Sunday, September 18, 2005

Remembering Passion by getting away


It works every time-- today I wanted to make art at my house but instead made myself go to the top of the volcano on Maui, 10,000 ft elevation: Haleakala. I only made the hike in an hour in, but I could feel my body tingle. And I come home remembering so much that I want to create.

By the way, I just launched my movie that is about mystical art with a realist attitude-- more influenced by abstract artists and graffiti artists than meditative spiritualists-- mystical street art.

Saturday, September 17, 2005

art lives in manhattan



What's that in the back-- it's a floating island. I swear when I first saw this picture I stared, amazed at how beautiful an image it was, but until I watched the multimedia presentation on Robert Smithson did I see the island of trees.

Blooters and Winders: Fites and Llacks.


If you are wondering what Kanye meant by the media calling white people "finders" and black people "looters", see this set of screenshots in which 6 out of 7 slides note black people as looting and the one slide of white people doing the same thing is of "finders".

I would venture a guess that this is one of the few grocery looting photos we'll see of white people looting in New Orleans. The area hit by the hurricane was predominantly black and poor. Maybe some white cats in the French Quarter were looting, I don't know. But this is not about blaming the AP photographer for the quote.

The point here is not to blame the media now, but to realize that racism is a subtle and often unconscious act that exists for us. The media is just a reflection of that.

Race has been exposed as a real issue again in America.

"George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People"




Five days after hurricane Katrina devasted the Gulf Coast of the USA, NBC TV hosted a telethon to raise money for the red cross. Comedian Mike Myers and hip-hop star Kanye West were reading from a teleprompter when Kanye ditched the script:
http://media.putfile.com/Kanye-West-at-the-Hurricane-Katrina-tele

Friday, September 16, 2005

This has to be the coolest thing I've ever done: The NEW GP TRIBUTE


The painting is "Preserving Gary" that served as the center piece for the GP Tribute. The music is from "Golden Rule" by Blackalicious. This has to be the coolest thing I've ever done: gp art.

Monday, September 12, 2005

art in times of this war


"(un)Patriot(ic) Act," the artist Lisa Charde's straitjacketed flag, is part of a new exhibition by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

The street mindset for art, what has been shown in alternative spaces for years, has made it into a gallery showing that was just reviewed in the ny times:

...the show is a thoughtful, legitimate exploration of one way in which American artists' lives have changed because of 9/11; it raises questions about artistic freedom that ought to be asked near ground zero. And the anger directed against the show reveals some chilling cultural trends: the devaluing of art as a proper response to 9/11, and the persistent, wrongheaded idea that to question the government is to dishonor the memory of those who died.

Carlos Andrade & Todd Ayoung's "Beheaded/Between," left, and an untitled work by John Leanos.





ABOVE: Kouross Esmaeli's "Greetings Without Flowers" features lifesize portraits of citizens of Baghdad.

BELOW: A simulated explosive device in a suitcase by the artist Hackett.

Saturday, September 10, 2005

Don't let New Orleans become Las Vegas

If you haven't figured out Bush by now, what we have to fear here is that he drops crazy dollars on his friends to rebuild New Orleans as the PARTY TOWN they know it as. I have nothing against sex, drugs and rock-n-roll. But, not if the entire city is rebuilt based on that concept and all the money is capitalized by the corporate elite. Let's have some REAL ART, some innovative music (DON'T LET NEW ORLEANS BECOME LAS VEGAS). Let's invigorate the vast community of people who lived in the heart of New Orleans. Let's step up to the opportunity in a right way. Every person affected must be in a home and healthy.

My question is how do we encourage a real art scene back into New Orleans.

Thanks Eric for this link.
Despite the disaster that has overwhelmed New Orleans, the city's monied, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of Katrina are gone. "New Orleans is ready to be rebuilt. Let's start right here," says Mr. O'Dwyer, standing in his expansive kitchen, next to a counter covered with a jumble of weaponry and electric wires.
Or was there ever one?

Peeling Away the layers of America we find Nikes


Eugene Robinson wrote this great piece on the Katrina Hurricane situation:
That's what this unreal disaster did to New Orleans and the whole country. Things we tried to tuck away and forget about are suddenly out there for the world to see.
America just went and aired our dirty laundry to the world. YO WORLD!!!: "We got a 'bunch a poor people' and they are mostly black and they are the same poor people that have been here for long, long time in our country. Reagonomics, supply siders, Clinton-boom-enomics, whatever you want to blame it on, hasn't worked....

(the blame game: While Jon Stewart is really MISSING when he blames Mike Brown and FEMA-- really Brown is just a fall guy for BUSH. Don't buy this America, Brown was given no power and no good infrastructure. Bush clearly chose the wrong guy and put him in the wrong place.)

American capitalism has left WAY TOO MANY OF OUR POOR STILL POOR. And, Hurricane Katrina opened our Kimono to show that we don't really have this "poor thing" figured out.

The Right Side says that it's their own damn fault. And in a spiritual sense, we all choose our own reality, right? We all need to be responsible for ourselves. And it's true.

And then the left says: bullshit, y'all just put your friends in the best god damn jobs.
RIGHT: You do too, look at all the Clinton ambassador appointments.
LEFT: Listen, I'm just saying, that I need to take responsibility for myself, but the rules of the economic game are based on who you know. White people know white people. Rich people know rich people. And that's straight up.

RIGHT: But I would hire the most qualified person for any job. White or Black. Rich or poor.
LEFT: Sometimes I agree with your whole point, that's probably why I'm a liberal. You probably think you do hire the best person for the job..
(BTW, when a conservative can see my point, I feel as if my mind is blissed-- almost numbed perhaps... but not quite, mostly inspired because 'my god, we might actually have our country and our world come together' kind of feeling-- yes, I'm going to say it, 'in peace').
Sometimes, I agree that people need to get off their asses and get some shit done. I get the most done when I am 90% sweating but I get the most done when I am loving my job.
... but what you aren't quite admiting is that you create your own standards of who passes the muster to get the job, get into the school, and be succesful.

RIGHT: Why the race thing? Kanye West, Howard Dean?

My friend called my on the phone and said he couldn't understand the looting. That was on day 4. "I can understand taking food, but why NIKE'S?

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Excerpts from interview with intuitive healer Mary Swanson


These are excerpts from an interview the Johnathon Human and I recorded with Mary. The entire text to be published in the near future.

June 27th, Sunday, 2004

JQ: What is it that you do?
M: Legally I can call myself an energy balancer, I can call myself an energy worker, I can call myself a chakra balancer. Legally, I can’t call myself a healer or a therapist. But what I do is work with people’s belief systems, their energy fields, to affect healing in their lives. I think of myself as a student of human interaction. I came up though poetry and theatre and the arts.

JQ: You use the words “seeing energy” would you say that it is actually a visual of what you “see” or is it more of the sense and a perception that’s in part vision, optical?
M: There are many different ways of being intuitive. And one way is actually seeing which is “clairvoyance”. And yes, I would say I definitely I see energy. At the beginning of my life I thought everybody saw things this way. It would be a very normal occurrence for me to see somebody with a tiny little head, or yellow things shooting off of their bodies.

JQ: So you would say you had this gift sense as a child?
M: I would definitely say I was born seeing things that way. But there is also clairsencience where you are feeling, smelling, and tasting energy.
And there is prescience where you are kind of seeing and sensing things ahead of when they happen. And there is clairaudience where you are hearing things. And I would say that all those ways of perceiving happen to me. And it’s really nice to be able to calm and quiet it down.

GQ: Was there any experience as a child... were there people you met as a child where you recognized that this was a different way of experiencing the world?

M: Two things come up when you ask that question. One is that my experience with my father was that he also sensed what I sensed. So I didn’t feel that I was that different. Because our communication was very non-verbal and I just thought that that was how people communicated with other people.
And then when I was in my seventh year, I remember very vividly my first out of body experience. I was cutting through from my school to my church, and I went through this long hallway, and the hallway started began to tilt. I just stood there and looked at it. There was a classroom right there and I went and laid down. There was a shelf in the back of the schoolroom, and I just laid down on the shelf and I was up in the corner of the room watching myself lay down on the shelf in the back. And that was my first experience of thinking I don’t think other people do this.

GQ: What is your experience in airports? For example, if you were flying, would you have any sense of the safety of the plane? Or would you have a sense of being able to check in with that? Or would you just have a faith that “I am trusting in the universe and that everything is going to be OK”?
M: I’ve never had the experience that I should leave an airplane. I’ve never had the experience that there is something wrong here and I should divert. But when I do get on an airplane I just sit down, ground the airplane, discharge any negative energies that I can see or sense, I ground the whole cockpit, and make sure everybody is awake and everything. I do do that. And then I just let go, I just turn it over to “I’ve done what I can do here”.

But I think the bigger question here is that I that nothing is really fated. And that you can have an influence. One person being grounded and calm in a situation can influence the situation that might be about to teeter off into some kind of chaos.

Maybe that is why it hard to go out there into the world. Not just that you are being bombarded. With the practice that I have, I do just try to maintain a calm and grounded thing all the time and I have come to trust myself that that in and of itself is going to create a safe pathway for me to walk in the world through.

GQ: Would you think you would know if something terrible was going to happen?
M: I think I would feel if something terrible was going to happen. I don’t know that I would know the exact cause of what was creating that feeling within me. Certainly with all the chaos that has been going on the world lately, I and several other psychics that I talk to sometimes will call each other and go “whoa what is going on, what’s about to come down here it’s just really hard to ground, it’s hard to get protected., it’s hard to feel OK. I’m waking up in the middle of the night in tears.” There’s an awareness when there is a building of energy, Around us and also worldwide.

So, I think I try to stay as calm and separate from that as much as I can because even with the belief that one person can ground a room and affect the whole situation it doesn’t help to react to that feeling of panic or chaos going on other than ok, just just be grounded, be as calm as you can.

But causation is a very tricky thing, you can feel energy and know that things are how they should be. But then finding out why is pulling that thread out to get to that point of causation. It’s a tricky thing. Because usually there isn’t one point of causation, there are a lot of factors coming together about to converge that create the chaos.