So I have a bunch of photos from Minneapolis but a lot are my usual documenting of local walls, street signs and windows. A brief recounting of a few events from the weekend:
The first night there was a Sleeping In The Aviary show with Taylor’s band, Teenage Moods, and both were rad and the bar was serving 12 year Jameson and everybody danced and it was all around a rad time, Matt even called Monica and I to drunkenly serenade us with a shitty Against Me! song, reminiscent of the time she came down to Austin and we barraged her with bad covers. (Matt and I are in a side project awesome cover band called Panic At Nabisco.)
I just like this picture of Ali a lot because it makes him seem like such a bad ass, there, in the back of Abby’s green VW beetle, which I crammed in to on more than one occasion and it was pretty great. (I’m not saying he’s not a bad ass, but I mean, well, he is, just not in the traditional way bad asses are.)
I’ve been asked why I bothered with the Mall Of America. I guess it’s like a bucket list of hell sort of thing; a don’t knock it ’til you try it kind of thing. (I have a list of things I will knock and never try, like heroin and owning a suburban home, and this should have stayed on it, because I had an intense dizzy nausea hit me the instant we walked in the door and I nearly vomited about five times and the entire place smelled of boredom and fear and butter and capitalism and was disgusting and I hate it. But now I have even more reason to.)
I enjoyed sitting on Abby’s floor because a) the trash can below her desk was filled with empty bottles of wine and Jameson and it felt like home, b) her wall could probably be on Things Organized Neatly and c) it was a nice sort of space to talk to people on, or at least listen to their conversations, as I’m not one to talk much in unfamiliar areas.
Liz’s birthday party started with Abby and I blowing up a bunch of balloons and Liz hanging her own Happy Birthday sign (quite possibly the saddest thing I’ve seen in awhile) and then there were porches and Matt lit a flare in a can and it was a good long drunken night and the weather was perfect.
We drove to go apple picking on Sunday and five of us packed into the Beetle and listened to The Smiths really loud and the air was the perfect temperature and I watched Minneapolis fade six times over in the various shattered parts of Abby’s rear view mirror and I just thought about life and how we see what is ahead of us with such wholehearted idealism and what is behind us with such broken regret, tattered and from too many angles of disrepair. Everything looked so peaceful and tragic looking back, and she put her hand out the window and I managed to get this shot and I just think about how we all try to put our hands out as the wind passes us by with such velocity, and in the end have to pick up the pieces of our fragmented lives, trying to assemble them to figure out what happened, and if we’ll ever see clearly again, will our hands ever really work the same after such tragedies that occur on any given night in fall.
Going apple picking, Abby and Ali and I decided to go out into this giant field of tall grass and lots of stickly, dead things, and we fucking conquered that field like nobody’s business, climbing over and through dead plants all over the place and I don’t think anyone got bit by a tick or broke a bone (it was close a couple times). So we are now declared field sisters? It probably would be a boring story to my co-workers (“Oh what did you do on your vacation?” “I walked through a fucking field! That’s what!”), but it’s things like conversations over twenty minutes of navigating through brush just for fun when the weather is great and there are dragonflies everywhere that really make an experience something that can’t be put on a slogan for a storefront or a restaurant.
Then we regrouped with Liz and Monica, who were not up for field conquering, and ate apple things.
I mean, there’s much more I’m leaving out. I didn’t photograph every situation, or a lot of things, actually. I was writing a lot, and just experiencing things. The house I was staying in was falling apart (Monica referred to it at least once as a death trap on the verge of being condemned), but it was great. I sat on the far couch on the porch the first time and said, “This is a great couch you can really sink in to!” and Monica replied, “Yeah, and it’s covered in mold! But you probably won’t die.”
It’s an odd juxtaposition, to experience the life you have on a vacation is more you than the life you lead in reality. That coming back to San Francisco felt foreign in a way; sleeping on a mat in the attic with a used couch cushion and a blanket as a pillow was just right, that my collared shirt job and worries about things like getting a new shelf to keep books in just felt so innately pointless. That I’ve lost track of myself, somehow, but in a house, city, state I’d never been … was able to somehow reclaim even just a little of who I feel so much like at heart.
I’m not going to quit my job, and I’m not going to move to some punk house in East Oakland, or go back to my old habits of dumpster diving and other things I grew familiar with while living in Portland. But it’s good to have these refreshing shocks of the culture that you grew up with and perhaps have grown out of in too many ways. It’s probably going to take some work, but it’s worth it, to at least take back the parts of me I can, to get away from the me that my job and lifestyle have driven me towards. To take back the parts of me that maybe I let fall by the wayside more than I should have to be what I thought the world I’ve entered wanted me to be.
To get back to basics, but also to reinvent them.
Everyone kept asking me if I was having a good time, it was sort of funny, just because I take trips and vacations for completely different reasons than most people, perhaps, maybe, I suppose. But to just experience and be thrown into an environment that I’ve felt so detached from for so long, there’s nothing really better than rediscovering everything that made you who you are, and meeting some great people along the way.
I’ve some ideas, but they’re just ideas, but they’re coming, they’re going to be something someday and someday soon. It’s time to think and almost time to work and remember that it’s always the fight, never stop with what you believe in, and never let it out of your sight, and keep friends who remind you of such things so very close, or as close as you can.
Monica decided to tell everyone that the only reason I went to Minneapolis was to see Sleeping In The Aviary, so my only blog post about going to Minneapolis will be about the show. Here are some fun pictures of the band! Yay!
Yeah! Bands!
(It more went that Monica introduced me to her various friends in the band as me being some mega-creepy stalker, as well as bringing up the fact I mentioned in the blog being stoked to see them [hence "dear diary"], so now my first post back from Minneapolis is solely as punishment. However, I can’t be all that mocking since I did have a really good time, so I should at least thank the following people for letting me sleep on various couches and attics and made me feel at home in foreign lands and helped me remember what’s been missing from my life:)
Monica
Abby (in this picture, in hell?)
Liz
Ali
Taylor
So I’ll have a more comprehensive roundup and a ton of photos probably tomorrow night or something. Lots to sift through and edit. But I still have to catch up on Mad Men, do laundry to get the smell of, well, various couches and attics and cigarettes and wine and whiskey out of it all in time for work tomorrow, feed the cat since she feels abandoned and do things that aren’t so blog-updatey. For now, Sleeping In The Aviary did intro with this and it’s basically been on repeat for me for a couple weeks now so I nearly lost my mind hearing it live.
She had a pawn shop gun in her mouth. The cancer had cursed her, her mind wanted out. Her soul just slipped backwards, convinced nothing’s wrong with the bullet she swallowed singing this song. Some will die lonely, some will die cold, some will die happy and married you know. So if I die awake well, I guess that’s a start. I’m gonna try to die thinking of you, my sweetheart.
His wife dead thirty years he was just doing time. He chased down the daylight with a bottle of wine and he died without knowing his own children’s names. His lips, they weren’t moving but the sound was the same. Some will die healthy, some sick to their skin. Some will die softly, surrounded by friends. So if we die together of if we die apart, I’m gonna try to die thinking of you my sweetheart.
They were two teenage songbirds flying around in young love. Their melodies mingled for a weekend a month. And a tune grew inside her with a soft, beating heart but a surgeon removed it before the music could start. Some will die sober, some will die straight and some will die walking to work with the shakes so if I die impatient or with dignified heart, I’m gonna try to die thinking of you my sweetheart.
I’m leaving for a bit. Minneapolis or bust. The IOTD is updated through the fifth and I’ll be back on the sixth.
So I decided since I’ll have an absence for awhile, I’d drop some hints as to what’s to come here at Distorted Perspective Productions. First, I’ve alluded to new books and paintings and all that. Well, here’s what it all really is about:
I’ve not done anything personal in a long time that I’ve completed. I’ve started parts of this project already, and will continue to develop it over the fall. Sort of an offspring of The Bolshevik Child life project I have going on, it will conceptually revolve around the various experiences I’ve had in 2010 that lead me to believe certain things. The title might signify what you can expect of this project tonally and visually. I don’t know if something can be sparse, dense, heavy, and detailed at the same time, but it’s something I’m going for and thinking of.
So yeah. This won’t just be paintings. It will be book(s), zine(s), painting(s), t-shirt(s), poster(s), maybe website(s), who knows. I want to make a complete art collection out of all this, as I did a painting series with Knife In A Gunfight and want to push those boundaries into places I’ve not yet experimented.
In other work news, the posters I did recently are going up around San Francisco starting on the sixth. So if you’re in the city, this map tells you which posters will be at what locations. Some are only doing a two-week run, some are three, and some might end up being more. But yeah. There will also be an exhibition at SF Camerawork in January which will possibly have some of the posters there.
Also, here’s a new mix tape. Haven’t posted one in awhile, and I’ll eventually get to posting those from the past couple months. These are tunes that have no real thread other than the fact I can relate to them all in different ways; I guess the theme would be being pulled in a lot of different directions mentally and still not having the sort of foundation that once grounded you. Nothing super abrasive but a good ‘build up and be tense’ sort of mix.
Sleeping In The Aviary – Everybody’s Different, Everybody Dies (2:43)
Okkervil River – A Girl In Port (6:37)
Grouper – Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping (2:53)
Also, this, because every time I go to SFO I listen to it:
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Choking on the thought of leaving, drinking to keep from sobbing. 4pm, 4 dollar pints – SFO – the time and price. With all my happiness aborted, the PA painfully starts boarding. I sink deep, thirty thousand feet into my window seat / electric chair.
And I was drinking you goodbye. A heart floats in the bay. From sour home Chicago, I hear it beating far away. There’s no telling what I’ll do If I don’t return to you.
Hopeful thoughts of soon returning can’t put out my stomach burning. Plastic wings and plastic smiles. Unsalted peanuts stretch my miles. Choking on the thought of leaving. Drinking to keep from heaving. 5pm 5 dollar pints, Hellbound Airlines, time and price.
And I was drinking you goodbye. A heart floats in the bay. From sour home Chicago, I hear it beating far away.And there’s no telling what I’ll do If I don’t return to you.
And that’s that. New things are underway, in addition to these crazy trips, to try and clear my head, or just at least maybe not have as many panic attacks (or perhaps do something constructive with them, in some abstract sense of that term).
When the fall is all that’s left, it matters a great deal.
I made my mom agree to let me get a cat when we moved from Massachusetts to Alaska the year I was going in to 7th grade. Shady has been back and forth across the country many times and lived with her after I went to college. I got to see him when they were in town en route to Alaska a few months back.
And now I’ll never get to see him again. Rest in peace, buddy.
One of those records that cost me more money than I wish it did, and I don’t listen to it much just because of how much of a punch in the gut it is, but nights like tonight it’s worth every penny.
One of these days I’m going to feel better about things, or not miss certain people as much as I do, or make something make some sense. But it’s certainly not today and tomorrow isn’t looking that good either.
A lot of things happened today and I am just sort of now realizing it was all only Saturday (as most of my weekends are plain and boring, the fact all this crazy shit happened in one day is kind of weird). But here I am with Laura who helped get me a last minute write-on to a plus one at the Levis Workshop closing party that had an open bar and a fuck ton of great print work on the walls and I took a lot of pictures but this is the one I was in.
I have a lot of thoughts on the workshop, the ideas of capitalism and the patronage of brands as far as marketing goes, but this is not the best time to write up such intense dialogs.
I am seeing Sleeping In The Aviary next week and that makes me pretty stoked because they just happened to have a show in Minneapolis the night I am flying in. Expensive Vomit In A Cheap Hotel Room is a pretty good album for people who go through shitty breakups and so I’ve been accompanying my martinis with it this summer and the fact I’ll be flying in to a completely new city and end up seeing them five hours after landing is a pretty awesome deal.
Although I have to give credit to this girl, who not only turned me on to the band but also convinced me to visit Minneapolis after about five years of promising to do so, and whose couches I will be sleeping on for five days:
If you’re wondering how my work evolves, take in to account my last blog post, and then add the next few pictures.
Today was all basically vodka and painting. And talking to this girl.
And I miss her, and many people, quite dearly. Everyone I know seems to up and move east. I want to tell them that it’s not worth it, because I’ve spent so many years there, and it’s just a fraud. At least the west coast is up front in being superficial and bullshit. I don’t know. There aren’t many people who I have long term relationships with in any sense, and there are even fewer on the west coast. I hate that the one city I really just dislike (New York) happens to be the epicenter of where all my old friends are. And/Or it might end up being my next move. We’ll see.
Today is the first day in more than a couple months that I’ve had no work to do. No responsibility. I can relax without eight things pressing down on my head. Went record shopping:
(Thanks to Matty for patrolling the in-bins at Waterloo and sending me John Prine.)
Kind of disappointed that Amoeba, one of the best record stores in the US, didn’t have any Stars Of The Lid or Unwound or Grouper or Frontier(s). Also didn’t have the Songs: Ohia or Jackie-O Motherfucker LPs I’ve been looking for. Which I mean, I guess is okay because if I had come away with my entire shopping list, I’d be about $300 more in debt. Still, though.
I am also selling some of my records, so stuff highlighted in yellow is up for grabs, if anyone wants them.
(Also, lol@ San Francisco’s “summer.”) Loving this:
August in the Bay, bleak as a life. Such a win.
Ate some Dots and watched a couple episodes of The West Wing, including this spectacular scene:
Granted this show always kills it. Who knows where the day goes from here, but it’ll probably involve paint of some sort and a bottle of wine at some point. It’s good to take a day to yourself and not feel guilty about it. Two weeks from now I’ll be partying with Monica (and going to a Sleeping In The Aviary show!), so there’s even some things to keep on the radar as far as the “helping life not totally suck” department goes.
