shelflife by visitor

I don’t really recall the context of the request–which isn’t unusual of anything involving Dylan Nyoukis, but I was asked to provide Chocolate Monk with an album of my tracks. Tracks? What the fuck?

I don’t know how exactly Dylan was made aware that I’d been recording anything. I may have slipped him a CD-R at a show at the Knitting Factory that he was in town for, but for the life of me, I have no recollection of the details on this one.

So, tracks… I had these microcassette tapes I had been recording. They were analog synth and vocal experiments. There were two distinct avenues I was exploring–pedal processing (usually just delay and phase) and pedal/synth processing, but in both cases, the fundamental signal being manipulated was just voice–none of this bleep-bloop synth stuff. I wanted to keep everything human.

I pulled together a set of tracks–evenly split between the two concepts I’d been playing with. I named each track for the designer of a chair that best suited the sounds. Dylan actually released it. I couldn’t believe it.

I’ve only ever performed the material live once–at the No Fun Fest. It was a battle between Mokinox and Glamorous Pat. We both ended up naked in a room full of a couple-hundred confused onlookers. I had an inverted crucifix taped to my dick and was smashing Jesus on a contact mic. I lost him that night–Jesus. I still have the cross, but I don’t think it’s technically a crucifix anymore if ol’ J.C.’s given up the ghost.

A little-known tidbit is that the interstitial, title and credit noise on the FUN FROM NONE No Fun Fest DVDs I did for Load Records is from the unreleased Mokinox cassette, Cherbourg.

STARCK.MP3

VAN DER ROHE.MP3 

Kim’s a compulsive omni-maker. A lot of people know her band. Some remember X-Girl. A few remember her role in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days. Fewer know of the books, columns and articles she’s written. Then there are the exhibits she’s curated, the theater actions she’s directed, the films she’s made and that dancing she did for our film in the pink wig and school girl skirt. There’s also the point of this post–the portraits she’s painted.

I think the first time I noticed her paintings was during a mind-numbing afternoon of troubleshooting an old Apple Performa she had in the Gordon/Moore apartment in NYC. I had this non-functional, artifact of prehistoric computing dismantled on the floor of her office and stood up to refocus my eyes thru the window to Crosby St. Looking back down at the dust-bunny ravaged components on the floor, I caught a glimpse of a basket boiling over with canvases.

“Oh shit. So this is where the cover for Sentimental Education came from.” I guess I hadn’t realized she’d painted that image. I flipped thru the paintings in the basket and shouted across the living room to ask Kim about them. “They’re just something I’m working on. I’m not sure what’ll happen with them. I’ve been giving ‘em to people as gifts. You want some more tea? Hey, Thurston–you want to order some Indian? Chris, you want Indian?” It was like that–just this one-more-thing she was doing.  

I dug back into the eviscerated machine, repaired the power supply and got it all back together and running. The three of us sat down for some Baluchi’s and pondered the direction the internet would ultimately take. It was ‘96 or ‘97, so it was anybody’s guess. Turns out we were all right in our theories of meta-expansion/collapse, content-as-king entertainment hub and advertising-dense wasteland. We finished our meal. I packed up my tools and laptop and headed out to the elevator. Kim popped open their door with a painting in her hands. “Here. You liked this one, right? Take it. Thanks, Chris.” A kiss on the cheek, a salutory wave from Thurston and the elevator dinged.  

Since then, my little collection of Kimstuff’s expanded substantially. Here’s that first painting, side-by- side with one of the others she painted on vinyl a couple of years later.