Let Me Take You To Your Grave Nice Picture

 

I wrote the following while engaged in a summer marathon of rock and roll-based movies. While writing, I was watching a lot of movies about people making their music, their mythologies, and their typical cliched skirmishes. I adore these rock and roll clichés, but I cannot get away from the differences between the world of musicians and that of people that “make stuff.” Anyway, wrote an essay about, here it goes.

This is an essay about practice leading to final creation.

This is my second draft of this report.

Whenever I practice making things, I end up with a thing when I’m done. This might seem obvious, but it’s something that needs to be stated. That thing is right in front of you. It takes up space in your room. You have to find places to put them. You might cut them up in anger or you might set them on fire. If you’re an idiot, you might even try to sell them. The biggest problem with all of this is that they’re not all winners. So much of what you make, while you’re making it, is just shit. Once in a while you’ll pull something nice out of a pile of failure, but that’s not always the case. 10% at best. No matter, it’s there. You have to do something about it. You’ve created a thing that exists in the world for better or worse.

Musicians can practice and it all simply goes into the air and then disappears. There’s no body to dispose of. A day’s failure is just gone. A day’s success needs to be reproduced.

I am writing this to address the difference between musicians and makers. I say makers because artists seems pretentious, it’s actually hard for me to say it. Artists use paint, right? Sorry, an old association, artists stack dirty dishes in the corner of whitewashed rooms while trying to pay down hundreds of thousands of dollars to RISD, right? I’m not a crafter, that’s the worst. A crafter makes things that are clearly beautiful or well-defined, something to go onto a wall or to tie a room together, something that could be useful. On the rare times I see my things on peoples walls, I wonder why they have them up there. A few people have printed 16x20 images of my face on their walls, and I can’t understand how they’re able to look at that for months, or even years on end. I just call them “makings.” I like to use that word because it seems vague, but also a fun way to play with the language. The “makings” consist of collages, assemblage pieces, and weirdo digital / analog amalgamations called broadsides. They have little meaning except to exist.

I know a lot of musicians personally, almost all my close friends play music to varying degrees. Some have properly trained, some have toured, many have made records, but most still collect fancy guitar pedals for discussion at mixed company parties. Although I have a lot of musician friends, I don’t really know anyone that makes things. Not having that connection creates some communication issues, especially when I try and make things for musician friends.

It’s something I’m used to. Being that they make my favorite drug, this isn’t much of a problem for me. For these musician friends, I have carried their heavy equipment into the club. I have tried to lift heavy bass cabinets by myself. I have hauled drum hardware up thin stairs. I have sold merch, something I hate more than carrying gear. One summer, I even drove a band on tour for a month. For that whole time, I was paid $125.00 dollars. The RV I drove didn’t have air conditioning and I mostly slept on the floor after driving to the next venue in the middle of the night, alone. That was fun, no complaints there. I have stood and watched friends bands that I didn’t like very much, telling them they had a great show even if I was thinking of something else while they announced from the stage, “Thanks for coming out.” Best of all, you get to pay 5-10 dollars at the door for that support. It’s not all woe being a friend of dudes (almost always dudes) in a band. Periodically I’ll get drink tickets that go unused. Once that led me to playing drums outside a New Jersey venue on the sidewalk. Some dude kissed me that night. Maybe I got in free.

No one has ever asked if they could come over and help cut paper, or collect paper, or put addresses on envelopes…no one. I practice upstairs while listening to podcasts in a long thin attic that gets way too hot in summer.

There’s a public culture that goes along with playing music, one that I’ve been able to engage with for decades. I’ve enjoyed doing all those little things that help make like easier on a band. Like an idiot, I even volunteered (more liked forced) my services as “executive producer” for a band over the past couple of years. I chose that title for myself because it seems rather meaningless. Manly what my job title has entailed is designing T-shirts and flyers and doing a little light clerical work. I’ve even taken on trying to design record covers, not that anyone has really asked. I just make the thing and then text it to them. Sometimes they respond and other times they do not. Right now, I have dozens of collages made of them but I’m not sure what to do with them. Not that musicians, or anyone for that matter, know what they want when you design things for them, especially when they haven’t asked for them. People only know what they don’t want, not what they do want. Keep in mind they’re musicians, not always the smartest people on earth. Count to four. Tune the guitar. Go to a party and talk about guitar pedals for hours on end, that’s the sort of things they know how to do. They never seem to know if a collage is “too linear.”

When I text them things they don’t know I’m practicing. If they don’t like something, I’ll just make another thing. If that thing sucks, it doesn’t matter other than having a body left to deal with, a thing sitting on my desk or in a giant pile of things. No one said stop either, I just keep going, I need the practice. Maybe I’ll make the bodies? Maybe I’ll cut them up? Maybe I’ll add them to an assemblage piece.

Every couple of weeks I’ll print some new images of them and move them around in a collage. Sometimes I’ll play with the image digitally. My favorite thing I made from one of these sessions is an image that appears in my summer report zine. I think it looks amazing, but I have no idea if they like it or not. Who knows if anyone said anything about the image when I send it to then. Either way, it exists and that’s the most important thing. I’ll find a grave for it later.

The New Bindle

 

I like looking for things along the roads. I like finding toilets, bumpers, rundown houses, and recently, discarded shopping carts. Shopping carts are interesting to me because they’re ubiquitous and multi-functional. They can be easily turned into something else without much work. They’re sturdy and easy to steal. They’re like post-industrial cars that haven’t received their motors. They’re trailers. They’re big trashcans. Most importantly, they’re somewhat expendable, tossed aside whenever their function has been exhausted.

They’re like “the new bindle,” and who doesn’t like hobo evocation?

Peter’s Creek Parkway, the road that crosses Silas Creek Parkway in Winston-Salem NC, is lousy with these. For the past few years, folks have set up residences in the woods up and down Peter’s Creek and Silas Creek Parkways, right beside Interstate 40. To move their “treasures” around, many of these people take shopping carts and pile as much as they can inside of them. I imagine it’s things they collect from the road or from dumpster diving the many shops in the area. I once saw a cart filled with shoes and a hand painted sign advertising a “sale” on the lot. Twenty dollars, not a bad deal. Sometimes these carts have five or six feet of stuff in them. Ride down either of these roads, and you’ll see carts off to the side of the road or just sitting in the green-space in the middle of the road. I don’t know where the collectors go. I don’t know why they take so much time to collect the items just to abandon them.

It’s an activity that draws attention to itself. In recent months, I’ve noticed that the piled high carts have started to mostly disappear, leaving only the modestly filled ones to languish by the major thoroughfares. Always looking for another thing to look for, find, and then document in some ridiculous way, I started taking pictures of these carts whenever I was driving around. Any creative use of a shopping cart I snapped a picture of, mostly looking for carts filled with weird stuff, or in an odd location. I pull up and snap a picture, most of the time I don’t have to get out of my car.

I had a few minutes to waste when I went on a shopping cart hunt. The sweet spot for shopping carts is off Silas Creek Parkway. From Compare Foods until Taco Bell, you see at least one of them daily. Since I like to get some variety in my pictures, from many different places as possible, I only go by there occasionally. It had been a while, so I thought I was due to treat myself to the wealth of carts lined up in that area, three of them.

I took pictures of the first two, nothing out of the ordinary, but then I came to the third cart which was right by IHOP. When I put my head out the window and extended my phone, I noticed paper inside the cart. Lots of paper. Most of my waking life is spent looking for paper so seeing it sitting out for me, in broad daylight, was a dream come true. An oasis in the middle of a Chinese Restaurant buffet made possible by roving hobos. What grabbed my attention is that I saw that infamous Avery logo that goes with printable labels. It was enough to get me out of the car to check it out. Clearly, someone did some dumpster diving at the Office Max in that shopping center. I’m sure they tried to sell what they picked up. I ended up taking a few unopened packs of printable labels, blank greeting cards, and something you attach to windows. Later in the day, I thought about going back and taking the rest of the stuff, spreading the wealth around.

Stealing From A Child

 

I covet Miles’ magnatiles.

If you don’t know, magnatiles are little pieces of colored plastic. Each one has magnets inside their see through shell. You use these magnets to build things rather easily. They simply click together. A collection of these has a variety of shapes so what you can build out of them is quite extensive. Think of them as today’s Lincoln logs without that horrible smell.

I don’t care for most of Miles’ toys; they’re just not for me. The trucks and all that, I have no interest in playing with those. Who wants to get on the ground to push a truck around? Don’t get me started on the Hot Wheels cars, and the cliched response every parent has to them. Yes, you step on them often and yes, doing that hurts like hell. Sometimes I scream, sometimes I yell. More than once I have tossed those things the whole length of the house. I’m a little cooler with the stuffed animals, I get those, either as a thing to clutch while laying in bed, or something that just looks nice. He has more than a few Simpson’s stuffed animals. When he gets to action figures, like he really gets to them, I think our interests will dovetail. I will force him to take them out the packaging though, I’m not starting that bullshit.

The magnatiles are something else. To me they represent potential making supplies. In recent years, I’ve done a lot with magnets. I have mailed them all over the world for folks to drop in random places, as well as leaving tons of them around my area. All you have to do is stick them to a surface that…accepts magnets (I have no idea the science language here) and then walk away. It’s an easy public art show without all the needless damage to public or private property.

So, when I see Miles’ magnatiles littering the house, I want them. I’ve told him this. I’ve even told his mother this, who has warned me against them disappearing from his collections. Some might even call her warnings, “mean,” or “threatening.” No matter, as soon as he loses interest, I’m going to take every single one of them and glue stuff to them. I’ve thought about buying my own, but I don’t want to have to sneak them through the house. Could you imagine getting caught with magnatiles not intended for the boy? No way am I going to cover them up and walk them inside like someone taking illicit “reading” material out of a magazine shop in the 1990’s.

To work through some of these issues, I forced Miles to star in a forty-five second movie about this very subject. If I were making underground movies in the 1920’s, this would have been an achievement, instead it was something I could put together on my phone in less than ten minutes. I think about this sort of thing all the time. Anyway, whenever we do things like this, mostly photo shoots, he’s been a good sport. He does like to use the camera which brings mixed results. At some point I’m going to let him shoot something and then stick it together as his first movie. If Ben Affleck can do it, so can Miles.