automort

automort

Home for the holidays. I saw my parents on Christmas day. We went to Mass at St. Mary's Cathedral, something that has become something of a short-term tradition. I visited them in Bastrop later in the week. Samantha and I are traveling to Boulder, CO to visit her friends there after the new year and with the terrible weather around Denver over the past week, my parents were nervously trying to do whatever they could think of to ensure our safety on our road trip. After a recent blow-out on their way home from visiting my sister in Mississippi, my parents have been very concerned about my car's lack of a spare tire, so my Dad took me to the local salvage yard to track down a tire that would suffice as a spare for me.

I'm not much of a car person. I wish I had a bit more know-how when it comes to automobiles but I don't. I've never had the occaision to visit a salvage yard. When we arrived I was non-plussed: as you might imagine there were piles of junked cars missing panels and wheels and doors and bumpers. I didn't even bother getting out of Dad's truck while he trekked up to the office -a haggard mobile home that rested unsteadily on stilts made from stacks of tire rims. After a little while a tiny 80's model Honda hatchback came whizzing from behind the trailer office and the scruffy driver deposited a totally decent tire at our feet.

Honestly I'm sort of tired of my car. It drives fairly well and its reasonably dependable. I'm sure it will make the trip from Denton to Austin hundreds of more times before it croaks but it is so plain and boring - a white GM 4-door sedan. I'd really like to replace it with a hybrid or a nice later-model Volvo. I'm not going to but I'd like to. While at the junk yard though I entertained this fantasy which involves seriously cleaning up all the horrible things I've done to my car in preparation for trading it in or selling it. I had in mind finding a trunk lining to replace the one horribly mangled by ill-conceived attempt to transport a car battery for recycling. I mention this to my Father and the Honda driver and we all pile into the tiny car with the back passenger door that opens on every sharp right turn and head off into the hidden depths of the salvage yard that lay behind the trailer and workshop and tin shantys that composed the yard's complex.

It was bewildering. There were rows and rows of mangled heaps of cars grouped by make. It was a decaying bizzarro car lot straight out of a J.G. Ballard novel. My new car fantasy excitement quickly dissapated leaving only curious dread as we sped by the crumpled hulks. It struck me that more than likely each one of the wrecks we were looking at had been party to a pretty terrible car crash - so many cars that were also coffins.

nest of cloth and fur

nest of cloth and fur

I know I suck. This blog is a microcosm of my life-o-cosm. As I pass through time and space I leave in my wake a trail of incomplete projects: the furniture to repair, the books to finish reading, the whatevers to whatever. When I've finally left this mortal coil, I'm not sure if tying up all of these loose ends will be my hell or my paradise. I certainly would like to be the sort of person who completed one task, or book, or project before adding on another, but I am not and suspect that I never will be. Finding the end of things, especially when the things are wonderful, physical objects brought into the world from nothing and imagination is pure ecstasy. Part of me thinks that maybe if I produced as much as I set out to, each product wouldn't mean as much, but I am pretty certain that is bullshit and mostly I just forget or get distracted or am lazy and would rather watch Law and Order. This is why despite my impulse to do the opposite, I've taken to keeping all of those ideas and project-larvae in my breast pocket. I figure if I keep my ideas secret, no one will know exactly how many things I have not completed and success will be mine when in several years I finally finish that screenplay that I started in college that had been my entire creative focus since the moment I conceived of the story on that cold winters night in my dorm room (wink wink). May the world slash internet never know about the innumerable websites, the copious number of furniture designs, the array of short stories, the plethora of paintings, or the constellation of blog entries that I bailed on! And may we who default never receive our come-uppance!

perennial

perennial

I cannot believe that it has been sevenish months since I last posted in this blog. Plenty of blog-worthy stuff happened over the course of the last sevenish months the least of which has my semi-recent move to from Austin to Denton with Samantha. I am completely baffled by my growing resistance to writing. Samantha is participlating in the NaBloPoMo National Blog Posting Month in her very clever and heartfelt blog. I missed the deadline to officially sign up for NaBloPoMo (which is still remarkably long for an acronym in my opinion) but since I want to face my aversion to blogging (and also do some mental exercise that might prevent the total deterioration of my memory) I'm going to really try to participate in an unofficial capacity. If I'm lucky, by the end of the month I will have recovered some lost memory and have developed a new habit of recording my life with a little bit more regularity...

The Junkman Cometh

The Junkman makes music with mailboxes, saw blades, frying pans and beer cans. But he has also composed two pieces for Twyla Tharp and performed with both Eminem and the Louisville Symphony.

Now the Junkman has written a full length spoken-word opera based on the Nordic myth of the Viking god of war, who also happens to be the Viking god of knowledge. Odin calls for 10 percussionists, a cast of six and a chorus of 24. It will be performed at New York University in April. Andrea Shea reports.

Click to Listen to NPR Piece

my first public showing


I've been living in the place where I am now for about 8 months and have never really bothered to make it very homey. I mean I moved in my furniture and stuff, but in all this time I've never really unpacked completely or put any paintings on the walls or anything. For the longest time I'd been doing my miscellaneous arts and crafts on the dining room table. The two cats that also live in the apartment with me seemed to take great pleasure in knocking the scraps of paper and rolls of tape on to the floor and eventually the mess grew so large that it eclipsed the entire surface. Even though neither my roommate or I really use the dining room table for its entended purpose, I felt that it would be better to move my personal art into my personal space so I finally broke down and purchased a drafting table. It turned out to be quite an enormous piece of furniture that necessitated some drastic rearranging of my room to accomodate it. In the process I realized just how little I actually ever moved in to this apartment. Most of my stuff was crammed in the same corners of my closet as when I first arrived. Crates containing cds and lamps and art supplies lay dormant, frozen in the first day that I took up residence in this place. So I began to clean and pick over and reduce the piles that had not never been sorted before moved only transported. In the process I'd found several old paintings that I didn't want to keep but I was too lazy to paint over. I've collected several canvases that had been placed near the dumpster at my apartment complex emblazoned with images that had a similar sort of feel to them - they were ok, but felt like they needed to be pushed out in order to make room for new work. I've taken the paintings and painted over them on a couple of occaisions, wondering about the person who painted them (all the canvases were signed by Kelly Reinhardt). So I hoped to instill a similar sort of wonder in someone else by taking a page from Kelley and writing my website in sharpie on the back of the paintings and having a 2 AM opening at my own makeshift gallery. My hope is that someone driving by will see them, pick one up, take it home, check out this website and have a brief glimpse into the life and art of another person, however as I write this I can already hear the trash trucks scouring the streets and I know they've already shut down my little gallery before it even had a chance to see the light of day.

Marfa: Chinati - 100 Mill Aluminum (two)

Marfa: Chinati - 100 Mill Aluminum (two)
Originally posted by ryan_pants.

Not Quite Yet an Amusement Park
Samantha & I went to Marfa for a pre-valentine's day getaway. It was great. Plus it has inspired my newest (& most awesome yet) scheme.

Small Monument to a Swiss Monument