bio:
Several years ago I was greatly inspired by Lacan’s psychoanalytic reading (and Derrida and others’ subsequent critiques) of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Purloined Letter.” In the story, a letter is hidden in full sight on the mantle while the police turn the house inside out looking for it. My experiments have shown that this is also the best way to do graffiti— right out in full view of everyone during rush hour. I dress in business casual, like I just got off work. I sport a wig in the latest generic woman’s hair style—lately it’s been the Rhianna pompadour—jet black and very chic. It’s amazing how the right pair of shoes will make the world get out of your way and let you do whatever you want. More specifically I mean expensive Italian ones that I can run like hell in without making any noise. Tod’s are always a good choice. They match my laptop bag filled with spray cans. The stencils are tucked in the fake fur-lined front pouch.
I work methodically—at a steady pace that’s neither too fast nor too slow. My earbuds are in but my iPod is off and my glasses are on as I focus on positioning the stencil upon the wall I’m going to spray upon. It’s at this point that I often attract a few onlookers. Sometimes they ask me what I’m doing and I answer “PR”.
Lovely Day
- the second of my three drawings i made for my friends.
If you get open and get aware it becomes apparent that everything spins in sync with everything else—you realize that even disasters unfold according to their own logic. In a sometimes wishy-washy world of virtual workforces and TV news cycles, there is the THUD of certainty that something real and undeniable has happened. The sudden, decisive leveling of a landslide or a bomb feels like the hand of history grabbing hold and shaking the place that you live. However horrific it may be, the universe goes on as though it were nothing special. No matter what happens there’s still the same calm sky shining down with a blank indifference. I remember on 9/11 looking back from the Williamsburg bridge and seeing the grey smoke rocketing into the sky in great gushes and realizing that I was looking at a battle zone…it was all very dramatic but soon the immense crowd lurched forward and I moved with it—the bridge groaning and swaying under the weight of our feet. When I looked back again the scene no longer seemed so menacing…the bright blue sky swallowed the smoke like the ocean swallows a drop of poison. It was a lovely day—the sunshine and the crowds made me feel like I’d just exited a giant simulation ride at a theme park such as Universal Studios. On the other side of the bridge the streets of Brooklyn were empty like unused back lots. Everyone was gathered in front of TVs either at home or in bars.
A few hours later the streets filled with people walking around like zombies—hungry for crowds to be alone in…groups formed without words and without leaders. The only agenda was being together.
I didn’t know it at the time but it was the dawning of a new age…
via Peter Callesen, “Dead Angels”
These days I spend the pearl grey morning hours meticulously coloring in the details of the paper super heroes that I cut like dolls out of NYC fantasies, complete with exquisite good looks and fatal flaws secretly folded in.
I don’t believe in books.
I started to stop believing in books back in college. I knew the great tomes of Modernism had seen their time…David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon hit the ball so far out of the park that they put the genre of the mega book to bed and ushered in the era of hypertext and hyper meaning. Not only were books getting shorter and smaller they were also appearing in new (and renewed) formats: zines and blogs and audio podcasts. So many new formats that the question arises: do we need books at all? The Beats and the Beatles and the hippies and hip-hop beat architects had unearthed, cut and pasted together a new culture—why should we insist on telling its story using the exact thing we spent so much time taking apart? A book is a closed system. A private Facebook profile. Password protected. A walled garden stacked 10 deep at Barnes and Noble where you can’t leave a comment. A book is done. Finished. A pretend totality floating in a pretend moment in time. I thought I’d blogged myself free from all of that. Yet still I’m caught by it’s siren song—steeped in nostalgia and powerful memories of my mind being opened up by the beauty of neatly typed words in the warm summer light. I thought I could write a book as a rhizome—a laterally growing root like that of the ginger plant that allowed for multiple connection points—like A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari. I believed the hype—that a book could be an assemblage of pieces instead of a reproduction of the world. In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari claimed that the book that followed was an assemblage instead of an attempt at recreating an image of the world. The text formed a circle, like that of ancient texts, in which the story did not end as much as return onto itself. As such it could be read in any order. It turned out to be a fake circle, however, as in the end it was still a book—mass produced on pages bound together beneath a flashy cover—but I allowed myself to fall for it anyway. I told myself that I could do what D&G did—I’d create a book in the shape of a circle—assuming this was the best form possible for my work: a book in which the awareness of its own failings was already built in. It seemed the only way—but a part of me refused to believe it. There had to be a better medium to tell the stories that I wanted to tell the WAY I wanted to tell them—without compromise. A better form—a better conduit. A zone in between my brain and the internets where machine and skin became one—tied together by gummy circuits and veiny cabling…
Welcome…step inside to my innernets…where do u want to go today?
I’m really excited to be a part of a conference being billed as “the Davos of Twitter”. It will be a chance for me to discuss the ideas I’m exploring on this site with some of the biggest names in social media. Jeff Pulver is very cool to throw a renegade philosopher internet mash-up thinker like me into the mix.
The idea of a conference being made up of a cast of people playing (in whatever way they decide) a version of the character they are on Twitter is very intriguing to an unrepentant internet charlatan such as myself. Twitter is an example of how we constantly create selves—approaching everything we do not as a single “true” self but as a multiplicity—a crowded crew of eclectic possibilities for interaction with others and the world.
Living one’s life in social media garners an awareness for this multiplicity. The act of logging in and going online makes us more aware of the character we’re invoking—whereas in the “real world” our personality shifts might seem more seamless. Instead of trying to winnow down the selves to one, I want to explore how social media can help us engage as multiplicities—how we can communicate in forms of many-to-many—as networks and streams and ever-mutating organic groups.
Radical Interdependence and Online Telepathy--How Twitter Helps Us Find One Another »
This is an article I wrote for Reality Sandwich that manages to weave together Twitter, online telepathy, New Orleans, Evelyn Rodriguez, and the book A Wrinkle in Time, among other things.
It is included in the collection, Toward 2012: Perspectives on the Next Age, which is available on Amazon
I made the choice to no longer make choices. I’m aware of it being a contradiction—similar to trying to will yourself not to will, or to a dog chasing its own tail. It’s a failed endeavor from the start, but in these Kafkaesque times (which I’m coining as such because of our AWARENESS that we’re living in a matrix of constructed reality coupled with our apparent inabilty to change this fact) failure is no longer reason enough not to do something—in fact, a truly post-post modern artist seeks out failure on a grand scale.
I don’t mean a petty failure, such as never bothering to try—but the kind on the scale of betting the farm—a fantastic, extravagant crash and burn—like a start-up that declares bankruptcy a few short months after being bank-rolled for zillions as being the brains behind the next big thing. I’m talking the kind of failure you can only make when you work your ass off for something. Olympic failure—on the level of preparing for years for something that takes you mere seconds to blow.
When yr afraid of being laughed at or called a fool, you start holding back. You get scared of failure, instead of learning to embrace it as part of the process—part of life. The strange corrosive power of such a tiny yet powerful fear is entirely made-up—this doesn’t stop us, however, from living our lives around our harbouring of it. Again, this is very Kafkaesque—our overly self-conscious lives are exemplerary of his short piece, The Tormenting Demon.
Just because something doesnt exist doesn’t mean it isn’t real.
The idea of failure and fate have much in common: neither exists but both are very real—as real as the ever fleeting present, and as real as a future that is constantly in flux. Nothing is definite—nothing is set in stone—by embracing your fate or your failure—by choosing not to choose and going with the flow of your life, you undermine any power that either possiblity once had—destroying it at the same time that you affirm its reality.
It is in this way that we make our own fate—a task as tricky and ultimately empowering as giving a message to your father to deliver to your mother during a moment in the past when you don’t yet exist:
“No fate?” No fate but what we make. My father told her this. I made him memorize it in the future as a message to her… Never mind. The whole thing goes, ‘The future’s not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.’ —John Connor discussing his mother, Sarah Connor, in Terminator 2, Judgment Day
Before BRANDTRUEBOY was a blog it was a motif in my sticker graffiti art. An ex banger who worked in the kitchen at the West Village dive where I waited tables drew the “Trueboy” bubble tag to add to the mix. Few gifts have made me as happy as that single piece of paper. Not only was the lettering totally hot but it came complete with a pink sperm cartoon character. I promptly made a series of T-shirts and stickers baring the tag either by itself or with stenciled phrases of text on top—like this “donut” version which contains a line from “Eric B is President” by Eric B and Rakim.
