1. To protect wealth and capital,
and those who control it.2. To preserve class lines
and harass, intimidate and incarcerate those who transgress them
or threaten to do so.3. To terrorize the disposed
Category: Goby’s Journal
Baltimore. May Day, 2015
The march over–some 10,000 or more winding their way though the streets and neighborhoods, down to the Inner Harbor, up to City Hall. After the speeches, after all but a hundred or so had left, electing to face arrest when curfew had passed. The Helicopters, floodlights, robocop voices “GO HOME… GO HOME”… but where is home in a country where this happens? Continue reading “Baltimore. May Day, 2015”
Ari Figue’s Cat–a précis
And some good mini reviews on LibraryThing:
I really dislike trying to write these things, but painted into the corner–the need for something straightforward to secure a potential review–I think I nailed it!
Ari Figue’s Cat is a search for the meeting points between imagined and real identities. The protagonist, who may or may not be named Jacob, sees a young woman on a commuter train, dabbing at what appears to be self-inflicted burns. When he later sees this same woman from his widow making a snow angel, he becomes obsessed with the contradiction between what he imagines her to be, and her elusive, untouchable reality.
The same theme is carried through for the other characters. The style and structure of chapters reflect the characters who appear in them, from apparent conversations with an invisible therapist, to dreamlike and magical, to straight forward narrative story telling. This is a book that would appeal to those searching for something outside of Establishment Literary Fiction: an experimental novel that does not eschew evocative description and beautiful prose.
Ari Figue’s Cat can now be pre-ordered in digital from from Smashwords.
Ari Figue’s Cat: blurb from review
This review will be released in the summer issue of Forward Reviews, by Barbara Nickels. Still in editing stages for now, but here are a few lines.
An experiment in poetic prose, nonlinear scenes, and even font style, …
Ari Figue’s Cat is Jacob Russell’s deep, perplexing novel of finding love in the least
likely of places,.. its complexity will either enthrall or completely alienate readers. But for those who enjoy experimental literature, this book will entertain.Overall, a very positive review. This is an honest appraisal. It’s not Establishment Literary Fiction. I would have been mortified had she thought it was. It seems that the reviewer found it a challenge, and a satisfying one. I couldn’t be more pleased.
Ari Figue’s Cat can now be pre-ordered in digital from from Smashwords.
Broken Sidewalks
While I love to get out of the city and enjoy what people call, nature–it’s not my inspiration for making art. I have no interest in doing landscapes. Rather, I love broken sidewalks, weathered wood and concrete–patterns and colors that invite my eyes to linger and explore. That was what led me back into making art–gathering trash for assemblages.
I want my work to be like that for others–inviting the eye for an excursion, mostly undiverted by words, word-thoughts: a tactile, sensual, essentially visual experience.This morning I finished what I hope will be the first of a series of sidewalk paintings, drawings, and prints. I also covered another half dozen older pieces with gesso, ready to paint over them with new work.
Of my accumulated work, I’ve been sorting them out. Those that have helped lead me where I want to go, and I feel are fairly strong, I’ll keep–and offer to people for supporting contributions. Those that have some merit, but turned out to be experiments that pointed in the wrong direction, I’ll give away–leave them in front of A-Space or on the street. Those that are weaker, and don’t represent what I want, I’ll paint over or destroy.
This is proving to be quite liberating. .
Shakespeare on GMO’s
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.
POLIXENES Say there be; 105
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean: so, over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock, 110
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race: this is an art
Which does mend nature, change it rather, but
The art itself is nature.
Polixenes in A Winter’s Tale, Act IV
You Don’t Have to Be Crazy to Be an Artist… just maybe more than a little neurotic?
Time to wrap it up for the day. I missed the bloodroot this year in my spring walk in Morris Park. Gone already.
But I started working on a painting–a series I hope– that I’ve been thinking about since I started making stuff again. Broken concrete sidewalks.
So far–it’s like nothing I’ve seen before. I need to do some sketches. If I were to set up an easel (I won’t), and be drawing someplace in public, peeps would come by and look, and say… wha the fuck is that? And I’d point down to where they were standing.
All of my considerable neurotic tendencies are concentrated and intensified in my making … “art.” Not in the doing it, while I’m doing it. But before and after. My only escape is to keep working on stuff.
Note: I said “stuff” … not “art.” Except in scare quotes. Evidence for above.
I really do wish it were possible … to do nothing else.
But not in this world.
G’night comrades!
Making Art: The Multiplying Fractals of Uncertainty
Have been feeling that I have a problem I need to solve, but I don’t know what the problem is. Too much like everything I turn my thoughts to. But it centers in my making art because that touches on everything else–all inclusive. Yet if ask myself, in what way or form, I come up blank because at the root of that part of the problem is the sense that making art is without any meaning or importance I can think of or articulate, multiplied by the conviction that this is in itself, unimportant and the making of art should be sufficient–but isn’t, because we live in such a fucked up world doing so much hurt to one another and our fellow creatures and anything close to ‘art for art’s sake,’ or as ‘personally sufficient therapy’, is so wrong, undermining the very generative source of the creative imagination–which leaves me with this compulsion to keep making art with no idea why or where it’s going or what it’s for, and believing that it’s not necessary to know that, and yet it is, very much so.
Something like that goes through my mind every time I finish a piece and ask–is this what I wanted? Did this piece answer the need I felt to make it, or did it fail that need? And of course, it always fails the need, so I have to sort what that failure consists of, which part is aesthetic, and which i can address in the next thing I take up, and which parts belong to this other multiplying fractal of of uncertainty I feel compelled to solve.
Is there a Capitalist Aesthetics?
In reading some of the essays and criticism on HYPERALERGIC, an idea began to form… don’t know where to begin with it. I mean, the idea that there is an aesthetic force to capitalism that has been internalized, infusing and corrupting the machinery that guides artistic vision & produces art. I mean something more and other than marketing–how the utterly corrupted gallery to investor pipeline determines what and who will be recognized and rewarded, and who and what will be rejected. Yes, that’s a part of it–in as much as artists are influenced by their belief that this is the, or even ‘a,’ measure of success; I’m thinking of something deeper, placing capitalism in the operational place in the visionary machinery occupied by kitsch for Clement Greenberg. There was clearly something I was reacting to in Greenberg—his capitalist historicism–the idea of progress in art and how it serves to first exploit and than erase everything and everyone outside the privileged circle.
I’ll have to give this more thought.
Goby’s Journal: April 16, 2015. Post-Depression
I’m not depressed now but I am deeply disturbed. I don’t know which is harder, living in this fucked up mess we’ve made for ourselves while depressed, where at least one’s subjective state seems of a piece with what is around us, or being of a ‘normal’ mind… or whatever you call it, and not having a clue how to reconcile the contradiction between feeling emotionally at home in the world, and yet profoundly alienated and out of sync. I walk down the street in Center City with a huge chip on my shoulder. I see business men in their Brooks Brothers suits and I want to punch them in their faces, knock the fucking iPhones from their soft puffy hands and stomp on them. I don’t know what to do with what I see–all these people going about their business with neither curiosity or awareness of anything or anyone outside the suffocatingly narrow closest of their self-constructed reality.
I sat on a wall in Love Park eating my falafel sandwich. Near by, a somewhat scruffy man dressed in black, suit jacket with tails, a stove pipe hat sat playing a violin. His case open for change. A man came by with a fancy camera and took his picture. He seemed to be looking for urban exotica. He turned and left. I wanted to run after him and shout in his face–if you’re gonna take pictures of street musicians for fucks sake, leave a dollar in their case! –but i couldn’t get the messy falafel wrapped up quickly enough and he disappeared. I told the violinist, he should put a sign in his case–that if you’re going to take photos, leave some damn change!. I gave him a dollar and bottle of water I’d gotten, but hadn’t opened yet.
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 