working on grant, or rather avoiding working on a grant.

I’m at a meet up of Flickr, or Vimeo types: camera people. We are running around some strange, beautiful city shooting pictures and films and video. I use a strange digital camera with a pencil long lens shaft. It’s fairly small, but you can shoot thousands of pictures.

Head in the gutter past couple of days. Nothing much to say about it.

I carry a stack of portraits of every man my woman has been with before me. Someone sees the pictures and wants to buy them which puts me in a quandary. I was planning to burn them.

I am allowed to use the studio of a collector’s son who has gone off to Berlin. The studio is a two room cottage behind a hospital. It has a good wall for painting on, but I spend a day just being quiet in the space. Later I find all the drawings the collector ever bought from me in a stack in the closet mixed up with some pages of notes and sketches from the kid in Berlin.

Ever get into a google loop where you start looking up people you knew a million years ago… funny but the ones you are really curious about don’t even show up in google.

I visit a friend’s studio and he has created a staircase like a large fusilli pasta. It is a spiral ramp of plaster up to his loft. I see there are tons of my book page drawings layed out on the ramp. I find it difficult to climb the thing. It is so steep and smooth and I’m wearing socks and keep slipping down and scattering the pages.

Just bought some video tape, don’t know what to shoot, but here is an interesting blog: Pouring Down.

This is a page from the old Collectibles project monoprinted with the day before yesterday’s drawing and reworked. Been in grant writing mode… chances slim, but still it eats time…. I had not memorable dreams.

I go to a cathedral to sketch the architecture and I notice a large portrait of the Virgin Mary done in a contemporary style. The background is all black and the face is abstract and colorful with eyes made from LCD display and they change colors and shape and become video, etc. I notice I’m alone in the church and overcome by an urge, I steal the Madonna off the wall and walk it back to my studio.

I go to visit a friend in Oregon… not Portland, but the second city; something like McClintlock… Not a real place, but he has a house overlooking the river and seems to be doing very well. He says he works in Airplane Salvage. It’s a bit like the deep sea divers who search for gold, only he finds airplane crashes and salvages all the crap in people’s luggage that gets scattered around the disaster. I say to my friend’s father, “Must be a lot of drugs, right? He must be going after the drug planes that run out of fuel and ditch with tons of cocaine?”
He assures me I am mistaken… “Those planes never crash,” he says. “These are just regular planes.”

Are there really that many plane crashes? Have I been missing something? I wonder.

The house is like one huge art installation, with moving bits of welded steel sculpture and lighting effects and a stage for performance, people are playing music all about, and dancing, and I try to shoot this “set” with my video camera and the father gets very upset. Later I find the father has rented the swimming pool for a Porno shoot. I don’t think I trust the father at all. I put my camera down on what turns out to be a burlap bale of Columbian Cannabis. McClintlock is one strange town.

We open the door to the studio building and find a man laying in a pool of blood. The whole navy ship gray stairwell is covered in splashes of molasses-like blood. At first we think he is a homeless guy who has been bludgeoned by thugs, but later I ride the elevator up to my friend’s studio. The “elevator” it consists of a series of ladder rungs that one holds onto and they wind you up like a conveyer belt. By the fourth floor, I am reeling with vertigo. I’m pretty sure that the dead guy fell off the “elevator”. This sort of thing must happen all the time.

Then in the chaos, they are separated and he flees the city with a small group that includes her sister, just back from studying in Poland, or was it Estonia? He avoids the little Estonian in deference to his love. But in the days that follow and the fears of the journey, they walk closer and laugh at nervous jokes and she hides in his coat when the wind blows and takes his hand at a sudden noise. Then they are often walking hand in hand. Nothing more has happened. She is pretty. She has a small frame, but an out sized personality; a bit of a wild child. She tells him stories of using her mother’s prescriptions to FedEx strange herbal drugs to Estonia. “They got you very high,” she said, “But also helped build Amino Acids…. so it didn’t feel like vice.” He smiles and nothing more has happened, but he has fallen in love with the sister just back from Estonia. He can’t help himself. It’s like the one sister has nudged the other sister right out of him. “What a mess,” he thinks and then he realizes that they are all going to die under the foot of a giant lizard. He kisses her beside a burnt tree. More happens.

He wears the memory of her on that yellow bed with the red pillows like he would wear a hat and when her mother was dying from Parkinson’s he was not invited to the hospital and instead waited outside on a bench with bag of getting cold take out Chinese. She eventually came down in tears and Godzilla ate the city.

I passed myself on a bridge.
Where are you going?
Back. You?
Forward.