Almost Two Years And I'm Either Scraping Myself to the Surface or Burying Myself Deeper
One day before my 58th birthday
I can feel that the broken pieces of myself are starting to adhere. It has been a nightmare. I never knew I could survive all I had survived and find myself over half a century into this life with everything I had, everything I'd known, everything I'd worked so hard for unraveled, lost, gone, and I was gone with it. But one thing that has not been gone is art. Good lord I have made so so so much art these past two years. Yeah, it's been almost two years since I found my mom dead in a lake of every ounce of blood in her body. And I lost my mind. And then bad after bad after bad happened. And I have been clinging to life. Clinging. Barely holding on by a threadbare thread. And then fucking COVID comes along. Just when things were beginning to look better. Kiddo had made it to France to study. We were healing. Everything was going to be okay, and then . . . she was forced to come home, and we are holed up here on quarantine. I was writijng my therapist today to thank her for all she has done for me. No one else on the planet has been able to make progress with me, but she has. I sent her some of the videos I've made during quarantine, and I had no idea there are so many of them. Here are the ones I sent her, in case you want to know what my head is like these days.
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A short reflection on the exposure and vulnerability that comes with letting myself out of a lifetime of lockdown.
JELLY ROLL GIRL
The original song/poem/whatever that I wrote to go with my painting Jelly Roll Girl, a celebration of my newly acquired Jelly Roll. After my mom died, I lost about fifty pounds in about a month - six weeks. I could not keep weight on. The doctor kept saying calories, calories, calories. I could eat anything I wanted and not gain weight. But I knew the day would come . . . It did, and now I have a jelly roll. As I work on my new paintings, I process whole worlds of shit that I have not confronted. In this one, I realize that I became bulemic in my late 20s. I was recovering from drugs. I had just died from suicide and they brought me back to life (no kiddding). I didn't understand food, and had no relation to it, so I thought that eating would be healthy. I also worked in a liquor store and was poor so lived off liquor store food. I got fat. I gained about 60 pounds. My mom told me, "If you keep going, you're going to need two places in the family album." A week later, I started puking my food and didn't stop until she died. Jelly Roll Girl is about being free from that layer of toxicity that woman suffocated me with. There were so many. . . . .
JELLY ROLL GIRL: LAST TEAR
After I "finished" Jelly Roll Girl, I decided her body needed to bear her narrative. I wrote in stream of consciousness tattooing her body with her history in the broken language of poetry, having no idea or premeditation what I was going to write. This video is of the words written on Jelly Roll Girl's body.
BLUE BRUISE DANCE
I painted this painting not knowing what the title would be. It is about abuse. I wrote a poem to go on her body. The poem ended up being called BLUE BRUISE DANCE which also became the title of the painting. As I transcribed words from the poem onto the body, the words became something else again. This video contains film of the words on the painting with me reading the poem, followed by me reading the second incarnation of the words. The painting is still not done. I have to add my Freebird tattoo.
TWILIGHT PIE
This was filmed in the parking lot across the street from my art studio. It's about opening your eyes and finding beauty in unexpected places. Take a big drink of that Twilight Pie, Blueberry Blackberry Sky.
NO MORE COUNTING
Using the wonderful resources of the Internet Archive (which I rely on frequently for my videos), this video is about reaching the point of erasure when time ceases to matter, when I have become nothing but vapor, when numbers are meaningless, and quantification will only lead to zero. I'm trying to gain some solidity now.
MASKThis one is about a prostitute I saw one night walking the streets during quarantine. She was wearing Depends and was barely held together. I was so haunted by her image, and especially since probably no one else noticed her. I had to tell her story. The video incorporates mashups of Jelly Roll Girl and video footage I shot while driving around Tucson at night, which is very otheworldly during quarantine -- the only people out are cops and people off the grid.
THERE GOES MY HOME
Live complete improvisation in my art studio where I reflect on losing everything.
BEAUTIFUL ANYWAYFor four months leading to the COVID quarantine, I was plagued by nighmares the likes of which I never had before. They were terrifying, all consuming, went on and on and on, and left me shaken during my waken hours. In the nightmare people were being sent into these tall dark towers surrounded by razor wire. Trump and his men were at the helm directing people toward their prisons. Once COVID outbreak was full force, the nightmares stopped. I dreamed the whole thing.
THE END OF . . .
Just when I thought it was as bad as it could get, lightning struck the mountain by our house and set the Big Horn Fire blazing. It charred Pima Canyon and turned it to ash. The trailhead is one mile from our house, and I have been hiking it with my kiddo since she was a baby. When she came back from France, she hiked there everyday, bringing her watercolors and painting the canyon. Until the day it burned to the ground, and she could go back no more . . . The images in this video are from photos I took of the fire from midtown Tucson.
I'M ON THE LINE
Another one about falling into obscure invisibility. Note that No-Tel Motel makes a repeated appearance.
ONE MINUTE VIDEOS. A handful of one minute videos -- some beautiful, some funny, some . . . .
I'm still needing to let videos and art speak for me. Speaking of which, here is a one minute film of some of the recent art I've been working on. My new paintings are VERY LARGE.