shelflife by visitor

THIS VEHICLE HAS BEEN SCHEDULED FOR REMOVAL. Looking over this book for the first time in a few years just now, I’m realizing that the cover has a replica of a sticker from the NYC Department of Sanitation Derelict Vehicle Removal Program adhered to an offset-printed detail of what looks to be a fried, black, car body-panel. The sticker’s filled out in ballpoint pen to mark my book’s place in the edition. John Furgason and John Ayala signed #18/100 at 9:57 on 11/21/03 and stamped the sticker, “000018″.

As a child growing up in New York, the ubiquity of carfires around the city was magical. My great grandmother lived and died on Houston & Sullivan. I don’t think she ever really spoke English–nor did she really need to–living in a neighborhood that was still then largely Italian. We’d often drive down to her apartment to grab and shuttle her over to the rest of my Mom’s family on Staten Island. That meant barreling down the FDR Drive to East Houston from the Upper East Side. East Houston was bewitching. Hookers, addicts, explosive graffiti, squeegee-amputees with piss in windex bottles and blood & shit-stained t-shirt rags soiling car windshields worse than they’d been pre-squooodge. That stretch was Lower-Manhattan’s funhouse. More than any of those other attractions, though…the carfires always got my little boner going. TV says, “Car catches fire. Car blows up.” It kind of works that way, but not really. It’s more like, “Car catches fire. Car burns and burns. Gas tank catches. Car catches more awesome fire.” There’s this incredible sigh of auxiliary flame, but there’s no real concussive force.

Carfires…East Houston, Harlem, the South Bronx I loved being stuck in traffic in any of those neighborhoods. There was always something burning. I’d just sit there in the backseat of the car, anxiously gnawing on the plastic and foam upholstery of our car’s door–hypnotized by whatever vehicle, barrel or building happened to be blazing at the moment. All of that makes Furgason and Ayala’s book particularly attractive.

If memory serves, I was given this book in 2004. It’s a pretty exceptional conceptual info-piece. Almost entirely composed of video stills from Furgason & Ayala’s film of the same title, CARFIRE’s an impressionistic study of dynamic, incidental sculpture in the industrial landscape. Details, portraits and under-the-hood porn of freshly-torched autos litter the first-half of the book–each image or image sequence assigned a catalog number. The second-half of the book resolves the histories of the images. A primary appendix describes each of the previously-numbered vehicles by location, make/model, color and year. A second appendix marks the locations from Appendix A’s table on aerial maps. A final appendix is reserved for incidents sniped from a police scanner and witnessed mid-flame.

I promised more of these catalogs. Here’s another. Dorien, Carisa, Pumpkin and Chloe look incredible. Memories retrieved by leafing thru this look-book: drawing a tattoo for Dorien and taking her to get it inked before tattooing was legalized in NYC; having Chloe recklessly wheel me around Rita and Susan’s roof in a shopping cart while I filmed No Neck Blues Band on super-8; shooting Pumpkin at Guv’ner gigs; invading the X-Girl shop on Lafayette with two nude girls painted orange, wielding ray-guns and decorated by Phil Frost for an unreleased film that Phil and I made; all of Mike Mills’ great TG-170 posters wheatpasted atop much of lower-Manhattan; Kim’s then-omnipresent Bonjour bag; High-Octane.

Thurston also once told me about a Bad Brains video in which Carisa can be seen headbanging in the front row. I guess I’m recollecting that as well.

catalog jpgs:
part 1 | part 2

I have every record anyone’s ever given me–EVERY RECORD. In fact–I rarely buy records, so nearly every record I own is an object of sentimentality. Santa brought me these three noise ragers on my third Christmas.

They were tucked into a Sesame Street 7″ case and were part of a suite of gifts that included my first turntable–also a product of the Children’s Television Workshop. I loved these records–always preferring them to my Disney Soundtracks, Hokey Pokey albums and holiday-specific superhero audiocomics. In the canon of children’s recordings, these noise records perhaps only eventually took a backseat to Frog & Toad and Why Mosquitoes Buzz In People’s Ears.

The fact that I loved them so was perplexing to my mom–who JUST. WANTED. A NORMAL. CHILD–a boy who’d sing along to normal music–communing with his peers thru song. Fate, however–rarely one to subscribe to the hopes and dreams of mothers–blessed her womb with a hellion who’d scream his entire life away in tongues of industry, zoology and appliances.

I’ve been pained for a few years now by how superficial and almost categorically devoid of experimentation and innovation fashion has recently become. Tonight was FNO09 here in New York. The only schwag I left the evening with was a concerned knot of dismay in my gut.

There have been unrepeatable moments in even the recent history of fashion where technology, crisis, artistic innovation or synaesthetic translation have stimulated sincere and radical excitement in designers. The explorations of cubists, constructivists and futurists; streamlined hyper-minimal simplicity; the spiritual, moral, urban and financial decay of the late 60’s thru the 80’s; the realization that one could selectively and individually abuse consumers thru conceptually arbitrary pricing; exclusivity-smashing situationist runway performances that exploited an unrehearsed city as a catwalk; the commodification of unfashionable concepts as unwearable couture; the palpable translation of sound into clothing that then fedback into clothing to inspire sound. Anyone with even a vague memory of or interest in fashion since the 30’s can almost instantly place any of the aforementioned moments.

Then we roll up onto days like today–days that do not bode well for the creative future of fashion. Dumbing down the love and the craft that once made your work so enviable in an effort to see it grace the racks of Target is not fashion. Hiring the most immediately delicious genre-DJ of the week to really pack ‘em in is not fashion. The caché you built by the drugs you did with who and where is not fashion. The celebrity trunk your publicist crammed with the contents of your showroom– guaranteeing a few choice tabloid snaps–is not fashion. Your hip photographer and his Yashica T4 click, click, clicking away at those t-shirts, jeans and tights is not fashion. The artists who once defined couture and now acquiesce to playing mannequin are not fashion. Streetwear is no longer fashion. Workwear isn’t fashion until it’s produced by some newer, faster, more durable and nano-autonomous process.

Confusing mere clothing with fashion is just as backward as confusing design with art. Art and fashion are serious mantles to grab at–ones I don’t think I’ve ever really touched. While I’ve designed lots of things and made lots of stuff, I’m not certain that I’ve yet made any art and I’m pretty sure I’ve never generated any fashion.

Couture is fashion. Concept is fashion. Conscious and unconscious stumblings into and around the ludicrous and the sublime are fashion. It’s time to stop confusing style, marketing, reach, design, cred and practical utility with fashion. Fashion is a wardrobe of impractical dilemmas excavated in secret at great temporal, emotional or monetary cost that can only be made sense of by the caretaker of the wardrobe–be they the inventor or the consumer. I for one cannot wait until that’s in vogue again.

In 1995, Simon Henwood/Purr Magazine pulled together a screening of Kern’s id-driven, 80’s super-8 films at the National Film Theater in the UK. Lydia Lunch and Kern presented. Purr generated a zine to commemorate the screening and plug their just-then-released “New York Girls” compendium of Richard’s celebrated hot-lit, cross-processed lower-east side pussy pics.

He’d always shot stills while cranking 50′ reels of super-8 out of his Canon 814XLS. This zine’s a love note to some of those. X is Y, Submit to Me, Fingered and Manhattan Love Suicides are all represented. Hell, there’s even a Marilyn Manson shot in the zine. Richard’s immortalized on the cover at the height of his junked-out oblivion. I once heard a story about the gun in that image. It involved children who’d thrown eggs.

This was one of the best, most enigmatic pieces of mail unintended for opening that I’ve ever tried to open. When I explained to Phil that I’d tried to get at the contents, he laughed–adding, “you did? that’s funny. there’s nothing in there.” nothing except for glue. I’d given him a book on mail art and he in turn, in time, sent this my way.

Leah Singer’s film work has always been mind-blowing. Her live performances with analyzer projectors are some of the most phenomenal bits of visceral human interaction with technology that I’ve ever had the good fortune to see. I remember when she first started talking about her concept for COPY. I was excited to see how her relationship with media would translate from film to serial book art.

At the time, she had been working in the archives of the New York Post as they were migrating to digital storage. She’d found a treasure trove of inspiration in the ruby-lith film that had been used and then, apparently, stored after being exploited to create photo knockouts in the pages of the Post. Drawn to the mysterious abstractions presented by the disembodied ruby-liths, Leah started editing simple, abstract layouts from the forms. They were essentially silhouettes. I’ve always been suspicious that an art director working on Apple’s iPod silhouette campaign stole the premise from the several volumes of COPY that had been released before anyone ever associated a silhouette with an MP3 player. I still am. Ad agencies steal oodles from underground ephemera.

Here’s the cover and centerfold from Leah’s first release:

The nineties weren’t bad. When people collaborated on projects, nobody slapped the presently ubiquitous X between collaborator names. They shoved that X right up there in the only name that matters–the singular brand-name. Executives at companies like Nike enjoy staring robotodreamily out their windows, surveying little fish-bowls like Portland and scheming up new ways to force-feed the notion that they’re not only relevant, but, get this–iconic–down culture’s consumption-addicted blogschlong-worn throat.

Manipulating your perception keeps their cool-consultants, marketing, advertising, publicity and street-team resources busy. Brands today are as iconic as their pockets are deep, their publicists are connected and everyone’s favors are owed. Beyond that, their products are what they are–the same crap they’ve been churning out for the past 20 years in a new colorway on another blog. There’s not much mystery there. There’s no sincere, primal cachet. There’s little style. There’s nothing to merit a glance back 15 years from now accompanied by the single-note sonata of a heartfelt pang of nostalgia for the story of why something was. In the nineties, the dotcom-induced virus of chronic entrepreneurial masturbation was neither as accessible nor pervasive as it is today. Creative people did creative shit because they were creative and they could. They had style to say, and damnit–that saying was gonna be said.

A few organizations came to epitomize merit-based brand-cachet in those years. X-girl was one of them. Kim Gordon, Daisy von Furth, Sofia Coppola, Spike Jonze, Andy Jenkins, Chloé Sevigny, Mike Mills, Free Kitten, Sonic Youth, The Beastie Boys–they didn’t just wear the stuff–they were all involved in it. They packaged it their way. The shop was their shop. The cuts were their cuts. The visual vernacular was their vernacular. They sampled wisely from a disparate past and a pop-then, but the wells they pulled from were of their personalities–as opposed to the pong-like tedium of the inter-brand quoting so pervasive today.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of old catalogs scanned. I’m making animated gifs of them. This first one is a xeroxed/stapled mini-zine they did in 1994. I’ll post the others in the future if this one goes well. If it’s not animating for you, shut off your fucking iPhone and get on a real computer.

Kim and Jutta curated a radically organic project at Kenny Schachter’s conTEMPorary in the far West Village–the Club in the Shadow. I had a ton of films on a loop upstairs. Kim and I collaborated on a series of videos of artists dancing in the spare, curved steel-mesh, Vito Acconci designed gallery. I shot Alan Licht, Jutta Koether, Karen Finley and Kim each performing to music of their choosing and cranked out a hyper-slow, meditative abstraction of those performances as an edition for the show. Double Leopards, Charalambides, Magick Markers, Alan Licht and a number of other phenomenal bands did sporadic sets. Electrophilia played what I seem to remember being one of their final shows before Steve Parrino’s fatal motorcycle accident. The space was more about sitting on the cold concrete floor and enjoying the ephemerality of whatever it was that would soon no longer be contained within it than it was about absorbing the few things that remained inside it as constants.

Kim printed up a box of membership cards for the club. I think Kenny was giving them away. Maybe they were for sale. I can’t remember. The image on the front is of Monica Lewinsky shuddering at the girth of Thurston’s tip-nibbled, unpeeled banana. It was taken in a trailer backstage at one of the Central Park Wilco/Sonic Youth shows. I have video of this…going down…somewhere. Somehow, though–neither the tropical cock, nor the gash at the end of the Clinton Administration are what make that picture. Thurston’s shirt… The thing people who’ve never been in or toured with a band don’t understand is that the access you gain to incredible t-shirts by driving thru every po’ dunk town in the many armpits of this globe is a luxury few torso’d mortals can really fathom.

Romain Slocombe is one of my favorite image makers. It’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll never fall for an artist on account of technical skill, pedigree or sundry other trite academic bullshit. I love Romain’s passion for fantasy, his rapport with his models, his oblique love of prosthesis and injury makeup and his effortless ability to wash pain and suffering with the precious pigment of humor.

Tristes Vacances is a small chap-book with some text by Francois Landon preceding a set of 15 color plates of paintings Romain made based on photographs of Japanese girls in various states of undress, bondage, bandage, battery and bliss. He gave me the book and a bunch of other work when we were cranking away on some film projects in NYC in 1996.

I love Ed. It’s been a lot of fun watching the subtle twists and shifts his work has taken over the years as it’s matured. I think he has a show up now on the west coast. I got an email with a picture of a striking sculpture of the profile of a man’s face–cut to contour–out of wood, I think. He has a bent metal rod implanted in his skull that acts as the support for a stream of serpentine text spewing from his mouth. I’m not sure I ever saw that coming–that hyper-designed, sculptural evolution of the paintings, drawings and photographs. But, it makes sense.

A lot of Ed’s work is influenced by his access to and his ability connect with just about anyone he stumbles across while skating. Awesome Ellis is one of those trip-hazards turned epic pratfall. It’s just a 7-page xeroxed bunch of text with a couple of polaroids thrown in–a conversation with this guy–Mark Ellis. Mark–a then 48-year old neighborhood guy who worked at the 7-11, did some substitute teaching, picked up a security guard gig, was a Christian and adored skateboarding and skaters–discussed all sorts of shit with Ed. Never shy about dipping into the waters of the chickenhawk, the interview–of course–goes there. Ed questions Mark on his virginity and relationship with women. He asks him about his relationship with children and to specific pro skaters.

“We were completely unsure what the whole situation was. We were young kids, and this grown man was offering us rides places. In general you would say that seems pretty scary, you know? There’s a lot of crazy dudes out there who want to abduct young kids and so… But we just…I think we felt that you were real nice and wouldn’t do anything to us. And we just took the rides. I remember one time we spent the night at your house…”

But, Ellis responds to that naturally and explains that he really just loved good street skating and knew the kids’ parents…that there wasn’t anything else to it. Appropriately enough, by the time you finish reading the whole thing–you realize that’s probably true. For the dozens of reasons the interview seems to present the possibility of a sketchy guy–Ellis just doesn’t come across as creepy–and Ed knows this all along. He doesn’t just know it. He’s pointing and laughing–not at Ellis, but at all of those kids who grew up in bubbles–sheltered from the weird neighbor who hung out with kids, by parents who were afraid of everything–pointing, laughing and telling them, “you assholes could have met some cool people if only you weren’t so fucking lame.” I agree and applaud both Ed’s mockery of his collectors and peers as well as his deification of Mark Ellis.

Glen’s another example of doing it right. I’m not sure he could avail himself of the convenience of tarnishing his integrity if he actively sat there at his stainless steel desk and tried. This zine didn’t really start it all for him, but in a way, it started him for him. Specifically, it marked the start of his independence from the corporate publishing world–something he’s maintained right up to the KYEO fugazi book he just published. It’s a practice he’ll likely never stray from.

The guy was a professional photographer by age 12. What exactly does that mean? It means he knew that the things he loved watching were worth documenting. It means that he had the drive to pick up a camera and document those things. It means he’d put up with being the grom–getting beat up, ripped off, scammed and laughed at because he was a child with a child’s instinct that what he loved was, in some way, pure–elemental–the atoms that would smash together and outgas the culture we all accept as ubiquitous today. He was getting published in Skateboarder magazine regularly. He was shooting his friends–not just doing what they were known for, but enjoying themselves away from those anchors.

Album covers, publicity shots, magazine spreads–punk, hardcore, rap, skateboarding–it was all the same. It was all energy as far as his affinity to it went. Initially, though, he didn’t edit it that way. I’m not sure Glen felt comfortable telling people, “it’s all the same thing. get used to it”.

At the start, he delivered the goods piecemeal. MY RULES, is indicative of that. There’s an ad for Thrasher in it, but there’s none of Glen’s iconic skate photography in the zine. He kept that in the skate mags back then. There’s no rap in it, but it was ‘82 when he released it, so he wasn’t really shooting enough rap yet to have it make much contextual sense. So, in the canon of Glen Friedman, MY RULES, has, until relatively recently, stood alone as a crystalline composite of singular focus–music–or, more precisely–the aggressive music that Ronald Reagan’s America helped inspire. In the past few years he’s bookended My Rules with the DogTown book, the Jay Adams book, Recognize and KYEO which have all been content specific–but in the decades connecting My Rules to KYEO, he took the liberty of allowing the diversity of the images he composed to be the message.

While we were designing one of his other books, he gave me a few copies of My Rules and made me promise to keep them safe. They’re under lock and key and that’s where they’ll stay.

Thurston and Byron have always been models of “doing it right”. Take this zine. They wrote this ridiculous, yet visionary, thing–a David Bowie discography in the form of a set of 27 tankas. The guys cranked out 100 of ‘em on a home office printer, stapled them, numbered them, boxed them up and took them down to Galapagos (when it was still down on N.6 St in Williamsburg) from Massachusetts on a particularly snowy night in 2002 for a reading. As far as I remember, they sold them cheap–for gas money, I reckon. They wrote a fucking book expressly for a single poetry reading–and you know what? It wasn’t the first time and it wasn’t the last.

Why? Why the hell would someone do such a thing? Because those motherfuckers write tankas and like glam. Why the fuck not?

When people have not just multiple passions, but also unique personalities–they have a responsibility to concoct mediums thru which to share their knowledge and perspective with others in interesting ways. That’s what creativity is. It’s what art is–making impractical things that have no business existing and no viable market, then loading your bladder with them and pissing wildly from the tallest barn, bridge, rock or tree into a gale wind and seeing what happens. People tend not to know how much they enjoy an accidental golden shower until they catch a couple of drops on their tongues. Next thing you know, 100 people are flipping Webster’s open to T to figure out what exactly a tanka is and then browsing thru the Bowie discography to see just how much sense this truly makes:

HUNKY DORY
(RCA 1972)

limp wrist hoot rock gas
naive enough to make lou
spit out a mouthful
on john giorno’s old black pants
very same place andy did