Mystery of the Braingasm Solved

So, I’ve had this *thing* for watching people do their *thing* for just about as long as I’ve been able to have *things.* Not sexual things, just regular day-to-day doings. But not everyone who does their thing has it factor, as it were. Someone like Bob Ross for example: Solid IT factor. Whenever I catch a glimpse of someone like Bob doing his thing, it triggers something strange in me…a unique kind of low-order euphoria. That is to say, I get all tingly n shit.

Maybe you’ve felt something like this, too. And maybe you felt like I did — a weirdo who who didn’t need any help feeling anymore weird than you already do at your plainest, most vanilla default setting, and so you remained cautiously reticent about this nameless quirk whilst in the company of those…other people.

If so, then relax my fellow pariah, for you are quite normal. Indeed, there is even a jazzy name for this sensation: Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, or ASMR. Check it out.

http://mindhacks.com/2013/05/13/the-unnamed-feeling-named-asmr/

…Fascinating stuff.

Now, I suspect that a lot of people/losers who’ve never experienced this unique phenomenon for themselves might read the piece above and come away conflating the merely mechanical with the methodical, or the boring with the quiet. The two are not the same! For instance, I cannot (and do not) watch someone Facebooking on their laptop in an airport gate and feel so much as a flutter of deflection on the ASMR meters; but if I were watching someone carefully and lovingly repairing that same laptop in their shop; someone who didn’t seem like they were in a big ass’d hurry, and who took real and perceptible joy in doing a good job — THAT’S the stuff of a good braingasm!

I was living in this apartment a few years back, staffed with a small maintenance crew who’d periodically come through and sweep out the stairwells and porch fronts. There was one elderly staffer in particular; whenever I was at home and I’d hear her coming around, I’d deftly sneak over to the peephole and spy her as she swept. Even after she’d disappear up to the second landing of the stairwell, I’d keep watching her shadow. Yeah, Creep City, I know — and if she’d ever discovered me — if the door had somehow turned transparent in that instant, I am certain she would have scrambled for the hills, freshly scarred for the rest of her life. Even knowing this, I still couldn’t help myself. I was (admittedly, bizarrely) captivated by this woman’s approach to dust/detritus relief. Despite it being one of the most mindless, menial chores known to man, she was thoroughly concentrated on doing the job right. Watching her in action in that sunlit stairwell easily set off my ASMR — a weird and lovely mixture of both quiet fascination and tranquility which poured over me in syrupy, tingly waves. It’s rare that anything effects what is actually one of my favorite sensations, and one which is impossible to replicate, but this sweeper-upper always did, and so whenever I’d hear the scritch of her bristles — even if I was fresh from a shower with a toothbrush champed between my teeth — I’d discreetly haul my soggy ass from the bathroom over to the door and silently ogle. I didn’t even holler when I caught her snooping around my storage closet – there’s nothing good to steal in there! Goddammit, go back to sweeping! You’re amazing at it!

Other tingle-inducers: watching my good pal Ray clean old records in his record store — especially when he’d get busy with an old hair dryer and some Ronsonol while attacking price tag goo on a precious 45 label; the world outside was burning, long-legged nymphs were milling about the Pop/Rock aisles, but there was Ray Ehmen, focused like a laser on his lighter fluid ablutions, (and me before him, all pimply-fleshed and dazed).

Watching someone polish aluminum is another good one; joinery and marquetry; cake decoration…I’m sure I’ll think of more once I publish this…

The two key ingredients for me are OCD-level detail-orientation, and, most importantly, care. The person has to really care about what they’re doing. I can instantly tell when someone is doing something strictly from the neck down. A certain ambiance helps, too. That’s why watching someone play the guitar doesn’t get me in that ASMR zone, while watching someone string a guitar just might. I was recently in Cuba, watching some workers in a cigar factory roll cigars, an ASMR minefield for certain — right? Unfortunately, the bustle of the workers and those damned German tourists effectively dampened the effects.

Anyway, that’s one mystery down out of a ker-zillion.

(Thanks to MindHacks and Lambert Strether via Naked Capitalism)

Sideshow

Sculpture is an art form I’ve wanted to foray into for a long time now — taking some of my illustrations and realizing them in full dimension. Unfortunately, it’s an ambition that’s so far remained impeded by a life of constant upheaval and spatial constraints. Patricia Knop’s work has captivated me for years. Whenever I look at it, it never fails to reposition the flames from the back burners squarely under my backside, and I start thinking to myself how I really need to get my hands in some mud before the arthritis sets in!

I first discovered Mrs. Knop’s unique talent after buying some old press clippings from the late sixties of Zalman King, whose early acting career I was jonesing on at the time (I even commissioned a woman to recreate for me one of the sweaters his character wore in The Ski Bum). One of the spreads among this collection of clippings included an interview from 1971 with Zalman and his lifelong companion/wife, Patricia Knop, accompanied by photos of Patricia’s life-size sculptures. I instantly went ape for her work, especially when I discovered that she was a completely self-taught artist. The sinewy, diaphanous quality of her renderings continues to arouse sensations in me that no other sculptor’s work ever has. (I also consider her and Zalman one of the coolest artist couples that ever there was; you can readily perceive how they both cared for and believed in one another.)

Knop’s emphasis on hands, feet and hair is something I very much share in with my own work. Creating on such a scale is something I can only dream of, however. It’s a gutty statement in and of itself, especially since her pieces were HUGE from the start. Most pieces I’ve created over the years have tended toward the diminutive. I want very much to get away from that.

Besides inspiring me as an artist, Knop’s works also compel me to want to transcend the bounds of tense and space; they remind me not to let myself get too swept off course by the here ‘n’ now and all the bad winds that wicked and selfish people wantonly fart into my sails. Again, maybe it’s the sheer size of her pieces that inspires me to think bigger and soar beyond all of the noise. For after all the inevitable hardships she’s no doubt endured throughout her own long lifetime — including the loss early last year of her husband to cancer — here remains this woman’s magnificent sculptures, towering almost defiantly in the face of the base and the mundane, and indeed, even time itself.

From May 20 through June 20, 2013, Trigg Ison Fine Art will present “Patricia Knop: SIDESHOW – Paintings and Sculpture 1968-2013.” The exhibition will unveil a comprehensive look at the prolific career of Patricia Knop featuring sculpture and paintings never before seen by the public.

I’m hoping to get out to this event myself. If you’re reading this and are in the downtown LA area, do yourself a favor and check it out, (and then write me and tell me what you thought!).

I Am…The Covered Man…

I keep coming back to this damn clip. It makes me happy, and also slightly uncomfortable. Kinda brings to mind the serial killer from The Town That Dreaded Sundown, in perhaps mellower, more soulful times…before she broke his heart…before life was such a task.

Life is such a task!..

Maybe it’s just the clunky edit, but I’m still not sure what to make of the message in the lyrics.

Meanwhile, imagine how much cooler Starksy and Hutch woulda been…or un-cooler…

Retro-Crazed Yoots and The Future of Olde Fashioned

I’m only just now coming to this Times opinion piece from last November by assistant professor at Princeton University, Christy Wampole. Overall, it’s an expert meditation on the irony-afflicted, retro-crazed hipster movement and its apparently baneful effects on everything from our modern culture to how America is perceived abroad. Wampole presents the hipster as a sort of walking recycle bin spilling over with pallid imitations. Even the term hipster is an appropriation (my mind still stubbornly flashes to a mental snapshot of James Coburn).

I’m not being disingenuous when I say this piece was an eye-opener for me. I keep a low noise floor when it comes to anything relating to popular culture (to this day, I have never heard a Britney Spears song). After having read Professor Wampole’s piece, my takeaway is that the hipster fad is really more of a cheap surrogate for youth culture than actual youth culture; y’know — if it ain’t youth culture, it’ll do until the real youth culture gets here.

There were one or two things about Wampole’s otherwise highly enjoyable polemic that lodged in my craw. First, this kind of thing really boils down to a guilty pleasure; sociological grabassery, or the more academic version of your favorite band sucks. I mean, let’s face it: getting at the exploded view of whatever shape mainstream happiness has assumed today and comparing it against your own personal blueprint is bound to prove disappointing — particularly for anyone as erudite as Dr. Wampole. As such, poking holes in a target as broad and flimsy as the hipster is almost too easy; a bit like crafting an elaborate argument against using Brasso as a condiment, just for the sake of having an excuse to exercise your skillz at arguing. Then there was that purple-ish patch she quoted from her friend with the three names. No. Just no…it’s one or the other: three names or bombast; you don’t get to have both. It’s simply hoggish, sir.

The really big pimple, though, was Wampole’s suggestion that having affection for things non-contemporaneous to one’s personal history is what supplies the bedrock for hipster turf. I deeply hate this idea, and so I figured I might spend a few well-caffeinated paragraphs chipping away at it.

RETRO V OLDE

Terms like retro and vintage can cast even the most magnificent artifact as something ditzy or kitsch. After all, do we regard the librarian who listens to Preludes and Fugues for the Virginal as a big retro music chick? Is the man who sharpens his straight razor with a horsehide strop really just being retro? Is everyone on The Antiques Roadshow really just a buncha hipsters? Is the long haul trucker who loves real maple syrup just being all pretentious & shit? Is the carpenter who covets postwar power tools for their superior durability really just being an insincere asshole?

(No.)

I happen to really like the old stuff. I’m tempted to insert the word timeless here, but I won’t, because one, it’s overused, and second, I think it’s become something of an intellectual smokescreen used by some people to get out of feeling stuck in the past, by scratching out the ‘sell by’ dates printed on the sides of all their treasure.

I first became occupied with matters antediluvian when I was twelve or thirteen — so late eighties — well before buzzwords like retro or vintage, and long before I entertained any notions of nostalgia. I grew up in a provincial hinterland where the only entertainment available outside of my own devout onanism consisted of an incomplete third-hand encyclopaedia set, free Marvel comics from 7-11, and a diminutive G-rated VHS library. For whatever reason, G-rated films from the 80′s tended also to be period films. We had them all: Roger Rabbit, Dick Tracy, White Fang and the last film in the Indiana Jones trilogy. Best of all the bunch were the generic SP copies of Chaplin and Mayo flicks that were mixed in. I watched and re-watched all of these tapes, soaking in the look of them, but especially the clothing, hairstyles and set pieces. I easily lost a years worth of sleep over those pale blue spectators worn by Doody’s character in The Last Crusade. Why in hell didn’t women’s shoes still look like that? (80′s shoes sucked.) And how about the hair? Whenever some moll slapped her beau in a Howard Hawks film, she’d unleash a tonsorial avalanche of dramatic, Vitalis-sodden forelock. I remember thinking to myself that that’s how all men’s hair should look — five miles of shellac’d tresses piled up and shoved back in shining waves (also sucking in the 80′s: coiffure). Whenever I’d watch a modern-day G-rated film, everything looked like bullshit to me; the ridiculous stonewashed jeans someone like Rick Moranis might be wearing looked like a lost bet compared to the ones Clark Gable was chasing around in forty years before. Even the coolest cars in contemporary films were forgettable at best; yeah, keep your pretentious-ass’d Delorian — gimme that 1937 Lincoln Zephyr coupe-sedan!

Like any impressionable squirt, I started trying to style myself after my heroes. Vintage clothing boutiques weren’t yet a concern anywhere around me in those days, so I started seeking out contemporary duds that embodied even the vaguest elements of the clothing from my favorite periods. I went apeshit for argyle patterns, pale yellows, salmons, tans & browns; likewise, linens, gabardine and freckled tweed all made the strings go zing. I remember I came across a shirt in a Ross Dress-For-Less made from a tan hopsack-like material; I lifted it, got it home and cut the collar off to make it look more like something Leslie Howard might’ve worn in The Petrified Forest. Shoes were the trickiest. I settled for a pair of disused saddle shoes rescued from the back of my dad’s closet, as they were the closest looking thing to a pair of spectators I could get my hands on, (I wore three pairs of socks just to make the bastards fit — two pair of crappy white gym socks covered with one of my three pairs of more stylish argyles). While the other delinquents were off skateboarding and huffing paint behind the 7-11 on Saturdays, you could find me cycling my ass off alone to the Jo-Ann Fabric four zip codes away to cadge Rit dye and period-looking buttons with which to retrofit a modern piece.

This might all sound like some precocious, fetishistic bent, and maybe it was that; but it was also sincere. It certainly had nothing to do with being hip. I actually made life difficult for myself, but I couldn’t help it; that’s how deeply I appreciated what I perceived as the more imaginative compositions and superior construction in the old stuff as opposed to the Hobe beachwear shirts and puffy LA Gear booties so coveted by my peers (in whose inevitable ridicule I did bask).

I still very much do. What’s more, I salute anyone else sensitive enough to discern and embrace the details of certain bygone conventions, even if their enthusiasm does spill over into cheap approximation from time to time. In fact, I think this single distinction is one for which Wampole or her editor might have better allowed for: Ideally, one shouldn’t trivialize the object of their passion with tawdry imitation. You won’t see me running around trying to look like an ersatz Gatsby or Tom Joad, (yeah, I know, I’ve seen that kid around town, too). But feeling inspired by sensibilities which came before your ability to load up a diaper is truly a mark of refinement. It says something about you; it says you’re not welded to the here and now; you look around and pick out what works best, regardless of what fashion or tradition dictates. If you were that way, and we lived on the same street, we would absolutely be friends (Wampole would be the chick on the block who avoided eye contact whenever you waved hello) — yes, even if you drank PBR and wore short jorts and had a forty-niner mustache and played the trombone. The euphonium would be even better, though…

This is something of a pet theme to which I’ll invariably return.

Exactly Like You

Some fine medicine for the doldrums here…John Lawlor’s tenor guitar playing is just so unique and sublime that it makes me want to run a lap around the world.

There is just nothing not to like here: I love Lawlor’s chording technique and tone; I love his great hair; his snazzy all-American kitchen; his bashful chuckle before he begins the tune…the whole thing just makes me happy.

A little research reveals little about the man himself. Not a showy guy in the least, Lawlor, who is totally self-taught, hid himself and his amazing gift away after gigging around with his brother throughout the 70′s. Apparently it was only at the behest of a friend that Lawlor allowed himself to be recorded and uploaded to Youtube. I’m really grateful that friends like that are out there in the world.

I’d very much like to see Mr. Lawlor lay down some tracks for a proper recording. If anyone out there knows John or can help make that happen, please do get in touch. (I am serious.)

 

HT: TK Smith

Doing Something With It

As an undiscovered artist, (I loitered on that for sometime before commiting to self-referencing as such), I sometimes/often get hit up by friends with some variant of the following with regards to my work: Yeah, but when’re you gonna DO something with it? Knowing their hearts are in the right place, I never openly bristle. Truth be told, it actually provides my starved ego with a healthy – if oblique – bit of flattery to gnaw on. It helps to be reminded that I am capable of doing anything worth doing *something* with. So, thank you, (goddammit).

But then there’s the unpleasant lingering aftertaste of the question, for it seems to intimate underachievement on my behalf. This makes me cranky, since I’ve remained robustly productive on all creative fronts, from three complete manuscripts — all three covers for which I designed the graphics — to the miles of pen & ink illustrations and, of course, my music. To be fair, I guess that’s just the *it* part of the equation. As for the *something* part, it’s not always clear to me what this is supposed to represent; celebrity and wealth? Cult status and a solidly above median annual income? What is this vague *something* folks seem to think I’ve forgotten to consider? It’s not like I’m not hungry; it’s not like my nervous tissues aren’t still awash in piss ‘n’ vinegar; it’s not as if I lost my ego somewhere in the bed linens. So, what’s wrong with me? Where’s that brass ring, already?

Background: As a kid, my father openly and regularly reviled anything having to do with my creative side. We’re talking from maybe 7 or 8 all the way up until I moved out, just before my 18th birthday. Besides the daily acid baths, he made scarce any kind of paper, pens or pencils in the house, including the fuck-it bucket full of derelict crayons and the office stationery he’d swiped from the supply closet at work. Brutal interdiction was followed by strategic raids of my bedroom in order to uncover any pieces of artwork I’d ferreted away; whatever he’d find he’d subsequently burn in the fireplace alongside his canceled checks. It’s maybe not surprising to any slob with even a vague concept of what passion is that my old man’s hostility toward anything remotely sophisticated or artistic in nature only intensified my pursuit of said. When I finally got out on my own, I felt literally intoxicated by my new-found freedoms. I was mystified by friends who frittered away their basic liberties on beer and pot. For me, being able to sit up until 4AM working on an idea out in the open…at the kitchen table…with the lights on! I mean, just the idea that I could leave a project out when I went to bed and discover it still sitting there in the morning was better than any drug or fantasy to me. I was free to produce, and that freedom was at once humbling and euphoric. I stayed high on those fumes for a long time.

However, heaven, like all things, comes in monthly installments, and so my creative bent once again grew fallow, only this time in favor of full-time employment with benefits, for to afford my half of the rent and the modest sundries pursuant to a decent standard of living, aka the vicious cycle/consumer trap/rat race, etc. It took only a few years time before the fourteen hour shifts left me feeling so exsanguinated and cynical that I feared I’d reached a premature cul-de-sac in life. I can readily detect that sense of defeat in the photographs of me from those days, and even the few drawings I managed to fit in back then, which appear heavy and frenetic, like they might be the last things I’d ever do. Instead of allowing the electricity to flow through my traces the way I had been blueprinted, I was jury rigging my circuits in order just to survive in a world that I didn’t always feel equipped to live in. Indeed, my ideal world resembled something more like a vast hangar where I toiled away the days while someone slipped basic nourishment under the front door in the form of protein, water and pussy. Whenever I’d see a film or something where some spaced-out gimper was going at a canvas on the bucolic grounds of some expansive sanitarium, I’d think to myself — that lucky fuck! Am I really supposed to feel bad for him?! (Recently, when I watched Franco Nero’s character at the end of A Quiet Place in the Country, I confess, I felt a little of that same old envy.)

Fortunately for me, around this same time, e-commerce was in its incipient phase, and I discovered I was able to scrape just enough scratch together dealing in various trash/treasure each month to cover my end of the bills. I never realized huge returns or anything, but that was also never my goal; the goal was to be able to make exactly enough to maintain that thin buffer between myself and certain dispossession, so that I could stop clocking in and start developing some of the ideas I’d been woodshedding. This is around the time I started the first draft of my first novel-length fiction manuscript, Soundtrack to a Dull Moment in Nowheresville, a boy-meets-girl/boy-loses-girl yarn spun from the scraps of paper and napkins I’d been amassing with little ideas scribbled down on them whenever work was slow. As I toiled eight hours each night at my book, I began noticing changes in myself: I started to shed certain nervous habits without even trying, like biting my nails, which I had done since boyhood; feelings of diffidence and anxiety which had plagued me throughout my teens and early twenties gradually gave way to a growing sense of fastness. For the first time in my life, I found myself thinking, “so this is the terrain this chassis was designed for.” I felt myself, and that was enough for me. I just wanted to sustain that for as  long as possible.

What Does Your Desktop Look Like?

Got an e-mail from LinkedIn the other day asking me whether my desktop looks like Richard Branson’s…well…no; but I like mine more.

(accidental snapshot of my desktop from a few years ago rescued from a now dying camera.)