JTony.Com

I’m getting in on the tail end of this meme, I know, but I think there’s a point here, so bear with me.

I’m not a big fan of Kanye West. I don’t dislike him or anything, it is just that, except for his occasional outbursts, he doesn’t really hit my radar. I’m told he’s a talented musician, and I believe that, but I really haven’t partaken in much of his work, so I don’t know first hand.

The same can be said for Beyoncé and Taylor Swift. I can’t think of a single song I know by Swift, and Beyoncé I only really know through Glee and Coverville (If I ever figure out how to surgically removed that song from my brain there will be scars).

But I was fascinated by the MTV Video Music Awards and Kanye West’s interruption of Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to extole the virtues of Beyoncé’s video and the subsequent memes it has produced. The audacity it would take to interrupt someone’s speech not to say that you deserved it (like he did at the European VMA Awards in 2007), but that someone else deserved it more… that’s just amazing.

What I’m finding particularly interesting is how shocking it all is. How surprising it is to see someone get up and break the planned framework and interject something else, however self serving and asinine. It surprises me that the American public finds this so novel.We live in a culture of all kinds of constant interruptions. From commercial television to pop-up ads on the internet, the culture of interruption is pervasive in our lives. From stop lights to panhandlers to our telephones, our lives are filled with things that break up our intended patterns. So why is it so surprising when Kanye West does it?Well, for one thing, the sheer rudeness of the way he interrupts and the inappropriateness of the comment at that particular time, but I think also that a single person not only can get up and take the entire scene hostage, but that he thinks he can and basically gets away with it. I think that’s the main thing we react to. That’s what we don’t like.But, I think that, as artists, we all need to be a little bit more like Kayne West, or at least our pieces do.

I’m not saying we should go around being rude to fellow artists, interrupting them when it is their moment to shine. I think the opposite, that we need to behave with the greatest reverence to our fellow artists… even the ones we don’t really like. Especially the ones we don’t really like.

But every piece of art needs to be thought of as just the same, jarring interruption to daily life that Kayne West was to Taylor Swift. A painting on a wall needs to interrupt that wall and stop you in your tracks to present you with an augmentation to your reality that you’ll carry away with you. “I see you’re enjoying that wall paper. I’m happy for you and Imma let you finish, but Elvis was the greatest gunslinger OF ALL TIME!”

Sculptures should shake your attention away from the surroundings and freeze your thoughts into a focused contemplation of form. “I see you’re looking at the columns and tiles in this courtyard, and Imma let you finish, but The Thinker had the best Thoughtful Pose OF ALL TIME!”

Ok, so maybe the analogy is not perfect, but the idea is that every piece of art should arrest you, stop you rocking in your sneaks and break, even just for a moment, the pattern of your day. If we start with that aim and cling to it throught the creation process until the finished piece not only arrests other viewers, but us, the creators, well, I think we might have something worth contemplating as art.

Art interrupts our lives, our patterns in ways we must be grateful for, because it makes us look at everything else just a little differently afterward. We don’t have to be like Kanye West, but our art should be just as outrageously brave and audacious and hubris in interrupting the daily patterns of life.

  This post is crossposted from SF0.org/jtony

Nancy Tabor was the love of my life,

or so I thought when I turned 20 and she held my hand even though I’d been a schmuck about the whole birthday thing and she’d worked so hard to throw me a party. I loved that girl with all my heart, and thought I’d end up marrying her as soon as we’d gotten out of school.

She was the 2nd woman I’d slept with and the only one I’d been able to share so much with. Of course, being an artist, it was important to me to place her in my art, just as she was placed in my heart.

I painted her portrait from a photograph of her sitting next to a yellow fire hydrant in front of the Communications Building at UC Santa Cruz. but I was intimidated and, in that 9 hour final spree to complete the paining, I did not complete her face.

And so I never finished the painting, and some time passed, and Nancy shipped off to Italy for a semester in Sienna. She broke up with me over the phone, so very long distance, in the middle of the night pacific time.

I was a mess. My emotional outbursts over the event ruined several good friendships.

But I kept the canvas. I always kept the canvas. I think I always hoped that Nancy and I would always be friends one day, and somehow the canvas was a representation of that. And I tried to complete it, but I could never get where I wanted with her face.

That isn’t to say I didn’t take out my frustration on the picture. At one point I removed Nancy entirely and replaced her with this hottie brunette with killer black and silver short cowboy boots. But ultimately it didn’t work and I shoved it to the back of the garage again.

Later I decided I wanted to use the canvas for something else, and I gessoed over every inch, only to regret it later. I spent several weeks sanding the gesso off (and the hottie brunette) to get enough of the original to work with. And I did work with it, and it was so much better.

But recently I’d gotten back in touch with Nancy, talked to her and she’d even talked to my kids and my wife, and that hope that we’d be friends felt so strong. But that wasn’t what she wanted. She didn’t want to meet for coffee or lunch or talk on the phone. While I offered and shared bits of my life and family with her, she shared nothing with me, and flat out refused to. I’m not sure why she talked to me in the first place, why she ever returned my first calls just to turn around and deny any thought of friendship.

So I had to let go. I had no choice. There’s no way to convince someone to be your friend, that you’re worth meeting for coffee, and so the rejection was absolute, final.

So, today, here I am with this albatross of a canvas I’ve been carrying around for 20 years, and I’m done. It is good-bye Nancy, and the frame will go toward some new use with a new canvas.

A simple Utility knife is all that was necessary. Nothing special, nothing fancy. No ritual, no rememberance. Just a simple cut.

Looking almost like a small chalk like, but so much deeper. Then more cuts, diagonally across the image. I was careful, though. I couldn’t bear the bad luck of cutting through either Nancy’s face or the face of the fire hydrant. This was not an act of anger or aggression. Just one of finality.

And here I am still trying to find the art in the piece after I’m all done. The pieces arranged around the frame in opposition to their normal relationship. Almost like flags or tongues of flame, dancing around the wood I’d cobbled together so long ago.

Or this brief animation of the stack of pieces diminishing rapidly.

Ultimately they were to end up here in my trash bin.

Like all good intentions, it has wandered. My daughter has retrieved it from the bin to stash with her treasures, god knows why.

I thought about hanging the frame as a memento, but realized that’s what got me into this to begn with, so it is hidden among my canvases, waiting to be draped and painted anew.

Good-bye Nancy. I wish you a long and happy life. You missed out sharing mine.

Please note the link to my portfolio above.

For the past couple of months I’ve been playing a new Alternative Reality Game. Becase it starts with your induction into a small 70’s throwback cult called The Jejune Institute, that’s what most folks know the ARG as, but since the Jejunists haven’t played a very heavy roll in the game past that induction, it doesn’t seem a very fitting title.

The game is physically based in San Francisco, playing within several neighborhoods including important elements that occur in the Financial District, ChinaTown, North Beach, and most heavily recently, the Mission.

Last week I danced with Bigfoot and a red sweatsuited hip-hop guy in the rain on 24th Street near Mission. This in order to receive a visual transcript of a radio piece that would allow us to finish off some specific tasks. Pretty damned amazing.

You can get the visuals and the flavor of last week’s Mission mission at http://www.ornitopterjumsuit.com and see Bryce and I “physically jamming” the negative energies emenating from the Jejune Institute.

If you want to get started on your own, go to http://www.jejuneinstitute.com to plan your visit to their facilities. The induction itself takes less than half an hour, but plan for a good 2 hours of fun treasure hunting after that.

More as things occur.

mustache moment

Originally uploaded by minch niddle.

For those of you keeping score, I had taken down most of this blog many months back, and with the exception of a few pictures have not been adding a whole lot of new content.

I’ve gone back and re-published the majority of the site, replacing most of your favorite posts, I’m sure. Posts dealing with personal and medical issues or with my former job and employer remain unpublished, however, and will stay in the shadows for the simple reason that I wish to keep those things private.

I don’t know yet what I’m going to do with this blog… whether I’ll be posting frequently or at all, but I liked the older stuff I had done enough that I decided to make it available again.