rollertrain

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Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:31:46 -0500

New fave porn athlete: C.J. [not usually big on the boney euros,...

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:41:56 -0500

New fave porn athlete: C.J.

[not usually big on the boney euros, but this woman displays acrobatics i haven’t seen for years. look for her evil angel titles if you still support good porn from good studios.]

[that glass table tease? damn. circa dinner party, old school. hot.]

Art Skool Up!Down! Date [tips: don’t waste time reading...

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 01:07:00 -0500

Art Skool Up!Down! Date

[tips: don’t waste time reading this unless you’ve already been through it or you’re thinking about going through it. or you’re just really curious or bored or crazy. welcome.]

Disorganized introductory paragraph, followed by several lazy bullet-point lists of final progress in various fine art classes, then roughly rounded off with an open conclusion that has no explicit point.

For the record: It’s much less vulnerable to post images of your boobs than to break down (heh) the process of going through art school in your mid-thirties.

This last round was awesome and tough, weird and fun and horrible and valuable.

Last summer, a friend of mine said something like “It’s not really possible to evaluate art work once it’s past the fundamental stage.”

This year, a lot of people asked “Why the fuck with the art stuff” kind of questions. Answer: Impossible! Hard. Fun! Retarded. Awesome! Stupid. Broke! FUN. Options? None and all!

[aside: this is the real fine art industry, via artfagcity. hilarious shit. again, the similarities between porn and fine art worlds are just as sick and delicious as the financial differences.]

[also, what the fuck does fine mean? i used to (still) think it meant hot dudes, then i thought it was fancy, and now i know it just means someone who has enough experience in any trade to let you know that, whether or not you dig their work, you’re at least in trustworthy hands. this trust applies to art stuff and work stuff. sarah calls the latter tool belters. correct.]

The idea of art school was so fun for the first two years. Shiny and new! Hot black chicks! Sleep late and still get the work done! These are the breaks! Learned a lot, made good marks, met cool folks, enjoyed the real-world hiatus.

This last year, which is two compressed academic years, has been an adventure. Never dealt with this kind of stress before. Art stress is different than work stress. Maybe it’s like other kinds of stress that I know nothing about. I don’t know. You just learn skills well or poorly, put your work out into the Bored Indifference and wait to see what does or does not happen.

And that’s pretty much what I learned this last semester: I don’t know shit about shit about shit. All I know is that I don’t handle stress well at all, and that handling stress well-ish is something I’ll learn to do better. Maybe not ever well, but just better.

Unless you’re genetically gifted or trained early, I think learning how to function with distress and eustress is something that comes with age. So, anyway -

Photography (B&W film) was my favorite class. I loved this class for a lot of reasons, and spent the bulk of my enthusiasm in the darkroom at the CDS. The mathy parts on the written exams were tough because I’m retarded with math and I don’t retain anything from standard test-taking, so I scored poorly on those parts. But I did some ballsy work with ghetto entrepreneurs who are too smart to grant permission to some old broad to post their photos on the internet, and I’m incredibly grateful to them for allowing me into their lives in random moments. I don’t think I’m a whizz at film photography, but the medium works well with my brain.

Art History classes at NCCU are always tough. Michele Patterson is one of the smartest art historians (and peoples? women’s? lady’s? persons? biggums?) I’ve ever encountered. She puts equal emphasis on art works and architecture, which is probably a standard thing for art history classes, and this is a great way to make sense of weird, basic human history. Her expectations are high enough to have kept us on our heads and toes and asses. I can’t believe I got good marks in both Renaissance Art (which is equally easy to love and loathe) and Ancient Art (which makes sense of the world, and is easier to understand). She’s one of the best teacher lady’s I’ve ever had, and I hope I can make it through her Modern art class next semester. I bet her classes are much more research/inferential driven than most Duke classes, which is funny, because Dookies specialize in art history. Also, writing formal art papers is soo hard and boring and actually necessary and they just suck. Getting through them was tough.

[matt is a fucking saint, literally, if you’re a real fucking nerd and understood the whole stoodent Caravaggio nonsense.]

Printmaking I was really cool. I had to take this class as an indie-study because of schedule conflicts, which kinda sucked, because Connie Floyd is a bad-ass who taught me as much as he could between his crazy schedule and mine. I’m taking the II class next/last semester as an indie because i want to get out of academia as soon as possible, but I’d like to shoot for a printmaking class at Penland or some such place. The resulting work goes so much quicker than painting, and seems like a better fit than trying to be a Kate Kretz wannabe (hero, *huge* influence). I suck at painting, but I think I could do some interesting stuff with various printmaking techniques. All the OCD in half the time, and repeatable.

Painting IV was a breeze, because it was already done. Sometimes, only sometimes, I plan things in accordance to the object constancy. Also, I like to watch black porn from Evil Angel a lot (NSFW blah). That’s art.

So that was this past semester. Made almost four A’s, maintained a 3.9-something, which really matters to me but has no worth beyond the white-whatever towers. Disappeared from my family, pissed off my few good friends, taught a class, made some cool stuff that will never get online, had a lot of financial stress, enjoyed some beautiful distractions, enjoyed working at the Maxxipad, will turn 36 in 24 hours, and get to repeat the final art cycle in January. Hopefully, I’ll graduate in early May 2010.

[want to bitch about NCCU’s fucked paperwork bullshit, which cost me $2K i do not have readily available, but i think this shit is standard academia. kids, go to tech schools or read the aside here.]

Oh yea: What’s my focus? Sex. Sex and encaustic painting and sex and it’s-gonna-get-even-weirder sex. And also stories. Let us stop asking until it figures itself out. Until then, Studio F-Art.

[image: daniels playing banjo at the maxxipad, destroying porn store stereotypes in the southeast.]

Copywriter’s unnoticed angst from the Charlotte Observer,...

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 11:36:12 -0500

Copywriter’s unnoticed angst from the Charlotte Observer, 3.2.95.

[via buckaroo]

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Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:25:09 -0500

rundr wonder: Let’s just say that I am VERY pleased that one of...

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 15:17:47 -0500

rundr wonder: Let’s just say that I am VERY pleased that one of the vintage valentine auctions I won on ebay included this mysterious bearded lady.

jonnodotcom: Lost Caravaggio painting ‘was burnt by Mafia’:...

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 11:01:00 -0500

jonnodotcom:

Lost Caravaggio painting ‘was burnt by Mafia’: “(T)he painting, said to be worth at least £20 million, was handed for safe keeping to the Pullara family, part of the Santa Maria di Gesu clan in Palermo, who hid it in a farm outbuilding. ‘There it was eaten by rats and pigs, and so was burnt,’ Spatuzza said.” (timesonline.co.uk)

Most difficult, frustrating academic paper I’ve ever had...

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 04:55:10 -0500

Most difficult, frustrating academic paper I’ve ever had to write. Status: DONE.

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Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:07:36 -0500

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Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:48:14 -0500

My uncle’s latest scar.

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:39:57 -0500

My uncle’s latest scar.

Crazy...

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:57:45 -0500

Crazy no-sleep-two-4-hour-art-history-final-exams-cut-it-me’self hair in the only (bath)room on NCCU’s campus that radiated heat.

[three final papers down, one to go. four final projects down, one to go. five final exams down, none to go. god, this blog just gets more and more interesting.]

“In the American south there is an ignorance that runs so...

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 22:29:34 -0500

“In the American south there is an ignorance that runs so deep, it actually has integrity.”

-Marc Maron, current obsession

The crazy nerds are impossible to resist. WTFpod is seeing me...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:05:51 -0500

The crazy nerds are impossible to resist. WTFpod is seeing me through finals hell, and teaching me important lessons in art making. Great show, great resource for anyone swimming against the stream.

Punk got cancer a couple decades ago, and alt.porn doesn’t...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:34:56 -0500

Punk got cancer a couple decades ago, and alt.porn doesn’t rent or sell or get made very well.

Has this ever been regrettable? Isn’t the entire point of taking the alternative porn road to make really masturbatable work? My dear pal O.C. might likely agree, though I hope not. Either way, that hard-earned work just collects dust on the millions of retail shelves of purgatorio.

[sometimes it’s not sad. but it’s mostly sad that the alt-etc-porn doesn’t move at all.]

Why? Alternative tattoo extreme young piercing porn spends too much time trying to be concepty instead of inspiring us locals to masturbate and have orgasms.

I can jerk off, with great pleasure, to the well-organized and neurologically perverted fantasies of about 7 decent pornographers, but it’s difficult to reach orgasm when you’re not seeing basic physiological reactions in the performers (flushed cheeks, swollen fingers, honest tears, verbal feedback, blushed chests, steely erections, pointed nipples, yea yea yea).

[singular POV. not judging anything. you should see my history on gomommy’s y4wnp00n.com. it’s obscene, illegal and sometimes delicious. so anyway, we were not having a conversation about how alternative porn tries to sell itself as real, but has mostly failed or lied.]

Timely, wordy, noteworthy exception: Documentary Sex - Comstock Films.

Meet Tony Comstock, maybe again. Maybe check out his recent ”sailed across a lot of water on a boat” action on his twitfeed]

[comstock films is not my thing in terms of getting off; i like my sex seedy and questionable with various risk taking, but comstock is making documentaries about love-making, and that task must be so difficult, because there is minimal edifice. i cannot imagine how much energy it takes to track, locate, hire and work with real couples who feel comfortable demonstrating these high, experienced levels of whatever intimacy is on camera.]

[that must be so much harder than moving your tattooed and beloved and so young! so pretty! places to the beast.]

[i would fail at that challenge. i’d beat your ass back and forth with concepts, but i’d never flesh them out and they’d die like fleas, because i’ve never had the balls to do what you have been doing. just know that most retail regulars are smart folks who appreciate every edit, every girl, every boy, every clever scene, every cover, every spine, every fucking thing you do. especially the BTS.]

I think I’ve done the National Guard porn path. Available as needed, turned to in times of crisis, respect for worthy veterans, ever curious, always interested. But I don’t know if you can quit this low frequency sex work forever, without turning into salt or a very sad christian. It’s just so - something that a friend said - so fucking popular, always utilized, a continuous necessity. Sex is on par with air, and we all know it.

It really is interesting to see the necessity of love documented on film. If I were a wealthy person, I’d ask Tony and Peggy Comstock about projects that deal with love in the realm of sex work on levels that continuously capture sexual dynamics:

1. Sexual surrogacy

2. The traditions and benefits of monogamy

3. Long-term intimate sex work

4. Senior lifestyle relationships that aren’t in Florida

5. Hispanic homos and lesbos and breeders or whatever - some sexual voice

6. Hot, vocal black chicks with not-black dudes

7. No fake subversive shitporn? Please?

Altporn, you’re an interesting case. I used to be just as artfaggy with the porno concepts. But then I started working with the people who fund your projects, or used to fund them, or maybe will only fund them.

Do you listen to your fans? Do you reply to the crazy storylined emails you get every fucking day? Do you care? Are you making what you need to make, or are you making what you’re paid to make? Are you an artist? A pornographer? Do you go to art fairs or porn conventions? What is the base difference?

[more clichés!]

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 20:46:27 -0500

[more clichés!]

NOT WITH A BANG [Phonecam image: 2/13 final oilgraphs for CDS...

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:28:00 -0500

NOT WITH A BANG

[Phonecam image: 2/13 final oilgraphs for CDS Photography and NCCU Renaissance art history portfolios.]

These are film prints of detail shots from Michelangelo Merisi/Caravaggio paintings, collected in a sort of pop-out art book. Here is a breakdown of how and why they were made:

- Took pictures onto Kodax Tri-X 400 film. Developed them with minimal damage.

- Dodged and burned and adjusted and fucked up and fixed things in the darkrooom, then altered each print with about 10 layers of oil glazes.

- Used Liquin and Utretch paint (alizarin crimson, vermillion, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, ultramarine blue, pthlao green and ivory black) and left many tiny brush hairs on the surface.

- By sheer luck, received free drymount tissue, which is the adhesive that bonds prints to matboard in a dry mount press (which looks like this). Also stumbled on a lot of 11x14” gray matboard sheets at the Scrap Exchange, which is a dependable resource for inspiration and cheap materials. The matboard was a buck a pound, and the right color. This never happens, but it did.

[- while we were there, matt found a telephoto lens that fits my canon AE-1 for $10, which would have been useful for this project, and will get used a lot.]

- Remembered that I know nothing about chemistry, and wasn’t sure if the oilgraphs (is this even a real term? i don’t know. kevissimo uses it on flickr and it sounds right, painting with oil on a photo print) would melt in the hot dry mount press, or start smoking or catch fire or whatever.

- Did a test at home and it worked. Did a test on the CDS press and it worked too.

[for google: you can dry mount oilgraphs. is google on twitter? i bet caravaggio is on twitter. oh look, he is.]

- For the narrative portion of the portfolio, wow, that is a horrible collection of words, I did actual research. Research is boring most of the time, but this Caravaggio dude is the main guy who attracts the young art-student cynics and punks because he was totally bipolar, drunk, horny all of the time, shame-smashed by a massive ego, morally flexible when the situation called for it, good at obnoxious PR tactics, a total bully and one of the gnarliest, most gentle artists of the high renaissance. He also killed dudes.

- That research led to the influence of Vag on the entire gross Baroque movement. I like the music alright, but most of the Baroque paintings are like porn conventions in Vegas. So loud and bright and ugly in the light, filled with drama because drama is loud too. The only kind of paintings I like less are Romantic paintings. Anyway.

- When English artists got into the Baroque style, they were on so many fucking drugs and so drunk all of the time, they went even crazier. Especially the writers. They’re known as the Metaphysical Poets. John Donne was the most popular.

- I don’t really get the metaphysical poetry. Super weird structures, lots of being witty and covering it up with conceits and metaphors to make the inside jokes and references even harder to find. Either that or they were all smoking opium seventeen times a day and drinking only alcohol. Not really interesting.

- But a couple hundred years later, T.S. Eliot got obsessed with them and ripped them off and made their tricks more readable and modern and better. I thought about some of my favorite short-ish poems by Eliot, and remembered The Hollow Men, and immediately saw the visual connection with Caravaggio: Nothing fancy, these are the streets, this is the dirt, the sky is filthy, people drink infested water and we’re going to spend our lives polishing shit into the ultimate #1 golden cliché: Quod tu es, ego fui, quod ego sum, tu eris.

- And then the latch clicked. I don’t know if it’s a perfect match; it feels close. Since this is a school project, it really doesn’t matter:

- Caravaggio is the renaissance artist I like best, which is a total art-student cliché. T.S. Eliot is one of my favorite modern poets, and the musical CATS made me fall in love with him when I was a kid, and I still love CATS, and that is such a huge cliché that it almost unclichés itself. Seriously - either T.S. Eliot’s face or the CATS logo is probably the avatar for twitter.com/cliché.

- So I made a cliché built from clichés because the internet has become so tiresome. Especially art criticism and popular art blogs. Everyone is so smart and witty and everything, everything, everything, everything you’ll ever see or do or make or take is already a cliché.

- And Caravaggio and Eliot made beautiful, horrible, dramatic things with a simplicity none of us can make.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

[this blog post is the final portion of my assignment. thanks for reading.]

Oil glazes, resin prints and Caravaggio.

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:01:31 -0500

Oil glazes, resin prints and Caravaggio.

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Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:37:42 -0500

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Sat, 05 Dec 2009 17:32:45 -0500