About Me

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Michael seeks to create works that reflect his struggles with the world he finds himself living in, and the commonalities that we all share in this. Desire, Defeat, Acceptance, Judgment, Love, Fear, Time, and Space. Michael's studio is downtown Los Angeles in the Spring Arts Tower. "Happiness is that funny little place halfway between fantasy and reality." -me

Monday, November 19, 2012

The Self in the 21st Century...3rd section.


...Section 1&2 may be read on Facebook if you are a friend.

I wanted to move to Galisteo, New Mexico when I grew up and live the life of a recluse. Now it seems, this century makes a recluse of all of us as we no longer need to interface, literally, because we can intercyber instead. Alone with my gizmo’s I can relate when I want to. I hear when someone wants me but I don’t have to respond, the message will be waiting when I choose to view it. I can post a birthday greeting on YouTube for my best friend who will love it because it is so publicly declarative, and I didn’t have to leave my warm cup of coffee sitting on the dining room table to make and send it. I’ve connected and reclused myself simultaneously. 
This simultaneousness is the heart of living in this 21st Century, and its illusions are as solid as the little rectangular flat devices we carry in our pockets enabling us to access them. I don’t believe in accessibility, however it seems I rely on it around the clock and participate in its machinations just the same. As an artist I have made myself accessible in more ways than I care to intellectually or spiritually recognize, and as such have given way to faith over disbelief that the accessibility I invoke will be the same ones that enable a gallery to find and promote me and my ideas. Twittering like millions of other birds as we nest on invisible lines perched in our iPhones, we read and dismiss information that was carefully crafted in under 144 characters with speed freak like distraction. Distractions once reserved for the meth addicted or ritalin needing grade-schooler, now embody most of the people I know, myself included. Fed by a constant need to know what is happening in the world around us, I’m certain however I know less about the world than I did in the previous century even as news sources and their reports are IV fed into my devices. 
I no longer feel as if I inhabit a world, taking up my little space in it, but that I am inhabited and what space I did have is no longer filled by me, as I seem to exist less and less. 
I think this feeling starts with my work and awareness as an artist. As more and more people move into the realm of being 'artists,' regardless of creative ability, understanding, or thought, my art world and its space diminishes. I may be a part of the generation possessing its last artists, as actual art making has been dissolved and replaced by the idea of art. Even the idea is appropriated so no longer is an idea required to produce. The artist will no longer be necessary and the world will have digitized all of it. Printing an oil painting, xeroxing a sculpture, and gif’ing a moving image from several still ones; all amateur crafted through technology. Even Garageband makes music for you and Soundcloud publishes it, and that feeds into Twitter and gets shared on a blog that hundreds of followers reblog. A regular blogjam of regurgitated regurgitation. RT’ing has become the last bastion of individual thought. You no longer have to have a thought, just RT one. Worst of all the creation of Rap, as it proves to be the final sound of music made. There was a time when artists wrote songs, and a generation later that song was re-recorded by another artist. Royalties were paid, as was homage to the original source, and a new artists’ insight through their era’s eyes was shared. Now a rap artist writes and records a rap, but who is going to re-record Bitch N****z by Snoop Dog? No one. Once artists like Joni Mitchell could think of the royalties coming in from re-records, but Snoop can’t imagine this kind of financial dividend as his work begins and ends with his own efforts. And efforts that may have been lifted in a riff written by Miles Davis, or a loop digitized on GarageBand, anyway. 
This is what it means to be living in the 21st Century. The previous century’s beginnings was an open field of artistic and industrial innovations and progress. Diseases were eliminated or contained. Methodology was crafted and educationally implemented. Real estate was ergonomically planned and cities grew enriching their space as the inhabitants filled them.
The beginning’s of this century were birthed out of the Y2K scare, which proved to be unfound. Yet a few years later as planes flew into towers in Manhattan, we were forced to re-boot in a new era we may not have been psychologically ready for and the shock of that crash was much the same kind of shock re-booting implements. Anti-terrorism tactics of searching the elderly in airports before plane boarding, and reporting suspicious persons and activity vetted anyone in their biases toward those unlike, birthing internet bullying their ugly offspring.  Welcome, 2013.  

Thursday, November 15, 2012

True Story:


Riding my bike home from my best friend’s house. Mom said be home by midnight. 

The field between our houses was a couple of acres. Old crops of wheat still sprouted up, but what was once farmland was now a field. This field would soon be new homes and a street connecting his neighborhood and mine would be in its place. I thought this field was pretty special. I didn’t want homes being built there. It felt sacred to me. Should be left alone. Sometimes I got scared riding my bike home through the field at night, down the dirt beaten path so many kids used. Used mostly during the day though. Sometimes I rode my bike all around the acreage even though the distance was triple, because I didn’t feel like crossing the field alone. This night I had to hurry to get home. It was getting late. 

Late summer night. Quiet. Beautiful and very still. Growing up in a town so silently silent, especially in the summer when everyone vacated to go to the lakes. I loved it. No one around. Listen for the train whistle from the tracks a few miles away just to be sure you aren't the only one left. Someone else is up. Someone else is awake. someone else is here.

Whistle blow. Blooow. Bloooow. 

A mourning dove in the evening as sun was setting would do the same thing to me. Remind me I’m not alone. Another being is near. 

Coo. Coo. Cooooooo. 

This night no train. Doves asleep. Just me. Soundless. The field. The dark night sky. The beaten dirt path. Somewhere a clock was ticking warning me to hurry. My bike metal chain and spokes banging as I rode shot home. Getting close to the street, closer to the homes and something catches my attention. A sound. A drone. A buzz. What is that sound? Like a garbage truck in hydraulic lift. Louder. More condensed. A sound I can’t place. What is that sound? I’m nearing the end of the field, almost to the street. Our house is across the street, second one from the corner. Always struck me as an odd location. Available. Exposed. Just off the edge, but not far enough in. Sitting silently in the dark of the night. A streetlamp on the opposite side lit the driveway. A small tree on the verge not moving. No wind. No one on the road. Just me, my bike, this sound. 

Squinting as I near the house, trying to orient the sound with my eyes in the dark. I’m starting to ride faster now this sound urging me. I see something. Noise coming from the end of our driveway. Something I can’t identify. Something is at the end of our driveway. The sound tells me it could be a garbage truck, but this is impossible. Not this late. Not on this day, not even close. I am looking at it trying to identify. It is smaller than a garbage truck, and my mind is trying to orient what I’m looking at. The sound confuses what the object could be. Not quite a truck, smaller. I am thinking a man with a shopping cart. A shopping cart? No, that is too small. Shopping cart doesn’t make that kind of noise. Doesn’t make sense. Mechanical electrical vibrating sound noise. So I think it must be, truck.  But no, what I see is too small for that. Smaller than a truck. As tall but not as long and more dense. 

I flash on the sound which is so loud now I wonder why no one is coming out of their front doors to investigate. This small college town where nothing ever happens. People leave their doors unlocked at night. Yet no one comes out of their front door. No one turns on a porch light. This sound. This shape of noise mass and a person behind it at the end of the driveway. Why isn’t the man in the garbage truck driving? It isn’t a garbage truck. He isn’t in it either. He is behind it. He is pushing it? I think of Mad Max. It isn’t necessarily a man. 
Something not from this time is at the end of our driveway and I have to pass it up our driveway to ride my bike into the garage. How do I know it isn’t from this time? From the space I live in? I am terrified, I am out of my body. What the hell is that. I want to cry. I’m scared. I can’t look at it any longer. That sound is near deafening. A male being with a shopping cart the size of a truck full of stuff making a horrible noise at the end of our driveway. I’m alone. I have to get home. 

I ride my bike up and over the curb diagonally across our lawn to the far side of the house where I know the gate to the fence is always open, otherwise I couldn’t get into the backyard. I ride around to the back door of the garage, connected to our house. Jump off my bike and throw myself at the backdoor to the house which is unbelievably locked. I can hear him. It. That. The sound is getting closer, right at our front door. I am banging on the back door with my fists, and miraculously mom appears. I am stammering. That sound. That sound. What is that? In the driveway. Mom! My mom doesn’t even respond. She looks out the window of the front door and nothing is there. No sound. Nothing. She doesn’t acknowledge my hysteria and says goodnight and walks upstairs to her room. I run downstairs to my room, which has windows on ground level facing the driveway.

Don’t turn on your bedroom light. You don’t want to be seen through the windows of your room.

I look out. Nothing is there. No sound. No man. No noise. No truck. Nothing is there.