Muslim Americans who acknowledge and support their fellow citizens who are Muslim?

For sure, there are a few visible and outspoken citizens -- NYC Mayor Bloomberg foremost among them, perhaps. At one time even President George W. Bush acknowledged the plurality of faiths in this country and resisted making the War on Terror one on Islam. Our current President offers his patented "for them in principle, maybe" garbled stance, for what that's worth. And in this little backwater on the internet, there is also me. I will not stop the pastors with their bonfire. But I will stand up and be counted as someone who does something a little more brave with a book in public -- read it!

And should that offend someone, either in the abstract or in situ, so be it. Welcome to America where, for at least a little while longer, we are still free.

[Note: I credit my good friend and artist, Amanda Grove, for telling me about "National Buy a Quran Day" on 9/11. She credits Tyler Melchior with the idea. Share it if you like.]

The Rush to Belief

2010-09-03T06:52:00.000-07:00

On a camping trip earlier this year, a friend turned to me and somewhat incredulously said, "You believe in aliens and UFOs, don't you?"

"Well no, not exactly, " I answered.

What followed was a nuanced discussion on the nature of "belief." And while we were talking about UFOs, the same arguments apply to what might be called "my religious beliefs," as well. But let's stick with those aliens first.

It is more accurate to say I would like to believe that UFOs are extraterrestrials visiting our planet. But I don't have any evidence that confirms that such is the case. And so for me, it is an open question.

I grant that most of the so-called evidence for alien visitation is thin on the ground. I admit that many of the "believers" are very lacking in credibility. But an absence of credible evidence is not proof of an assertion, either way.

I also think that some of the skeptic's arguments against alien visitation are kind of skewed, too. Consider two of the leading arguments against.

1) The great void of space would make interstellar travel highly unlikely if not impossible.

Forgetting for the moment that theoretical physics has begun to consider how to overcome such an impediment, let the skeptics acknowledge for a moment that we mere humans perhaps don't know everything. The hypothesis of alien visitation posits a more advanced being than we are. To assume that space is too big to travel through is not unlike Native Americans in the 15th Century imagining that no humans could cross the Atlantic Ocean (or whatever they called it) because it can't be done in a canoe.

2) Even aliens would be a natural phenomenon, and so there should be physical evidence of their presence.

Without participating in a false binary between "intelligent" and "natural," again what this argument glosses over is that the hypothesis posits a superior intelligence. We humans are very proud of our covert operations. We increasingly espouse an ethic of "leave no trace" in our own explorations of nature. Why is it so hard to consider that a more advanced species might work very hard and with a high degree of success to hide evidence of its visits? Add to this consideration our inability to necessarily recognize or collectively accept that physical evidence should we find it. I think these points offer at least a reasonable amount of doubt for this skeptic's position, and I haven't even turned to conspiracy theories.

For me, the best position on this issue is to leave it an open question. I do not know that aliens are visiting the planet. I do not believe that they are, either. I do not know that UFOs are aliens -- I accept that they are, as the acronym says, "unidentified." I would be thrilled to learn that the 5% of UFO sightings that cannot be currently explained turned out to be something other than aliens (see Leslie Kean's recent book on the topic).

There are questions and wonders that science has not yet explained. That's kind of what makes it science. But I also think there are aspects of the human experience and the nature of the universe that science (at least as we currently do it) cannot answer. Put in academic terms, there are some epistemological limits on science.

For similar reasons, I've always been more comfortable calling myself an agnostic than an atheist. In too many atheist's positions I see, ultimately, a "leap of faith" in the assertion that "there is no god." I am more sympathetic to atheists who claim "I see no evidence for the existence of God." And I have little patience for those who cannot see the difference between those two claims. An agnostic, on the other hand, leads with "I don't know." And I don't.

A lot of harm is done in this country and on this planet by folks asserting the superiority of their beliefs, the exclusive rightness of their particular religion. To me, though, the real crime is the assertion of certainty in order to fill an uncomfortable void of uncertainty. For many, the unknown is just too scary.

But does it have to be? I try very mindfully to be at peace with the unknown, to accept and acknowledge uncertainty. Whether the existence of god or aliens, I just don't know. I imagine at some point in the future the population of this planet will hopefully figure out what those other 5% of UFO sightings are. We may also learn interesting things about extraterrestrial life. Maybe we'll even answer with definitive proof the god question. I guess I'll get my answer on that day that I die. In some ways, the possibility of finally knowing makes me look forward (but not in a way that makes me want to hasten it) my death: a void, a white light, a tunnel filled with dead relatives, St. Peter, reincarnation, a flaming lake of fire, or something no one ever really imagined?

Meanwhile, I think I'll keep looking up. What can it hurt?

Why I Make Comics: Still Exploring Their Potential

2010-08-29T05:17:00.000-07:00

Click to enlarge images.

Perhaps you've figured it out; the art at Bungy Notes skews toward comics and cartoons. I like creative illustration and caricature; I like the blending of ink-work with digital image manipulation. But I find most mainstream comics, well, disappointing. I tend to prefer the experimental in comics, from wordless and story-less abstract comics to surreal underground indie comix, from poemics to visualized memoirs. I promise this is not (just?) hip snobbery. I have my guilty pleasures in the mainstream (Image being one of my favorite publishers). But I dive into the margins of comics in part because I am always looking for further evidence of what comics can do.

In David Cronenberg's film Existenz, the topic is not comics but video games, although even this is a metaphor. He observes, though, that in film and video gaming we've yet to see what these media can really do. I tend to agree. As a culture, we get locked into certain preferences for what the conventions of a particular medium should be. Hell, we even teach them in the pre-professional training components of higher education. What would it mean to abandon those conventions and see what else the medium can do?

Scott McCloud (among others) has persuasively shown different cultural trends in comics across cultures, contrasting US trends with those in Europe and Asia. One can certainly argue with these distinctions, or better still, track the on-going cross-pollination of comic forms from culture to culture. The larger point, however, is that comics may develop particular visual languages, but those languages are not the only way to do comics.

In Reinventing Comics, McCloud suggested that the Internet would revolutionize comics, both at the level of marketing/production and at the level of creative process. While I think some of his more bizarre predictions have not (yet?) come to pass, it is clearly true that the Internet has been good for comics. More and more, bloggers and other web-content producers are embracing an imperative in this medium for visual communication. Rare is the blog that is purely textual anymore (or maybe I just refuse to follow blogs that don't include visual content). Often, this visual content takes a comics form.

Fascinating explanation of time and culture using a

medium that often emphasizes the various way

time passes and moves in narrative.

As I continue to explore as critic and creator what comics can do, I am inspired by a variety of trends: comics for visualizing data, multi-panel comics for political argument, comics for explaining processes, comics for phenomenological expression, comics for...(fill in the blank).

And yes, comics (my own and others) do make for interesting blog content. See, for example, this prescient comparison of Aldous Huxley to George Orwell for what comics can do in linking literature to contemporary socio-political concerns. To me, this is more than simply illustration; the combination of words and line art contribute to the synthesis/contrast of these writers. And the conclusion is, well, chilling.

The popular perception is that comics are "simple," that they are reductive and do not offer any depth. Comics are a sign of a decline in our culture? I could not disagree more. Or, at least, I contend that the potential of comics as both art and cultural commentary has not yet been fully explored. This is not to say that folks aren't exploring comics, but just to assert that there is still undiscovered territory. Here at Bungy Notes, I'll continue to use comics (and other visual messages and forms) as part of the discourse. Consider that a promise.

(And yes, the comics on this page -- but not the video or movie poster -- are all my original work.)

Crazy vs. Crazy

2010-08-25T16:47:00.000-07:00

Criminy, this Park51 "debate" is happening everywhere, isn't it? I think the protests against the mosque are doing a pretty good job at proving Osama bin Laden right. He always claimed (as several of our more radical, fundamentalists Christians do) that this is a holy war of Islam vs. the West. The counter argument has always been that the US is a country of freedom where all, including Muslims, are free to practice their religion.

Except, apparently no.

In the end, building the building (whether called a mosque or otherwise) or not building the building won't change what crazy, radical terrorists say. Sure, build it and they will spin it as a "win." Don't build it, and they will spin it as, "see, told ya." Either way, they will use it to recruit. So maybe we shouldn't be quite so worried about what crazy people will say.

Maybe we should be a little more self-reflexive about the ways we in the US are crazy. Is this really who we want to be? Shouting in the streets about the atrocities of others while ignoring or explaining away our bloody actions as always justified, or at least excusable? Do we really think we can suspend the First Amendment just this once out of "sensitivity" that we somehow forget when we yell indiscriminately at fellow citizens, "Go back to your country, towelhead!"?

And how do we conveniently not recognize the timing of this -- an issue that nearly a year ago had no real opposition and even the support of local religious leaders (Jews and Christians!), but now in the rundown to the midterm elections the masses are whipped into a lathering, street thug frenzy? Ring a bell, froth at the mouth. Now get your treat. Snausage or thorazine?

It's crazy vs. crazy, but at least in all this madness the folks on the extremes are finding some common ground. Too bad it is a psychotic delusion.

Sharing a Find

2010-08-22T08:59:00.000-07:00

In my recent frustrations over the kind of public discourse the Park51 project "debate" is producing, I've been finding new blogs to read. I have to share with those of you who follow here a true gem: Black Magpie Theory. It is everything I could want in a multiply-authored blog; it's arty, snarky, funny, and insightful. It offers the right mix of politics, popular culture, environmental news, rants, poetry, visual art. As I continue to contemplate the re-design of this blog, I could do a lot worse than to emulate BMT. Seriously, check it out!

If I seem to be writing Bungy Notes with greater frequency lately, that is equal parts commitment to blogging and work avoidance. I admit: I am in denial about the work piling up on my desk. Which is simply to say, don't get used to this frequency of output. I doubt I can keep it up. But I will be trying to make my posts here at least more regularly, more predictably. Do they make the blog equivalent of roughage for that?

Update on a Divided Left

2010-08-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

The national "debate" over the Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero continues. Howard Dean has joined the "perhaps they should move" camp. Wrong of me to call that a "camp," of course. He is not the shrill advocate of religious intolerance that Newt Gingrich appears to be. His position is more nuanced. We need a conversation about this topic, he tells us, that recognizes the wisdom of building this center somewhere else. I agree with him that we need a more civil and reasoned conversation. And if that were all he were calling for, I would be in complete agreement. But when that conversation has to begin with moving the project, I think Dean is at worst disingenuous about having a conversation and at best (but still pretty bad) further demonstrating the Obama administration's problematic preference for "preemptive compromise."

On the closer-to-home front, I did ultimately comment on Chris di Spirito's "From the Left" blog about the stoning in Afghanistan (see last post). I also commented there in response to Chris's blog post about Obama clearly being on the wrong side of the Park51 controversy. My comment was deleted and I have now been blocked from the site. I will copy below this post my comment that offended; you can decide for yourself if you think I violated the comments policy Chris has articulated for his site.

Lest anyone think I am just using my blog to wage a discourse war with another blogger, I want to clarify. I have a pretty firm stance of support for the Park51 project. It saddens me that some others on the Left don't share my views, but at least I am not alone in having these views. I worry that an even more divided Left does not bode well for the future of this nation. But I also think disagreement and diversity of opinion are important -- something the Left usually embraces, in fact. And we need that space for civil discussion that Dean says he is calling for. Certainly we need to discourage uncivil discourse, but what happens when we start blocking and censoring reasonably well-articulated and civil disagreement?

Yes, I can conceive a number of interpretations for Chris's actions. Maybe he doesn't like long-winded rebuttal. Maybe he is young and youthful enthusiasm trumps wisdom. Maybe he has personal experiences that motivate his firm stance on this issue. Maybe he is right and I am an evil person for disagreeing. In the end, none of this really matters. It's Chris's blog and he can do with it as he pleases. Unlike Dr. Laura, I will not confuse access to a private venue as a violation of my First Amendment rights.

But really, this isn't about who's right and who's wrong. It's about the failure to communicate across difference. Perhaps it is about the failure to negotiate difference, especially among folks who otherwise seem to share an ideological position. But is is a failure, and one that I fear threatens our future. A dispute in the blogosphere surely doesn't warrant such concern, but it does if it is yet another symptom of a deeper divide in the nation...and perhaps the world.

Chris, I welcome your comments here if you are still following my blog. And of course, I welcome others' views on this issue, whether or not they agree with mine. My offending comment from Chris's blog follows:

I am having a difficult time tracking your point with this. If this is a continuation of your August 14th criticism of Obama that he would step up for NYC Muslims despite public opinion against them but not for Marriage Equality (which has been gaining popularity in the polls but is still not exactly favored in the polls), I get it. Yes, I want the President to show the same (well, actually clearer) support for the LGBT/Q community and the 14th Amendment as he does off-the-cuff for Muslims and the 1st Amendment.

But if you are criticizing him for unwisely jumping into a Constitutional issue because recent polls show it is unpopular, well, that seems more than a little contradictory to me. Just because the majority of Americans think it is a bad idea and distrust an ethnic/religious group doesn't mean that it justifies re-zoning (gerrymandering?) based on a particular religion. And I don't think it is that surprising that public opinion against Muslims is rising in the US given the foolishness of Birthers and a radically empowered shrill Right that continues to cast all Islam (not just radical Islam) as the enemy of the West. A country in economic meltdown usually seeks a scapegoat. Remember?

As for your final criticism of Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's 2001 "60 Minutes" quote, I have a real problem with the way (a) you are taking that quote out of context and (b) seem willing to overlook the US's role in creating conditions in Afghanistan that made members of the Mujahideen (our covert and abandoned allies during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan) transform into Al Qaeda. Keith Olbermann's recent special comment on this issue notes how folks like Glenn Beck have similarly taken this quote out of context to cast Rauf as an anti-American terrorist-sympathizer when nothing could be further from the truth.

I can understand why we would read these sorts of comments as "blame the victim" in the post-9/11 shock of 2001, even going so far as to end Bill Mahr's "Politically Incorrect" TV show because he said something similar. But nearly a decade later it seems highly irresponsible to continue to erase or dismiss that history of the US's involvement in the Middle East (particularly Afghanistan and the Mujahideen); involvement that Rauf is clearly NOT saying justifies 9/11 but did play an important role in motivating the 9/11 terrorists.

Chris Hayes of "The Nation" [actually, he's reporting an article from Salon.com on "The Rachel Maddow Show"] has recently tracked how this non-mosque not at Ground Zero eclipsed all other political discussion. The building has been planned, publicized, and talked about since nearly mid-2009. But in early May, Birther conspiracy theorist Pamela Geller started blogging about the "mega-mosque" at Ground Zero, subsequently finding her way easily into interviews on Fox News and other elements of the conservative spin machine. Big surprise that the Right (many of whom previously supported the project) saw this as an opportunity to develop a wedge issue for the midterm elections.

In 2009, the folks planning 51 Park Place described the project as a concerted effort not only to meet the needs of the local Muslim community in the neighborhood but also to send a clear message to radical Islam that when they attack the US they are attacking a country that supports and protects its considerable Muslim population. In other words, as material evidence that bin Laden's "Islam vs. the West" rallying cry is wrong. This is a country of religious freedom where minority groups are protected from the tyranny of the majority by a Constitution that is ultimately (if rarely immediately) upheld.

I guess, if we are to believe the recent polling data and the rhetoric from the Right (and some "From the Left"), bin Laden was right after all.

Rethinking This Blog

2010-08-17T13:44:00.000-07:00

I know, it's been a while since I've posted here. Sometimes it is easier to read than to write. Reallly, though, I am struggling with what I want this blog to be: Outlet for my political views? Resource for sharing art? Professional musings of an academic? A public version of a personal diary? Maybe.

I guess I am finding it difficult to keep my focus on the purpose of this sort of project. After spending much of the month of July "off the grid" and almost entirely away from electronic communication in McCarthy, Alaska, I return to a more mediated homeplace intimately aware of the different mindset all this connectivity allows. Hell, psychologists are even studying the effect of so much electronic communication -- I know because somebody linked this NYT piece about it to my Facebook page. Ain't irony cool?

I think I also liked the self-imposed news vacuum while I was away. Sure, I came back to Judge Walker's 136 page rebuke of the Prop H8ers. But even that moment of celebration was followed all too quickly by the 9th Circuit's decision to keep a stay on same sex marriage in California until the legal appeals process has a chance to work itself out, no doubt years from now.

Mostly, it is the latest furor over the Islamic Cultural Center at 51 Park Place that has me shaking my head these days. To me it is such a no-brainer; this is what freedom of religion is for. I would actually support a mosque at Ground Zero if one were seriously being proposed, but that is not what this non-issue is about. It's really about pundits and political operatives taking advantage of a hot button issue. It doesn't help when President Obama wades into the fray (exacerbating it) with a confusing for-the-First-Amendment-but-cautious-about-the-wisdom-of-the-location stance. It also doesn't help that Sen. Harry Reid decides it is better for his campaign to agree with his Tea Party opponent that it is a bad idea. These folks (Reid and Obama and even the Anti-Defamation League in NYC) trouble me more on this issue than the screaming heads on the Right, so ready to whip their base into a lather with the usual tactics of xenophobia and fear and scapegoats.

And then this: today I perused a blog that I generally like, Christopher di Spirito's From the Left. His queer and progressive news blog is a constant source of information and useful discussion. Sure, he's a bit more critical of the Obama Administration than I think I am, but it's not like they haven't given him a reason. Still, it is today's post that hit me like a gut punch, where Chris criticizes Obama's Afghanistan policy by reporting on the Taliban's stoning of an adulterous couple. He writes:

I don’t understand President Obama’s arrogant thinking that a surge of U.S. combat troops will somehow reverse the tide of radical Islam in Afghanistan? This is a deeply theocratic nation, mired in the 9th century, with absolutely no interest in joining the greater community of modern nations.

I share his doubts about the effectiveness of our military actions in Afghanistan, despite General Petraeus's recent junket to support the idea that there is a way to "win" there. But it is the totalizing sweep of Chris's anti-Islamic analysis, replete with the following header image for the post that so bothers me:

Really? Chris too? Even the Left is now joining in the Al Qaeda and Christian Right meme that this has always been about the West vs. Islam. Even if we get the hell out of Afghanistan, how is that meme going to help us negotiate the volatile global politics of the 21st Century? Do we "win" if we're only stuck in a 1950s mindset while "they" (all of 'em!) are trapped in the 9th Century? A bevy of polls over the last few years shows that Chris is hardly in the minority in the US in being suspicious of Muslims. Nor is he alone in equating Islam with anti-American ideology, despite considerable evidence of Muslim support of the US and firm criticism of terrorism. But then, as most queer folk are painfully aware, there is a huge disconnect between popular opinion and what is right, between polls and justice.

I considered writing a comment expressing my concern on his blog, and I still might. But I think the issue for me is bigger than just a comment. I considered dropping his blog from my reader. But what does that really accomplish? Better to hide from the Internet as a whole, I suppose. And besides, I still find From the Left to be a pretty good blog, perhaps all the moreso because I sometimes disagree with it.

In the end, I think I share Chris's frustration (rage?), but I am cautious about where to direct it. Does that caution make me, like Obama, "spineless"? Maybe. If, in our frustration with Obama's (liberals'? Democrats'?) spinelessness, we turn to sweeping generalizations and graphics more frequently found on the vitriolic Right, aren't we compromising our message and ideals? Is it really gaining a spine just to start sounding like your opposition, to start using their tactics?

Which is why I find myself reconsidering what a blog is for or if I should even be blogging in the first place. It was a conservative blog, after all, that fanned the flames of the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy. It is blogs that fuel the Birthers and the Oath Takers and a host of radical groups from across the political spectrum. And it is in blogs where self-proclaimed (professional?) Leftists rehearse rhetoric that can compete with (i.e. out shout?) the screaming "dittoheads" on the Right. But to give up on blogging in general is, well, like dissing all of Islam because of the behaviors of the Taliban. Or, if you prefer, it is like ignoring the inevitable; it's like trying to "take your country back" by selectively deciding what the founding patriarchs wanted it to be.

So I take this all into consideration as I consider what is to become of Bungy Notes. I don't want (or plan) to give up blogging just yet. I want to do my best to exemplify the discourse and practice I want this electronically interconnected world to be. I don't want to whine or just bash on other people's sites. I want it to be a place for art, politics, and the personal. And yes, I want it to be an open place for disagreement, by all means. I share much with Chris, from sexual orientation to political leanings, but for all of that similarity we are still very different people. Let us celebrate that difference, and let us look for such diversity in others even when they seem to be part of a group, particularly a reviled group.

(Anticipate a redesign of the site with maybe a little more clarification of my focus here. Or maybe it will just have a different color scheme.)

Trafficking

2010-07-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

Another collection of Vispos on the topic "traffic." Is this one of those devil terms? When is traffic a good thing? When it indicates patronage, perhaps, as in the traffic of consumers enjoying some form of commerce. Or when there is high traffic on a blog (not that I am too familiar with that here).

If traffic is about transport, in addition to a cluster of trajectories we might attend to what we are transporting, what is carried. And, well, where.

What is the link between traffic and addiction? Are we addicted to our cars? To oil? Are we addicted to our relative status as reflected by the traffic on our internet sites? How many followers do you have? What are you selling? What do we carry with us in this mad tangle of trajectories and patterns of flow? What risks are we willing to take in the face of internal rupture?

Traffic U/S/X

2010-07-05T12:23:00.000-07:00

David Byrne says that freeway overpasses and complicated traffic exchanges are the cathedrals of the (post)modern age. Architecture is architecture, I guess. But I wonder if the not so open road with its clutter of trajectories isn't a little more like a poem than a building.

I dunno, maybe it's commercials that are more like poems, and a steady diet of car advertisements has led me to see traffic this way. A sibilance of curves and smooth acceleration. See how I hug the curves? Driving is just so sexy.

Something in me says this is wrong. There is a price to pay for making excessive transportation sexy, for making traffic a poem. It's not just a minor inconvenience on the way to work. Too much US ultimately SUX.

iPhone Abstraction

2010-07-02T11:35:00.001-07:00

I admit it. I love this damn iPhone, and not for its phone functions. It keeps me arty even when away from graphics pad and art supplies.

Today's art is generated entirely with iPhone apps. Groovy, huh?

Enjoy.

More Bar Code Vispos

2010-06-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

One of the things I appreciate about meme/challenge/prompt blogs is that they inspire me to write more. Well, and do more art. One of the truths I discovered moving from graduate school to being an academic is that I love assignments, but I am very bad about making them for myself. So thanks again to Satu Kaikkonen and her new blog Time for a Vispo for inspiring me with an invitation to create work.

This set of images continues my fascination with bar codes, but goes in a slightly different aesthetic direction. I locate this "difference" in a tension I struggle to articulate. At its broadest, I think it is a tension between the more abstract (yesterday's offering) and the more representational (today's). Similarly but not isomorphic, it might be a tension between image (aesthetic composition) and words (linguistic meaning). And maybe there is a little tension between the accessible and the indeterminate. I am not really interested in choosing sides; I am obviously not even sure what the sides are. My point, though, is that I find both (all?) sides productive places to work. In truth, visual poetry (like its predecessor, concrete poetry, and its contemporary variants like poemics) is open to multiple approaches, multiple styles, multiple philosophies. As it should be.

So, with no apologies, I offer today's take on the bar code. I am influenced, obviously, by a pun (linguistic and visual) on both "bar" and "code." Satu's prompt notes the ubiquity of the bar code in contemporary life. But aren't bars and codes, themselves, also sort of ubiquitous? Part of the Vispo heritage is the "intermedia" of the Fluxus movement, one that valued the found poetry of urban signage and the DIY aesthetic of the Xerox zine. Today, that is the influence I honor (or, well, maybe just borrow).

Vispo Challenge

2010-06-28T12:36:00.000-07:00

My internet friend and accomplished visual poet/artist, Satu Kaikkonen, has started a new blog, "Time for a Vispo," where she offers weekly challenges (prompts) for visual poetry (a.k.a. "vispo"). Her inaugural prompt is simply a bar code.

A happy coincidence, that. I've long been fascinated by bar codes. One of my first performance art pieces, "Body Sonnet," worked heavily with the image of the bar code and the concept of scanning information. More recently, I have been active in (as adviser and contributor) a local artists collective called "The Bureau of Artistic Reasources Corporation," or "BAR Corp" for short. The bar code is their/our logo and has made frequent appearances in our now defunct visual poetry project for the comics page of a local newspaper. Below is one of Joe Hassert's contributions to that project:

So, in addition to the already quite strong connection I feel to Satu's work, this synchronicity of image seems charged to me. I pursue my visual art intuitively and avocationally, drawn to it with the love at the root of the word "amateur." I sometimes wonder what it is all for, though. I enjoy it. I am an avid believer in the DIY aesthetic, and I know my psyche needs constant outlets for creative expression. But I sometimes forget to enjoy the journey and get hung up on the destination.

And then something like this happens: A friend I know only through virtual connection and social networking offers an opening move in a game of artists and, in doing so, calls forth a familiar and personally meaningful symbol. I don't know where this is going. I probably can't know. But I deeply, deeply appreciate signs like this along the way that I am on the right (or at least a very productive) path.

I'll close with another take on Satu's prompt:

One Month Later...

2010-06-19T11:25:00.000-07:00

Funny how I thought the summer would come with more time for blogging. Well, technically, I guess it has, but summer also comes with more ways to spend one's time.

I am sort of recently back from a trip to North Carolina, where I combined some professional work with a visit to my folks. Both went exceedingly well, and the visit with my parents sparked the creation of a 12 page comic titled, "Vacation on the Moon." Not sure what I am ultimately going to do with that, but here's a page from it:

I'm working with influences from Abstract Comics, poemics, and asemic writing in this comic -- and I mean "influenced by" rather than trying to just do any of those. I am less interested in capturing what happened on the trip and more interested in an open narrative of possibilities and the phenomenological experience of interpreting confusing messages. Formally, I am interested in working with abstraction without leaving behind recognizeable representation. Elements (some of them, anyway) may be recognizable, but their relationships aren't necessarily clear. I think (although I could be wrong) that this approach in some ways captures more of the feeling of the trip (ambiguous as those sometimes were) rather than the facts or a unified narrative of it.

Whether or not it "succeeds" as a comic (abstract or otherwise), at least the trip and the week or so after it resulted in some creative expression. I think I needed that!

And in this case, it was work generated significantly away from digital graphics software. Okay, what's attached here has been processed, but it started out as pages in a journal, scanned and cleaned. It felt good to work "old-school" with paper and pencils and pens.

This has not been my only work. I still post work at the Abstract Comics blog, including the opening image of this post and the following:

I also continue to be interested in asemic writing, and post the occasional work at Satu Kaikkonen's collaborative blog, foffof: AsemicWritingsLettersAndMarks. Some of my recent contributions there:

So, in other words, I've been keeping busy. Just. Not. Here.

And why is that? Reluctance to post smaller offerings through more portable technology? I guess, yeah, a little. Or maybe a little uncertainty about what this blog is really for. Ah yes, "purpose." Well, have no fear on that account. I am cooking some ideas to give this blog a little more direction -- a project, perhaps. More to come. But for now, let's just say I am checking in with interesting art and reassuring you all that more will follow.

Until then, enjoy your summer in the Northern Hemisphere. Don't be afraid to put down the internet and go outside and enjoy a bit of it.

My Own, Personal Antichrist

2010-05-19T15:40:00.000-07:00

In the wake of inaction in the Gulf of Mexico and my daily growing depression about that, I have discovered my own, personal Antichrist. And I'm still waiting for my own, personal Jesus as promised by Depeche Mode. But the dude pictured above could actually be the evil version of me in that "Mirror, Mirror" universe where Spock has such a fetching goatee.

What, you don't recognize him? His name is Jonathan Katz and he's a physicist at Washington University who, for a very brief while, was part of the White House's brain trust for solving the oil gush in the Gulf. Maybe they should have done a better job at vetting their geniuses, but I am at least thankful that they dropped him like a bag of hot gerbils once they checked out his former publications.

Publications that include "In Defense of Homophobia," a screed that opines that it is okay to hate the gays. After all, being gay is a choice and those gays, they do like their risky behavior. Hey, if it weren't for the gays, straight people wouldn't have to deal with AIDS, right? According to Katz, being gay is a choice -- or more accurately, a temptation that gay folk can't resist giving in to. Katz is grumpy because part of the human condition is resisting temptation -- he apparently does it every day. Uh-huh. I just bet he does. But so, the bottom line is that anyone who is good and resists temptation is justified in judging, condemning, and hating those who don't. Therefore, homophobia is justified and moral. Good to know.

Right, so here's another out and proud homophobe who probably uses his hate to hide his own queer desire. Anyone want to bet if RentBoy.com is bookmarked on his computer? There sure are a lot of these types coming out of the woodwork (or is that closet?) these days. So why is he my own, personal Antichrist?

Well, let's add to this mix his Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) denialism. In his essay, "Cold Thoughts on Global Warming" he outlines his "why worry?" stance on climate change. Admittedly, he more or less starts the essay with, "The conclusion that anthropogenic emissions of [greenhouse] gases will likely warm the climate has been generally accepted for a century. It is a consensus, but it is not emerging or new. It has been there all along. Only a panicky fear of the consequences is new." That doesn't really sound like denialism, does it? I call it AGW Denialism 3.0. The original version denied the climate was warming. Version 2.0 asserted that the climate is changing but humans were in no way a significant cause of it. The latest version, which Katz so masterfully articulates, is that climate change is happening, we're a significant cause of it, but there's (a) nothing we can do about it and (b) it's not really going to be so bad. So enjoy business as usual.

It's these two essays side by side that so annoy me. In one, he notes that sexuality is a matter of choice and that gay people should be held accountable for making a bad one. In the other he offers that it is unrealistic to think that anyone in the world will be able to curb their desire for fossil fuels and control their pollution. See the contradiction? And that's what really irritates me.

Because my frustration is bigger than Katz. We are coming up on a month of allowing oil to flow at unknown but very high rates into the Gulf. And our response has been tepid at best. BP still calls the shots on the "recovery." The Obama administration still only has expansion of off-shore drilling "on hold." The Senate is consumed with Wall Street reform and facing endless GOP blocks on regulation -- delay tactics that will likely work because they need to get on to approving funds for our foreign wars. And the "Drill, Baby, Drill" crowd who, by all rights, should have egg on their face, moves blithely forward with calls for energy independence through domestic oil production. How's that oily, drilly stuff workin' out for ya?

I might actually agree with Katz about the hopelessness of AGW mitigation efforts. For me, addressing AGW is less about actually mitigating climate change and more about waking up as a species to the unsustainability of our collective practices. It is an opportunity to demonstrate we can act collectively to say no to our baser desires, to not be in denial about the consequences of our actual choices and behavior. Global warming is the tip of the iceberg, so to speak. Can we talk about endocrine disruptors and other toxins that flow into our waterways and rise into the atmosphere with those greenhouse gasses we seem so unable to regulate? Can we talk about that island of trash growing in the Pacific? Can we talk about asthma, cancer, diabetes, and a host of other environment-related diseases being on the precipitous rise? Hell, can we acknowledge that one of the reasons die-off in the gulf in the wake of this "spill" has been less than expected (so far) is that it is occurring in an area that suffers from hypoxia (dead zones) as a result of agricultural run off down the Mississippi?

At the core of all of these problems is not a lack of knowledge, but a lack of will. We like to imagine there is limitless "away" for us to throw our trash and pass our gas. We are fascinated with what our technology can do for us, but less willing to consider ahead of time solutions to myriad problems when it fails. We have made the precautionary principle anti-capitalist and made the pursuit of profit at all costs our holy mission. We cannot even begin to seriously consider changing our life-styles or cutting our profit margins or investing in more sustainable energy technologies. Those are impossible choices. But let's distract ourselves by bashing on those vain, nelly, promiscuous, immoral gays. Hallelujah!

I am an out gay man and a proud environmentalist. I believe that both of these identities inform each other. I know that my sexuality is not so much a choice nor is it the moral failing proselytizers like Katz would have me believe. I know that there are some things more important than my sexual identity, foremost among them the planet that sustains me, that sustains all of us. Understanding it, caring for it as our ecological impacts reach global proportions is the moral challenge of our time. I believe embracing diversity, from human to bio-, is a big part of that challenge. Whatever knowledge of physics and hydrodynamics Katz might have brought to stopping the oil flow is outweighed by his failure to see diversity as a good thing and by his failure to imagine that we, as a species, could live more sustainably on the planet.

Now if only we could make some meaningful legislation and regulations to prevent anything like this from happening again. Dare we dream? Or shall we give into the fantasy (and self-fulfilling prophesy) of "End Times"? Reach out and touch faith.

Art on Stages

2010-05-09T08:37:00.000-07:00

Okay, so despite all the technological workarounds and ceaseless ways of making blogging easier, I am not exactly keeping up with this blog. But I am also not planning on dropping it either. I am actually coming into that time of year when I have more time and more opportunity for exactly this sort of digital presence.

A year ago, I resurrected this blog and increased my digital presence by participating in a project created by @Platea (and then joining that loose collective). Unfortunately, I am not aware of an @Platea project curently in the works that might draw me back in, but the timing is right nonetheless.

But so, what keeps me from the Internet? I am tempted to say, "life," but I find that whole dichotomy of "real" life and "second" life so trite. A lot of work-related administrivia gets in my way. But then so too does the work of art in less digitally oriented venues. Consider, for example, the above embedded video. I work fairly closely with my department's Performance Studies program, including our very active Kleinau Theatre. This year, in addition to advising some performances, I also volunteered as photo-archivist for our productions. We recently held our awards ceremony for the season and kicked it off with the slide show retrospective I've embedded here.

These images represent the multi-night run, prepared performances our 2009-2010 season -- sometimes group, sometimes solo; sometimes graduate student directed, sometimes faculty directed. They do not represent the proseminars, guest artists, or visiting residencies and workshops that also round out our Kleinau season. It's a very active arts space, and I consider myself lucky to be involved with it.

For a small, Midwest college town, we have a fair amount of performance and performance venues, from community theatre to a more traditional drama department's offerings. What the Kleinau offers is more experimental and usually less oriented to entertainment (although many of the productions are quite entertaining). It is a space to experience performance as a mode of inquiry, as an opportunity to explore and experiment, as a venue for broadening one's aesthetics. In other words, the kind of space that appeals to me for many of the same reasons performance happenings on computerized social networks do.

The shows this season represent a wide swath of performance experiences and experiments not too easily encountered in other venues. From an Anne Bogart inspired, viewpoints performance of "The Carnival" to a solo critical performance of Miles Davis; from a cast-devised cyborg fairytale in "Cybernetic Fruit" to a poetic meditation on memory and loss in "Amnesiac's Diary;" from an adaptation of Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad" to a script inspired by an oral history of women serving in the Navy WAVES in WWII, there is an invigorating variety of creative work going on in the Kleinau space.

I am happy to be a part of this work, sometimes as performer, sometimes as director...but this year, mostly as photo archivist. The images don't do the shows justice, but it's what we've got to offer in this forum. For now.

Petit Jean Performance Festival

2010-04-20T08:20:00.000-07:00

I'm just back from the annual ritual of taking students (graduate and undergraduate) to the Petit Jean Performance Festival at Petit Jean State Park outside Morrilton, Arkansas. I've been attending this event off and on for the past 20+ years. And it is always a good time.

Now, by "good time" I mean that this is a bunch of (mostly) college students on a mountain doing the work/play of performance by day and socializing by night, with the occasional hike to a waterfall thrown in for good measure. And all of it somehow related. It's a bit of a struggle to remind party-hearty students that this isn't a university-paid vacation but an educational experience and an opportunity to be ambassadors for the university. But so far, we've kept our focus on the learning objectives all while making space for what should be a good time.

This year's theme was "Experimental Adaptations," and the workshop was facilitated by long-time festival attendee, Jason Hedrick of Sauk Valley Community College. Jason is an alum of the SIUC Performance Studies graduate program, so seeing him run an excellent workshop was an extra joy. He asked that we consider "distortion" a productive tool of interpretation. He also asked that we not only consider traditional "literature" as an artifact for such distorted interpretation but also other media. So, for example, he brought a show that involved live performance distortion of classic experimental short films that occurred in various relationships (in front of, behind, around, over, etc.) a screening of those films. The result was something recognizable as performance art but arrived at by some pretty classic traditions of oral interpretation. In the process, I thought he showed clear directions for the future even as he embraced traditions that many like to consider "retro" and without relevance today.

My students and I brought a show of our own. We did a critical/ experimental adaptation of J.D. Salinger's short story, "Just Before the War with the Eskimos," from the collection Nine Stories. In our adaptation, we created several interventions drawing attention to Salinger's use of the "unsaid" to both mark and erase difference along race, gender, and class lines. We tried to show what aspects of this story from half a century ago were still relevant to modern audiences even while marking mysteries in the oblique references and suggestive characterizations of Salinger's prose. I think we too gave a reverential nod to the past (the recently deceased Salinger, Chamber Theatre, etc.) even while experimenting with the holy trinity of Cultural Studies. And we did so in a way that remained both accessible and entertaining. What else do you call a production that takes a pause to have elite New Yorkers square dance to Dwight Conquergood's moral map for ethnography? As one character says, "How esoteric!" Indeed.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Petit Jean Performance Festival is that, in addition to prepared solo and group performances that the schools bring, the workshop generates its own group performance. Students (graduate and undergraduate) mingle in multi-school small groups and follow a prompt given by the festival facilitator. This year there was even a faculty group. At the end of the two day (!!) festival, we present the group work. Jason did a great job creating a frame for these performances such that they hung together as a cohesive festival project. Imagine a performance event where the audience and performer roles are constantly shifting, as do the aesthetics. We move through a space with purpose and structure, audiencing and performing as we go.

So, I call this festival a ritual, mostly because it has a cyclical, repetitive structure that I think fits the broadest definition of "ritual." We perform rites, from in situ group performances to contributed offerings, from libations to pilgrimages to nearby altars of natural beauty. Each year, there are the converts, those students (and faculty) making their first trip to the mountain -- and there ARE initiation rites. Each year, there is reverent talk of past festivals, from those recently converted and those of us who have been doing this ritual since we were new to the world of performance. There may be no gods specifically named (except that shifty and ambiguous deity, "Performance"), but there is still something almost holy about the experience. While some criticism can be made for the ways the rites change (poor additions, sad deletions), there is still a palpable sense of significance, the accumulation of time and regular practice in a space already magical but made more so by our work/play there.

It's hard to leave that space and its energy to return to the world of classes and end-of-term grading. It's hard to let it go. But we do as we must. And I plan, against all odds and the ever decreasing university budget for such "luxuries," to return with a fresh contingent next year. Or well, luckily for us, this is a strange calendar where the festival will move from spring to fall and so 2010 will have two Petit Jean Performance Festivals -- one in April and one in October. Who can say what influence such a confluence of ritual energy will have on the universe?

Networked Performance

2010-04-13T05:09:00.000-07:00

So, I am recently back from the Southern States Communication Association conference in Memphis where I presented a paper on my recent involvements with various art projects on social networking sites. Principally, these include involvement with @Platea and Inter.Sect. In the last year, I have participated in several "crowdsourced" happenings sponsored by these organizations.

My paper was on a panel about how folks are using iPhones and other smart phones in performance work. My paper was mostly about my recent social networking performance work with a nod to how the iPhone makes that more possible, particularly because of its portability and the ways that it allows me to check in on and contribute to projects even when I am away from my desktop.

The presentation was generally well-received, although there was some skepticism from members of the audience less hospitable to virtual performance and social networking. In one case, an audience member had been pretty harsh about Twitter in a previous presentation, and I admit I took the opportunity to speak back to his suspicions. I am hardly a Twitter-holic. I think of myself as a "migratory Tweeter," flitting in and out of Twitter as projects, interests, or world events attract me to micro-blog. But I don't think any of this work with new technology should be met only with disdain. Moreovr, I grow weary of criticism made from the margins of experience; don't judge something if you haven't spent sufficient time trying and exploring it.

Mostly, the techno-suspicious asked two related questions: (1) how do you find the time to do this work, and (2) isn't it somehow less authentic for not involving actual human contact?

In answer to the first, I responded that time is always a finite resource, and that all of our interests and activities take time. We make choices about how to spend our time. Work demands may limit our availability, but even work involves a certain amount of choice. How we spend our time -- from reading to watching TV to making a family to participating in on-line communities -- is always a choice. I find time to do this work (which is also play) because I choose to make time for it. It engages me enough that I want to spend time at it. I don't judge others for not making a similar choice; and I welcome those that do.

The second question is a little more difficult to respond to. I am interested in the intersection of face-to-face encounters with computer mediated encounters. I am interested in the sustainability issues addressed (and not addressed) by working in a digital, virtual medium rather than a material one. So, for example, not having canvasses and photo prints cluttering up my studio has freed me to be more experimental in my art; much of my artwork now conveniently is made and stored in digital form.

But given that we were presenting this work to Performance Studies scholars, this embodied authenticity question takes on additional heft. Much of Performance Studies inquiry celebrates the body as an epistemological tool, performance as a mode of inquiry, etc. How, some might ask, is all this social networking stuff an actual performance. Sure, digital graphics and textual expression, but where is the body?

It's a good point, but I have never been comfortable making the body the ontological essence of performance. Or, more accurately, making the body clearly on display the center of performance. Is not this virtual performance an extension of puppetry or the clever mechanism, clear performance traditions predating the computer? Does a performance stop if a performer works in a mediated environment and leaves the stage while some digital media "takes over"? Moreover, just because you cannot see me working with these digital interfaces doesn't man that I am not here, making my gestures and leaving traces in a virtual world. In some ways, doesn't the seemingly absent body of virtual performance more honestly point to the body as a social construct? Perhaps the anxiety over presence in digital performance does more to reveal absence in so-called "real" physical performance.

By and large, though, my presentation (and others on the panel) were well received by most, in part because what we had to share made the case for us. That, in the end, is the best test for the value of something. When you show folks what you are doing, do they at least find it interesting? The work of performance is not a zero-sum game. We need not force a choice between forms when a choice is not necessary. There is room (some might even say need) for multiple forms of performance on multiple platforms of display.

For me, I think social networking and the Internet in general would be a dry and boring place if it didn't include and invite opportunities for performance.

Sign of the Times

2010-04-06T21:29:00.000-07:00

They said it was closed due to damage, still unrepaired from last
year's big blow.

I think they were protecting something.

In a shelter cave, something hissed and I backed slowly away.

Some signs we heed; others we take on advisement.

In this way, the world remains colorful.

Anyway, as Spring's flowers cast their invitations, the blocking signs
came down.

From The Bottom Up

2010-04-03T22:19:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been trying the see past the layers of patterns that build
up over time. Call it palimpsests of perception. Call it habits of
mind. Past these rocky shores are only flow, the grace of creation
becoming. Not truth. Not the noemic realm of ideal and pure forms.
Leave your Plato at the door, please. But merely that time before we
convinced ourselves we know what it all means -- or most of it, anyway.
Fool's errand, for sure. An impossible quest. Maybe it's more about
energy and finding a different current, remaking the now. Maybe it's
about confronting the whiplike sting of limitations. Oooh, and it
hurts so good!
Well, maybe it's just the weekend. How it calls for rest even as it
promises time to catch up. How it always feels like a little
vacation, an opportunity for re-creation. I dunno. Maybe snorkeling?
And yes, this weekend I could call that a euphemism -- one I enjoyed
thoroughly, me and the jellies.

Time is a Limited Resource

2010-04-01T05:48:00.000-07:00

(Scan from Justin Green's Binky Brown meets The Holy Virgin Mary)

In the afterword to Binky Brown meets The Holy Virgin Mary, Justin Green writes of his early career choices: "I didn't want to be a dilettante and was beginning to notice the half-life that so many artists in the academic system were living. Teaching provided security, but rarely inspiration" (53).

It's a bracing confession to come across at this time of the year when academic schedules become insanely packed and all other interests must take a back seat....a WAY back seat at the back of a very large and overcrowded bus. I feel the truth of this observation, even as I want to challenge its details.

That is, it is not that the academic career lacks in inspiration for the artist. Rather, the work of the academic leaves little time to explore inspiration. I am regularly inspired by my colleagues and students. And I am occasionally provided venues to pursue that inspiration if I choose to take them up. The resource that is in regularly diminishing supply, though, is time.

In the anti-intellectual populism of the current political climate, academics often come under fire for their open schedules. My state (to say nothing of some of my relatives) thinks that my time in the classroom constitutes my only work hours, or that I am only involved in my work during the few months when semesters are in session. Would that that were true! From graduate advising to the demand to have an active research agenda, from committee work to the ins and outs of service to my department, college, and university, this is work that knows no convenient boundaries. Sometimes that is a good thing, as when work cuts across disciplinary boundaries and allows dialogues with unexpected colleagues. But sometimes it is frustrating, as the work oozes and explodes out of the easy confines of a 9-5 schedule. I like a job that allows a certain amount of porousness between vocation and avocation, but it is not without its unreasonable demands. And as funds continue to dry up, the university life asks of its faculty that we do more and more with less and less.

Green is right, though. My fellow academic artists are compromised in their "half lives." We have pursued that golden grail of academics, the security and academic freedom associated with tenure. But soon after receiving that award, I found myself confronted with depression. Here was the security I had sought, but it is a kind of prison. Or maybe the better metaphor is that tenure is a drug -- once you have it, it is very hard to give it up.

As I enter April, the "cruelest month" of the academic calendar (in my opinion), I find myself contemplating an intervention. How to be an academic in the humanities in an environment that increasingly disrespects the work? In culture that increasingly thinks of academics as disposable -- as pampered elites? How to be an academic when the demoralizing tediousness of the job grows with each month, pushing out that which inspired me to be one in the first place?

It is in this light that I amend Green's observation. The half-life is not the result of a lack of inspiration -- I've got that in spades. The half-life is about not having time to follow the inspiration, and I think that might be worse. To be inspired but not be able to follow through? What kind of sadistic trap is that?

Green's inspiration led to one of the first autobiographical comics, replete with neurosis and penis rays. An underground, experimental comix, to be sure -- but art nonetheless. The desire of the artist to not "be a dilettante" is not necessarily about fame and acceptance (though both are nice), but about the time and resources to pursue inspiration fully, to be "true" to your art. Unless your art is paying the bills, all artists create those resources with a second job. And therein lies the rub. It isn't easy to make a full-time academic position a "second" job. The best one can do is make one's art part of that job. But few are the academics afforded the time and space -- the resources -- to focus sufficiently on that work.

Let me be clear: It is not that I want time away from the business of education to do my work. Education, in the classroom or on the page or on the stage, is my work. But the amount of my day that is devoted to actual pedagogy is woefully small. And this is a truth about the academic career that is rarely acknowledged -- by anti-intellectual politicians, by non-academic family, or even by many of the students on my campus. It is certainly an aspect of being an academic that was under-represented in my graduate training for this profession.

And so, my inspirations are often breathless, not with hyperventilating excitement, but with the suffocation of endless administrivia and obligation. Is that half-life or just halfway to death?

Paying Attention

2010-03-30T08:19:00.000-07:00

It's true.

Doodling keeps me focused.

I'm not alone in this.

But I have gotten increasingly bolder in being obvious about doodling in meetings. I have colleagues who won't sit next to me in meetings because they find my drawing distracting. And I have colleagues who try to sit next to me for the same reason.

The image above is a snapshot of doodles from a meeting last week -- taken with an iPhone and manipulated with apps therein. A field sketch digitally remastered in a "stolen" moment of aesthetic therapy.

I am counting down the days until work lets up and I can get back to bigger projects with better equipment. Until then, I use my need to draw and create to help me keep my focus, to help me pay attention.

(Image made with iPhone apps.)

One Final Test -- I Think

2010-03-29T17:52:00.001-07:00

Here we are, sharing a meal and facing the open door of future
possibilities. This is the door I walk through to reboot life, love,
and blogs.

Suprise. This is a staged moment -- a moment on a stage. This is a
first rehearsal. A first iteration, before the repetition, before the
audience.

Great way to start a show, eh?

Yet Another Test

2010-03-29T16:56:00.000-07:00

And so I am wondering if this work-around solves the problem of words with images via email/mobile. We’ll see. Otherwise, enjoy this silly rendering of me being, well, warped.

This is Another Test

2010-03-29T16:52:00.001-07:00

Sooo….

I am trying to figure out how to make a blog post via email. The post before this one (also a test) included both image and words, but of course, the words did not come through (except as title). I beg your indulgence if these posts are cluttering your feed, but I don’t know how to figure this stuff out without doing it.

For now, enjoy the short but frequent contributions. And just so this doesn’t become tedious self-referential noodling, here is a little haiku to go with the last post’s image:

Cartoon rendering

Of me hiding in the woods.

The frame makes it art?

This is a Test

2010-03-29T11:17:00.001-07:00

#Vispoetweet

2010-03-22T10:07:00.000-07:00

So. How does it happen that I make a longish post about still doing art despite the calls and obligations of work, and then disappear for over two weeks?

The truth is, I was blissfully "off the grid" for a week, backpacking in the not-yet-Spring Appalachians. Sometimes, getting away from this overly interconnected world is a good thing. I took a journal and art supplies with me, but my drawing skills were definitely spidery after hard days of hauling a very heavy pack up and down mountains. It's official: I am now a "flatlander."

When I returned from this trip, I found that work had piled up in my absence. I also found that my home computer, where most of the art lives, had missed me so much that it decided it needed major maintenance before it would pick up where we left off. Fickle bitch, my Dell.

But true to my promise, I have been making time for art. The works I present today are made solely with my iPhone and its various apps. I've been uploading them on Twitter under the hashtag "#vispoetweet". I consider them a kind of visual poetry, although probably other visual poets would see them as too figurative, too much like illustrated captions than actual visual poems. Whatever.

Now, I know there is some way with Blogger that I could do at least single picture updates to the blog from my iPhone. And I promise I will look into that. I also realize that I could link this blog to my Twitter account, but I resist that. Despite its status as "microblogging," Twitter seems like a very different ethos from this blog. Even so, for now, I thought I would catch up on the blog with a little re-posting of work from Twitter.

Anyway, my point is that the art continues even if posting it to the blog sometimes eludes me. I'm not sure if Twitter will really hold my attention. Like the bird in the logo, I flit to and from Twitter with almost migratory regularity. I like sharing comments and using it to find interesting links. And I LOVE when people use Twitpics. But it also seems like an endless conversation with no focus in a very crowded and echo-y room.

Not bashing on Twitter, really. Just saying I, like most of its users, have a love/hate relationship. And I guess after two months of these #vispoetweets, I hoped one of my followers or someone else might join me in the fun of sharing art rather than just photo-ephemera of the day. If nothing else, consider this blog post an invitation. Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?

Digging In and Stepping Out

2010-03-04T15:14:00.000-08:00

I am trying to make good on my promise to myself (and whoever out there might care) to post on the blog at least weekly. Not that anyone wants to read an "obligation" post or even that a post needs to be such a commitment. Then again, why try to predict why anyone reads these things or what they expect? (Oh God, I think that question might be a blogger cliche!)

This week I am buried under administrivia. It's all important work and I do care about it, but it all feels like so much distraction from what I really want to do. Digital art projects and opportunities for such are popping out of the woodwork. Feast or famine, as my mom would say.

Last night, I took time to attend a Faculty Association (union) workshop about preparing to go up for promotion to full professor. Not that I am anywhere close to considering that move, but it was a meal paid for with union dues and arguably information I needed to know. I appreciated that the workshop leaders reminded us that going up for full is a choice, and one that there are many legitimate reasons not to make. Sometimes we have other interests in our lives that consume our energies and yet do not produce that which the institution values or recognizes with promotion.

This next week I'll be pursuing one of those competing interests as I head out to the woods with some graduate students (friends, really) for my annual Spring Break backpacking trip. I've written and performed about these trips before, so it's probably wrong to characterize them as only a hobby interest. Still, this time it feels like more of an indulgence as I take the time for trekking trail away from all the other things I should and could be doing. In the end, though, the mental payback for this investment in my need for time outdoors will make it worth it -- even if I don't end up publishing about this one.

Meanwhile, around the edges of these busy days I still find time to do the occasional doodle or push a stylus around the graphics pad. I tend to reach a point in the day when I just can't do the labors of pedagogy and copy-editing manuscripts (mine or, more often, other's), when the right side of my brain craves color and pleasing form. So, I push away the piles of paper and push away the guilt at pushing them away, and I click on the relevant Adobe software that allows me some escape. And then, my shoulders relax and my spirit is lifted.

These colorful panels of abstract comics could be trees, could be spring's wildflowers finally pushing through hard ground and remnant snow. They are their own path through the woods, their own commitment to breath and beauty. Whether they lead to something anyone one at this institution cares about is hardly the point. They lead me back to myself, to a sense of identification with the aesthetic. And sometimes, I think the "stolen" moments to walk this path are all the more precious for being stolen, for being that time when I reach the end of my ability to meet obligation and must, instead, meet my own needs to play and, well, re-create myself in recreation.

So yes, this is a bitching-post about how I wish I wasn't so tied down with obligation, about how I wish I had more time to do art. Yawn. But it is also a sharing of art, in words and colored pixels. Because I'm not the guy who laments he doesn't have time to do art. I'm the guy who does it anyway, in and around the edges of these very full days.

And now it's time to pack up some brushes and head to the woods.

I Shall Wear My Trousers Rolled

2010-02-24T06:28:00.000-08:00

Today I turn 45, and I am consumed with images of sharp geometry. I live in denial about my firm status as "middle aged." At half way to 90, I think the designation is sort of a given. But 90 isn't just old, it's "right." So, in an odd sense, 45 is also half way to perpendicular. If that sounds like some sort of metaphor for being half way to the grave (supine the perpendicular state to standing erect), well, bring on the gloom. But really, I am consumed by symmetry, 45 degrees being the measurement of the smaller angles of a isosceles right triangle, a shape so central to geometry, architecture, and trigonometry. It may not quite be the Golden Mean that so captivated the ancient Greeks, but it is a fearful symmetry nonetheless.

I'm not such an avid follower of numerology as I am, say, the Tarot, but I do find numbers beautiful. And I think 45 is a particularly beautiful number. I am not so trite as to bemoan growing older or to resent a ceaseless accumulation of years to my age. If anything, I am startled I've been on the planet for so long. I feel like these years flew by and are only accelerating. I am caught in that liminal dilemma of fearing speed hastens the end but also wanting to throw my arms in the air, feel the breeze in my hair (what's left of it), and enjoy the ride. Wheee!

So, my birthday card to the world: some abstract comics that revel in geometry. The shape of things to come. The shape of a life. That beautiful blend of angles and lines, straight and curved. A snapshot in time, as arbitrary and meaningful as any other frozen moment.

The Bois of Winter

2010-02-20T09:47:00.000-08:00

Here we are, then, caught in the schematics of desire. It's cold outside, so all the hunky athletes dress up warmly, as they should. Except for the tease of removing outer layers in a restaurant or the suggestion of a bodily contour under drape, the season thwarts the the lover of eye candy and body (as) art.

Thank Heavens for the Internet, then. But it's difficult for me to just rejoice in the digital capture of boi beauty, whether posed or candid. I get bored quickly with just looking, my desire forever deferred to the next (web) page. Before the advent of digital technology, I used to enjoy collaging hunky models from magazines (not ALL of them porn). By "enjoy," I mean the full range of pleasure. Sure, I experienced a prurient titillation in carefully navigating scissors around bicept, razor around buttock. But there was also compositional pleasure of combining shapes, the artist's (or artist wannabe's) fascination with anatomy, shadow, and form.

Now, in this age of pixels and fast download, images not only proliferate, but the capacity to manipulate them increases exponentially. Sure, there's all that worry about copyright and who owns the image. But always around the edges of that concern are people taking out their metaphorical scissors to "rip," "cut," and "edit" for their own pleasure in the making. If I were doing this for money, I might feel guilty. But the eye wanders where it will, and the hand makes what it will. And the internet (Web 2.0) increasingly becomes a place not just of viewing disseminated images (or other information) but also for interacting with those images and sharing the, um, "fruits" of that interaction.

I admit to my queer male gaze, and its tendency to objectify. I notice the world around me, and desire guides my eyes. And yes, it is a desire shaped by my culture. It would be reductive to imagine that my gaze is about sexual conquest only, that I notice what I find attractive because I want to possess it, or even just bed it. My mind is full of fantasies, and not all of them have to do with sex. Some involve color and texture and imagining combinations and compositions. But...is an artist's gaze any less objectifying than a seducer's?

I think I am not alone in my wandering eye that "violates" others by noticing them in public spaces. I think I am not alone in gathering images (or other information) "owned" by others and using them for my own art on the internet. Maybe the prohibitions against doing these sorts of things are silly. Or maybe, just maybe, it's the prohibitions (silly as they are) that add to the fun.

Valentines ArtSpark

2010-02-13T09:43:00.000-08:00

Susan Sanford over at ArtSpark Theatre put together a really interesting Valentine's challenge. It actually involved surface mail! For those who expressed interest in playing, she sent us a small envelope of collage materials including a playing card from the suit of Hearts. I got the Four of Hearts. The assignment was to make a collage with it and then place the card in a public space and photograph it. A gift of love and art to the world.

I was happy to take time to make a collage, more or less limiting myself to the materials in the envelope. (Okay, I added the green star). I was even happier to leave the gift to the universe on a block in Carbondale, IL where daffodils were just starting to break the surface of snowmelt soaked soil. This is just in front of a local food grocery store opened recently in protest of the high cost of food in our food coop. The other businesses in this block are similarly progressive in nature, including one of my favorite haunts, the Longbranch Coffee House.

The Four of Hearts was an interesting card to work with. In the Tarot, it is represented by the Four of Cups and signifies a kind of divine discontent. In the Rider-Waite deck, the card depicts a young man solemnly contemplating three cups before him, yet unaware of the fourth offered from a divine hand behind him. The meaning of the image is that he is too dissatisfied with what he has and therefore too introspective such that he misses the true gift(s) being offered him. He needs a fresh perspective. It is one of my more favorite cards of the Minor Arcana because it offers a message about discontent coming from fixating on certain issues so much that you miss the bigger picture. I frequently caution myself in times of despair to look over my shoulder for the gift I am not seeing.

On this greeting card holiday meant to create anxiety about our status in love and our willingness to mark that with conspicuous consumption, the Four of Hearts/Cups offers an important message. And I think ArtSpark Theatre continues to offer gifts unlooked for. Sanford's challenge effectively spurred me to break away from V-Day cynicism and turn to art as a random gesture of love to the universe and my fellow human (and other) beings. I love my partner and we express that love as often as we can; but there's something deeply soul confirming about turning that love outward to the universe on this particular day.

Thank-you, universe, for your endless gifts and unconditional positive regard. B Mine 4Ever?

Another Dream -- With Color and Without

2010-02-08T05:25:00.000-08:00

The vibration spread out across the universe, distorting wit and structure. No rhyme, no reason...a train of thought in space, a toss of hollow dice. Shadow and light. Those who see do not smile; those who don't, lose perspective. And if I listen really close, I see thunder.

Stuck in the Mud?

2010-02-07T10:05:00.000-08:00

This week's theme at Illustration Friday is "muddy." I'm feeling this one as snow melts and the driveway and walkways become mud pits. I also feel a sodden metaphorical weight as obligations increase, health stumbles a bit, and suddenly I don't seem able to do as much as I would like.

I'm afraid that my output on this blog is suffering for it not being my highest priority. But for Illustration Friday the last few weeks, I might not have posted at all. Still, I remain firmly committed to at least one blog post a week and will try to ratchet up the frequency. But who can say?

In the interest of keeping any and all who might be reading this post updated on all things Bungy in the blogosphere, here's a short list of links where you can find me (as well as items of interest):

I've been contributing a bit over at the "poemicstrips" blog, including a very exciting project putting together an issue of Xerolage on the theme of dialogue balloons. Check out the open call for participation here and then check out the other beautiful work on the blog. Consider posting a link in response to the current Poemic Inquiry prompt "What might a love/romance poemic look like?"
@Platea recently completed is sixth project, "PlateaKnit." It was a wonderful collaborative project thematically linking fibre crafts with networking and producing a crowdsourced knitting pattern on Twitter. You can read about the project here, and check back at the blog as we anticipate a wrap-up post soon including lots of pictures of the works people produced.
I follow Artspark Theatre regularly. Recently, one of my comments was highlighted there as both a post and an invitation to others to do art. I'll be posting my contribution here soon to Susan's Valentine's challenge. Artspark Theatre is another one of those gems of a blog that never disappoints. I only wish I could post with something more like Susan's frequency (and, well, depth).
I've been following Andre Molotiu's "Abstract Comics" blog, including both amazing artworks and really sophisticated analysis of classic comics. I comment regularly there, but lately Andrei's post about similarities between our contemporary reception of comics compared to 18th Century debates over musical form has really got me thinking.
Finally, Piotr Szreniawski has started a new blog for "experimental comics." It's new and eager for both regular readers and contributors. Why yet another blog? Well, his thinking is that many of us are doing work with comics that aren't quite poemics and aren't quite abstract comics. This is a place to share that work under the broader rubric, "experimental."

So, did I mention I have a day job? Quite a busy one, too. And yet, somehow we make time for the work that matters, whether it happens at work or on our own time. Maybe I'm less stuck in the mud than just really committed to getting my hands dirty.

Focus -- Losing It While I Gain It

2010-01-30T10:45:00.000-08:00

This week's theme over at Illustration Friday is "Focus." Yet another one of those serendipitous confluences as the theme itself seems to come into focus in my life.

It's that time of the year when my profession requires me to engage in the ritual of the annual review. Polish up the CV, review what I accomplished in 2009, match that against what I said I would do, extrapolate from all that my plan for 2010. I always put this bit of administrivia off until the last moment. I loathe it, and I am convinced it will yield nothing but internal angst over my lack of direction, my lack of clear focus. And yet, every year as I fill out the paperwork, I find I was more productive than I thought, and that there is a more or less clear direction in my labors.

And that's the point of it all, I guess: to demonstrate for others but also for myself that I am delivering on my commitments to profession. To bring into sharp relief the fruits of those labors. Still, it is exhausting work. Even if the message is ultimately confirming, I find myself drained by the effort. All evidence to the contrary, I feel like I've lost my way.

So. A dark illustration in shades of gray. A lonely alley with noir shadows. A face lost in black ink and crosshatch. Call this an illustration of inner turmoil. See in it how too much introspection, even if required, ends up being an exercise in beating your head against a wall. And somehow, at the very edge of the frame, my life swimming in and out of focus.

Grace is in the Recovery

2010-01-24T09:16:00.000-08:00

"What?"

This week's theme over at Illustration Friday is "clumsy." I struggled a bit with this week's theme, and hence my offering of two submissions in one blog post.

The title of this entry -- "Grace is in the Recovery" -- is something of a life philosophy (yeah, I have a lot of those). I've never been the most graceful person. I trip a lot; I bonk my head a lot. Sometimes I think I never really grew into my body. However, even as an audience member, I bore quickly of the precisely controlled performance. But I find it very exciting when an actor or artist has to deal with an unanticipated problem. Yes, that is painful if they don't deal with it well. But I am ecstatic if they respond well. I feel like I am in the presence of a unique moment where a scripted and precise action gave over to one that must respond to context. And how do we access those moments if not for the willingness to be clumsy? That's not to say I value the under-prepared performance -- more that I value preparation that readies the performer to deal with the unexpected.

I recently wrote a brief piece for an environmental education center's newsletter where I discussed my lessons learned from walking down the side of a glacier's lateral moraine. In that piece, I talk about how you have to give up the idea of sure and stable footing and be ready to respond quickly to the steep and slippery gravel-mound's tendency to slide. There is really no way to do it and look pretty. At its heart, the experience is about letting go and trusting your ability to respond. That is where grace resides. Not in the perfectly executed gesture, but in the capacity to recover from the fumble. And that is a lesson about grace that goes well beyond walking and performance.

We all fall. None of us are perfect. All of us are sometimes (often times?) clumsy. But beauty is in how we respond to clumsy -- in ourselves and in others. And I think beating ourselves up about not being perfect, about not being graceful, is about the least graceful we can be.

Social Knitworking: @Platea Tackles Crowdsourced Knitting in "PlateaKnit"

2010-01-22T05:32:00.000-08:00

@Platea's sixth on-line performance project is scheduled to begin next week. You can read about "PlateaKnit" here. And if you check out the blog entry after that, you'll find some of my theorizing about knitworks and networks.

If knitting is not your thing, please know that you can still participate. The basic idea is to create a knitting pattern by crowdsourcing it to Twitter. And if you don't know a knitting pattern from Klingon poetry, have no fear. The protocol for the performance encourages but does not require a knowledge of knitting to contribute to the instructions -- just describe what you would like to see in a row or two of a project. Ingrid Murnane at @Platea has also provided a brief cheat sheet of possible knitting instructions to get you started.

Now, if Twitter is not your thing, let me extend an offer: If you would rather make your suggested instructions for the project here in the comments section below, I will happily Tweet them myself and make sure they become part of the pattern. And of course, if you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them here or at the @Platea site.

I'll be making something (probably a scarf) following the instructions, as will several other folks. I'll post what I come up with here along with links to what others come up with.

The Flexible and The Strange

2010-01-17T13:30:00.000-08:00

The tag line of this blog: "Be Flexible. Be Strange." I like to imagine that as something of a life philosophy. My interests are wide-ranging. I like to think I can adjust to most situations. And the strange part? Well, that mostly happens without my attention or conscious effort. Mostly, I mean don't be afraid of being strange. Don't shy away from doing something just because it is not how others would do it.

That's not to say I don't learn from others. That's not to say that doing things differently from everyone else is the only valuable way to be. Trust me, I spend plenty of my life conforming. But sometimes it's wise, productive, and best to heed to that inner voice that wants to go its own way -- regardless of whether that way is different or strange.

Probably one of the most frustrating questions an artist gets is "Where did you get that idea?" (or possibly, "Why did you do it that way?"). I put it right up there with the most annoying question you can ask a performer: "How did you learn all those lines?" I guess the only way to really answer any of those is: it's just what I do. This time, anyway.

If you find these cartoons cryptic, know that you are not alone. I don't know what they mean. I don't know where they came from. I don't know why I did them this way. They are largely unplanned. Just ideas put to paper and then digitally processed. All along the way, I let my interest and sense of the appealing guide me. I break some "rules" here and there. But mostly they are what they are -- me playing around. Me stretching my abilities and interests. Me courting the strange.

Colorful, aint it?

Ah Wilderness

2010-01-15T13:36:00.000-08:00

Illustration Friday's theme this week is "wilderness." Okay, so this is a great one for me. I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about the wild, and I recognize the problems with it as a concept. Namely, we have a lot of romanticized notions of wilderness and what it means. Orginally, the concept referred to something unpleasant -- and so is etymologically linked to words like "bewilder." The Puritans saw the wilderness as a site of evil and danger, something to be tamed (like all "baser nature," internal or external). It took visionaries like Romantic poets and early American nature writers to see in the wilderness the sublime, that mix of awe and wonder at once terrifying and spiritually uplifting.

Today, several environmental thinkers posit that our perceptions of wilderness get in the way of meaningful environmental management more than they motivate it. Folks like William Cronon and Neil Evernden posit that our received notions of wilderness are more social construction than actual nature. Cronon notes that in the US, we tend to equate wilderness with the absence of humans, and in the process conveniently erase the humans that lived here before European colonization. Evernden cautions that many neophyte ecologists tend to focus on the happy "light" side of wilderness by emphasizing harmony and balance and downplaying the shadow side of all that -- including predation, parasitism, disease, etc. Both (and others) suggest that the evocation of wilderness is often a problematic call for preservation that fails to recognize that nature is always about change.

So what is "wilderness," given all this history and critique? For me, it is about systems of relationship. It's about organisms in relationships, be those relationships predatory, parasitic, symbiotic, nurturing, or what have you. Wilderness is an "organic" system, by which I mean both living and emergent/unplanned. This conception allows us to consider humans as both a part of wilderness (nature) and apart from it. The first half of that observation is easy -- we cannot escape it, it's all around us, and it supports us. But humans also create, with purpose, their own complex systems (towns, buildings, farms, ranches, factories, etc.) -- and those systems often compete with wilderness systems. The result of that competition is often bad for the wilderness, although occasionally wilderness "wins." More importantly, wilderness adapts from the competition, although perhaps a bit more slowly than human systems do.

The ecological systems we designate "wilderness" have developed over eons. They represent incredible diversity that still extends beyond our capacity to catalog let alone comprehend. And much as we like to ignore it in the name of human "progress," those finely honed organic systems support us, making our life on this planet possible. We have yet to replicate the dynamic and intricate system of relationships that is a wild ecosystem. Perhaps, one day we will. But until we do, we are ill-served in the casual destruction of wilderness. If that sounds like a preservationist's ethic sneaking back in, so be it. Or maybe, just maybe, it's about humbly accepting our place in (and not above) these wild systems of relationship.

PPPPPPPoemics

2010-01-13T11:05:00.000-08:00

The Dance of P and Q

Interesting conversations in the world of poemics and abstract comics about the relationship of words to images in experimental comics. Coming at the question from two different directions, one of the most interesting aspects of this work is focus on the abstract shape (and, well, concept) of letters. And words.

As always, I find these conversations and the work of others profoundly inspiring (I highly recommend checking out Rosaire Appel's new abstract comic, As The If And, as well as his blog for additional inspiration of this kind) When I should be, um, writing professional letters, I find myself absorbed in imagining letters as comics compositions. I think my love of language gets in my way as I tend to default to visual puns and word games. Still, this is what comes of PPPPlay.

P Stream

apPEASe

Doodle or Die

2010-01-12T05:32:00.000-08:00

But what does it say? A log, a pipe...but this is not a pipe, right? It's a sketchbook page. No, it's a scan from a sketchbook...digitally edited and colored. It's not abstract enough to be an abstract comic. It doesn't play with words enough to be a poemic. Maybe it's just another doodle. Maybe it's just a visual stream of consciousness drawing. Maybe it's crap. Maybe it's just a blog post. And, of course, none of these possibilities are mutually exclusive.

And for those of us who prefer our world less colorful...

Confined...at home.

2010-01-08T09:15:00.000-08:00

Actually, it was a lot more

comfortable than flying coach class.

This week's prompt over at Illustration Friday is "confined." Given that I am more or less trapped at home this weekend since our car is snowed in at the top of an icy hill with unplowed roads, you'd think I'd focus on something like cabin fever. However, I kind of like being stuck at home with plenty of groceries and art supplies. Today, anyway.

Am I alone in a selfish response to the Christmas attempt to blow up a plane in Detroit? I thought air travel was bad enough, but now we're making it even more loathsome. I doubt it will be too long before mailing yourself somewhere would actually be more comfortable and probably more efficient than flying. The prisons we build for ourselves are always worse than any dungeon imagined by others. If that claim is too much of a sweeping generalization, it is at least a thought to carry with us as we return to contemplating how much of our liberties we are willing to sacrifice in the pursuit of "perfect" security.

Maybe in the end, it's the rhetoric that is the most confining. Here we are again, back among the pre-packaged arguments and memes, pointing the finger for political gain. The world may (!!) have changed on 9/11, but the more it changed the more it stayed the same.

Found 01

2010-01-07T04:22:00.000-08:00

Mirro-Krome Card. H.S. Crocker Co., San Francisco.

On a recent day-trip to Cape Girardeau, I enjoyed perusing vintage post cards in one of the many antique malls downtown. I like gathering cartoon post cards because they offer interesting source material for line-work techniques. I also like them because they offer hints at differing fashions, technologies, and both shifting and universal humor. To the best of my abilities, I locate these cards as circa 1940s. I dig the camping equipment! And the humor is much more risque than my grandmother ever led me to believe was popular in the 1940s. None of these cards were actually mailed, though. I wonder if they were more often collected than sent, an underground amusement.

My digital work has led me recently back into mail art. I am making my own post cards now to send to friends who, in turn, send me little capsules of their own work. Fun to imagine what might become of those as the minutia and ephemera of our day find their way into someone's packrat house and eventually an estate sale and flea market. Years from now, what sense will collectors make of our sense of aesthetics and humor, our taken-for-granted technologies of exchange? Hard to know, but fun to speculate.

Plastichrome. Coulourpicture Publishers, Inc., Boston.

Kromekolor Comic Card. Noble, Colorado Springs.

Plastichrome. Colourpicture Publishers, Inc. Boston.