Last night I had the strangest dream. I did a painting performance for JFK up in Canada. He didn’t look like JFK and he was too busy with politics to care much about my paintings. I offered him one, but he declined and I sort of agreed with him. One was too loose and the other too stiff. Later I went to some impossible Xanadu of a mall that seemed rendered in digital post production. The place was ornate and enormous and I got separated from my group from the JFK event (I think they were Hong Kong Chinese). I realized I had no idea where I was or how to get back to the hotel when I ended up walking through a sort vice court (like you have a food court in a mall, but this was all liquor and drugs and in the lower depths of the mall). Someone snatched my wallet and I chased him into a bar where the entire cast of characters there began a theatrical negotiation. If I agreed to give them 25% of the cash as a “reward”, they would return the wallet and I could even take part in the drinks they would buy. I didn’t think there were many options and I agreed and a man dressed like a brown leather Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland brought me my wallet and cell phone in paper bag. Someone was looking for me from the event, but I decided to sit down and stay a while with this looking glass menagerie of drunken thieves.

I made a few drawings after reading in Kerouac:
….I’d gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death and I had really no lie come to a point where I regarded lust as offensive and even cruel. “Pretty girls make graves,” was my saying…

Last Night I had a dream
It was much more interesting than my life
I would have stayed asleep
if it wasn’t for the dog with diarrhea

Here is a shot of the On The Road scroll where Jack Kerouac wrote the novel in one long Benzedrine fueled act of typing. It’s really a fantastic sculpture as well as being a great book. Belongs in a museum as much as a Library. I’d like to see it next to Rauchenberg’s tire print scroll just as one idea. I’ve heard the story of Kerouac writing on long rolls for years, but it was only recently that The New York Public Library put a few on display, with On The Road as the center line down the Liway. It got me reading Kerouac again. The drawing is mine with a page torn out of Dharma Bums, the photo is from Ben Vershbow.

Trying to turn my head to other things

I can’t speak for you, but I for one am sick of my own voice. Here’s a self portrait that’s been sitting in the studio for a few months waiting for the blog to go figurative again.

Vid of Friday’s Talk.

A drawing in the pages of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums that I started at Colin Stetson’s concert and finished in the studio. I’m currently editing the film documentation of the reading on Friday. I’m actually using a track from his new cd and it’s working very well.

Went to see Colin Stetson play last night at Monkeytown. He plays solo saxaphone and all those wonderfull wood winds and its amazingly physical and passionate, but also seems to make a lot of sense after electronic and minimalist music. He was all over the room and the instrument and the sound echoed from the cinder block walls and went right through me. I drew in the first few chapters of Dharma Bums to try and capture the energy. It was like grabbing at smoke. I tried to work them today, but in the end I turned to the rice paper and whipped this drawing out… it’s about as close as I can get at the moment.

Did the old Hamlet Camcorder as skull performance Last Night at the LMCC reading. So there may be some video documentation of the event some time this week. I uploaded it last night to i-movie at about three in the morning. It sounded okay, but what do I know? It was three in the morning.

Doing a little reading/presentation tonight and I’m sort of racking my brain to figure out what I want to say. Infact at the moment I’m reworking an old e-book in an attempt to make it fit a sort of improvised narrative I might (given enough courage) speak. Also, now that the collectibles book is done… have to make things out of a given constraint.

Lat Friday I was hanging out with Ben and he threw me a pad of rice paper and started noodling on the guitar. I recorded him with the tiny mic on my still camera and eventually put it in the I Want More video. We also spent some time laughing at You Tube viral trash like the THX lemur below. We talked about scale on the internet (as I’ve been trying to make these longer documentary experiments) and wondered if these multiauthored motion jokes weren’t in some way great art. This one is like that uh huh moment of satori writ in cross species EYE get it face recognition. Anyway, it made us laugh.

Friday, March 21, 2008, 7-9pm—New York, NY—125 Maiden Lane, 2nd Floor.

FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY: Step inside three books, drink free beer and wine, and experience the future of the book:

Mark Batty Publisher, Hotel St. George Press, the Institute for the Future of the Book, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Writers Residency program offer a night of multi-media readings that invite attendees to step inside books, celebrating how new media and traditional publishing fuse to create innovative projects that are more than “just books.” On this night, authors Garth Risk Hallberg, Alex Rose, and Alex Itin demonstrate how their stories rely on more than just words.

Hallberg’s illustrated novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, documents two fictional families through 63 entries accompanied by evocative photographs contributed by some of today’s freshest photographic talents, as culled from the book’s ongoing companion website, afieldguide.com.
Read from start to finish or in a “choose your own adventure” style, Hallberg’s attention to narrative detail makes clear why he was included in the 2008 Harcourt Best New American Voices anthology, and why Print called A Field Guide to the North American Family “a modern illuminated manuscript.” Hallberg will project photographs from the book.

The interwoven, post-modern folktales that comprise The Musical Illusionist by Alex Rose muse upon historical arcana, tethered together by music and topography. Drawing on his experience as a director whose films, videos, and animations have appeared on
HBO, MTV, Comedy Central, Showtime, and the BBC, Rose conjures, in the words of the Village Voice, “the playful parables of Jorge Luis Borges. . . exotic maps and exquisite prints further suggest a volume passed down from an epoch much more enthralled with mystery than our own.” Rose will read from the title story of his collection, accompanied by a surround-sound score composed by David Little and recorded by the Formalist Quartet.

As an artist-in-residence at Brooklyn’s Institute for the Future of the Book, Alex Itin uses text, original illustrations and animations, and music to encourage readers to reconsider the definition of a book. Take for example Itin’s Orson Whales: Melville’s Moby Dick meets Orson Welles, and Led Zeppelin. Itin’s multi-media books will be screened.

The LMCC is the leading voice for arts and culture in downtown New York City, producing cultural events and promoting the arts through grants, services, advocacy, and cultural development programs.

I’m thinking of this, the second part of the Portland Trilogy, as the Valley of Desire.

Coming to the end of the Time Life Encylopedia of Collectibles Beads to Boxes book. Meanwhile there’s some interesting thoughts on my recent and ongoing efforts on if book.

Here’s a little box of memories. Trying again to tell stories. Most of mine or slightly morbid, but hopefully hopefull.

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Working on some Portland edits and the dog went in to have a tumor removed from her lip. Wish her good luck.

Trying to get back to work. Distracted by fatigue, laundry, broken toilets, general nausea.

Back from Portland and back to the book and then tons of video to edit, etc. This for now.

Untitled from Remyyy on Vimeo.
As i’m travelling look at this vid as it feels like what I’m seeing, or thinking, or something.

Traveling in space felt like moving backward in time. I’m still not certain when I am. I wake up in the morning with all these monsters I have made staring back at me. They are like some sort of mirror that I dreamed and am now redreaming them and I go back to sleep and dream of airports and my dog. All over Portland there are second run movie theaters that have never been turned into multiplexes. They are real theaters and they have pub style beer. Seems like a great place for a film festival.

dalas verdugo’s Guide to New York City from dalas verdugo on Vimeo.