mad skills

I didn't realize that being able to lift a 10 speed into the back of a pick-up truck was a skill until recently. I pick people up, sometimes drunk people, I'll admit, who may or may not have called me to come get them because I have a truck to carry home their bike. So, logically, I assumed that these people couldn't load a bike into the back of a pick-up because they were intoxicated. Even some sober people I know can't load bikes into the backs of trucks. Some of them are much taller than I am, and they still were banging bike bits up against truck bits. I try not to be too annoyed by the fact that they are potentially hurting my lone asset (which isn't even really mine, but my mom's) and just realize this, much like herding chickens and creating sentence fragments, is just one of my mad skills. However, when someone says "It's just a pick-up," that's when it really gets me.

I'm very Jack Sparrow about my mom's truck. It isn't what a truck needs that makes it magic(like a new shiny bumper). It's what a truck is. My truck is freedom! & I'll be damned if people too intoxicated or too clumsy are going to nick or scratch my haul-it-everywhere, through hell or high-water, every-dent-a-story, every scratch a battle wound, vehicle of power!

Sisyphean Tasks.

I've been half-heartedly odd-jobbing it lately. In fact, this month I may have made almost $1000 from removing carpet, vacuuming, hauling and distributing bark dust, painting interiors, &, yesterday, filling a crack in a cement pad with (you guessed it) more cement. In order to do this last task I had to rearrange, individually, about a yard of rocks without a wheel barrow or a shovel. So I sat and hurled rocks from one side of a pile to another. For, cumulatively, about 45 minutes. I got paid about $10 to move small rocks.

Which brings me to the point of this blog post. People would much rather pay me to do easy but slowly back-breaking, mindless work, than accumulate my art. Painted trim is worth more, even to artistically informed people, than a drawing or a sequin covered duck decoy. Yesterday I got called an "Angel" because I had a screw driver to put in a switch plate. No one has ever called me anything pleasant because of what I make.

I use bark dust a parameter of progress. I have yet to have a summer since graduation from undergrad where I didn't have to interact with the stuff. It makes me itchy and sneazy, and generally distressed. To prepare a garden for it you make islands of perennials, and then surround them with the mulched up skins & innards of non-native cedars. My client made the joke (and he was clearly proud to have thought of it) "How many graduate school courses does it take to be able to shovel bark?"

The thing is, I'm not unhappy odd-jobbing. I really like looking back at a task well-done, that makes someone's home more comfortable and beautiful for them. I just don't know how to make that art. For all I know, maybe it is already.

Camping with Hunter.

So, I went camping.

I've been unemployed, almost completely, for almost a year. Mike and I also "broke Up" or he "dumped" me (very hard) just about a year ago. But hey, whadaya know, we find ourselves out in the woods with my dad's gear and my mom's car (and Mike's beer at about 10 am).

Rural Oregon is fantastic. We found the town of Dale on the 395, which I'll be talking more about in my other blog (so stay tuned.... or tune in... or whatever). We had beers bought for us in a way too well-lit bar by a boring man (really- he drills the holes for optic cable. He's a professional borer). We were stopped on the road because of a very small, slow stampede. There were frogs and garter snakes and the wonderful town of Ukiah, with robot windmills and a Motel covered in Antlers.

And, best of all, We found the Wheeler Bear! this is the same bear that was outside my gallery in Wheeler, mysteriously. And, last time I checked, is now chained outside one of the Wheeler antique stores...

Which just goes to show- life is full of the oddest coincidences, and endless possibilities. Of all the bears in all the antique stores in the world...

I don't have any idea what I will be doing this time next year. If I will have income, or lovers, or friends, or fingers. Judging by the last 3 years of my life there is absolutely no way to predict my petty future. But I'm certain I haven't seen the last of these bears.

codgers

Yesterday Ted and I spent a lot of time discussing the future of digital technology. As one can imagine, this meant we spent most of the time cross-referencing Radio Lab and On the Media. Ted and I both live on the fringe outskirts of technology, hesitating to ever stick a toe in those frigid waters. And yet that was most of our day.

Suffice it to say, we are both fairly anxious about the whole ordeal. We talked of stock market crashes and reality, virtual reality and avatars, morality and plurality... it went on and on. And as Ted grew more anxious, I grew more relaxed. My calmness came because, as we discussed it more and more, the more I realized how I was still adept at solving problems without a computer. Here were 2 people, both not very well informed, hashing out many a problem verbally. Often we could see that there were problems solved by computers, but there were still problems we could solve on our own- for instance, the problem of distilling meaning. As Ted worried that meaning would be lost, I watched as we established meaning between the two of us over and over again.

It's such an adventure having old friends. You can learn more about yourself in an afternoon with a great one than you can in a whole week of interacting with newbies. You might learn different things from new people, but once you have gathered their various and sundry impressions it is good to repeat them back to an old friend. They become like a sieve to help you sort the wheat from chaff.

Pretty, but is it Art?

Yesterday I had the opportunity to lay out a corn labyrinth. That's a very nice way of saying I got paid very little to do a lot of shoveling and mulching and planting on a little farm in Newberg. Which, I thoroughly enjoyed- I love working hard as long as it's not raining. But I am beginning to wonder if I will ever feel like I'm really worth more than $12.50 an hour. Even as I'm nursing a very tender feeling back and bicep today.

In other news, I've been watching M*A*S*H. There are jokes about Martinis in nearly every early episode. There's no laugh track. Every character, even the bad guys, are clearly acceptable as human beings- no character is treated as shallow, or superfluous (except maybe the women that Hawkeye messes around with, but even that is debatable). Everyone is treated as a stereotype, but all stereotypes are welcome, accepted and appreciated as fodder for oneliners. & it's great to see the clear development of a character from Groucho to Hawkeye to Gregory House. What a legacy.

Back from Boston!

As it turns out, The Powers that Be actually would like us to keep a separate blog. For that purpose I'm reconstituting "Painter's Victory Garden" Which I believe is paintersvictorious@blogspot, for anyone who wants to continue to read my rants on graduate related reading materials, and artistic developments. I'm not quite sure what that leave's this blog to do, but I'm sure I'll come up with something.

I'n the meantime, I've decided to formally try for the Guiness Book of World Records record for longest ball of fingerknitting. I'll be kickstartering that project probably sometime in the next week, if anyone is interested in kicking me a couple of bucks....

In the meantime, I'm staying at Todd Isaac's lovely abode, surrounded by wooden wonderment. It's so pleasent to get to live around beautiful belongings. Also, I have to say that the bed here is amazingly comfortable compared to the rubber mattress at the MASS ART dormitory. And they have a lovely big computer for me to write my rough drafts of essays on, as well as quickly post pictures. I need to get me one of these.

& on to homosexuals!

Gavin Butt's (nope, ya can't make this stuff up) "the Greatest Homosexual? Camp Pleasure and the performative body of Larry rivers." continues a complete waste of a perfectly good sunny day in Portland.

Larry Rivers could kinda draw. I remember (one of the few things that I remember) from his auto-biography, that when he first started to paint he wanted to be able to "draw like Rembrandt- we all did." Well, isn't that nice?

There was this first wave of what would later be called post-modernism, before it de/evolved into POP, of some marginally talented and not all that witty wannabe raconteurs who happened to include Larry Rivers. A not too great Jazz musician, and an ok, but also not that great painter. What Larry was as an early early adopter of as an art form, and people such as Andy Warhol perfected, was his ability to know what was cool, avant garde, &/or nasty. In other words, he knew how to have bad taste well. That's really all there is to say about Mr. Rivers.

However, I thinkit's funny that a 7 sentence article in Life magazine in 1959 got almost 2 pages of analysis. Same Life article featured the dying of the pop and an article on the first lady, as well as innumerable adds for cars, cigarettes and liquor, all that had more information and were more interesting than the article on Rivers. It's amazing how far just about every aspect of culture has come, even the catholic church, compared to the discourse on art.

"What Did I Do?" Mr Rivers' biography is POrtnoy's Complaint written with a lot more salacious details, and a lot fewer complaints.