The Desert

The minute I stepped off the plane and onto Los Angeles (well Burbank) soil I noticed a change in the air. Something about the wind here, the desert, it feels dusty and serene. The wind has weight here, like it's pulling at your hair and face but not stinging or chapping it. I stick my head out of the car going 60 on Venice boulevard and I feel like riding a horde of mutant buffallo into a giant spinning orange tornado.

Foodcourt Woes

So it's official. The westside pavillion foodcourt is falling into a state of decrepit downfall. All that is left is korean, japanese, mexican salad. What happened to the glorious 1980's foodcourt golden era? Where can a good guy go to get some pre-packaged styrofoam divided deep fried food served on a plastic tray. What is happening to America?

A Long Wednesday Delayed

I write this post from the airport. Today I awoke and got all my things together and packed my bags. I left my apartment with two hours to get to the airport. Usually this is enough time to get to JFK, even with traffic. Do you sense the impending doom? So I was walking down the street to quickly return the "Notorious Bettie Page" Dvd I forgot to return the day before and I notice an extreme lack of cabs. Maybe this is just in my mind I tell myself. Two hours is fine! That's plenty of time! So I get out of Kim's and walk up st marks towards 3rd avenue looking for a cab. Nothing. Ok I'll try 3rd there are always cabs on 3rd avenue. Taken. Ok how about 4th avenue. I roll my wheely luggage up the gravel road bouncing plastic chunks off the wheels. 15 minutes in. All the cabs are taken. 20 minutes. Finally a cab stops next to me and asks where I'm going. "JFK" and I move to get into the cab. The driver turns back to his wheel and drives off before I can even lift my luggage off the sidewalk. Seriously. He just left me there because he didn't want to drive to the airport. That is illegal by the way. So I walk around a little more and begin to get really nervous. I still have plenty of time but it's just the nerves starting to get to me. Finally a cab drives up that is off duty but the guy is nice enough to take me to JFK. It's probably close to where he is dropping off his cab for the night. The cab driver says "I'll take you to JFK but I have to warn you, there is alot of traffic right now." Shit. Well even with lots of traffic it shouldn't take more than an hour. Right? So we are off and the cab driver is great, he's swerving around cars and honking and getting the finger thrown at him more times than Donald Rumsfeld at a peace rally. Everything is going great until we hit the expressway. And that's where things begin to go wrong. And I mean really wrong. It was probably the smoke pouring from the hood of the cab. I really hoped it was a magical illusion and this cab driver was an amature magician. I was hoping that at any moment he would turn around and yell "I'm just kidding!" But unfortunately he did not. And you can't imagine how hard it is to find a free cab on an expressway. SO needless to say it's now 6:47 and my flight left at 445 now i'm delayed and waiting for the new flight. It's going to be a long wednesday.

Underwater (I Found Your Face)

So I am going to begin a new project featuring people dunking their heads into water. The faces will appear almost as if they are drowning in watery graves. As you approach these tubes mounted on a dark wall, the faces will poke through the water and stare at you holding their breath while holding their eyes wide open. Almost like a watery staring/breath holding contest. I want it to look really blue and black. I've been really into the blue/black look lately. Or maybe they will look like portholes as if you are on a giant ship and there are these weird ghostly faces peeking in from the ocean looking at you. I like the idea of the viewer being watched by the art. Sort of like a watery silent film star screaming for your attention.
These are some sample photos I found online by a photographer named SnoopRat. I tinted them in photoshop to show what kind of effect I hope to achieve.

Easy rider:Blog from a bus

I am writing this from a bus
it went dark
on the way
to
atlantic city

5 to 1 1 in 5

I was eating lunch today and there was this guy slurping his spaghetti out of his plate and his head was hung so low into the plate that his chin would dip slightly in the sauce everytime he bent down for a slurp. He didn't seem to notice.

My first and most immediate reaction was to be disgusted. Here was a guy so busy, so engrossed in life or work or thought that he was shovelling noodles into his mouth like a snake handler cramming 35 snakes into a cigar box. And with every slurp of a new wet spaghetti strand, his chin burned a deeper tone of saucy crimson red. But he didn't seem to notice.

I on the other hand could not stop watching. It was a beautiful and hideous display. It reminded me of a scene from Mathew Barney's cremaster cycle. As the man chordled his final slurp I desperately hoped that he would forget to wipe his chin and walk around all day with the bloody looking mess decorating his chin but to my dismay, he quickly swiped the sauce from his face and practically ran out of the pizza place.

I think this scene was especially interesting to me because I have weird issues with food. If I dont have time to sit down and actually enjoy the act of eating, I tend to just skip the food altogether. I really enjoy relaxing and talking with people while I eat and I can't imagine becoming a human food vaccum, slurping down nutrients like a hungry plant.

Drillin for a livin'

So I am currently constructing something called the memoryphone. It is a musical instrument based on the design of an organ grinder. More Info Here So last night I was using a heavy piece of machinery known as a drill press. You know the kind of machine you need to wear goggles so the splintering wood chunks dont' fly into your eye. The kind of machine they make horror movies about (ahem Body Double) The kind of machine you should not be drinking while operating. However this didn't stop my buddy who was also working in the shop from offering me a bottle of wine while drilling! It's like I'm diffusing a bomb and trying to decide between the red and blue wire and sweat is pouring down my brow and the time is ticking down and wait oh here buddy have a drink! NO. There are certain situations where a drink is a definite bad idea. So I thought I would make a list of other situations in which I feel it would be innapropriate to be offered a drink:
1. Riding a bicycle in New York City traffic
2. Swimming with a killer whale in a tank full of seals
3. Any sort of Trapeeze work
4. Running in the special olympics
5. Driving a schoolbus
6. AA meetings
7. Climbing at high altitudes
8. Any sort of religious cult meeting (especially Kool-Aid drinks)

But of course I couldn't wait to have some wine and now thanks to mr drill press I have a huge yet stylish hole in the middle of my hand. That's in this season though. The bloody gash you know. I swear.

When planets crash into the sun

Tonight I got home after soldering for 8 hours and thought I was going to go directly to sleep. Actually I really didn't want to go to sleep at all. I wanted a break. Some fun. But as I got home and set my bag down and sat on my bed I felt increadibly tired. It was 1230, I was ready for bed. So what did I do?

I went out. And it was very pleasant. The air has turned crisp and breezy and the leaves crunch and twist under my shoes on the pavement. The air is buzzing with people on friday night in New York City and everything feels alive and undulating. A mass hysteria or is it belligerance? Either way it's still interesting to see. Sleep is overrated.

It's now 5:33 am. Tonight I saw MIT students dancing to hip hop, a man smash a beer bottle over someones head at a bar, an awkward but pleasant encounter with a friend from last summer, and the Turkish theory of phenomenon. Yes this makes no sense whatsoever, but I've come to the conclusion that life itself makes absolutely no sense whatsoever most of the time. And that's fine. Let's stop trying to find meaning in everything and just enjoy things for a while. Sounds a bit libertine doesn't it? But coincidence and chance and spontenaiety are often what drive the most important turning points in our lives. You could spend your entire life trying to achieve your life's purpose or goal. You could spend everyday in the lab, in the office, on the set, studying the stock market, reading medical journals...and then one day you look right instead of left and wham! you are hit by a greyhound and all your hard work and dedication is tossed in the air and flattened on the road.

I'm not saying you shouldn't try, I'm just saying next time it's 1230 and you are ready to go to sleep, make sure you really want to be sleeping. Do what you want, don't do what you should. And that's my inspirational rant of the night. Goodnight vampires and good morning early birds.

I'm a vampire

It's 522am and I'm a vampire baby!

I don't know what it is about the night that keeps me so awake but I love it. There is something about the quiet. I can't imagine only being alive when it's noisy.

Back Again (with a mouse in the house)

Ok so I have officially decided to start this engine up again. It's good to have a blog I think? Maybe it is. Maybe not. Ok I'm done good bye.

No ok I'm back now and here's been what's up. I have been working on several projects. Most of them video installation type things with screens and projectors and little people in bottles. It should be crazy. I'm also working on something called the memoryphone which is a musical instrument/ video player. hot Hot hot.

In personal news. I believe there is a mouse in my apartment. I was washing a cup the other day and out of the corner of my eye i noticed something flash by on the floor. It was like a scene out of a really small horror movie. I was thinking about it. Mice are pretty cute but when they are in your house they suddenly aren't cute anymore. If you put the mouse in a tank it would be cute. But if it's free than it's vermin. This applies to some humans as well.

Halloween was pretty great. Me and ranny went costume shopping and purchased some good suits. Then for actualy Halloween I ended up working till 1am and then went to the Motherfucker party at the Roxy down by the water on the westside. That place is totally insane. There were people naked and covered in blood. good old pagan fun you know? At some point they turned off the lights and put on Carrie and played the shower scene. However when the clip ended and the lights came back on, I noticed that directly to my left there were two gentlemen engaging in some halloween fellatio. Yes right there on the dancefloor. Only feet from where I was standing. Who does that? Especially during carrie?!

On another note I finally removed my air conditioner from my window and now I think it I may have been a mistake. Yes it's still warm in New York. It's going to be a hot nuclear winter boys and girls. But it's fun to be back in the blog.

July 12th 2006

...and it's on this day of our lord July the twelfth two thousand and six that two legged animals will burst like tiny bubbles of bones. And all the squids and snakes and manatees will grow plump from excess oxygen and fruitfully multiply both day and night until all that is left is unintelligible blobs of furry winged, saliva horned male-female zygote sex bristled beasts...

On Your Dash

12 days ago we stumbled across deserts made of concrete. My hands stunk of lamb oil you rubbed through the milky strands of your auburn hair. I loved how you loved me when you were nineteen. The devilish glare in my rear view mirror as we hit 120 somewhere between the ranch and the rest of the world.

You always wanted to die in a car crash. Lungs ruptured full of oil and exhaust. Strangled together by seatbelts, pythons winding between our hips and around our necks. My California license plate embedded deep in the back of your skull looks beautiful. The edge of an aluminum palm tree peeks out from under the rupture in your cerebellum. Some kind of white viscous fluid oozes across the number "4"

And for a moment my gaze falls jagged across your auburn hair and into your eyes and I remember days when we used to drive down desert roads made of concrete. The wind blurring the world into a sweet shudder. The way you used to laugh when I took my shoes off while somehow still managing to steer the car across the dusty desert road. The way the world fell into a deep grey blur. And when at 120, I suddenly hit a lamb in the middle of the road, blood sputtering from its throat where my chrome grill kissed it atop bright white yellow lines right before we flipped and turned and slid into the cool blue night...


photo by Ansel Adams 1960

We're All Gonna Die From Ink Poisoning

It's inevitable. We're all going to die from inki poisoning...or at least anyone who's been hanging out with me recently. You're doomed. The skulls and dragons and spiral hexadodecahedron patterns scrawled into your arm with a Sharpie, they're going to be the death of you. Everynight we go out to bars or restaurants or movies or shows and draw into eachothers flesh. Who needs tattoos? Every night I've got a different eyeball, face, korean lettering, lightning bolt...the possibilities are endless. Marker felt is the new ink.

Uh-Oh Mr Chicken Salad.

I've been working on a digital comic for the wonderful world of the internet lately. It is full of irony...much like life. I find that ironic things are always happening to me, like I'm living in some weird practical joke world. Maybe irony is the wrong word for it...I need a word that conveys both the emotions of sad and funny. Maybe I should call it the Charlie Brown effect. You sort of want to cry for Charlie Brown when Lucy constantly rips the football out from under his feet like some sort of evil bitch harpy who revels in the pain of others, but it is kind of funny at the same time. Uh-oh funny not ha-ha funny. Maybe my life has become uh-oh funny. LIke when I get out of the shower and step in cat pee. That's pretty uh-oh funny. Or when I realize that somehow I've managed to tye-die all my clothes so that they have giant red blotches. Or when the man at the chicken salad sandwich restaurant recognizes my voice on the phone and says "Oh i know who this is, Mr Chicken Salad." That's sort of pathetic uh-oh funny. Being known as "Mr. Chicken Salad."

A still from my comic: "3:07pm and the world ended" COMING SOON to www.gabebc.com/comics.html

It's alarming!

Something just occurred to me as I haphazardly made my way down Broadway wearing a blazer, long pants and canvas shoes. It gets hot in New York City. You see, I'm fairly new to the idea of seasons. In California we have seasons, well we have two: Summer and Winter. In Summer it can get to be 90 degrees in los angeles and everyone takes off all their clothes and hits the beach. In winter it gets to be about 60 degrees and everyone wears scarfs and hats and has fires in their living room. But New York is a totally different story. My mind doesn't quite comprehend these "seasons" yet and my body is struggling to adjust to the temperature as well. I woke up in the middle of the night last night, sweating and confused so I opened my window next to my bed and fell back asleep. Then at around 5am I hear a strange noise that sounds like someone is trying to get through my window and I sit up and slam it closed. In other news when I arrived home last night, the emergency exit door of my building that leads to the roof was open and a horrible ear bleeding alarm was going off. Seriously it sounded like someone being poked in the ear drum with a metal toothpick. So me and my roommate decide that we are going to take it upon ourselves as good tenants of this fine establishment and disable the alarm. I put on my ear buds and cover them with my huge headphones and make my way towards the electronic shrieking banshee of death like some sort of bomb dismantler. Then I remember, oh right I have no idea what I'm doing. My roommate on the other hand, comes out with a sledgehammer and hits the alarm box about 40 times. He continues to pound at it and I am reminded of Dave dismantling HAL at the end of 2001. Finally it falls off the door dead. The alarm stops, but the ringing continues in our ears for about 10 minutes. Flash forward to that night when I hear someone trying to break into my window. There is now no alarm box on the roof because we dismantled the alarm earlier that day. It's alarming!

Walls

I spent yesterday in complete zombie mode. With little to no sleep from the past 4 nights, I worked on a video project all day and by the end, was ready to crawl into a small hole and die. However I did not crawl into a small hole and die but rather walked out of my bathroom at midnight and slammed my face right into a wall (accidentally) I swear that wall wasn't so close to the bathroom. Maybe the walls in my apartment have some sort of nighttime alternate life that I don't know about. Like as soon as I turn off the lights they go to the awesome Wall club where they all engage in debaucherous activities with other walls. Dancing to Gloria Gaynor and soaking their plaster in cheap wall booze. However, last night I caught them surprised and they couldn't return to their natural positions and thus I faceplanted directly into the corner of one of the mischievous creatures. Well now my right eyebrow feels dented in and the right side of my face feels slightly numb. Walls....can't live with 'em...can't live without them... fuckers.

A break from the drama

So here is a break from the dramatic novella I started writing in my last post. I will get back to it, I just realised that it was preventing me from writing in the blog at all and I can't have that now can I? So now I've decided to use this arena to vent all of my frustrations and joys in this tiny plastic wrapped suction cupped world.

Yesterday I was walking down the street outside of my house and a couple of pimple faced undergrads toting a cheap hi-8 camera and some condenser mics approached and wanted to ask me some questions. So I figured either these two were members of the secret nerd police or they were film students (which pretty much is the secret nerd police for those who didn't go to film school) I obliged to answer all their questions because I am pretty much a ham when it comes to hot on the street interviews. And the paler of the two held an ice cream cone shaped wind socked mic up to my mouth and asked:
"Do you use Myspace?"
What is it lately with Myspace? Seriously should I be worried? When I joined myspace a couple of years ago I thought it was sort of interesting, I mean in that internet phenomenon pop culture trashy playground sort of way. It was Friendster's sluttier younger cousin. You know, the one that always wanders around in a tank top and cut off hot pant jeans and loves the movie "The Wedding Planner" But lately all I hear about is Myspace Myspace Myspace. It's like somehow the younger sluttier cousin ran for president and won and now completely controls the universe. For god's sakes, it's the second most viewed page on the internet after google. At least google gives you some sort of information. Myspace just gives you some sort of personal weird vallidation. Some channel to be whoever you want. (Which usually turns out to be a brooding emo hipster) But maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this is just what our society needs. Maybe we'll all become so completely blissed out in our world of pre-teen softcore porn shots that we will forget about all the war and hatred in the world. Maybe myspace is the answer to all our problems, to all the unjustices in the world....maybe Myspace is the new Holy Grail. Gosh I hope so...
I told this to the pimple faced boy with the condensor mic. He looked shocked for a moment, but then he realised that the mic wasn't actually plugged into the camera at all and well...my tyrade was lost forever. And...I do love myspace.

Part I (It was golden...)

It was golden she said-- ready to go. Pressing 1982 adidas blue and white striped tennies down hard onto the dirty pedal of the Cadillac, she sends the vehicle rocketing off onto cold midnight concrete.
2nd Gear.
The sky is warm. A faint smell of eucalyptus stings the air like the shrill voice of a soprano on opening night at the Met. And now she's so far from the Met, so far from anything that vaguely resembles New York City.
3rd Gear.
The hull of the Cadillac begins to creak and whine. Outside its thick scratched windows, the world blurs into an orange desert smear of Joshua Trees and soil.
4th Gear.
Smoke tendrils flip and flop from thick red lips. She bats her eyes, the fourteenth eyelash of her left eye sheds two microscopic black dust balls of mascara. She pulls another drag off the cigarette, her lips leave lipstick stains on the filter. Evidence. She cracks the window a little more, the air momentarily swirls the smoke throughout the car and she takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with a fine coat of dust and gravel.
5th Gear.
"It's almost as if the entire world fell asleep one night and never woke up" she grumbles to the empty passenger seat on her right. She hasn't seen anyone in days. How long has it been? She thinks back to the last time she had any sort of interaction with a living human being. Last Thursday, At the gas station? There must've been somebody working in the convenience store while she pumped another fresh 14 gallons into the hungry Caddy. Some pimple faced seventeen year old bumblefuck slurpy vendor crunching into a sodium heavy meat stick as she pumped gas in another town with a name ending in 'Ville.'
How long HAS it been?
She hadn't actually seen anyone in the convenience store.
A fly buzzes into the car, the kind of fly so thick and black you wouldn't want to kill it on a wall for fear of leaving a large fly stain. The girl, the woman, barely notices. She bites her lip. The fly buzzes around and around, drunk on the smell of nicotine and cheap pine tree shaped air fresheners. It lands on the woman's dark red bangs that partially obscure her right eye and she brushes the insect away. The fly flips into the backseat and sticks to the leather upholstery. It crawls into the gap between the seats and nestles itself deep into the body of the car. From inside the trunk, the insect claws its way across grey velvet lining dotted with oil stains. In the darkness of the small tight trunk, the fly buzzes over a rough red corrugated surface, around a cold metal clasp, under a plastic handle.
The car rocks back and forth, a boat wavering between faded yellow wiry asphalt.
The fly sits atop the small red suitcase nestled sweetly in the trunk of the car and rubs it's tiny feet together. With a hairy pair of lips, the fly quietly licks the top of the suitcase. Inside this red ballistic nylon shell, locked tightly in the trunk of a Cadillac going 115 miles per hour somewhere in the desert between New York and Los Angeles is six hundred thousand dollars in cash.
Celeste lights another cigarette and pushes the dirty pedal of the Cadillac a little further into the floor...

Where no cars go...

Today I got 0 emails, 0 emails can you believe that?!
this is a first since maybe 6th grade!
love gabe

Animated Advertisement

Last night I was feeling lethargic and so I decided to do something new...I was browsing through the Village Voice when I realised I have never actually been to a play in New York City. SO, I flipped to the theater section and saw that there was a production of TAPE going on in midtown which I could easily attend for 17 bucks. So I hoofed it up 29 blocks over to W36th and 8th avenue to the Underground Artists Theater Company playhouse for a short theatrical endeavor. The theater was small and only fit about 40 people although only 15 were in attendance. I was fairly familiar with the play as I once had to recreate a scene for a film class in college, and while the performance was slightly over-acted, it was still exciting to see live acting again. I think that maybe we are too used to having a certain distance between ourselves and acting (usually in the form of a screen) and seeing actors up close and personal really is much more exciting.

On my way back home after the play I decided to walk back whichever way the street lights took me. What I mean by this is that whichever street light was green is the one I would walk down. So I took a nice 45 minute walk home and saw many things I would've never noticed otherwise. As I was walking I suddenly looked to my right and found myself staring at an animation moving right next to me on the street! It's hard to explain, but a light box with small slits was hanging on the scafolding nex to me. So as I walked by the slits, the pictures on the inside turned into an animation of a new car commercial. I have posted the experience below so check it out....you never know what you might see in New York City.
Street Animation