thomas stolperer

Original pencil on vellum drawing w/ text for litho run long time ago sent out as holiday cards by SBGallery

2012-01-31T22:50:00.012-05:00

Some people posing for a picture at the holiday party at work while Wilson-Phillips is on the radio and, following very different sequences of reasoning through their different circumstances and without suspecting the same thoughts among each other, feeling remarkably similar, mild doses of melancholy generated by stronger kicks of anxiousness, mostly caused by perceptions of themselves as inadequate based on standards they can't quite wrap their thoughts around, which in turn are being brought out of dormancy by the unregistered yet pervasive expectations that are part of big holidays

Drawing-titles copied in pen over 15 yrs ago for unknown reason discovered in back pgs of bio on Habsburg Charles I of Austria

2011-12-04T22:36:00.005-05:00

I have "The Last Habsburg" by Gordon Brook-Shepard on my shelf, I read it a few times in the last 15 yrs. I flipped through the book today and discovered that on the last page of the index & the final blank pages, I had written long ago in pen a handful of titles of my drawings, and I have no idea why. Some of the corresponding drawings are posted on the Stolperer blog, some are earlier versions of stories I rewrote for new drawings, some are in the orange book, some I'd completely forgotten about.
Anyway here's the titles:

_________________________________________________

-Wood sculptor on sofa while his date when to piss

-Wealthy historian form year 2230 trying on artificial custom-made cock and balls

-Dog whore on couch

-Guy at 1st day of telemarketing job listening to speech about wearing shorts but not jeans, & thinking that he's probably the only person in the room with 4 different hair colors for head, beard, cock & stomach

-Famous athlete watching Bob Costas interview George Peppard on "Later" while woman he never met before is going down on his cock for 3rd time

-2 girls 4 months away from bad girl clothing stage but still young enough to cry about cat getting killed

-Morning sunlight shining on glass of booze (with vegetable in it) in computer paste-upers' bedroom

-Middle aged fucker who abuses his family & gets paid money to play golf

-Small girl at a catholic college who likes to wear a lot of makeup sitting in class while priest/teacher is telling story about girl who once ruined her looks by wearing too much makeup

-Kid asking his bitchy lawyer mom how she would rate the Superfriends in order of strength and speed

-Uncomfortable guy who doesn't drink anymore & wore white T-shirt to a party where they have Japanese furniture

-Photographer who only does drugs when he & his wife hang out with other couples

-Guy at meeting daydreaming about running for president by wearing white T-shirts

-Someone who went to Texas to work and got beat up by 5 guys

-Isis beside her dresser

-Friendly alcoholic telling nephew that New York is so big they need 5 phone books

-Mad guy because he got the most expensive underwear in world for Christmas but it hurts his nads cause its made partially of metal

-Old woman watching "On Golden Pond" on cable & thinking that she loves all of her children, but probably loves 2 of them better than the others

-Drunk guy with no shirt who just won 12 dollars on slot machine

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #1

2011-10-13T10:26:00.000-04:00

"Anthony and his brother when they got left in the car out in the parking lot while their parents went to eat in the fanciest restaurant in France", 2010

From the ANTHONY BOURDAIN FINNISH PROJECT: scenes based on readings of “Kitchen Confidential: Mestarikokin Tunnustuksia,” the Finnish translation of "Kitchen confidential : adventures in the culinary underbelly"

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #2

2011-10-12T14:19:00.000-04:00

Anthony and some co-workers at the Dreadnaught looking through a vent opening watching the head chef out back behind the restaurant ramming the bride that just came into the restaurant with her wedding party on some boats from across the bay, and he’s ramming her from behind with his apron up on her back while she’s bent over some trash bin

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #3

2011-10-11T00:43:00.000-04:00

Anthony going for it trying his first oyster while his family looks on in disbelief in their relatives’ oyster boat off the north coast of France

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #4

2011-10-10T23:48:00.000-04:00

Anthony & his wife carrying Christmas Tree wrapped in a blanket downstairs in his apartment building in the middle of the night to take it out to a dumpster area where there’s heroin pushers because he doesn’t want anyone to know his life has fallen so far that he still had his tree up in June

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #5

2011-10-09T00:23:00.000-04:00

Tyrone the head chef at Dreadnaught screaming at Anthony for being a pussy and showing him all the blisters on his hand while everyone in the kitchen suddenly froze and went silent after Anthony asked if there was any hand lotion, I think or maybe oven mittens but I think it was hand lotion during a mad busy rush in the kitchen at one of his early jobs in Provincetown

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #6

2011-10-08T00:32:00.000-04:00

Heavily distorted impressionistic scene of Anthony and I think Dmitri and some other fuckers he worked with at Manhattan restaurants the next morning after they got wasted all night on booze & drugs while closing down the kitchen & then took a train to Long Island and now they’re getting fucked up some more at a beach before they go back to work their shift in the restaurant later today

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #7

2011-10-07T12:56:00.000-04:00

Anthony at job interview with owner of famous NYC steakhouse where after having felt that the whole thing was going great he’s now having trouble with the question “what do you know about me?” and his mind is running rapidly through potential elaborate angles he could use to fudge the answer because he didn’t prepare for this question before the interview and after some rationalization he ends up telling the truth and says “nothing”, which he will assume a few minutes later cost him the job as his mind semiconsciously replays and intuitively reconstructs the conversation so that it’s clear to him as he's leaving the restaurant that the question was “what do you know about meat?”

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #8

2011-10-06T09:12:00.000-04:00

Anthony and some other fucker that he got sent to Japan to work with who took him out to some exclusive, to travelers little-known restaurant one night that they had to wind through lots of streets and some seedy area to get to, and they’re at the sushi bar and the chef keeps trying new exotic delicacies on them one after another and they keep asking for more, and he can’t believe they can keep eating such an ass load without getting grossed out

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #9

2011-10-05T08:53:00.000-04:00

Anthony and some other fucking cooks that work at restaurants right on the bay at Provincetown carrying buckets out front to get some catch of the day for their menus and some fish to take home for grilling because they heard someone yell that an ass load of juova-bass had just swam up and got stuck near the edge of the water

Anthony Bourdain Finnish Project, #10

2011-10-04T14:08:00.000-04:00

Anthony and some other fuckers checking out a car bringing an illegal food delivery behind some restaurant where he worked for awhile that was run by some ex-cons from the mafia

2 naked women with naturally-occurring outlined stripes on their bodies taking a bath

2011-10-03T12:16:00.004-04:00

The devil looking out the window

2011-10-02T13:11:00.002-04:00

The devil looking out the window in a different section of the time-location matrix, a dimension which has an axis that happens to cross an axis in the location-only component of the time-location dimension that we’re familiar with, the crossing of coordinates occurring somewhere inside what is at the time of this drawing a container store, and marking a point between the 2 dimensions which, though this has never happened, if touched by a unit while that unit is consumed in unproductive misery due to a perceived problem stemming from either an underestimation of others’ roles or overestimation of its own role in any accomplishment-like event or state (thus the possibility restricted to humans, quite likely other animals, and very likely computer systems in the future), would cause that unit to be, depending on its belief patterns, either flipped into that other dimension to be the object of metaphysical justice, or else sucked in and mangled at the intersection point by a set of foreign physical situations or states and then spit out into one or the other, or both dimensions as a pile of scrap or completely decomposed into molecules and dispersed into its surroundings as compositionally non-existent

Down-trodden young woman looking out the window

2011-10-01T13:09:00.004-04:00

Strangers at the Nyquil Party

2011-09-30T11:15:00.000-04:00

Some Fucker

2011-09-29T00:09:00.000-04:00

Some fucker, the bottom half of whose face and head and by analogy everything around it is, with the exception of a few interpersonal memories left over as insoluble burdens on expressive freedom, relative to his contemporary world fairly light and forthcoming and signals an instinctive disinterest in unnecessary & therefore misleading emotional communication, and the top half of whose face and head and by analogy everything around it is, aside from a few existentially complete reflections, relatively dark and opaque, reveals an innate thorough comprehension of tragedy, and hints at a perpetual emotional intention that isn’t completely honest, a fascinating & non-trivial but uneventful “balance” in the strictly quantitative sense of the word, a sense recently extended in an intellectually careless manner to a “balance” of a different meaning, usually used loosely in philosophical or spiritual contexts, apparently a translation misnomer and lexical shift developed via incorrect analogy and misinterpretation by a few inane generations -- as if one would feel better when sickness or pain somehow quantitatively equals healthiness or comfort within their organism, or as if purported bad and good literally need to be exactly the same spiritual sizes to run a respectable purported metaphysical world -- but in the context of a rectified version of this latter meaning of “balance” (likely rectifiable in large part by restoring and then emphasizing “interdependency” as a primary semantic factor of the lexical compound) quantitatively trivial (50/50 is as subjective and random as any other possible contextually ideal proportion in the world of the so-called non-quantitative “balance”) -- so, a trivial situation in this latter sense of the word, but in this particular case not uneventful, because, the quantitative sense of the word set aside, the human traits and their relative proportions and their distribution within this particular fucker’s head as described above just happen to be, as per the properties of biological, geological and maybe also possibly-existing metaphysical states, the makeup of a personal system easily capable under suitable conditions of simultaneously generating in others a euphoric but usually unsustainable faith-like sentiment via an emanation of support, and of facilitating vicious resentment and violent scapegoat situations at a society level via persistently assertive, illusively convincing, expressive, and (not fully consciously) emotionally-self-defensive protectionist affiliation and rhetoric

Some god damned fuckers

2011-09-28T04:01:00.000-04:00

Fish

2011-09-27T00:14:00.000-04:00

LOOK AT THAT BIG FUCKING FISH! HOLY FCUK THAT’S A BIG FUCKING FISH! LOOK AT THAT BIG FUCKING BITCH! THAT’S A BIG FUCKING BITCH! THAT IS A BIG FUCKING BITCH! HOLY FUCK! LOOK AT THAT FUCKING FISH!

2 Elvis impersonators and a surrealistic figure going to church after a heavy snowfall

2011-09-26T16:58:00.000-04:00

Webcam girl adjusting her monitor just before she starts ramming herself on camera for free

2011-09-25T04:08:00.000-04:00

12,000 reasons for not playing 5-card 'follow the bitch' with Fred Grandy

2011-09-24T00:08:00.000-04:00

Biosphere

2011-09-23T00:28:00.000-04:00

A bunch of fuckers standing there trying to figure out who they want to ram the most on the 1st day of their lockdown in a biosphere where, as part of the incentive, they were implanted with virtual reality chips for adjusting the appearance of the other people & the environment to suit their individual pleasures in an experiment where scientists are going to study psychological and sociological conditions for a case where 100 people or so would have to restart human life by themselves from some fallout bunker or spaceship or maybe even another planet

Shroom-goggle view of John Edwards Tea Party Sex Fantasy

2011-09-22T00:41:00.000-04:00

Shroom-goggle view of John Edwards Tea Party Sex Fantasy 3-Way Daisy Chain with Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin, where he’s going down on Coulter and Coulter’s licking Palin and Palin’s blowing Edwards, but they stop and change directions every once in awhile

Some Witch

2011-09-21T11:09:00.000-04:00

Some witch that people, depending on individual dispositions regarding facial fetish, might more or less think is hot because of her face's rounded, maybe somewhat bulbous character in places, trying to call up her first moderate-level demon to enter her or at least show physical signs of presence but she's having trouble focusing cause she's still coming down from a heavy gin & pepsi drunk from the early afternoon

New drawing title - image not available

Some Guy Sitting There in the Dark Watching Porn on His Computer

2011-09-20T01:30:00.000-04:00

Some guy sitting there in the dark watching porn on his computer because he
got excited by the image of a tennis player that he came across online by
accident when he was looking for websites about camera accessories to
help with his generation-Y son's E-business who quit
high school
when he was a sophomore and got rich selling digital
equipment accessories at home online but had to
leave early today to go give his girlfriend
a house that he got her for
her B-day on his way to
meet his friends
to go get
wasted

Witless Grace

2011-09-19T13:16:00.000-04:00

Some woman with a blank look that doesn’t seem to register anything at all, no external input and no generative power from within, and who is very often mistakenly attributed with the property of grace, roughly in the sense of the word as it is so commonly misused today, for the wrong people, solely because her profound witlessness, of which the blank look is just an external manifestation, actually masks one of its own effects, namely lack of individuality, because the witlessness is so extensive that even rudimentary elements necessary for developing analogy and recognition skills can’t begin to develop, which by nature precludes a susceptibility to peer pressure, so that, unlike the rest of us non-individuals in this generation who, even against our egotistical insistence on seeing our lifestyles as, if not models, then affirmations of an exemplary world, would have to admit in honesty that we constantly annoy each other with our inbred recycling of the same lifestyle, tastes, acts, pastimes, beliefs, etc, all nothing more than perceptions that help us think we’re not under peer pressure to do “what is simply done”, but perceptions whose foundations cement so fast in people’s nearly defunct reasoning senses that they believe they will somehow be inferior or behind if they relax or let go, she, on the other hand, though still equally lacking in individuality, unintentionally mimics “what is simply done” in a serene cloud of primal instincts, without a hint of purpose or attitude, and appears as unaffected and socially non-self-incriminating as people when they reflexively begin to scratch indiscriminately once someone has mentioned that the mosquitoes are biting

Woman Looking in Mirror in Hotel

2011-09-18T11:32:00.000-04:00

Some woman looking in mirror in hotel room just before she starts to get dressed up to go give a speech to shareholders to try to get them to support some proposed tax cuts, and while unrelated lines of changing thoughts are simultaneously moving at different levels of consciousness in her head in the late-morning disorder that usually precedes a serious event set at an odd hour in the day, where focus & organization still haven’t adjusted to the unfamiliar schedule, one of her most conscious thought-lines is stuck in a loop reviewing some anticipated logistics concerning the lecture, space, & audience, based on her imagination of what it will look and feel like, since she hasn’t seen the room yet, while about 3 consciousness-levels down, a thought-line without a theme has been running through successive subjects without transitions, kind of quickly, one of whose 1st components concerns a difficult decision she and her husband just started discussing a few days ago about whether they should remodel their kitchen whose original basic design and details they said couldn’t have been more perfect except they really want a sink and counter in the middle that you can walk around on all 4 sides, and another concerns conflicting reports she’s heard during the past year or so about the health benefits/detriments of very frequent ramming, for both sexes, followed by about a half dozen other topics, before she ends up at a recurring notion that she kind of knows these tax cuts won’t hardly effect any of the shareholders except a few really rich ones who are paying her salary and won’t even be at the lecture today, and with a strong enough awareness that she could probably state it directly to herself, at least in her mind, if the lecture logistics-line weren’t running on so much power now, something like a belief is emerging from this notion and suggesting that if the world were fairer then there’s no way she’d want to do this kind of work, but as it is, someone else would do it if she didn’t, and anyway she’s fairly socially responsible in other respects and nothing would change if she acted otherwise, except that she wouldn’t make as much money, but at exactly the same time, on a much weaker consciousness line, with too faint a perception to be called ‘self confessing’, there’s a thought forming, branching down from the end of the pervious line, whose content contains a mixed and vague set of propositions that, if it could continue its structural development and ignore the noise from competing thoughts at other levels, might start to suggest that, based on her particular abilities, she’s actually pursuing the most direct path possible to a position & lifestyle with sufficient authority, critical-analysis activities, and dynamic public-interaction opportunities for drowning out a permenant and exaggerated self-consciousness she has about some of her own physical features, namely that her eyes are set too high, and a little too close together relative to the overall shape of her face

Drawing of Artist Engulfed in a Mesh of Half-Heartedly Expressive Doodle-Work while Reading a Map

2011-09-17T10:03:00.000-04:00

Drawing of a self-declared but not in fact asexual-minded artist engulfed in a mesh of half-heartedly expressive doodle-work while reading a map while he’s on a vacation alone because he needed to shake up his perspective on his existence as a creative person, because he turned 40 just after the turn of the millennium when the now mainstream notion that making art about yourself being in public with your art has in turn been stated in mainstream criticism, which signifies that this notion is already decades old and thus the artists that break this trend will be the best off, but since such predictable changes never come into full swing before the problems that they’re addressing become obsolete, he is stuck in between trying to further develop, on the one hand, in order to stay in the race, his cerebral, timely, and generationally-specific self- and cultural-referential ideas that often unfold into states which resembles projects, usually mediocre ones, that he can’t quite afford to refine well, yet still get the points across, and whose creation involves something that functions much like an ongoing job or career, in which case he risks squandering his ability to make what he is well aware of as being the “right choice,” a choice that will cause him to perhaps be smiled upon respectably in the end ; or, on the other hand, doing what he believes will be the right choice in the long run, which is to ride out the remainder of the “spectacle,” while trying to navigate the constant balance between internal primal urges, whim, talent, and a few other elements that make art something more than a career on the one hand, or an urge of instincts on the other, thereby risking sinking into oblivion while other artists crank out expensive projects, usually, but not always, based on buzz-concepts and timely issues that suck up the majority of the art-system’s attention, and even though artists are supposed to believe this attention is merely a side-benefit which, although full of earthly pleasures mostly in the categories of selfishness & vanity, can in any case be omitted from an art life if necessary, one could no more say “no” to this attention when offered than turn down a large inheritance from a widely disrespectable relative that would forever involve a rehearsed defensive tone on your part around those who know both you & the relative, yet would pay for an art studio, college tuition for your child, or the ability to view the income & insurance from your ft job as extremely valuable but not absolutely indispensable

Litho Print in Leafy Frame of a Fucker Sitting at a Family Reunion

2011-09-16T10:23:00.000-04:00

Lithograph print in leafy frame of a fucker sitting at a family reunion where you can tell he’s less successful that most of the people there and listening to a relative through marriage telling things he learned from a book he just read about the U.S.’s early failures in the spying competition with the Soviets

Memories

2011-09-15T17:16:00.000-04:00

A fucker with dull senses and usually totally incapable of categorical or analogous thinking but who’s now going through an unprecedented moment where his instinctual and mental faculties all of a sudden recognized an abstract reality of a co-worker, from the combination of an expression and a momentary angle of the face, as a purely biological creature, made of nerves, teeth, a balance of body systems, reflexes, and survival instincts, and via a quick series of probably 5 or more free mental associations, succeeding too fast for a human to recognize and therefore too fast for me telling this story to name, so that transition to the following is unclear, he ends up at a revelation arrived at in steps which would normally be far above his reasoning ability, that -- memories necessarily presupposing experience -- unlike memories whose experiences are driven primarily by things or acts or facts external to him, to which he has access and over which he has some control, like, for example, when, due to the egotistical nature of the way people project into the unknown from only what they know, he imagines that a place he lived at, like a college town, or someone he knew 20 years ago, hasn’t changed and the same people still live there, or only he and not the person has changed, and, if they should meet again, he would need to fill that person in on what’s happened in the world during the last 20 years, then a visit to that place or meeting with that person is enough to dispel the delusion & the self-centered magic is gone immediately; and also unlike memories of an internal-experience nature, for example that of an emotion distilled from the mass of feelings that make up his being and its history, or the memory of his will power having withstood something difficult, to which, like the external-experience memories, he also has access, in this case because it has always been the same emotions, will power, etc, that have been at work in him, regardless of the different external factors presented to them at different times, there is, conversely, another type of memory, for which the interaction between external and internal modes of experience is the crucial property, where they mesh together inside the individual and dissolve there together with him to where they’re irretrievable, suggesting that these and maybe all memories are fully unreal and, -- this thought sequence suddenly reminding him of a mild night in bed in the summer on a farm during childhood where the breeze blew the curtains way in and he could hear locusts and crickets and the buzz from an electrical box hooked up on the pole of a yard light close outside the window screen and, beyond its short range of bluish white flood in the dead night hour, the red blinking lights from giant radio towers near the distant city creating imaginations of the future that combined in a tempting and comfortable way with the enclosing loveliness that he felt he was experiencing, -- he then realized, after a few seconds of trying, counter to the lucid level of reasoning he had just accomplished, to mentally reenact this memory again in order to regain or control it, that this experience as a whole can’t still be real because it contains a past reference to the future, always logically or naturally false, and that consequently the experience can never be accessed again, causing a pressure to swell up in his chest along with something like a shaft of wind being sucked through his throat and windpipe in both directions at the same time, somewhat resembling one of the effects of loss, and as he watches his co-worker leave the break room with his small container of quinoa he had just grabbed from the fridge, it's finally become perfectly clear to him that, even if he could go back to the same place in the same season, and if in theory the exact scene could be recreated down to the last detail, this experience, though he clearly understands it in all its features, and its memory’s sweetness is still biting him, is itself no longer real, and he can never share it or explain it, and never gain access to it again, not ever

Some Guy Sitting There Listening to a Lecture

2011-09-14T14:09:00.000-04:00

Some guy sitting there listening to a lecture about cultures that always had less consciousness about differences in the sexes, and something out the window’s making him think about one day a long time ago when he was walking in a warm windless rain to deliver some paperwork that was mostly just a formality related to a short comfortable transition time he was about to start where he had plenty of time to imagine how his future might turn out, and now he’s thinking that his role in social groups is pretty disappointing compared to how he imagined it would’ve turned out back then

The Legend of the 672nd Night (Das Märchen der 672. Nacht)

2011-09-13T13:15:00.000-04:00

by Hugo von Hofmannsthal ; translated & adapted by Jeff Gabel

Was tired of social life at 25 yrs – felt uselessness of my stuff, belongings despite their beauty – the thought of my death never left me for long, often came up during the most beautiful thoughts & memories – I told myself “where you’re meant to die, your feet will carry you there” – cause death wasn’t a horrifying thought, rather solemn

________________________

I kept 4 servants, loved them duty to help them but a burdening feeling couldn’t escape their gazes – went alone in the most remote corners of the garden under thickest foliage but still felt pursued by gazes – 15 yr old self-abusing servant girl’s icy evil stare recovering after she survived by chance a jump from window – only from close, up very close to them did fear of gazes subside

________________________

Trip to town on account of servant to save his name – arrived late afternoon no one home except a cook & a scumbag scribe sitting in half dark gateway – gave only short grumbling answers, ugly people – I left – my house locked up in town cause I move to mountains w/ servants for hot summers so I’m a traveler in my own town and curious like a traveler & have to go search for lodging like a traveler & curious walked unknown streets finally came to dried up river, from there followed a bleak street lost in thought – turn right – entered a dead forlorn silent alley that ends in a tower-high set of steps – a jewelry store run down – nothing but crap in display window – until I saw 1 piece reminded me of my old servant woman – thin gold w/ beryl – went in to buy – old jeweler took me to back room inadvertently over his shoulder gazing saw silver half-blind mirror –saw my 15 yr. old servant girl’s face in it – I was pleased by the multiply wound gold chain wearing around her neck – I asked jeweler for one like it – he’s wrapping up my shit in tissue paper & I walk over by a window w/ bars – see neighbor’s garden – beautiful, back border 2 greenhouses & a high wall – jeweler let me in thru a back courtyard door – I walked along wall to 1st greenhouse, inside rare strange narcissuses & anemones, shit load of them, & strange foliage unknown to me – looking up it’d got dark w/out that I’d noticed – sun down behind houses – didn’t want to get caught in someone’s garden at night. I’m gonna just go look thru the panes of the 2nd greenhouse quick & go – holy mother, as I walked up to greenhouse some one’s looking at me from inside w/ face against pane – I jumped back almost crapped myself – after a moment calmed down, it was a girl, 4 yrs old max, white clothes & pale face – I stepped closer w/ horror, unpleasant feeling in back of neck & constriction in throat & chest cause this kid looks exactly like my 15 yr old servant girl, I noticed as she stares motionless at me w/ evil gaze – the same light eyebrows, fine vibrating nostrils, thin lips & one shoulder carried a little high – but the servant girl never induced so much horror for me as this kid – I can’t turn around knowing she’s staring at me – I have to be near to kill the fear – I ran to the door locked from OUTSIDE – found a low latch, cut my pinky pushing it open –inside the girl ran up to me as I ran to her & she tried to push me back outside, it was hard not to step on her – I bent over her face, pale as a sheet, eyes full of rage at me, shaking, her small lower teeth pressed w/ an unnatural fury into her upper lip – I stroked her hair, & the nearness killed by fear for a moment til I remembered my servant girl recovering in bed when I touched her, all pale, & she opened her eyes & gave me the evil stare – poking feeling in my temples & throat, horror, hand in my pocket I felt sthing cold & pulled out silver coins – I gave them to the girl, she dropped them at her feet – they fell thru cracks in the floorboards – then she turned & walked away slow –I’m afraid she’ll come around & lock door from outside – I should’ve left then but wanted to give the evil kid enough time to leave the garden – not much light at all left, plants took on strange shapes, senselessly threatening branches emerged from the half dark, very uneasy feeling, & back behind them it shimmered white, as if the kid was still there – a row of wax flowers in pots on a shelf – looking nothing like real flowers, more like masks w/ eye sockets grown into the petals – I counted petals to pass the time – I’m finally ready to leave, went to the door, it didn’t open – that evil 4 yr. old bitch locked me in! I wanted to scream but afraid of my voice – I beat the panes w/ my fists –outside everything dead silent, behind me rustling leaves, maybe the girl’s back, but probably just the leaves & branches settling I said – but anyway I turned & peered thru dark tangle, in dim on back wall saw a rectangle w/ dark outlines – I crept towards it not worrying about the plants & pots I was stepping on & the leaves & branches closing in & collapsing behind me – the dark-edged rectangle was a door – it opened – fresh air blew in my face, behind me I heard the pressed-down leaves & crunched branches rising like after a storm – Now I was standing in a narrow passageway w/ walls on both sides – Up ahead after ca. 15 steps the passage ended with a facing wall – Trapped again I thought but walked ahead anyway in indecision – then saw a narrow opening in the right wall broken out – from the opening a board led out over open air to a platform on the facing building
[to the exterior facing wall]

Beyond the platform the opening was covered w/ an iron grated gate – Impatient I stepped out on the board many stories high, as I neared the gate I imagined it open outwards, my hands slipping from the slick iron bars like a child’s fingers in exhaustion and apathy, & then crashing on the wall and falling to my death -- but, the gate opened out w/ enough room for me to swing myself thru onto solid ground but ended up inside some shitty apt bldg. hall, found the stairs & left the trashed out bldg. w/ a hatred for the senselessness of all this misery. I headed for a pt. of town where I could find decent lodging, while longing for my own bed – Passed by the shitty houses where the soldiers live – Thru a window w/ bars some soldiers w/ yellowish faces yelled something at me w/ gloomy eyes. I raised my head & smelled a stale suffocating smell from inside. I didn’t understand what the soldiers wanted but they woke me out of my daydream. I looked in the courtyard large and gloomy at dusk – the bldgs. inside were shitty too – there was a straight line of ca. 20 horses w/ a soldier dressed like shit on their knees in front of each horse washing its hoofs. I went over to them, they must’ve all been from the neighboring villages, they hardly spoke. It was hard for them to hold the

[to the exterior basement door]
horses’ front feet so their heads & their exhausted yellowish faces bounced up & down like under a heavy wind

[to the wooden column inside]
Heavy wind - The heads of most of the horses were mad ass evil ugly w/ ears set back & a strange way of pulling up their upper lips which showed their upper teeth (Eckzähne) – They also had malicious rolling eyes & an odd way of pushing air out of their crooked nostrils in impatient bursts – The last horse in the row was especially strong and hideous – it was trying to bite the fucker in the shoulder that was washing it. This fucker had such hollow cheeks and such a deathly sad expression in his exhausted eyes that I reached for some silver coins to help him – then I remembered that the fuckin evil kid in the greenhouse dropped them under the floor – so I looked for some gold coins – at that moment the fuckin evil horse looked at me w/ maliciously pulled-back ears & rolling eyes – it looked even more evil than before cause of a Blesse level with the eyes that ran all the way across its face. At this disturbing moment a long-forgotten face came to mind – never would’ve remembered otherwise – The memory that goes w/ the face wasn’t as clear – I only knew it was from my 12th year, somehow connected to the memory of the smell of sweet warm shelled almonds – then I remembered it was the hideous contorted face of some poor fucker in my dad’s store that I’d seen, contorted from fear cause everybody was threatening him cause he had a big ass gold jewelry and wouldn’t say how he got it – so the fucking face leaves my thoughts, I’m still digging for gold coins in my pocket & suddenly some thought holds me up, in indecision I pull out the gold jewelry w/ the beryl wrapped in tissue paper and throw it under the horse’s foot. I bent over to pick it up, & the horse kicked sideways w/ all it’s strength right in my nads. I screamed & writhed on the ground w/ my knees up, some soldiers carried me up to a room, put me in a bed searched my clothes & took my jewelry & gold coins, & out of

[to the wall outside next to the bathroom]
out of sympathy for my ceaseless moaning they left to get me one of their wonder doctors I woke up after a while – the pain distracted me from the fear of death for awhile – then I felt a much weaker fear, one I’d felt before, but this time I felt I’d overcome it – I cursed my servants – they’re the ones – led me into the town, into the jewelry store, the greenhouse, & under the horse’s hoof – fuck’em all! Then I fell back into a massive numbing fear, wined like a kid, not cause of the pain, but the misery, looked back at my life in bitterness & disavowed everything that I’d been. I hated my premature death so fucking much that I hated my life. This internal tantrum wasted the last of my energy – I got dizzy & slept a violent sleep for awhile – then woke up & wanted to scream cause I was still alone but couldn’t – I threw up bile, then blood & then died w/ contorted features lips so twisted that teeth & gums were showing giving me an unfamiliar evil expression.

The End

Reitergeschichte (A Tale of the Cavalry)

2011-09-12T00:30:00.000-04:00

by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, translated & adapted by Jeff Gabel

July 22, 6am – a Streifkommando, the 2nd squadron of Wallmodenkürassieren (cavalry), the cavalry captain Baron Rofrano, left the Kasino San Alessandro w/ 107 riders and rode towards Milan. Open radiant landscape, and indescribable silence. Morning mist rose from distant mtn. peaks like motionless smoke clouds against a radiant sky. The corn stood w/out movement, & villas & churches glowed between pristine groves. The Streifkommando had barely gone a mile ahead of the farthest outpost from the front.
________________________

good morning
for Officer Anton Lerch

--Weapons gleamed from the corn fields & the scouts reported enemy foot squadrons – under fire – Officer Anton Lerch’s Streifkommando attacked them from the side & drove them out of the field, soldiers from the Manara Legion w/ strange headdress
--Scouts reported suspicious figures in a villa up a drive lined w/ Zypress tress – Lerch took 12 men w/ Karabiners & they took 18 students of the Pisa Legion captive
--½ hr later Kommando took a passing man, suspicious in his harmless & unlikely appearance ; found sewed inside his jacket important enemy plans
--ca. 10:00 Kommando confiscated a herd of livestock – immediately afterwards scouts under heavy attack from enemy from behind churchyard wall – one of Lerch’s lieutenants counter attacked over the wall, pursued, took new captives & some heavy weapons – The wounded & captives were sent back to the front to report the good news – Lerch’s troop rode to Milan
________________________

MILAN

Corroboration among enemy captives that there were no more enemy troops in Milan, nor their barricades or supply storages – So Officer Lerch couldn’t resist the chance to ride thru the grand beautiful city w/ his troop – Under the commotion, the ringing of the noon bells, they rode in, their 4 trumpets blaring the general’s march into the radiant steel sky, bouncing off the thousand windows and back onto the cavalry, & the unsheathed swords – amazed faces to the left & right everywhere like an anthill – cursing & fearful figures disappearing behind house gates, sleepy windows opening, the arms of beautiful strangers
________________________

they rode past a shit load of famous buildings – entered Porta Venezia – leaving thru Porta Ticinesea

________________________

the woman & the foreshadow of near future

So not far from the latter city Porta, Officer Lerch believed he recognized some woman’s face in a window they passed by. Turned his head around in curiosity, and wouldn’t you know it, at exactly the same time he noticed a few stiff footsteps of his horse, like it got a pavement stone stuck in its front hoof or something, so he pulls out of formation & into the courtyard of the house where he saw the woman & dismounted. And no shit, no sooner did he lift the white-boot brown house’s foot to check the horseshoe, a door to a room opened up right out to the courtyard & he saw a fancy, almost still-young woman in a disheveled morning gown standing there, behind her a bright room w/ windows opening out to a garden. On the window he seen some small pots w/ basilica & Pelagronien, & a mahogany chest & a mythological group made of Biscuit (wft), and a Pfeiler(arrow) mirror that showed the opposite wall of the room which had a secret door through which was disappearing at this moment some old fucking guy – so now the Kommando leader remembers her name, plus, that it’s the widow or divorced woman of some Croatian RechnungsLower officer – that he’d spent a few days & nights w/ her in Vienna about 9 or 10 yrs ago in the company of some other fucker, her actual lover from that time – she just stared at him in a half flattered Slavic manner, & his blood rushed into his neck & under his eyes – while the somewhat dainty way she talked to him and also the gown & the room setup made him a little apprehensive. But while he was following a fly w/ a dull gaze as it was flying around above her hair clip & noticed nothing around him except how he would, in order to shoo the fly away, at the same time lay his hand on her warm neck – at this time he suddenly became conscious of all the successes of that day, from the top down, so that he heavy handedly pulled her head forward and said “Vuic” – he ain’t spoke her last name in 10 yrs. & probably completely forget her 1st name. “Vuic” – he says – “we’re rolling in here in 8 days, & then this place is gonna be my quarters” – as he pointed at the half-opened door to the room. He heard doors slamming inside, he felt was being pulled away by his horse’s pulling on the reins, then it whinnied like hell so he got on & caught up /w his troop, having had no more of an answer from Vuic than an embarrassed laugh w/ her head bent down into her neck. But the spoken word made his authority valid. – following alongside the troop, no longer w/ a lively stride, under the metallic weighty burning sky, his gaze lost in the haze that followed them, Lerch’s mind was still in the room w/ the mahogany chest & shit – living like a king in 8 days, comfort & violence, slippers & sword, w/out active duty, Vuic’s fine white skin – shit, that old fucker that disappeared thru the secret door, he’ll be an easy buy-off, keep & tell secrets, bring me tobacco – Ahh shit – I can’t wait.
________________________

In the afternoon the Streifkommando ran into no new resistance, & Officer Lerch dreamed away. But he had a thirst now for unexpected booty, gratification that falls in your hands. The thought of the 1st entry in that room w/ mahogany furniture was the thorn in his side, around which all wishes and desires revolved.
________________________

It’s the shit for Officer Lerch from here on out

Close to evening, the horses is fed, halfway rested up. The Streifkommando is riding in an arc attempting to push thru to Lodi and the Adda bridge, where an encounter w/ enemy troops was very likely. Officer Lerch thought this one village set back away from the road in a dark ravine w/ half destroyed tower seemed suspicious in an enticing way. So she waved over 2 soldiers, the Gemeinen Holl & Scarmolin, & they broke off from the troop to go check it out. Fuckin Lerch hoped they’d surprise an enemy general w/ insufficient defenses or otherwise extraordinary booty, his imagination was so reved up. They came up in front of the miserable, seemingly deserted dump of a village – He sent Scarmolin left & Holl right and told them to ride around to the outside. So Scarmolin and Holl went around the outside of the village & Lerch got out his pistole & got ready to gallup up the center – but his horse had to watch it’s step cause of the hard stone surfaces that had some kind of slippery grease poured on them. The village was still dead silent. Filthy houses life & right – no kid, no birds, no breeze – the mortor had fallen from the houses – ugly images were drawn onto the bricks here & there w/ charcoal. Now & then Lerch saw between bare door frames inside – saw some lazy half naked figure laying down or hauling its ass thru the room like if their hips were dislocated. His horse walked in heavy steps, like its back legs were made of lead. While her turned & leaned over to check out the back horseshoes, footsteps dragged out of some house – as he straightened up he seen some woman walking past right in front of his horse.He couldn’t see her face – she was only half dressed – her filthy torn dress of flowered silk dragged in the shit in the gutter, her feet was in filthy slippers, she walked so close to his horse that the breath from its nostrils moved the greasy shining clump of curls in her hair, that hung in her neck under an old straw hat but she didn’t move any faster & didn’t step aside for the cavalry officer. Out from under a door to his left, 2 bloody rats biting each other rolled out into the middle of the street – the rat losing the fight let out such a disturbing scream that Lerch’s horse stopped & breathed hard & thrust its head to the ground. A kick in the thigh brought it on forward again, & the fucked up woman had disappeared w/out that Lerch saw her face. Out of the nearest house, some dog came rushing out w/ its head raised, dropped a bone in the middle of the street & tried to hide it in a crack in the pavement. It was a white filthy bitch w/ hanging jugs. She scraped like mad then grabbed the bone & carried it a little bit farther. As she started to dig again, 3 other dogs’d joined her. 2 were very young w/ weak bones & loose skin. W/out being able to bite they bit each other w/ dull teeth. The other fucker was a sighthound, light yellow, but it had such a bloated body that it could only drag its ass slowly on its 4 thin legs – spanned body like a drum, its head looked too small – in the small restless eyes you could see a terrifying expression of pain & repression. Then 2 more dogs joined them – a meager white dong, exceptionally hideous, w/ black streaks running down from it’s enflamed eyes; and a fucked up dachsund w/ long legs, looked very old.
The white bitch ran back & forth in front of the horse like a crazy fucker. The 2 young dogs nipped at the hooves w/ their weak muzzles - & the sighthound ran its ugly body at the hooves. – The horse couldn’t go forward. Lerch aimed his pistol at one of the dogs but it didn’t work – he kicked w/ both spurs, after a few strides they were past the fucked up dogs. But right away the horse had to slow down again cause a cow was blocking the road. But the cow was terrifyed by the bloody mist and the fresh hide of a black cow nailed to a door post – The boy leading it to the slaughterhouse w/ a switch had to whip & beat it to move it along – but not before it grabbed a mouthful of hay that Lerch had fastened to the saddle. – Lerch finally passed the last house of the village & could see the course of the road up ahead wind thru the country side as he rode between the low crumbling walls, beginning w/ on old one-arch bridge over an appearantly dried up creek. But he felt such an indescribable heaviness in his horse’s stride that it seemed like he’d spent an immeasurable timespan riding thru this fucked up village.
________________________

Then his horse starts making heavy breathy sounds that he’s not familiar with – looking around for reasons, then looking to the distance he seen a cavalry soldier form his own regiment coming from the other side of the stone bridge towards him, at approx.. the same distance from the bridge that he is – it’s an officer too, on a brown horse w/ white front feet – he knew that he’s the only one in the troop w/ a brown horse w/ white boots, so he speeds up - & the other fucker speeds forward too at the same tempo – they reach the bridge at the same time – Lerch pulls up the reins abruptly for a retreat as soon as he recognizes himself as the other officer – before turning he stretched out his hand towards the other being w/ spread-out fingers, the other fucker did the same, & then suddenly he wasn’t there no more – Scarmolin and Holl came riding up the dried-out creek from both sides, and across the meadow, loud & not too far off, the squadron’s trumpets were blowing “Attack” -
the trumpets blew “Attack” – Lerch galloped forward across the meadow – saw the squadron racing towards a wooded area where enemy troops were emerging, saw the 4th section break off from the squadron & slow down, he was suddenly on threatening ground,then in a thick cloud of dust then in the midst of the enemy, swung his sword at a blue uniform, saw nothing but enemy faces & uniform colors, dismounted in a flurry of swords, cut the throat of the nearest to him, pulled him from his horse, saw Scarmolin next to him w/ laughing face cutting off someone’s rein-fingers & then striking deep in the horse’s neck – felt the deluge loosen –
________________________

was suddenly alone – alone but behind an enemy officer on an Eisenschimmel horse – The officer wanted to cross a stream, the horse wouldn’t go – The officer turned it around – a young, very pale face w/ a pistol pointed at Lerch – Lerch stuck his sword in the officer’s mouth w/ the power of a galloping horse – pulled out his sword & grabbed the reins of the other fucker’s horse as it lifted its feet light & delicate like a doe over its master’s dead body – Lerch rode back to his squadron w/ the horse booty, the sun threw a monstrous red thru the heavy haze onto the meadow. Even in spots w/ no hoofprints, it seemed like pools of blood standing. A red reflection was on the white uniforms & laughing faces, the howitzers & weapons glimmered, & most of all the sun lit 3 fig trees where the soldiers were laughing as they wiped the blood off their swords. Officer Lerch seen the squadron trumpeteer, who was blowing Appell. Lerch rode from one section to the next & saw the squadron didn’t lose a single man, plus they got some horses & weapons. Still w/ his new horse beside his own, he rode up to the squadron captain & reported. The captain listened unattentively. He waved a lieutenant over, gave instructions, the Lt. immediately grabbed some other fuckers & pulled the weapons booty & some of their own weapons over to a swamp stemming from the stream & dumped the suckers in, then chased off the load-pulling horses that they’d captured – During this shit the squadron held itself in 2 files, in a somewhat suppressed laughter –even the horses were restless, especially the ones w/ the captured stranger-horses between them. Everyone seemed like they was pumped up and ready to roll into new battles. At this moment, squadron leader Capt’n Baron Rofrano rode close up in front of his squadron – as he raised the lids of his somewhat lazy blue eyes, he commanded – “Let the booty horses go!” The squadron stood dead silent – only the horse captured by Lerch stretched its neck & nearly touched w/ its nostrils the forehead of the horse Lerch was sitting on. The Capt’n put his sword away, got out his pistol, & as he wiped off the dust from the gleaming barrel w/ the back of his rein-holding hand, he repeated his command w/ somewhat louder voice “Let the booty horses go.” Then counted “one…two…” After “two” the Capt’n’s gaze turned to Officer Lerch who sat motionless & stared at him. Though Lerch’s persistent gaze showed a kind of devout trust from yrs of service, in which an oppressed subservient nature only lit up & disappeared now & then, his conscious was almost totally clueless to the enormous tension of the moment – but rather flooded w/ a multifaceted web of images of an unknown comfort & satisfaction – and then from a depth, almost completely unknown to him – arose a primal rage towards this fucker there in front of him that wanted to take his horse away, such a horrifying rage towards that face, the voice, posture which can only arise from years of close quarters & still only arise in inexplicable ways.

________________________

Whether or not sthing similar was going thru the Capt’n’s mind, or weather, in this moment of silent subordination, it seemed to him the intensity of a dangerous situation was getting out of control, remained unresolved: w/ a casual, almost dainty movement, the Capt’n raised his pistol, & w/ a disrespectful raising of the upper lip, counted “Three”, shot immediately – Officer Lerch was hit in the forehead, he fell onto the neck of his horse, then between it & the stolen horse to the ground
________________________

all the other fuckers let their stolen horses go real quick, before Lerch even completely died
________________________

The Capt’n calmly put his pistol in the holster – soon had the squadron ready for battle w/ enemy who seemed to be regrouping in the distance
________________________

The enemy never attacked, shortly afterwards the squadron safely reached the southern outpost of its own army –

The End

Some guy that usually dresses tacky

2011-09-11T01:33:00.000-04:00

Some guy that usually dresses tacky who was born recently enough in history that he doesn't have reckless disregard for everything that happens outside of his immediate community, but long ago enough that he doesn't expect instant gratification for everything without earning it through a little bit of stress & sacrifice

Picture of Guy on Manhattan Rooftop

2011-09-09T10:10:00.000-04:00

Picture from old book of guy not from the US sitting by plant on Manhattan rooftop that people see years later and think it looks romantic & distinctive, so much that they will even move to NY and get a place where they can sit on a roof with plants and smoke cigarettes & drink booze even if they have to give up their whole career or everything they own, because they aren’t wise enough to realize that those people in the books are special not cause they’re on a roof, but because they were famous writers or artists or politicians who were already recognized for what the did before they got their pictures taken on the roof, and also, even though you could read the books that these pictures are in and maybe figure it out, people still don’t wonder what the circumstances were that made the famous people move to NY, and the photos aren’t able to show whether those people were being bothered by bad memories, guilt, or even physical pain while they were sitting there

Small Bouncy Athletic Girl

2011-09-08T11:00:00.000-04:00

Small bouncy athletic girl with a T-shirt that doesn’t go all the way down to her waist where she & her boy friend came to a senior home to take his grandparents out for a ride, and she’s moving around all excited & directing everyone else with so much energy that her arms are hanging way apart from her sides the whole time while she’s telling the guys to sit in back & the grandmother to ride up front with her cause it’s something that young couples think is fun to do with older people, and after the others are in the car and she’s closed the doors for them she turns around & notices some people on a bench have been watching them, and it makes her stop moving while she’s looking at them and puff out a hard breath for a second before she turns to go around the car and get in on the driver’s side

Leaving Home Tomorrow

2011-09-07T11:15:00.000-04:00

Stained-glass portrait of some fucker who, by chance, after the scattering of his group due to impromptu and erratic drunken changes to their already aimless plans, is sitting together in a car at night drinking the last 6 beers with another fucker from the same group who, due to a typical pattern in interpersonal associations which often occurs between two people within larger groups, without resembling anything of his polar-opposite, nonetheless shares a lack of mutual social access with him so that they could normally never have a disagreement nor be outwardly friendly to each other, such that when they are forced into social interaction by chance it creates an irregular experience, usually memorable in itself in revealing a new and rare example to add to the commonly known ones of gaps between the perception and reality of human behavior, and in this case oddly embellished by the fact that this is the first-mentioned fucker’s last night before he leaves his town for good for the first time, an occasion that most people probably expect he will always closely associate with this concurrent social-combination anomaly, but, since memory doesn’t function according to the physical properties of time, external to the one doing the remembering, and is instead driven by, among other things, thematic concepts that are internal to the rememberer, frozen and vaguely-framed images or at the most extremely short clips containing logically inaccurate movement, his co-association of these 2 events, chronologically near in real time and similarly possessing a highly anomalous nature, but extremely unrelated in thematic terms, won’t occur until 25 years later when, incidentally, and causally unrelated but not completely irrelevant to the belated co-association, he will no longer possess his current world-experience level or his current emotional and physical state, according to which he is now buffered deep within the monotonous society of a powerful empire-like country and thus has never recognized much need for social self-criticism, so that anything different from his own experience has always reached him in filtered form, indirectly, without the full influence of the source, and whose ideas he has always viewed only relative to what he knows, which, unknown to him, is highly inaccurate based on overarching reality, so that he believes he is physically stronger and also visually sturdier than he really is, and also that his face is rugged-cut, and that what he knows and has experienced has some sort of centrality to the world or to reality, or is of a seminal nature, though, as is easily recognizable by the irregular shapes and folds when he wears a long-sleeved button-shirt with collar, he’s actually a skinny twerp, and, as he himself so often notices by looking in a mirror yet continues to forget each time within a few minutes, any ruggedness in expression is feigned and no one including himself could mistake in his features the predominance of a soft and hesitant nature, and, what he really doesn’t know now but will have figured out 25 years later by the time he recalls the temporal connection between the anomalous drinking-partner event and his last night in his hometown, which will surface due to wandering mind associations which will include a recollection that a few normally unmemorable, yet, relative to his underformed conceptions of the person, unpredictable, oddly-worded, and thus enduring phrases spoken that night by his incompatible drinking partner in the car were incidentally similar to something his sister said the next morning as he was saying goodbye and leaving the driveway, wandering mind associations caused by a laziness which he will employ to help him pass time on this 25-year-later day before a deadline so that, pass, fail, or accept mediocrity, the pressure and discomfort of having to think to identify and solve problems will be over with one way or another, a laziness that never fails him in this task because it has grown enormously in 25 years due to the continued lack of need for self-criticism mentioned above, which reminds me to return to the question of what he doesn’t know but will have figured out on the same day 25 years later as he re-connects these 2 anomalous memories, which is namely that he will then have needed, were it possible, to go back and re-do the next 10 years following tonight under a less presumptive and more urgent mindset if he will have wanted to lower his cluelessness to a level which would have at least allowed him, in a conduct that could have co-existed with his physical being and innate belief system, to recognize and distinguish irregular openings amid all-pervading habit, which seem strange but useless to a half-ass but, when combined with a decade or more of directed, self-critical, and rational intelligence and practice, can make the difference between dying an extraordinary or a peacefully anonymous yet personalized death, either one according to individual tendency or choice, or on the other hand, as will be the case with him in another 35 years from the point where he will realize too late that his cluelessness level ran too high for too long, or in other words, 25+35=60 years from now, a regretfully habitual and mundane passing from existence

Detail on a 15 Year Old Photo of an Opening Reception for a Grad Student’s Sculpture Show

2011-09-06T09:20:00.000-04:00

Close-up-level zoom-in detail on a 15 year old photo of an opening reception for a grad student’s sculpture show that picks up a guy in the background that always talks a long time about eastern philosophy when he drinks and he’s been talking with some other fucker now for a half hour even though the other fucker’s not interested, because, even though other fucker has complete immunity to the harmful relationship between perceptions of himself by others and widely recognized aspects of etiquette regarding alcohol, like time of day, type of event, or amount consumed, so immune that he can drink heavily when no one else is boozing at breakfast on a visit to his relatives if he feels like it or at an afternoon circus performance if the opportunity arises without any more of an apologetic or uncomfortable expression than that of a woman showing the majority of her jugs anywhere to anyone of any age under the condition that they are being revealed by the cut of a shirt or dress which is recognizable as being in fashion, for all of this immunity he is all the more sensitive and vulnerable to a superficially similar but fundamentally unrelated situation, namely that caused by the perception of himself by others as one who desecrates an event or insults someone by appearing to be present or interacting only for the purpose of getting alcohol, free or otherwise, so sensitive and vulnerable that it takes on a mild paranoia, something like that caused by some intoxicants, and that even at a grad student art opening, where transparent desire for alcohol and disregard for the event which offers it is more accurately called expected than commonplace, he still doesn’t have the nerve to drink anything without inventing pretexts for staying there by staking out potential conversations with others and, once begun, camping there until ended by someone other than himself, or until he no longer feels like drinking, the craving for which is stronger than his aversion to being a suspected freeloader for booze, and is causing him in the case of this photo-detail here to continue a conversation with philosophy guy which by now has drifted far from philosophy, mainly because of other fucker’s inability to maintain relevant replies or answers once an exchange moves from a greeting or info session to a conversation, and they’ve come to the topic of other fucker’s inhibitions about trying both to explain and avoid discussions of “what he does and doesn’t do as an artist” to relatives or opinionated non-artists, for which philosophy guy, though he needed to repeat the line 3 times with increasingly hypnotic penetrating gazes by interrupting other fucker’s “yeah, but…” -- “ok, if...” -- and “you’re right, maybe I’ll tell them…” is offering salve in the form of a magic 4-word sentence that is at once an encouragement, a disclaimer, a relief, and best of all for drinking other fucker, who is creative within guidelines and with prompting yet often uninventive with the total picture, a road to pure freedom: “JUST… SAY… I … CAN’T.”

Some Woman With Raised Up Eyelids & Wide Eyes

2011-09-05T14:25:00.000-04:00

Some woman with raised up eyelids & wide eyes without meaning to and a tight thin mouth that make her look more intense than she really is & sometimes kind of stupid – and these features together w/ her skill at things that are undervalued socially, like driving well & doing the big kinds of tax forms yourself, at the expense of grooming her social & intellectual image, cause her to get caught in the middle by the 2 common arrogant & defensive types & despised by both of them: the conservative herd w/ the slight scowl & the side-to-side head-toggle w/ a touch of threat that assumes a claim to known tradition and hoards knowledge as something to be earned but not shared, and an intolerance to anyone that doesn’t love them ; and, the wannabe liberals with half-sedated eyes & an up-and-down argumentative affirmative head-toggle, and a slight smirk on one side of an arrogantly lax mouth that claims exclusive rights to useless marks of originality and says that I’ll never change my mind no matter what

______________________________________

DESENHOS A-Z
Exhibited by Jeff Gabel in "Desenhos A-Z" at the Museu de Cidade

Some Woman Everybody Thinks Looks Hot Right at First

2011-09-04T15:38:00.000-04:00

Some woman that everybody thinks looks hot right when they first look at her and it’s partly because of a facial expression she makes without meaning to, & she’s sitting at the campfire on a camping trip where she & her husband went with 2 other couples in their 30’s & 40’s that knew each other but not that well and she’s looking at one of the other women’s husbands like she’s trying to get him excited while the other fucker is telling her husband about a book he read that says there are 6 international borders you could change and about 20 resources you could destroy that would take away all the incentives for armed conflict for the next 50 years

TV Shopping

2011-09-03T12:48:00.000-04:00

Guy not that young standing in part of electronics store where they have TVs all around a partially enclosed room and, having reached the part of the shopping process where the criteria coincide and mesh into an inseparable blob of decision-matter where they lose their distinctive qualities and can even become contradictory relative to each other when one tries to rank them according to relevance, in any case well beyond the point where he’s lost hope that it will be a one-dimensional “learn what exists, choose, buy” experience, his stress is swirling up, pulling along with it some grudges which are multiplying it, caused by those of his siblings and in-laws who had been the most vocal about the idea that his mother, having by chance a special milestone year, needs a special gift and it would be nice if they all got her a TV with some recent features like highest possible def., widest flattest screen, etc, even though he thinks she won’t even know the difference and all she wants to do is watch a relatively clear screen without a complicated menu, and the stress is on the verge of finding its outlet, which in this case would’ve amounted to him calling them a bunch of dickweed fuckers halfway out loud if a sharp quick shock hadn’t just punched through him in the form of a specific memory, or better a now unambiguous comprehension, socially incriminating to his confidence and self-respect, that the lies he has told about very personal experience or lack of experience, not by any means recent though far past his juvenile stage, are still real and not part of another earlier version of himself, were more frequent than he would normally attribute to a personality like his own, and used on people who should’ve expected him to be trusting or intimately forthcoming, a comprehension brought about through a very loose association with a TV ad that just now came on about a medicine that makes you have periods less often and shows fresh looking hot young women continually striding past the screen, replicated all around him because the TVs, except for a few that are showing a non-local Chiefs/Chargers game and one with a music-video show running a Wilson-Philips video at the moment, are all on the same channel, though the shock, barely having begun, has just now become much less densely concentrated because, quickly enough to be considered almost concurrent with the onset of the shock, a social-survival defense-instinct in him which works to preserve confidence and a belief in self-value has been released in the form of a meditation on a treatise which, though having first had to endure a process of being, if not really created, at least embellished, then reviewed, confirmed, and accepted by him, appears almost instantaneously and as if ready-made, a robust and solid treatise on the nature of and on comparisons of different types of liars about experience, in particular regarding his own type in favor of people that lie about owning things or having successfully handled certain types of systems, machines, or tasks, like up-to-date software, unconventional motor vehicles, or jobs involving the orchestration of multiple simultaneous functions and actions, experiences with almost no influence on his own dignity or vanity and which are commonly attributed to commanding natures, who, in a strange way, though this is not now being addressed by his innate defense-mechanism treatise, also tend to be the people who lie for the purpose of appearing more lucky than they really are, but far more importantly, unlike the personal-affairs liar and his type of lies, who, though often pathetic because of a an inherent juvenile weakness or intimidation or lack of self-confidence, can also be thought reasonable or practical, often having the effect of softening or altogether avoiding a conversation that it’s better not to have had, protecting a reputation from pointless though not necessarily undamaging criticism, and in any case usually harming, if anyone, only himself, the owning- and work-experience liar on the other hand represents insecurities of a more primal and grave nature, resulting from a fear that is a deep and intrinsic cowardice rather than a superficial timid reluctance, intimidated by popular competition in all its forms, from fashion to current-awareness to possession, breeding a laziness of wisdom which, when hidden, as is often the case with this character type, by an outward physical vitality, is one of the foundations of erratic judgment of personal satisfaction, leaving inner peace to the mercy of society and sometimes pure chance, and a twistedly simplified moral scheme, the final result of all of which is often a disastrous pattern of two-way mistrustful personal relationships and, not all that infrequently, a life of crime

Official Artist's Live Depiction of Scene from Damnation Process

2011-09-02T14:15:00.000-04:00

Official artist’s live depiction of scene from damnation process of some fucking self-declared very serious Christian woman of the particularly American suburb or less likely the semi-rural type, despite facial traits suggesting a cultural or national origin which seems to me, along with an unskilled yet somewhat unconsciously individual quality in her dressing habits, to be highly contradictory to her social profile, though the former anomaly can very easily be attributed to the deceptive difficulty in defining social stereotypes based solely on physical features, especially facial ones, and the latter might be attributed to an erratic transitional style in the more well-off suburbs caused by their tendency to categorically distinguish their fashion-sense from that of lower-class burbs and rural areas, without the upper-burbs realizing that not only are they merely copying more progressive styles, they’re also doing it wrong because, as far as hierarchical, contextual, or decompositional reasoning, they’re inhumanly clueless and would’ve been better off staying behind the fashion-front like the less-affected lower-standing groups, combined with my own general and severe inability to intuitively discern elements or overall effects of fashion, especially regarding clothing, so that tendencies in dress habits might have shifted during the past 5 to 15 years across socio-cultural boundaries to the extent that I would need to spend another decade of childhood continually immersed in popular media before I could rely on any multi-aspect social stereotype models of my own again, and she’s getting damned because, being the kind of very serious Christian whose religion is actually a hatred of anything that is intentionally different from her own habits rather than a real religion, and whose inability to critically but also objectively assess anything whatsoever, including the reason one might continue a religious habit, or the consistency of such a habit relative to the original or even evolved affirmations of that religion, is hopelessly inseparable from instinct, too far from consciousness to be vulnerable to reason, she was instantaneously enlisted and never once flinched even for a second in believing that she was following faith by letting an unconvincingly self-declared Christian-serving, but really almost fully secular political party, along with a coalition of Christians defined by priorities both so narrow and so inconsistent relative to the Bible and to their own affirmations, yet at the same time so uniform relative to the enormous religious variation, unacknowledged in political contexts, across the coalition, that their rehearsed and disingenuous qualities are transparent to anyone who’s not an idiot, and also shameful enough to employ the secular party to help them attain their goals, talk her into harassing and trying to remove her church’s unnervingly conservative (to someone not like her), yet honest, a little more than halfway generous, and wholly unaffected pastor for trying to get rid of the giant-ass American flag from above the pulpit out of concern that his congregation, half of whom decided to hang the flag there, would be inadvertently and, for some, purposefully worshipping, counter to scripture and, in a sort of ironic twist, counter to conservative intolerance itself, a secular national flag alongside or instead of worshipping God the Father, the Holy Ghost, the Lord our Savior Jesus Christ, and the Holy Mother of human-fuckin-kind

Small Slidable Plastic Tiles

2011-09-01T01:41:00.000-04:00

Small slidable plastic tiles with pictures of more or less unhappy actual people who work in moderate- or lower-levels of the art-business industry printed on them and fitted into a square device as a grid with one tile-space left free so they can be moved around one at a time like those puzzles where you have to arrange the tiles into a sequence, except that here there is no discernible potential sequence, although you could create or imagine one, for example, assuming that you can tolerate the high subjectivity and the problems it causes when ranking things in numbers greater than 4 or 5, the tiles could be ordered according to degree of unhappiness, but that’s not the point, because it’s an artwork made by a self-declared yet in reality not at all asexually minded artist who, fully aware that this work here is a gimmick that consists of commonly-known and negative references to the art system mixed with concepts like “nostalgic toy/game” and “easily graspable mechanical apparatus and aesthetic scheme”, spends a large part of his time imagining how the essence of his main art, almost completely unrelated to the tile-puzzle, will and should someday be judged as the perfect combination of reference to particular modes possible in art (like writing, creation of form, humor, mental conception, personal use of media, juxtaposition)with the actual application of these modes, a combination magnified by his ability to maintain it across such a vast range of modes that someday a full article about him in Artforum or a write-up for his retrospective, which would include work from undergard school all the way up to an ongoing, at the present time yet unknown work, should close with the line: “From the sublime to the tactile to the conceptual to the real to the intuitive, he works purposefully yet instinctively up to the points where these and all other artistic properties reach a natural or historical equilibrium point, and stops there without temptation to cross that point, beyond which they would become aesthetic commodities and self-responsive building-blocks to an artwork rather than elements of art, and the result for the viewer is an introduction to new dimensions and the realignment of the fronts of beauty and expression.”

Row of People at Theater

2011-08-31T10:53:00.000-04:00

Row of people sitting in a small theater watching a play about a young girl that lives through an unforgiving tragedy and then ends up with people that saved her but also mentally abuse her until she goes crazy

A Drunk Person Cussing at People

2011-08-30T01:25:00.000-04:00

A drunk person cussing at people when they walk by because they won't be friends with him, and he's calling some of them cock-heads and others cock suckers

A Sorry Fucker That’s Squandering His Productive Life Away

2011-08-29T15:11:00.002-04:00

A sorry fucker that’s squandering his productive life away cause he’s already spent a few decades trying to decide if self-imposed isolation is worth it if no one else knows you’re doing it, or on the other hand if it’s worth it to part-way show people that you’re isolated to get credit for it, where it would lose its nobility & respect cause it wouldn’t totally be isolation anymore, but he’s getting to an age where he needs to decide on one or the other, or else give them both up and compete with all the opportunists, extroverts, & aggressors in the free-for-all grab for small legacy plots which, depending on how many plots you can grab and how relevant they are to the whole structure, amount to more or less permanent and recognized shares in the picture of recorded civilization and offer the most tangible, though often also the least valuable and, when the holder concedes the lack of value, the least satisfying basis for claiming a part in immortality

A Guy Sitting There at the Airport Bar

2011-08-28T14:22:00.000-04:00

A guy sitting there at the airport bar getting drunk during a 4 hour layover while some propaganda ad about tax cuts is playing up on the TV on his way to his cousin's wedding where he has to be an usher, and a bunch of fuckin frat boys behind him are talking loud & out of turn about basketball like they're experts or something, and they all think they're comedians too, and he's wondering if the hotel he's going to stay in will be discrete about his bill if he decides to pay for porn on their TV

_________________________
MONANISM
Exhibited by Jeff Gabel in "Monanism," the inaugural exhibition at the Museum of Old and New Art, Jan 22 - July 19, 2011

Hack job translation of 4 short Vepsian works into English after a 2-month self-taught crash course in Veps

2011-08-27T13:32:00.000-04:00

________________________________

Mountain Ash

What are you,
Standing over the river
With bare legs, bare head?
The forest above
Sees red berries, stems.
Like a young girl, striking,
You grow in the beautiful black earth.
Nearby, the fox’s tail,
Cranes fly overhead.
Autumn goes, winter comes,
Your green falls away.
Naked, the wind strikes you
As the hazel hen eats the red berries.

Nikolai Abramov

Pihl’

Midä seižud jogen päl
Pal’hal jaugal, pal’hal päl?
Rusttad marjad kandad mest
Kacub sinun päle mec.
Kuti neižne, sinä bask,
Kazvad čomas mustas mas,
Rindal nägub reboin händ,
Letas kurged ülähän.
Mäneb sügüz’, tuleb tal’v,
Lankteb sinun vihand pal’t.
Ahav alastoman löb,
Pühut rusttad marjad söb.

*mest=möst

Nikolai Abramov

________________________________

Morning Voices in the Village

Early in the morning in the village streets, various kinds of voices can be heard,
Above all, house women talking with their animals.
Without animals, village life doesn’t run.
Where there is no place for animals, there can be no town.
There’s my neighbor calling the lambs to come and eat.
Čke-čke-čke! she says in a [descending?] voice.
And she already has a reply from her beloved household animal – the cow,
Aware of its status,
And when it wants, it shows the other animals that it comes first.
The woman gets on with her work.
She’s already calling the chicks, Cipa-cipa-cipa!
C’mon, I’ll feed you in the [trough?].
How well you understand,
The [trough] is filled up for everyone!
The chickens need food too. Tipa-tipa-tipa! Where are you hiding?

A man's voice can also be heard.
The horse – that’s his job.
He won’t leave this work to anyone else.
Pron’-pron’-pron’! he calls [with a falling tone?].
The horse knows of its master’s love, breathes loud,
And [snorts?] through the nose,
As if it wants to proclaim its love for him.

Suddenly the slender voice of Nastoi joins the other voices.
She too carries out her animal chores.
Kis-kis-kis! the girl calls out in a clear voice,
To be heard by her friend –Meow the cat.

Nina Zaitseva

Külän Homendesen Äned

Homendesel aigoš voib kulištada külän irdoil erazvuiččid änid. No enemban kaiked voib tedištada, kut emaged pagižeba ičeze živatoidenke. Küläs ei voi eläda živatoita. Nece ei ole lidn, kus ei ole živatoiden täht sijad. Naku minun susedakaine kucub lambhid sömha: “Čke-čke-čke!” saneleb [heledal laskval] änel. A sid’ jo emagale andab än’t emagan armaz kodiživat – lehm. Lehm tedab necen polhe, i ku voib, kaiken ozuteleb toižile živatoile, miše hänhän om ezmäizel sijal. No emag jatktab ičeze kodiradoid. Hän jo kucub kananpoigaižid: “Cipa-cipa-cipa!” Tulgat tänna, sötan teid [šonal]. A voi-voi, miččed to el’getomad olet. Kaikile [šonad] täudub! Pidab antta kanoile-ki. Tipa-tipa-tipa! Kus to peitletoiš?”

A sid’ emagan än’he ližadase ižandan än’. Hebo – nece om ižandan rad. Hän necidä radod nikenele ei jäta. “Pron’-pron’-pron’!” [laskvas] kucub hän hebod. Hebo tedab ižandan armastusen polhe i komedas hengib, i [purskab] nenal. Kuti tahtoib sanuda ičeze armastuses ižandale.

Ühtnägoi nenihe änihe ližadui hoik Nastoin änüt. Hän-ki pidab hol’t ičeze živataižes: “Kis-kis-kis!” komedas heikab neičukaine. Necidä kuleb hänen-ki sebranik – kaži Näugoi.

Nina Zaiceva

________________________________

Juniper trees

Many black and red currant bushes,
Mountain ashes, and bird cherry trees once grew outside around the house.
Everyhwere,
On the [tehud-?], beside the steps, near the fence –
A varied display of familiar and unknown flowers.
Right by the steps there grew a tall juniper tree.
It had seemed to me the junipers were like bushes,
But they were really tall trees.
It was pretty,
Like a tree from southern lands,
Completely green,
Perfect for decorating front yards and roads in the summer and winter.
It dawned on me – why don’t we plant & cultivate
More of these trees, more often?
Long ago the Vepses made several household items from the tree,
Spoons, milk buckets, [kerande-?]s and more.
Try to see this tree
Through the eyes of others,
Suited for our environment, undaunted by frost,
And entirely green.
Let’s rethink, and begin again to plant along the roads,
restore beauty for our eyes.

Nina Zaitseva

Kadagpud

Ümbri perits kazvoi äi mustan i rusttan čigičaižen penzhid, pihl’puid, tomičaižid. Keiktäna: [tehuden] veres, pordhiden rindal, aidad sires – nägui erazvuiččid tutabid i verazmaižid änikoid. Ani pordhiden rindal kazvoi korged kadagpu. Mina olin mugošt mel’t, miše kadaged oma kuti penshad, a nece oli todesine korged pu. Nece oli čoma, suvipol’žen topolin pojav pu. Paiči sidä, se kaiken om vihand i voib čomitada ezitanhid i irdoid i kezal, i tal’vel. Tuli pähä – mikš mijal lujas vähän i harvoin ištuteldas i kultiviruidas nenid puid. Neciš puspäi ende vepsläižed tehliba lujas äjan erazvuiččid kodikaluid: luzikoid, lüps’ragendoid, [kerandesid] i tošt. Pidab toižil sil’mil kacuhtada neche puhu, kudamb lujas kožub meiden londusehe, ei varaida pakašt, kaiken om vihand. Pidab udes arvostelda sidä i zavotta ištutelda irdoil, miše ned ihastoitiba sil’mid ičeze čomudel.

Nina Zaiceva

________________________________

What the Little Squirrel is Afraid Of

Little squirrel, little squirrel, where do you live?
I live in the big forest in a warm little nest.
Little squirrel, little squirrel, how did you make your little nest?
I found a quiet little place in a thick fir tree, carried moss there, grass, [packed myself deep inside – lit:. packed (myself) into the (its) heart?]. Quite a nice little nest!
Little squirrel, little squirrel, and what are you afraid of, when you sleep in your little nest?
And I’m afraid of the marten. The marten’s pointed claws, the quick teeth on the marten. It climbs up the fir tree, tears my warm soft little nest inside out and eats me.

P. Petuhov

Midä Oravaine Varaidab

Oravaine, oravaine, kus sinä eläd?
Minä elän sures mecas lämäs pezaižes.
Oravaine, oravaine, kut sinä tegid pezaižen?
Löuzin paksus kuzes tünän sijaižen, kandišin sinnä samalt, heinäšt, [ličoimoi südäimehe]. Ani hüvä pezaine!
Oravaine, oravaine, a midä sinä varaidad, konz pezaižes magadad?
A varaidan minä nädad. Nädan künded nügelad, hambhad nädel teravad. Libub näd kuzhe, murendab minun lämän pehmedan pezaižen i mindai söb.

P. Petuhov

________________________________

Notes

A few yrs ago I spent a few months trying to learn Veps, and tried to translate of a few works.

There’s a few words that I had to guess at because all I had were 2 crappy online dictionaries: a Veps-English word-list and a Veps-Finnish/Finnish-Veps dictionary. I couldn’t find a lot of the words in them that I needed. I don’t know Finnish vocabulary that well, so I had to look up a lot of the Finnish words in English. It looks like the only really big dictionary out there is a Russian-Veps dictionary, and I can’t read any Russian. Anyway, I chose stories whose words were familiar to me in either English or Finnish. I used [brackets] for a few words that I couldn’t find at all, and in these cases I left the Veps word in the English translation, or I made a guess based on the story content, or based on the words' similarity to Finnish vocabulary. Besides these problems, I'm sure there are other mistakes or misinterpretations.

I also had problems with certain grammatical forms. The only detailed textbook I got ahold of was in the Vepsian langauge, so it was hard to understand, and it only covered verbs, adverbs, conjunctions and particles. I used some online pieces of information in English, mostly about noun cases and pronunciation. They were highly incomplete grammars, and inconsistent as a group. Other sources consisted mostly of Finnish language linguistic treatises on phonology, suffixes, and phrase- and clause-typology, and one source was great cause it had a shit load of examples. Though these were highly descriptive, many parts of them were hard to understand because they were in Finnish, and because I’m not a linguist. There was one German language text that treated object noun cases, also with many practical examples. I found a children’s reader in the Vepsian language, which helped me become familiar with simple grammatical and sentence forms. The last story in this book is from the children’s reader. I also had the Book of Mark from the Bible to compare Vepsian and English texts. I relied a lot on Veps' similarity to Finnish noun case endings, verb paradigms, and sentence structures.

The information on Vepsian spelling, vocabulary, phonology, and grammar is not uniform across the various sources I used. Published linguistic studies are fairly scarce (in English- not so in Russian and Finnish), and differ in opinion about whether certain sets of sounds are phonemic variants or separate phonemes. This, among other factors, causes variations in spelling among different resources. The non-uniformity problems are compounded by the fact that Veps doesn’t have a substantial literary history, so particular research works are influenced or bound by regional and local dialect variation. Also, different authors chose different phonetic symbols for describing the same sounds.

The standard form used in literary works is obviously a forced hybrid from different dialects, but, as I understand, often tends to favor elements of the Central Vepsian dialect, which has been pushed as a literary standard. I have no idea which if any of the major dialects (North, Central or South Vepsian) are represented in each of the partucular translations here. They might even be compromised combinations for standardization. Anyway, literary works in languages without a comprehensive literary and standardization history most likely sound artificial to a large amount of the native speakers.

My 2-month run with Veps is pretty much a closed case, and anyone who wants to correct my hack job translations is more than welcome. I'm an artist w/ a day job and this was pretty much just for kicks. Life isn't worth the energy it takes to crap out stale booze and fortified processed carbs if you can't get your kicks somewhere - visual art activity isn't quite delivering the kicks I was counting on, it's actually devolved into somethimg of a drag, whereas this Veps ditty was fun.

Interview with Jeff Gabel about his online drawing project on Artreview.com's Project Space

2011-08-26T10:25:00.009-04:00

(this will serve as my Artist Statement from now on)

artreview.com: It looks like you gradually gave up on working site-specifically here — what happened?

Jeff Gabel: Without anything that resembles what one would call evidence, I believe in the ability of a simple relationship between artists and their materials to almost fully account for the recent rapidly increasing failure of fine arts to distinguish itself from other visual or intellectual entertainment, a relationship which I would reluctantly have to call a theory or a theoretical model, though it would probably be, even if the missing data mentioned above could be supplied, too broad in generative capability and too low in explanatory power to be seriously called a theory by a researcher, so that only an artist can get away with calling it that. It simply goes: for each artist her/his media (or medium); for each medium, its artists. Art is, more or less, from artist to artist, internal, more or less the artist’s internal representation of something otherwise external to him/her. Everybody knows that. So, experiment all you want, but ultimately you should rely on the hundreds, dozens, couple of media, or the one medium, that you are meant to or have harmoniously learned to use. Sounds like simple and sensible advice, right? Fuck that. In this world where the first person to grab, even in the cheapest manner, a new technological or visual fad and pull it into the art world, and where everyone with some cash and a little success who is bored with their other type of work connects, even in the cheapest conceptual or physical manner, phenomena or processes or ideas from their own field with those of art, will receive a wave of attention that is completely immune to criticism. If you don’t play this game, I'd say your chances of turning your day job/career into a sole and permanent one will increase by at least 75 percent. None of this is to suggest that artreview.com represents nothing more than a media fad; quite the opposite, it has some nice works which use the media well. But, though this is by no means my first work dealing in a medium that I'm not suited to, and although I've been, in my opinion, relatively successful in twisting incompatible media into my comfort level by use of self-conscious contexts, sarcasm, commentary on those media themselves, and other extra-art methods without giving up creativity, as I began this artreview.com project on the other hand, I had just finished three exhibitions, and was in the process of re-acclimating to my full time job, which can take months sometimes after periods when I'm mentally out to lunch for a month or so, and consequently, all attempts at this project resulted in reminders that this is not my medium, so much so that I was nearing the decision to drop the whole thing when I suddenly realized that, pay or no pay, I am in no position to say no to any respectable offer in the art world.

artreview.com: Have you ever made the declaration 'This is the worst project I've ever done' before?

Jeff Gabel: No. And, this declaration is actually not true. I've done a few other artworks (and shown them publicly) which are far worse than this, and which I would also definitely call projects. And if I want to adhere to truth based on facts as they apply to my quoted words taken literally, then I would also have to include college works of the crappiest design-, graphics- printmaking-, architecture-, and probably a half-dozen other-typed-projects that one could possibly imagine coming from someone who studied and then practiced, and still practices, art. But still, even ignoring the annoying literal sense, which was completely unnecessary to bring up here, your question has caught me exaggerating and, even though it's only in the form of a figure of speech, I'm not proud of it, considering I'm six volumes deep into the influence of the unobstructed view of reality and truth of In Search of Lost Time. The declaration only represents a small part of this work, but its lighthearted overstatement begins to suggest that maybe this project is mainly a conceptual work of art rather than a literary work, which, however poor one might consider the quality, content or style to be, and whether viewed as documentary, experimental, or otherwise in nature, I would have much preferred.

artreview.com: But do you love failure?

Jeff Gabel: No, but I do thrive on it. Regarding failure as content, there seems to be a strong drive or inclination in me towards exploiting its nature or celebrating it, and it's one of my most comfortable subjects to work with. As for the reason, it's internal, which means that I probably can't see or comprehend it as clearly as others around me can, so I'll leave it at that, it's an internal thing. Regarding failure as art process, it is easier for me to be a little objective. It comes from my temperament's gross inability to condition itself to wide open-endedness or situations which involve turning chaos, even mild disorder, into clarity. If one doesn't share this trait with me, then what I'm saying so far might seem to be heading for a counterintuitive conclusion, but this is where art can be special, and where it becomes clear why the introspective nature and the joy of the problematic relation between internal/external factors of art has to be returned to its place as a central element (also, see the answer to the first question). In attempting to create a plan and follow it, or, as is far more common for me, in starting with a blank slate (literally; I often draw on slick clayboard or gessoboard), the failures of the formal and physiological elements, along with other factors, are sources of creativity. It's up to the viewer or anyone else interested to take my word for it that I'm not in control; the opposite would preclude failure. It's not fake, and therefore it’s not fun and I don’t love it, and, though often rewarding after the fact (otherwise I would have quit long ago), it’s difficult to manage over the long run (hence my problems in finishing this project).

artreview.com: Which library do you work in? Can you tell us about it?

Jeff Gabel: I work for the library at Brooklyn Law School. Librarians might want to hear about this place, but for the purposes of this interview, and in the context of the job's relation to my art activity, the only purposes or contexts which might be of any interest here, it is more useful to talk about the career in general, since, pay aside, all library jobs should mean roughly the same thing to an artist: -As with most other jobs or careers, almost 100 percent dead weight, i.e., no notable cross-over or double-duty with materials, ideas, emotions, creativity, time or any other components of creating art. If you have a family, you often have to make art at night, period
-A few caveats to the previous point: Though it doesn't pay quite enough, it's a career, which pays better than just a job, yet doesn't involve the direct* stress that a job in law, for example, would have (I'm a law librarian, not a lawyer), so that I am occasionally able to unofficially use time on the job to take care of necessary extra-artistic duties, like running errands to the post-office or gallery, or performing this written interview; since my work is based heavily on literal content, I do have access to materials that aren’t necessarily readily available and free on the web (but that’s just luck, it wouldn’t help someone who makes outdoor stainless steel sculptures); and along the same lines, my previous full-time job had a great collection of European literature, some in German, as I was learning to read it, and formed the basis of some of my translated art works in 2004 (again, just luck).

*as opposed to indirect stress, where the job itself causes little or no stress, but the amount of life wasted on it causes you to work at night all the time and artificially stimulate the body over long periods of time

-It's a career, not a job; it might not be rocket science, but the professionals are often excellent at what they do, adaptable, and so moving up is hard, i.e., would kill your art activity for good, i.e., if you want more income for your art, you'll lose the time you need for making art.
-As an artist, information isn't exciting, it's just information. The career is boring as hell. As someone who, if not a real writer, at least loves literature, and I'm amazed at how much of a surprise this is to many people, but I stress, for someone who loves reading anything at all, libraries DO NOT PAY YOU TO READ BOOKS. I catch some good blurbs, I've learned some anomalies or areas of study or concern in the historical and political worlds, for example, just by scanning book introductions or blurbs that come across my desk. But, unlike the free full text, which I don't have time to read, you can find that peripheral shit online, and more importantly, the more I read anything for personal gain, the more I'm avoiding my job duties.

This all undoubtedly seems like whining to many, because I know many, maybe most artists also not only have to work a full time job but also, like me, have no way out, ever; but (1), I'm not above whining if it gets me what I want, or if I just want to bring others down when I'm down, which is one of the duties, or at least strengths, of art, and (2), I don't know about all you fuckers, but I really want to work on art all day, or rest so I can work at night, or however one wishes to divide up their time, and (3), unlike most people, whining really does become me, it complements me, it often helps me, and it’s part of how I work.

artreview.com: What are you like in everyday life? This is another way of asking: is your art a direct transcription of yourself?

Jeff Gabel: Yes, my work is probably very close to a transcription of myself, at least in terms of the process and tone, though not necessarily in terms of the content, regarding which I generally invent stories whose details, though originally driven by realistic and sometimes actual human themes, often of myself, I never hesitate to change in order to make a better story. That is the case with this project as well. But regarding other elements of my work, the decision to pick the topics that I pick, the decision to make literature rather than art because I want to and because I tire of making art in the same way that I tire of almost everything I do, the erratic movements of pencil and eraser, the reluctance to use much more than pencil and eraser, the indecision, apprehension, moderate intolerance towards everything, lack of self confidence, lack of faith, and much more, in this work and in the rest of my work, is almost all me.

artreview.com: There's an unusual spirit in your work: the non-cynical abject, or the genuine abject. What I mean is that you’re starting at the bottom – of anger, depression, low confidence in your work – and looking up, rather than the more conventional tactic of abjection in contemporary art, which starts high and forces itself low, for kicks.

Jeff Gabel: That's a great take on my work, I'd like to leave it how you put it by not responding (and anyone tired by now of reading my crap, yet for some reason still reading it, is probably wishing I would do that). But I should mention a few things which, though they partially contradict a few of your points, don't really change your overall meaning. First, I have to admit that, seen as a body of work, I’d have a difficult time saying my work has nothing cynical about it, though it might not be the first descriptor to come to mind. But your creation of the term 'non-cynical abject' as a qualifier for abject gives the terms, and consequently your clause, a meaning that isn't necessarily incompatible with the notion that my work is cynical. Next, I have to admit that in my stories I have sometimes employed, if not the portrayal of hope, then at least an amicable tone and constructive content, before ending in an abrupt negation of everything just said, a spiral of hopelessness; and the lightheartedness with which I’ve sometimes done this might suggest it was just for kicks, though I would call it more of a cynical pleasure than kicks. But again, this tactic is restricted purely to storyline content, and I have a feeling that you're talking about the whole work, including my mood, the images, etc, as well as the story, in which case, again, we aren’t necessarily contradicting each other. In any case, even if I'm wrong here, you probably haven’t seen such works, and they don't represent the majority, though they are some of my favorite.

artreview.com: I first saw your work in an exhibition a few months ago at Spenser Brownstone in New York, where you wrote long unfolding highly analytical and scathing stories on the walls. These stories felt spontaneous — were they?

Jeff Gabel: The content and preliminary structure, at the outset, are very spontaneous. Even in cases where the original idea stems, for example, from a specific piece of literature or a real event, ideas that aren’t my own, they are worded, changed, or combined with other ideas, original or borrowed, as well as with the accompanying drawing, in a process that remains spontaneous and unpredictable, as with straight drawing or painting. I've always believed whim is one of the most important components of making art, as long as the artist takes responsibility for providing adequate quality control. But the next phases of the work, though possibly still whimsical, are anything but spontaneous. I often spend my down-time reading what constitutes for me immense amounts of literature, during which my mind unconsciously, though definitely not always correctly or literarily artistically, forms a sense of ‘ideal sentence style’ made all the more amusing by my lack of training and lack of intensive experience with writing. The process is a very intentional reworking of these sentences to make them sound right for me. The notion that they’re not so spontaneous sometimes surprises people, I think for three reasons:

-I've already mentioned that the original content and the original flow are very spontaneous, and the effects of this stage of the work are no doubt still evident in the final product.

-Lack of training in writing results in a lack of refinement which, combined with my thin vocabulary (which is being reversed a little due to Microsoft's spell-check and the proliferation of online thesauri and dictionaries), gives the work an unfinished or slightly unedited feel.

-Perhaps most importantly, under the influence of the long-winded structures of pre-postmodern European literature, I've developed a similar style, more uncomfortable and sort of tongue-in-cheek, for my own purposes and amusement, from which was derived, among other tactics, an insistence on finishing my entire stories, regardless of the amount of content, and overriding nearly all considerations of style except for those based on my intuition, without the use of full stops

artreview.com: How did you arrive at your method of portraiture: fine pencil drawings and text on small panels? Do you have a background in drawing cartoons?

Jeff Gabel: Content (stories, visual narrative or depiction, etc) and physical expression (how I move, neurosis, etc.) probably constitute most of what is important for me in making art, and pencil & eraser on board or paper still seem sufficient for working with these factors as variables. The physical properties of the works are fairly arbitrary, I don't like to plan before I work. Regarding the sizes, I guess I work small because I prefer not to spend forever on a drawing; there's a point where I don't care whether it gets better, I want to go to the next drawing. Other common elements in art, like conscious process, calculation, media for its own sake, construction, have never interested me. Color as a medium is an exception, but of all color media, I've only felt successful working with oil paint. But it's been 15 years, I can't afford a fuckin studio and I have to work full time, so painting is probably over with for good. But when I'm on a roll and make a series of good stories, and their accompanying drawings are even halfway successful, then I'm not bothered at all about the painting. If I got rich all of a sudden, I'd probably say fuck it anyway, I've inhaled too many fumes in the past and don't always feel well now, and I'd probably study something like language evolution on the side just for fun while I draw and write stories. To fully answer your question, I did do a daily cartoon strip in undergrad school at Kansas State U. It has nothing to do with my fine arts format, but it might have been a rudimentary form of my urgency to use a writing which does more than just support my pictures.

artreview.com: You say in the final image: 'I want a purpose.' If you could travel in time, what period would you go to where you would have a clear and unequivocal purpose?

Jeff Gabel: Considering my meager familiarity with history and the respective connections between widely-recognized consequences of the various ages, you could get so much better of an answer to this question, with such a potential for creative stories, from almost anyone else that's halfway intelligent and moderately educated. I'll probably have to stick to the 20th century unless you give me time to read some books, which I wouldn't find the time to do any time soon, I'm trying to finish the last volume of Proust now. To start with, I'd have to say that, due to my personality, unequivocal purpose would likely be for me unattainable in any period. I'll just try for any amount of purpose, since I feel almost none now. Furthermore, I've just decided to partially cop out of this question by not choosing from a set of specific periods, but rather taking a cheap route by creating a binary set of choices between the existence and absence of a particular feature of civilization, regardless of the periods with which it coincides: namely, the absence of the feature, for which I still have no name, of over stimulation, continuous yet fragmented documentation of and undue credit for the smallest increments of progress, and the skewed value of information relative to knowledge. On the one hand, I can't keep up, I don't have the nerves. On the other hand, partially due to this lack of nerves, which in turn creates lack of patience, I can't do the opposite, the right thing, I can't patiently find my way back to a path towards comprehensive experience, or reconnect to the more encompassing nature of the analogue way of working and thinking, not to mention living.

To end with, I should re-assess my purported lack of purpose. I feel it so completely most of the time; if I left my job, it wouldn’t mean a damn thing to the function of the library. I'm just lucky to be there. I'm largely incapable of making the world much better for anyone. I don't have time to do everything I could do with art, the purpose of which, as always, constantly needs to be reevaluated anyway. Still, people wonder, and I sometimes wonder, why I have such a tendency to slide into the abject tone and content when I write. Actually it's an easy answer once I think about it a little bit. I grew up in the late 1970s and the 80s. What a fucking 15- to 20-year stretch of a lack of caring about anything or anybody. Even if the verbal altruism or half-hearted vacation-package altruism of the late 90s onwards, along with the assumption that we are, if not quite the ambassadors, then at least the affirmations of the correct life, without having sacrificed ourselves working for it, but rather simply by living in inviting dwellings of perpetual celebration, which most people in the world can't afford, and holding our intellectual chins up proudly and over-forcing a welcoming strain to our smiles, cracking into shape from their arrogance-cast, while we hug our virtual friends before they move on to the next soiree feigning a look that won't confess a single worry or other state of normal human perplexity; no matter how phony this all is, it’s still an attempt, though a weak one clouded by too much pride, and which, by its own nature, lends itself so poorly to the invention of creative voices by artists who could perhaps have supported its better aspects; yet still an attempt, which is, to get to the point, a century advanced beyond the mindless swill from 20 and 30 years ago when cowardice won arguments over care and reason, and suffering was funny, and ass holes made most of our spiritual and administrative decisions. The biggest problem is that the fake altruism, while unarguably preferable to its predecessor, is still fake, and inadvertently serves as a mask for the 20-30-year-old swill that continues with only a slightly altered tone and re-spun rhetoric. So to finally wind this up, if I have any purpose at all, it's to help spread the word of hopelessness, maybe as an aid to personal liberation from the old backwash swill by exposing it through parody or sarcasm, but maybe also, in a more tactical sense, as a foil to the slightly good-intentioned mask that still hides it but does little to replace it.

Sparkly Illustration in History Book from 2050 of Some Woman Back when She Was Narcissistic & Unempathetic Generation Y College Girl in 2003

2011-08-24T17:25:00.000-04:00

Sparkly illustration in a history book from the year 2050 of some woman back when she was a narcissistic & unempathetic Generation Y college girl in 2003 that went through 18 cell phones & 4 laptops and used to put herself on Youtube dancing naked telling ramming stories before 3 society-generation-names later when she ends up being famous for being the 1st person ever to make an empirical measure of altruism’s effectiveness with a math equation that says, depending on peoples’ inherited means and available resources, that somewhere between 22 and 45% of the world’s adults would need to spend enough time, energy, & money on altruism to where they can only just exist & be healthy, in order to cause a noticeable increase in the # of individual cases of imporved well-being conditions in the world; but as long as altruism is just a lifestyle or social activity that people combine with travelling or self-promition or self-exhibition, then well-being, burden, and suffering will keep on shifting around in the population without any net change, all the way til the end of the world or til people fucking go extinct

Adapted Selections from the Conversation during the Walk from Stils back up to Salwáre

2011-08-23T09:21:00.000-04:00

“There's always been that kind of people,” I said, “in who or through who all the demonic powers of nature are directly active – I mean physically active – and not dispersed or dissolved in the mind, soul, dreams, eros, or thoughts, like with the rest of us. Ya, there's these kind of people, and there always will be.”

“Ja, except today there’s no real, practical relation to them people anymore,” she says, “but there’s also none to God either – and not to the stars, -- or to anything at all -- except to them damn menacing machines! But just wait,” she yells and raises her hand, “people will still be amazed! They’re already flying around in the air like devils–-“ she breaks off, & I didn’t ask if she meant the planes, or some kind of demons that only she knows about…but I believe that she really did mean the planes.

So she says: “I met this inventor this one time in Berlin. These guys from the War Office took me along to visit his laboratory. I think he was talking about remote ignition or something, -- and even though it was a totally official visit, it had something about it that was like a meeting of secret conspirators, like some kind of shady outfit. / So the man hardly looked at me, and he gave this totally boring specialist lecture, I didn’t understand a word what he was saying. But the whole room with all its precise instruments seemed kind of like an alchemist’s or magician’s cave, and then the way that he uncovered his model and dicked around with his switches and levers & shit was totally terrifying. / The whole time I kept feeling like rays were about to shoot out of his eyes & fingertips, and his brain would start to boil out of his skull in white bubbles. / Them other guys there, who all together represented a pretty big chunk of power, they were totally nothing compared to him -- at least that’s what it seemed like to me. / But what was most sinister about him was his endless modesty. It was like he had no idea that he could make it thunder. We’re used to Zeus being conscious, feeling in every fiber that he’s the ‘Earth Shaker’, and that everybody knows it. That gives him something human -- familiar to people. / But this fucker, -- with him, you couldn’t feel nothing, except that he marched in an army of Zeuses, Hephaestuses, and Prometheuses – and probably in second file, too. I was terrified of him, but he didn’t even notice. / It’s a bad time for saints and demons both. Even martyrs are out of work these days. Today, the only people that get killed & tortured are the small honest people that just happened to pull on the other end of the rope. The whole thing sucks."

Alcoholic from Upstate New York

2011-08-22T13:23:00.000-04:00

Alcoholic from upstate New York that married a gullible woman from Long Island that thinks she can help people by talking rough and acting like she doesn’t care about what happens to her, and they’re visiting her relatives where he’s telling them all that he heard the New York Senate elections were fixed, and it must be true cause everybody he talked to at the packing plant said there’s no way they’re gonna vote for Hillary

Orange Reflection

2011-08-21T19:00:00.000-04:00

Some fucker that’s not as young as he looks because he has a thin neck and a facial expression that makes him look innocent and surprised even when he’s really not, and a round head that’s wider on top who used to get confused by magazine ads that showed guys that wouldn’t have been popular a few years earlier with soft features and big round plastic glasses with colored frames and short dorky haircuts or a woman that was making a hot face even though she was wearing a business blazer, and by commercials & movies that showed people rushing around with busy schedules or hurrying through airports or other modern-looking places that showed how their jobs and lives seemed important, because when he was growing up he lived in a place where there was no transitional period between this fashion and the one that came just before it where the cool people had heroic features with intense facial expressions and anti-social and counter-culture attitudes, and now 20 years later, a long time after he already realized he didn’t fit in either style, he’s sitting up in bed one morning and he sees a saturated orange reflection in 2 tones, a large rectangle area with a deeper-hued strip about 4 inches thick along the bottom, on his wall from the sun coming up shining through a window in another room out of his view, and unlike usual on a weekend in Sept or Oct, where, probably because of the overuse of this time of year as a setting for much of the so-called heroic and majestic anecdotes in the teaching of history, culture, and lore, an environmental accent like a striking anomalous decoration of nature or the sound of a hammer in the distance during the fall typically suggests, to him, bustling and vitality that makes him believe, since he has always failed to see that changes caused from within a person and those caused from the outside are almost always completely unrelated, life can, with a burst of positive attitude & active posture, and a small bit of energy, sort of start over again without the unwanted baggage that had accumulated up til now, this orange reflection on the contrary reminds him of a time when he mostly felt hopeless in any situation that didn’t conform to the possibility of him needing to use his planning abilities, and a time when sunrises and sunsets made him think of distance and possibilities, so now it’s evoking wistfulness, playful now that it’s long over, along with a remembrance of unsatisfaction and, influenced by his subjective memory, a little guilt too, all of which is now de-mystifying this orange spectacle, just amplified to where it had seemed synthetic, and the culturally implanted nostalgia of sunny early- to mid-autumn weekend mornings, dissolving the sham to reaveal that he always worries like an old bitch about sequential and categorical things that don’t have any effect on the outcome of his life, and that he thinks a lot about mortality in a very unconstructive way

Lemons

2011-08-20T09:10:00.000-04:00

A fucker that gets jealous of women

2011-07-28T17:10:00.000-04:00

A fucker that gets jealous of women, especially if they're upbeat & somewhat small, whenever, whether by their natural abilities or through effort, they do really well at something, except that he never really gets bothered when they're good at sports as long as they don't look extraordinarily hot

#12 of 20, 3rd Series

2011-07-27T17:03:00.000-04:00

Financial adviser who got invited to a champagne breakfast by some people he kind of knows, and they also invited their artist friends & you can tell easily that they're all trying to get him interested in buying their art, cause he's rich

Death sailing up to Brighton Beach during end of world in year 2880

2011-07-26T15:13:00.000-04:00

Fancy Couple at a Diner Bar in Chelsea

2011-07-25T15:06:00.000-04:00

Fancy couple at a diner bar in Chelsea in 1997 where she's telling him that she has to go to 6 doctor appointments a year if you count the dentist & that's assuming it's a year where she's not even sick

Yell at your Unsatisfying Lot in Life

2011-07-24T14:54:00.000-04:00

Pencil & ballpoint pen on canvas, ca. 9 ft. high

A Fucker at Night Watching 'The Eyes of Laura Mars'

2011-07-23T14:51:00.000-04:00

Getting a Haircut

2011-07-22T14:51:00.000-04:00

#19 of 20, 3rd Series

2011-07-21T13:04:00.002-04:00

Model from 1982 watching her kids at an Easter egg hunt where she wore a fancy vinyl jacket w/ messed up looking half-sleeves that make a contrast w/ her tight pants so you can't help it to notice how hot she is, so people behind her aren't watching their kids hunt for eggs

#3 of 20, 3rd Series

2011-07-20T21:42:00.003-04:00

Sort of mixed up high-school girl dancing w/ her 29-yr-old boyfriend at prom in the mid 80's where she has to lean forward & yell cause of the music to tell him for 3rd time she's so happy she can't believe it that he dressed in style for her prom, because he wore a pink button-up shirt w/ a grey sweater over it that doesn't have sleeves

On the Technology Maintenance Deluge, the A-Team, Max Frisch, and Why Books are Still Better : a Rant

2011-07-14T13:42:00.010-04:00

(I)

I'm alone for the week, so every day after work the theme is "what should i do while i'm free" so yesterday i got me a six of Radeberger, some chew, and I decided, i'd never go to a theater for this and i don't do netflix or any of that crap, i don't give a shit about movies in general, but I decided, guilty pleasure this one time, i'm gonna go rent me the A Team movie, but on Blockbuster Myrtle Avenue's door there's a paper sign written in marker: "this store is out of business as of Wednesday" (that was today), and i looked in and they’re almost done emptying the shelves, netflix and the like put them suckers out of commission i guess – I ain’t riding around NYC to find another video store, so i figured, just this one time, i'm gonna pay for a movie online, even do a month of Netflix if that’s the only way -- but no , the A Team's on DVD only, no download available -- so i opened me some Radebergers and watched some old A team episodes on Hulu.com instead and had some nicotine, then my McAfee starts telling me i got a problem, scan status is fine, but I need to backup, never even seen that message before like they just added it, so I say OK, but all it does is lead me thru a typical inane logic loop all around the McAfee page, finally i get it running but it freezes my computer so I try to close it and ignore it but keeps coming back, then my web starts freezing, I have to restart a few times and my computer starts up w/ a registry check – this looks bad but I keep trying to finish my A Team episode, -- then my registry starts freakin out and w/in a few hrs my computer doesn't work - didn't even watch no porn, just the fuckin A Team, how can Hannibal crash a computer? I just paid Mcafee to clean my fucking computer twice in the last year on top of the yearly fee I already pay them fuckers to keep my computer clean, also had to buy a new printer, and my old desktop crashed 2 yrs ago, - I got no fucking money left

(II)

So after I smashed the dickweed machine a few times and ruined a few keys I figured I still got more Radeberger and chew, then I got my Max Frisch book out and read for a few hours and realized I could've been doing this the whole time, spending my time on Montauk instead of the ATeam for one thing, then also instead of dicking around with a hard drive and web problems all I had to do was open a fucking book and close it when I wanted and maybe put in a god damn bookmark if I really needed to be particular, but the best part, I don't have to worry about my Max Frisch book breaking unless I fuckin burn in the frying pan by accident while I’m heating up tuna and a slice of bread , shit even if I spill my Radeberger on it or drop it in the can I could still probably read it

(III)

As I was, in large part unwisely, setting things up for my life when I was younger and weighing the idea of dragging my ass thru a moderately demanding 9-5 my whole life to make non-commercial drawings & stories and live in NYC and all the give & take and shit that comes with it, vs. running thru some hard core sort of stressful regiment and forgetting about art to try to live better when I got older, I didn't count either way on this money- and time- eating tech trap, I never asked for none of this shit, I don't even have nothing but a home laptop and cell phone and printer and I can't even afford their upkeep, I hope everybody chokes on their bottleneck- and price-driving aps and upgrades and toy gadgets that cost them more than my whole food budget every month.

Some woman watching On Golden Pond on cable

2011-04-06T01:54:00.002-04:00

Some woman watching On Golden Pond on cable and thinking she loves all her children, but probably loves 2 of them better than the others

A fucker whose dad told him he's not very exceptional

2011-04-06T01:29:00.001-04:00

A fucker whose dad told him he's not very exceptional at anything so he should be happy with what he gets, but his looks are maybe good enough he could hook up with a lot smarter woman than he is

Poor Archiving, Poor Recall : the previous 9 posts, plus 3 more captions

2011-04-04T12:47:00.007-04:00

Going through some old piles of folders and papers this weekend, I found copies of drawings that I sold yrs ago from the 1st Series of 50. I didn't keep very good records of my work, all i have are these bad photocopies, but at least I have the text. They're scanned in the previous 9 posts, the April 2nd posts.

_____________________________

Besides these photocopies, I sold others from the Series for which I have no image or text. All I found were 1 or 2 keywords with the corresponding Series number written on paper, which were supposedly going to remind me of the original works. Of these, I recall the rough content of 3 of the stories. Though I obviously can't produce the drawings here and I can't accurately reconstruct the text, I've re-written the 3 captions here the best I could based on memory:

#17, Some woman saying "i think i can arange that" to try to sound hot and also like she's composed at the same time while she's about to start scaming with some fucker on the couch

#29, Some fucker waiting in the emergency room where there's a TV up high on the wall that's showing a talk show about couples that let each other have affairs as long as it's in another country

#37, Some woman walking home from work and talking really fast and excited to her husband on her cell phone asking if their guests that are coming to stay with them are there yet

#45 of 50, 1st Series

2011-04-02T15:37:00.001-04:00

A guy that always tilts his head from side to side whenever he tells foreigners legal and historical things he knows

#42 of 50, 1st Series

2011-04-02T15:35:00.002-04:00

A slacker on vacation watching a foreign religious performance & thinking of everything he has in common with everybody he knows, but doesn't know that the real reason he's getting emotional is cause he loves himself

#33 of 50, 1st Series

2011-04-02T15:33:00.002-04:00

Immigrant that raised 4 sons in the U.S. that were more capable and had better tolerance than everybody they were around but they all ruined their lives from bad marriages, cause it was harder to tell who was a fuck-up than it was in their own culture

#30 of 50, 1st Series

2011-04-02T15:30:00.002-04:00

A philosophy professor that got tired of figuring out ideas for a lot of years that all come out to be part of the same 3 ideas & he ended up telling his students that philosophy isn't that important & Nietzsche's just an old bitch

#22 of 50, 1st Series

2011-04-02T15:26:00.002-04:00

Picture that just got taken of a writer that's almost famous that will make people way in the future wish they could be in pictures like it too, cause they will look at it in a romantically historical sense

#18 of 50, 1st Series

2011-04-02T15:24:00.002-04:00

A fuckin guy that was always jealous of his sister's family and got invited to her son's art opening and wonders why artists need to get a degree if they don't have to prove things & figure shit out

#5 of 50, 1st Series

2011-04-02T15:22:00.002-04:00

Couple from a snowmobile party who stopped ahead of the others so they could go behind a snowbank and do drugs

#3 of 50, 1st Series

2011-04-02T15:19:00.003-04:00

A woman that is smart like an intellectual is but she never developed her critical thinking skills and she doesn't have very much natural talent, so her life stopped getting better when she was about 26

#1 of 50, 1st Series

2011-01-25T15:14:00.000-05:00

Some guy that could be a House member because he knows a lot about taxes, but he couldn't be a Senator cause he looks like too much of a fuck-up

Sneak Peek: Titles of Drawings from 2010, including drawings of the Anthony Bourdain Finnish project

2011-01-12T15:39:00.003-05:00

_________________________________________

-A bunch of fuckers standing there trying to figure out who they want to ram the most on the 1st day of their lockdown in a biosphere where, as part of the incentive, they were implanted with virtual reality chips for adjusting the appearance of the other people & the environment to suit their individual pleasures in an experiment where scientists are going to study psychological and sociological conditions for a case where 100 people or so would have to restart human life by themselves from some fallout bunker or spaceship or maybe even another planet

-The devil looking out the window in a different section of the time-location matrix, a dimension which has an axis that happens to cross an axis in the location-only component of the time-location dimension that we’re familiar with, the crossing of coordinates occurring somewhere inside what is at the time of this drawing a container store, and marking a point between the 2 dimensions which, though this has never happened, if touched by a unit while that unit is consumed in unproductive misery due to a perceived problem stemming from either an underestimation of others’ roles or overestimation of its own role in any accomplishment-like event or state (thus the possibility restricted to humans, quite likely other animals, and very likely computer systems in the future), would cause that unit to be, depending on its belief patterns, either flipped into that other dimension to be the object of metaphysical justice, or else sucked in and mangled at the intersection point by a set of foreign physical situations or states and then spit out into one or the other, or both dimensions as a pile of scrap or completely decomposed into molecules and dispersed into its surroundings as compositionally non-existent

-Down-trodden young woman looking out the window

-LOOK AT THAT BIG FUCKING FISH! HOLY FCUK THAT'S A BIG FUCKING FISH! LOOK AT THAT BIG FUCKING BITCH! THAT'S A BIG FUCKING BITCH! THAT IS A BIG FUCKING BITCH! HOLY FUCK! LOOK AT THAT FUCKING FISH!

-Shroom-goggle view of John Edwards Tea Party Sex Fantasy 3-Way Daisy Chain with Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin, where he’s going down on Coulter and Coulter’s licking Palin and Palin’s blowing Edwards, but they stop and change directions every once in awhile

-Some god damned fuckers

-Some fucker, the bottom half of whose face and head and by analogy everything around it is, with the exception of a few interpersonal memories left over as insoluble burdens on expressive freedom, relative to his contemporary world fairly light and forthcoming and signals an instinctive disinterest in unnecessary & therefore misleading emotional communication, and the top half of whose face and head and by analogy everything around it is, aside from a few existentially complete reflections, relatively dark and opaque, reveals an innate thorough comprehension of tragedy, and hints at a perpetual emotional intention that isn’t completely honest, a fascinating & non-trivial but uneventful “balance” in the strictly quantitative sense of the word, a sense recently extended in an intellectually careless manner to a “balance” of a different meaning, usually used loosely in philosophical or spiritual contexts, apparently a translation misnomer and lexical shift developed via incorrect analogy and misinterpretation by a few inane generations -- as if one would feel better when sickness or pain somehow quantitatively equals healthiness or comfort within their organism, or as if purported bad and good literally need to be exactly the same spiritual sizes to run a respectable purported metaphysical world -- but in the context of a rectified version of this latter meaning of “balance” (likely rectifiable in large part by restoring and then emphasizing “interdependency” as a primary semantic factor of the lexical compound) quantitatively trivial (50/50 is as subjective and random as any other possible contextually ideal proportion in the world of the so-called non-quantitative “balance”) -- so, a trivial situation in this latter sense of the word, but in this particular case not uneventful, because, the quantitative sense of the word set aside, the human traits and their relative proportions and their distribution within this particular fucker’s head as described above just happen to be, as per the properties of biological, geological and maybe also possibly-existing metaphysical states, the makeup of a personal system easily capable under suitable conditions of simultaneously generating in others a euphoric but usually unsustainable faith-like sentiment via an emanation of support, and of facilitating vicious resentment and violent scapegoat situations at a society level via persistently assertive, illusively convincing, expressive, and (not fully consciously) emotionally-self-defensive protectionist affiliation and rhetoric

-Strangers at the Nyquil Party

-12,000 reasons for not playing 5-card 'follow the bitch' with Fred Grandy

-2 Elvis impersonators and a surrealistic figure going to church after a heavy snowfall

-2 naked women with naturally-occurring outlined stripes on their bodies taking a bath

-Webcam girl adjusting her monitor just before she starts ramming herself on camera for free

_________________________________________

TITLES FROM THE ANTHONY BOURDAIN FINNISH PROJECT: SCENES BASED ON READINGS OF "Kitchen Confidential: Mestarikokin Tunnustuksia" (Finnish translation of Kitchen Confidential" by Anthony Bourdain)

-Anthony and his brother when they got left in the car out in the parking lot while their parents went to eat in the fanciest restaurant in France

-Anthony & his wife carrying Christmas Tree wrapped in a blanket downstairs in his apartment building in the middle of the night to take it out to a dumpster area where there’s heroin pushers because he doesn’t want anyone to know his life has fallen so far that he still had his tree up in June

-Anthony and some co-workers at the Dreadnaught looking through a vent opening watching the head chef out back behind the restaurant ramming the bride that just came into the restaurant with her wedding party on some boats from across the bay, and he’s ramming her from behind with his apron up on her back while she’s bent over some trash bin

-Anthony and some other fucker that he got sent to Japan to work with who took him out to some exclusive, to travelers little-known restaurant one night that they had to wind through lots of streets and some seedy area to get to, and they’re at the sushi bar and the chef keeps trying new exotic delicacies on them one after another and they keep asking for more, and he can’t believe they can keep eating such an ass load without getting grossed out

-Anthony and some other fucking cooks that work at restaurants right on the bay at Provincetown carrying buckets out front to get some catch of the day for their menus and some fish to take home for grilling because they heard someone yell that an ass load of juova-bass had just swam up and got stuck near the edge of the water

-Anthony going for it trying his first oyster while his family looks on in disbelief in their relatives’ oyster boat off the north coast of France

-Anthony at job interview with owner of famous NYC steakhouse where after having felt that the whole thing was going great he’s now having trouble with the question “what do you know about me?” and his mind is running rapidly through potential elaborate angles he could use to fudge the answer because he didn’t prepare for this question before the interview and after some rationalization he ends up telling the truth and says “nothing”, which he will assume a few minutes later cost him the job as his mind semiconsciously replays and intuitively reconstructs the conversation so that it’s clear to him as he's leaving the restaurant that the question was “what do you know about meat?”

-Heavily distorted impressionistic scene of Anthony and I think Dmitri and some other fuckers he worked with at Manhattan restaurants the next morning after they got wasted all night on booze & drugs while closing down the kitchen & then took a train to Long Island and now they’re getting fucked up some more at a beach before they go back to work their shift in the restaurant later today

-Tyrone the head chef at Dreadnaught screaming at Anthony for being a pussy and showing him all the blisters on his hand while everyone in the kitchen suddenly froze and went silent after Anthony asked if there was any hand lotion, I think or maybe oven mittens but I think it was hand lotion during a mad busy rush in the kitchen at one of his early jobs in Provincetown

The Desert

2011-01-09T15:45:00.000-05:00

"The Desert as Target or Facilitator of Society’s, in rough estimation mostly from my perspective only, Collective Subjective Projections and Resulting Failed Prospects and Dreams -- and an Approach to Gaining Insight into its Objective State via Disappointment or Failure"
by Thomas Stolperer. Published in "Into the Desert" by Eight Cuts Gallery

Etching of some fucker that's only made one mistake in his life so far

2010-12-20T22:57:00.000-05:00

High school kid whose mom said most books are cynical

2010-12-20T00:46:00.000-05:00

Isometric of Katrina and the Waves

2010-12-20T00:45:00.000-05:00

Bitchy old east coast woman beside her dresser

2010-12-18T00:53:00.000-05:00

Quick sketch of film frame of close-up shot of Bruce Nauman playing w/ his nad sack

2010-12-18T00:47:00.003-05:00

1 Cock & 2 Thermoses

2010-12-16T11:52:00.006-05:00

Poorly exposed scan of photo called "one cock & two thermoses" from art student's exhibition in 1996

14 yr old girl feeding her cat

2010-12-16T09:17:00.001-05:00

Space woman disguised as naked woman walking down the Lower East Side

2010-12-16T08:52:00.000-05:00

Horror

2010-12-07T08:55:00.006-05:00

There’s a kind of thin metal sheet with a large surface space that they use in small theaters
to imitate thunder.
I’m thinking about a stack of them, even thinner,
ones that make even more noise,
piled vertically at regular intervals just like pages in a book,
except that they’re not squeezed together, but held apart by some apparatus,
such that if I place you on the top sheet it will crack and explode
at the touch of your body’s weight.
You fall onto the 2nd sheet and it breaks too, even louder.

You fall onto the 3rd, then the 4th, the 5th sheet and continue to descend,
hitting the surfaces one after another in a drum roll
that becomes louder with speed,
running through a stage of heavy rolling thunder
eventually surpassing comprehension.

That’s the nature of horror’s grip.
Unlike dread, anxiety and fear,
it’s much closer to the terror which percieves Gorgon’s face
with bristled hair, screaming.
Dread is a suspicion of approaching destruction rather than conscious recognition of such,
wildly disturbing, though a diminishment of terror and horror,
and fear can go so far as to hold dialogue with hope.
Fright,
that’s what you feel when the first metal sheet cracks, and during the deadly fall
the drum beat and glaring red lights eventually cross the line
from warning to confirmation
as the event accelerates toward horror.

Try to imagine what goes on in that space you might end up falling through someday,
between recognition of imminent extinction,
and the ensuing end.

__________________________

unofficial translation of “Das Entsetzen” / Ernst Jünger

Both Chump and Fool

2010-11-30T09:51:00.001-05:00

Spending life as an artist w/out financial backup or a profit plan is for fools ; spending life stoically trading your time for wages that merely cancel the cost of living is for chumps. In trying to manage the time-finance balance as an artist I've somehow worked it so that I'll spend the rest of my life as both a chump and a fool. Shit. Is there any way to start this fucking thing over and try again?

Postmodern* Definitions for Modernism and Postmodernism

2010-11-21T13:49:00.002-05:00

Modernism-- all humans, along with their institutions, beliefs, activities, and products, etc (except for me and the things I influence, believe, do, create, etc) have Jumped the Shark

Postmodernism-- I've Jumped the Shark too

_________________________

*"Postmodern" is used to categorize or qualify the nature of the definition of itself, so the definitions here (both of them, if you take the common view that the concepts "modern" and "postmodern" are intrinsically bound to each other) are self-referentially circular-- so these definitions might not be useful for anything more than cheap aphorism-like material for uncritical pondering or fragmented rehash of old ideas

What if Don Johnson was God? What would the answer to a Protestant prayer sound like?

2010-11-19T09:39:00.018-05:00

A Fucker Praying
God, I know everybody’s eventually supposed to be christians, but you know it ain’t never gonna happen for everybody. People believe different shit, and some don’t believe nothin, and it seems like they’re doing fine anyway. But them conservative bastards & fancy TV ministers are fuckin up everything. As long as there’s even one person left that ain’t a christian, then they’ll keep blaming all our problems on everybody that ain’t kissin the church’s ass. Why do these fuckers get to use my government to try to up their numbers? Shit, ain’t your numbers good enough as it is? I pay my taxes & shit to the government and I go to church to get holy. Can’t you make them stop fuckin around with my town’s laws & my social life? Tell them there’s a lot of christians that want them to get the fuck out of my church and stop pretending they’re god or something.

God
Well well well, lookie what we got here, a mid-american protestant from the provincial ranks that’s beat the christpublican dogma rap. First things first, buddy, just cause Marty L. hooked you up a hotline to dial direct upstairs so I could understand your colloquial swill, that still don’t mean you’re allowed to say “fuck” when you’re talking to me. As for your conservative buddies, you nailed it on the head, they’re gonna fuck up everything. But I can’t change them or make them disappear, that’s out of my jurisdiction, I only work miracles that you folks won’t remember and can’t verify. It’s your job to pick your candy ass up off the pew & tell these fuckers they’re phonies, and if that don’t work then screw their church. Take a clue from the goddamned buddhists. Hell, they’re stealin all my thunder these days cause you dickoffs are so busy shoving your steeple heads up industries’ & churches’ & lobbyists’ asses that you can’t see nothin else but their two-bit propaganda through your stained-shit windows. Listen, yours truly learned something a long time ago way back before the earth was created that a lot of you blank slates still ain’t figured out: that old saying “There can be too much of a good thing,” well that goes for everything, even religion, and that goes double when you’re stuck in a mortal biological life. Sounds like you learned it too, and the hard way- one too many years in close quarters with your demographic bunkmates in a rationality cesspool. All right pal, your dime’s up. Keep your nose clean, & I’ll check you later.

Cheerleader looking at the flag

2010-11-16T00:50:00.001-05:00

Artist sitting in free studio in Paris with tree outside window

2010-11-16T00:46:00.002-05:00

Diary Entry - Includes Full Bibliography of Works Mentioned in the Noted Conversation

2010-11-11T15:50:00.013-05:00

11/7/10. H and C evening guests – a very welcome visit as convalescence much slower than expected, brought soup, not hungry themselves - brought the books we’d discussed – J out for the evening - H informs me of facts about T Bernhard’s life & personality, what I would’ve expected, also I feel partial affinity w/ him now – C with some genuinely interesting ideas about showing my drawings & stories on apparel – both gracious & generous as always – discussion primarily about literature and society

___________________________________________

Bibliography of works mentioned in conversation w/ H and C:

Adel des Geistes : ein Vergessenes Ideal – Rob Riemen – (Adel van de Geest : een Vergeten Ideaal - translated from the Dutch by Waltraud Hüsmert)

Auslöschung -- Thomas Bernhard

Eight Cuts Gallery - at http://eightcuts.wordpress.com

The Equalizer - (Television program)

Freedom : a Novel -- Jonathan Franzen

In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust - (A la recherche du temps perdu - translated from the French by Lydia Davis, et. al. ; general editor, Christopher Prendergast)

Interview am Zürichsee : Roman -- Bora Ćosić - (Intervju na Ciriškom jezeru, translated from the Serbian by Barbara Antkowiak)

Jeff Gabel 01 - (Catalog of an exhibition by Jeff Gabel at Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, Dec. 1, 2001-Jan. 19, 2002)

Kitchen confidential : Mestarikokin Tunnustuksia – Anthony Bourdain - (Kitchen Confidential : Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly - translated from the English by Leena Nivala)

Maddalena : Romanzo -- Carl Zuckmayer - (Salwàre oder die Magdalena von Bozen - translated from the German by Cecilia Calabresi)

Das Märchen der 672. Nacht -- Hugo von Hofmannsthal

The Moons Ride Over -- Carl Zuckmayer - (Salwàre oder die Magdalena von Bozen - translated from the German by Moray Firth)

Musta Torni II : Kolme korttia pakasta – Stephen King - (The Dark Tower II : the Drawing of the Three - translated from the English by Kari Salminen)

Novels in Three Lines -- Felix Feneon – (Nouvelles en trois lignes – translated from the French by Luc Sante)

Reise ans Ende der Nacht -- Louis-Ferdinand Céline - (Voyage au bout de la nuit – translated from the French by Isak Grünberg)

Reise ans Ende der Nacht -- Louis-Ferdinand Céline - (Voyage au bout de la nuit – newly translated from the French by Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel)

Reitergeschichte -- Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Die Ringe des Saturn : eine englische Wallfahrt – W.G. Sebald

Salwàre oder die Magdalena von Bozen -- Carl Zuckmayer

Schwindel. Gefühle – W.G. Sebald

Thomas Bernahrd : eine Erinneruing -- Krista Fleischman - (Film)

Ulysses -- James Joyce

Der Untergeher -- Thomas Bernhard

Someone with red hair who manages a restaurant

2010-10-16T23:44:00.000-04:00

Bride Asking for Water at Reception

2010-10-16T23:38:00.004-04:00

Bride with big face asking for water at reception where they have 2 kinds of meat as main dishes and one kind mixed with beans

Veps, pt. 1

2010-08-12T20:17:00.001-04:00

Veps, pt. 2

2010-08-12T20:16:00.000-04:00

Some Woman That Was at Her 10-yr. High School Reunion Last Month

2010-08-09T20:25:00.002-04:00

Some woman that was at her 10-yr. high school reunion last month & got the award for the classmate that moved the farthest away from their town, & now she’s sitting there at the wedding dance party for her sister that most people think looks better than her, & she’s a little smarter than her too, and she’s looking over at her older relatives at another table staring into space & guesses that they’re figuring out at what point did their lives change from being an experience to a tradition, except that a few of them whose kids didn’t ever fit in with the rest of the family seem like they’re thinking the bride’s a bitch

Some fucker walking out of shower barefoot on pissy floor

2010-08-09T14:59:00.000-04:00