just a couple of working days

the last two days i tried I to make an object a day in order to use up excess materials I have laying around the studio. The small ball of circles, is actually made up of cut up pieces of a friends old exhaust pipe, and that thing at the top I don't know I just wanted to make a tunnel. Well it is looking like we will move sometime in the middle of may. Brooke will be in field schools most of the summer, and I will be trying to establish a studio, or find usable work space in charleston. I looked at my calender and next week we start de-installing the world in a jar show, and then I have to install the next show. One nice thing this time is the new people who will be taking over for me next year will be working with us so they can learn the ropes. The next show opens on the 17th, and then after that I will start crating and finishing stuff in the studio, and I will probably start figuring out how to move all our stuff. because this is spring break I am actually home and caught a couple of episodes of the simpsons, so that makes today a good day.

San Francisco for a day

we ducked into a photo booth in the haight.
I need one of these switches, for when my life starts to seem too normal.

I was really excited to see this sculptural installation at the sf moma by an unknown artist.

just a reminde absolutely no photography in the gallery, especially no pictures of Robert Irwin's optical illusion wall mounted sculpture

Today, after I put my application in the mail, we went to san francisco. It was a little bit rainy so we started by going by crown point press, and then we went to the sf moma to see the picasso and the americans show, and the brice marden restrospective. The picasso show only served to remind me how little I actually enjoy picasso's work. I would go so far as to say I don't even like picasso. However hiding in the show were a few gems by Lichtenstien, and a few outstanding jasper johns paintings. The brice marden retrospective is pretty cool, but probably has about 100 paintings too many. The majority of the work is from his drugged out days in the sixties and seventies and has a really stilted line quality that was very appealing. After Moma we went to the haight. I have been to haight ashbury quite a few times in the last couple of years but something really struck me differently today. I noticed how every store we visited had a hip hop soundtrack, and then it occured to me Haight ashbury has gone from hippie to hip-hop. After doing some shopping, we visited cousin nina brilliant who had just gotten back from her trip to buenas aires. The pictures she showed us were really interesting. Tommorow won't be quite as exciting since I am just spending the day cleaning up in the studio. Later this week brooke is going to bend me some new acrylic shelves when she is at work. the shelf i bent(pictured below) using a heat gun in my studio looked so cool, but I just used some scrap I had laying around the studio, Brooke is going to use some nice pieces of acrylic from her work and polish them up real purty can't wait.

Pimento cheese, from the vault

the following was originally written in 2005, but just re-surfaced today.

August 5th 2005

Pimento cheese is definitely an acquired taste. I honestly can’t remember when I acquired it but I have always been keenly aware of it. In summer camp when we went on our overnight trips they would pack us a bag lunch. Since I grew up in the south and went to summer camp in North Carolina the bag lunch was a southern affair through and through. To cover all the possible tastes there were three lunch items and a piece of fruit all inside a classic white paper bag. Most kids, myself included, were so sick of camp food that the simple familiarity of the bag lunch was a many splendid thing. What were these three magic, kid-satisfying lunch entrees? First, was an apple butter sandwich on white bread. An apple butter sandwich is so sweet and chewy it almost counts as candy. So of course I would eat that one first. Next, was a cold piece of fried chicken preferably the drumstick or wing. And finally, wrapped in plastic, was the winner a pimento cheese sandwich on white bread. Pimento cheese is great, in fact I just finished one pimento cheese sandwich while I was writing this. For the three of ya’ll reading this uninitiated in the ways of southern comfort food, pimento cheese is a smooth creamy neon orange cheese spread whose ingredients include; sharp cheddar cheese, cream cheese, mayonnaise and a generous amount of little red pimentos. Pimentos, which are normally seen hanging out in the ass end of an olive, are in fact a pickled pepper with a tangy pungent taste matched by their color. The flavor of pimento cheese, is well like I said, an acquired taste, but once acquired is an essential quick fix for a meal. When I moved to San Jose California, in August of 2004, I was immediately in love with all the seemingly random and new ethnic food varieties. I quickly shifted my diet to include Mexican, Japanese, Thai, vietnamese, and Indian cuisine. When I grocery shop in California however I try to buy what I always bought for eating in the south. I was immediately let down when I found that pimento cheese was missing. So it was, with the greatest excitement that I found Safeway had begun carrying the smallest container of pimento cheese. This amazed me coming from a place where grocery stores generally stocked an average of four different brands of pimento cheese as well as their own house brands. I was so elated that I called my girlfriend to tell her my California depression had ended and I was finally happy to be here. I didn’t realize how many things I had given up in the hopes of a new life and the promise of golden opportunities in the land of sunshine. If you haven’t had one yet I beg you to slather a generous helping of pimento cheese between two slices of bread and enjoy the taste of a true southern comfort.

January 2007
Epilogue
It saddens me to report that sometime last year Safeway did away with the chintsy container of pimento cheese they had been stocking. To make up for this my fiance and I began making our own pimento cheese, which has been met with various levels of success.

March 2007
The struggle ends
As if by magic.
The day after we make a decision to move back to South Carolina, on a whim we went to a different Safeway location and low and behold...Pimento Cheese. So to celebrate, the completion of the Kohler arts industry application and the joy that is a pimento cheese sandwhich I have included this piece of writing from my pre-blogging days.

I blog therfore i spam.

still life with mochas
I






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A full week, and what a week. Since the last time I blogged so much has happened. Last Sunday we went down to santa cruz to try and get our heads straight about a possible plan of attack of what to do next. At the moment the looosest version of the plan looks like this. When I finish in may we will drive back across country and set up a temporary base, at my parents house on Sullivan's island south carolina , and spend the summer planning a wedding and working part time. Brooke might be going to a couple field schools this summer and I would probably take the time to work on some writing and make some work in charleston, most likely in the redux prints studio, since they have such an affordable monthly rate. I am pretty sure I can find some temporary work, and I still have all the pieces from the rust never sleeps show in storage in charleston , so maybe i can sell those there. I have been working and procrastinating over my residency application and will probably finish that this weekend. I have been trying not to be depressed about being 30 with no real prospects and a tremendous amount of debt, and for the most part I really am not that depressed. One of the highlights of this week that lifted me from my depression was meeting Richard Lou. Richard Lou is one of the candidates they are interviewing to be the department chair here at San Jose State. He was incredibly insightful and brought a tremendous presence to a very academically depressed department. At the moment the school is running leaderless, and has been for the last 3 years. This has led to an environment where the professors and staff spend their time defending their tired old academic positions,and preserving their comfort by refusing to change or budge on their beliefs, no matter how misguided. This experience has reinforced the fact that the greatest victims of a leaderless directionless academic department are the students. The reality is that most academics are selfish, and self serving and care very little for the success of their students and their department, they are just focused on what is comfortable for them. This can be great, when their is competent leadership in place, but when there is no competent neutral leadership things can go to shit fast, and imagine three years with no leadership, no revision of curriculum and several medium specific out of touch artistic has-beens running the ship, and you have the equivalent of the inmates running the asylum. This is the condition that i have gone to graduate school under. Not to say this hasn't been without it's high points, many times what the faculty and grad students around here have taught me is what not to do. The point is this Richard Lou had so much to offer but alas he is probably too smart and visionary for this place. I sound like the classic jaded grad student and to some extent that is what I am. I suspect i would have encountered the same thing, in any department with out a clear direction or leader and a graduate curriculum that has not been revised in over ten years, so that makes me lucky since i probably shouldn't have gone to graduate school in the first place and here I got to go to graduate school in such a divisive environment. This has truly been an experience of learning between the lines, now if I can just mind my own business for the next month and a half it will all be over.

fun with photoshop, and not so fun with life

these are some vacuum formed plastic test patterns that Shannon Wright made using my stir stick joinery test samples

this is a photoshopped image to give a sense of the scale we are shooting for in our proposal for the public piece Buddha with mocha(a monument to fetish objects)
Well I took full advantage of dka's buddha and will try and make a legitamate attempt at getting this monument fabricated or at least considered as a legitamate piece of "public art". For the three of you that haven't heard from me and my big mouth Brooke received her rejection letter from UNM yesterday and she seems to be taking it well. We went out for sushi to comfort ourselves last night and we intend to spend the next couple of weeks figuring out what to do. I am trying to get another application finished that is due april 1st , then I have one more due in may. I haven't heard back from the job in anaheim that I applied for but that does not suprise me. With those kinds of positions they usually hire from within. While we are on the topic of rejections, I never received a formal rejection for this one show I applied for in oakland, but they never charged me the application fee, which makes me think they never received the application which is as good as a rejection. I am hopeful that once we figure out our plan for the summer, we will resume planning our wedding.

"you're a romantic, that's why you are so cynical!"- Julia Bradshaw

this is an anonymous plastic landscape with a polished mocha fetish
so dka has tentatively agreed to collaborate with me on a proposal for monumental sculpture, based on how compatible my polished mocha and his bronze buddha are, I just have to take some evenly lit photos to use for later photo shopping action.
lead corn with drill and megaphone

Well I have been racing to get yet another application finished, this one is due on the 1st, and we still haven't heard back from brooke's grad schools but we assume the worst. I probably owe Shannon Wright an apology for my behavior today on the grad panel she organized with me, julia bradshaw, amanda lynch and her boyfriend casey jex smith What was interesting was that amanda and casey our mormon artists and julia is from england/germany and I am a brash southerner so the undergrads never actually got a california perspective. I probably got a little too chatty, mostly because I still believe that a liberal arts education and in particular an arts education can be about producing better informed and more critically versed citizens rather than just mediocre professional artists. It was funny and at one point I may have said something like " before grad school I didn't really know how to use the internet so i probably didn't research grad schools well enough and probably made the wrong choice." I don't know if regret is the right word but maybe I will never be satisfied, and will have to just get comfortable with that. in truth I think i will always regret or be uncomfortable with my choices but i may just have to learn to embrace that uncertainty. i guess in a world full of people that are so sure of what they do the most radical thing i can do is to be uncertain.
on another note the saturn may have finally broken. I don't think it is dead necessarily but it does not look hopeful, currently the gear shift doesn't seem to be connected with anything and the car is stuck in like second gear, it moves but not with out a ton of smoking and bad smells, brooke is going to call a mechanic tomorrow that a friend recommended and hopefully we can get her back on the road without too much trouble.

30 seconds of bad edits from the forthcoming video polishing my mocha

you may want to watch this a few times, I know I did.

just polished off a couple mochas

this is one possible way to levitate a latte

this is a still from the as yet unedited video, I hope to post in the next couple of days






well I polished off a couple of mochas yesterday, literally. I am beginning to like the look and luster of these fetishes as I continue to polish out the surfaces. I made some video as well but I still need to edit it down to make it interesting. Last night we went out to Aqui for some cal-mex food and that was nice, but this morning brooke has been a little sick and I am feeling a little bad myself, maybe too much mexican food. The time difference seems to have taken it's toll as I am not sure whether it is 11:30 or 10:30 right now. On Tuesday of this week I am going to be on a "panel" about grad school for Shannon Wright's BfA seminar. The other two panelists are Amanda Lynch, an awesome artist who makes illustrated panels about childhood trauma and fantasy based on traditional indian miniature paintings, and Julia Bradshaw, who is a genius, British, and just like bruce nauman but female. It should be interesting although I don't know what to expect. Finally I went to the show at 12th and taylor on friday, and was moderately disappointed, with the exception of Mike Lowell's photographs, and Ben Hunt's wooden sculpture standing out as high lights, the rest of the work was pretty flat and unmemorable. When I go to write about it for the art shift san jose I will probably use them as a way to discuss potential in the San Jose art scene, since they are the perfect example of the untapped potential for the arts here in san jose.

a day in the studio, with dka

a tall non-fat no whip zen mocha for Jonathan

this is a venti coming out of the wall

well I spent today casually cleaning up the cast coffe cups. Throughout the day I chatted with david Kimball Anderson who was also slowly working on cleaning up one of his buddhas, pictured above with one of my fetish objects. Not much else to report now I just have to keep polishing my mocha's and figure out the design for the boxes. I just added Borat to my blockbuster queue, and cannot wait to see it again...high five, it is very nice movie film.

Busted the cups out of the mold, so now the work begins

it is funny the impression left in the investment looks kind of like a fossil record of the cup











Well the show in the gallery opened at work yesterday, which means I get to go back to my regular life. I did my TA thing for shannon wright today which was okay, but I am losing interest a little because I am just counting the days until It is all over, approximately 70 or so. It is not so much what I am doing it is just the knowledge that graduate school will end, and I thank god for that. There are a few problems with the cast aluminum cups but hopefully I can get those sorted out and have them all shiny soon. I got a really cool Barry Le Va book from the library and I am super excited about flipping through that. This friday is the show at 12th and taylor, which is an exhibition space so artsy and avant garde that they don't even need a name, they just have an address. I think I am coming full circle to the realization that my sixties obsession is purely based on my belief in social revolution, as a way to help bring about cultural change. I came to a sad realization today though that college campuses can no longer be the center of radical thought that they once were, but that they are now merely job training centers, and in fact teach less critical thinking than before. Okay I didn't just come to this realization, but it is on my mind. maybe I am getting too old to care about things like the sixties, but every thing I am drawn towards, every piece of art that resonates with me is from the sixties, oh well I guess that makes me kind of dated. and speaking of dated check out this band


they are called trigger renegade and they were playing outside at school today they are totally obsessed with the eighties

mom's cinnamon bread to the rescue

My mother is awesome. She has been making homemade cinnamon bread as far back as I can remember, it is just a perfect treat. Lately things have been dreary here in california, with incessant rain, which is more like a constant drizzle than a real down pour and I have been locked inside the white cube working with owen on the current show. This has left me pretty down. Brooke has been working crazy hours and doing her ta thing on her days off, so that leaves us very little time to play with the cat. But today a fedex package unlike any other arrived, with a jumbo loaf of mom's cinnamon bread. Perfect timing, and hopefully by early next week when I finish with work I can start cleaning up the castings of the consumer fetish. Tonight was the opening of Dore Bowen's show in San Francisco but because of work I was unable to make it in to the city, oh well at least I have fresh baked Cinnamon bread!