#uncoffeed...

Kalamazoo now has traffic circles. why does pain so familiar feel so good?  I play the same song over & over opening the same vein over & over recounting the crossroads where the path could have been different mighta been coulda been shoulda been woulda been never matters anyway It's not regret I'm feeling, no I'm playing Physical Graffiti to remember a particular permutation of me. The me who helped break a puppy out of dog jail. ...the one who once took a bunch of the blinky traffic signs and put them in someone's yard like their front door was blocked off...and then another day did the same thing but blocking off Douglas, one of the main streets in Kalamazoo. THERE WASN'T ANYTHING ELSE TO DO. We were kids who didn't want to go home. I was "raised" by old hippies. I'd given up on traditional life entirely, skipped school, and went downtown to hang in basements on the North Side with musicians who had weed and philosophy. They talked to m...

buy Deconstructed Corvid 1 - Fibonacci Putting together an art show seems very much like putting together a music album.  Some of you-all may  not remember albums. They told stories and wore cool jackets, sometimes smoked. Dark and enigmatic, glistening in the dim light of somebody's basement while the needle danced over the grooves. God, I miss analog.  An exhibit needs to tell a story. Our brains seek patterns but like surprises. We want the A-HA! Like the words I write, my paintings blurt images in quirky detail, narrative a little jumbled like that last dream before you wake up.  As I compile my varied works to hang on the walls of Beanetics Coffee Roasters , I may find a piece doesn't fit, quite, between its compatriots. I can bend the narrative by reordering the pieces so one nuance leads gently to the next. This project wants editing like any other. A good whisky and a good perfume are the same way. The first impression may be bold; you're not sure...

I've known for a long time that it's useless to force creativity:  often the work will have to be done over.  Thanks to discussions peripheral to Gödel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid , I've learned to use math terminology (imperfectly) to further identify aspects of the process. According to me, the difference between one person's brain and the next is the degree of pixelation each can discern.  How fine a grain are you able to manage? I can work with very, very, fine grains; I have challenges taking in the forest.  I see not only the trees but pebbles, lichen, the tiny little things that creep therein .  I can discern minute intervals with alarming (to myself) accuracy, even when I haven't figured out what they are, but I can get lost trying to drive across town. Also, I can see wisteria vines, bats, and birds in the grounds left at the bottom of my coffee, so I'm interpreting that vision in scratchboard. There's a place in every creative ...

Patrice used to take a personal interest in my looks. "You need concilla ," she told me in her South Cackalacky accent.  I made her repeat the word a few times and finally spell it: C-O-N-C-E-A-L-E-R.  She had a point - my dark eyecircles are legendary.  Patrice was a beautiful woman, masterful with fashion, trying to help me out with the obvious.  Over time, though, I found an awkward trend to her advice.  One day she was adamant - adamant - that I should try parting my hair on the side. "Just do it one time. You'll love it," she insisted.  She'd done her hair with a severe side-part . Obviously it would be good for me, too, because she liked me. Understanding her motivation is exactly the kind of thought that plagues me for years, but I think I've finally sorted it:  Patrice felt an elation when she found herself beautiful with side-parted hair.  I think she was trying to recapture that elated feeling by replicating the action on me. ...