sky pockets

A man with a trumpet takes his shirt off the hood of a burning cop car on Queen Street West during the G20 Summit in Toronto, Saturday, June 26, 2010.

A man playing a trumpet leads a funeral procession of a village elder through the streets of Leogane, Haiti, Monday, February 1, 2010.

Weekends.



Patrick and I saw the film Gerhard Richter Painting, Friday, May 3rd.  Disappointing.  Left the theater feeling like I like Richter's work more than Corinna Belz (the director).  Maybe the film was just a victim of that trend in documentary filmmaking to not make documentaries.  Maybe Beiz wanted to match the obliqueness of abstract painting in her filmming style.  
She does ask questions from time to time...  very flat questions, which are answered simply.  Then (maybe realizing she should dig deeper?), she asks, "But why?"  
Her subject shrugs.  
As if to prove that it is her dull questions that cause the few people she points her camera at to clam up, she twice shows clips of some older black and white footage of a young Richter being quizzed and answering eloquently (The voice you hear in the trailer is from these clips and it comes close to the entirety of any real ideas about painting that the film dares to dive into).  Talk about tease!  She makes us aware that this trend in documentary filmmaking, at least as she as interpreted it, is to weed out the gesture of gathering information, as if that were somehow a dishonest gesture.  Instead she shows action, which is wonderful.  I do like watching Richter paint.  But there was room in this film for both action and history to be in dialogue.  Would it dirty the film to mix it up a little?
How many people going to see a film titled Gerhard Richter Painting want to learn something about Richter and his painting?  Raise your hands.

Arnold Kemp at [2nd floor projects].  Great show.  The opening was Saturday, April 28th.  That day, up until I went there, I spent my time doing nothing but moping.  I've actually done well at tackling depressions and anxieties lately, but on that day I was exhausted from having wrestled inner demons with moderate success for the past couple of months, so I let myself backslide till 6PM and wallowed in disorder.  
Once I got to the gallery however everything picked up.  
Arnold's show is lovely.  Arnold is lovely.  Margaret (the gallerist) is lovely.  And the crowd there was lovely, too.  I left with two of them: Mike and Gregory, good lads both.  We had tacos and then bullied our way past the doorman at Darkroom.  At midnight my coach back to Oakland was turning into a pumpkin, so I left the ball, but it was time well spent.



I've been working for Marsh & Clark Design a lot lately, which means weekdays I'm up before the sun.  Because of that, staying awake past 11PM, even on the weekend, is a major challenge, but not impossible.  This Saturday I managed it again, thanks to a long disco nap.  Josh and I went to a Downtown Oakland hip hop party.  The day (Cinco de Mayo) marked eight months together for us.  The club stayed open till four AM, but it was an accomplishment that we lasted till one.  I see Josh once, sometimes twice a week, but in that short period together he manages to remind me how much he loves me many times over.  In doing so, he makes me feel not just loved by him, but loved.  



Another thing I do on the weekends is work on art.  Three big exhibitions looming before me.
1. Berkeley in July.  
I think I've convinced my brother to contribute a work of his to the show at BAM, which is exciting because he was the one who inspired the other work in that show: a series of drawings based on John Carpenter's Halloween.
2. SFMOMA in August.  
For this I'm working on a video with Kevin Killian and the San Francisco Poets Theater.  It's the project I spent a year writing grant proposals for, but not getting the majority of them (that's normal).  The exception (so far) was 3000 dollars from Alternative Exposure.  The museum will give us some money too, but the total remains really low for a video project, so we're doing a "work in progress."  A fraction of the script.  
The plan is to present such a well-made sliver that people and organizations will donate to see the whole pie finished.  
Some of the money is for expenses of course, but mostly the dream that has come out of this past year of writing those grant proposals as been to pay the others (friends and colleagues) working on this.  I work alone mostly.  Not because I prefer it.  It's because I value people's contributions so much, that I don't feel comfortable asking them to simply volunteer their time.  And yet, these days I haven't had the money to pay them.  (In times when I did have more income, I certainly did pay.)
This filming business wasn't going to start until after there was a budget in place.  Those were my good intentions.  It doesn't always work that way, though.  Being offered to show the work-in-progress at SFMOMA means our chances of getting funding later will increase.  In the meantime however I need volunteers to get to that point, and I'm trying to force myself to find them.  
It dawned on me, that my roommate works in theater, so I asked her where I might post a CALL for a few volunteers: did she know of a type of Craigslist for theater geeks and filmmakers, or an old-fashioned well-placed bulletin board?  She wrinkled her nose and said, "I don't know anyone who would do that type of work for free."  
She was just being honest, and had no idea had much it stung.  
There was sting from being reminded that in searching for volunteers I'm compromising my own wishes, but also it hit me that I am someone who does that type of work--making art and the busywork surrounding it--for free.  In theory, I hope to see reimbursement down the line (a drawing sale, an honorarium...?), but if you match it to the hours put in, it's a fraction of minimum wage, a minute fraction.  
It's exhausting if I let myself think about it: how much work I pour into something that doesn't give much in the way of financial return.  For myself clearly it is a labor of love, but how can I drag others into this dysfunctional relationship?  I just have to have faith that THIS is the project that will get a budget ... eventually.  And then I can compensate people down the road.  
But I can't fucking tell people that!  
What if the money doesn't come?  It seems better to ask them to volunteer now, and hopefully surprise them with a check later.  But according to the look on my roommate's face, and the feeling in my gut, there is no nice way to say "volunteer."  It's a dirty word in a capitalist society.
3. New York in November.  
Drawings coming along slow but sure.  

one heavy week.
one less heavy.






























































































people raising their hands.
people there and not there.

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