IDEA THIRTY-TWO: Throw out anything you haven't used within the last year.

One of the things I've come to believe in is that it's important to live lean if you wanna make art that packs a PUNCH.

I find it necessary to get rid of unnecessary distractions. It's hard enough for me to finish anything without a lot of STUFF getting in the way. Of course, at the end of the day, all art is a distraction on some level--the making of it and the experiencing of it is, at its essence, a beautiful waste of time. So it's important to carefully seperate the so-called useful from the so-called useless in such a way that will avoid future tears and despair. Everyone fears the moment of realizing that something priceless is gone for good. That's how I came up with the formula that I get rid of any tools, materials and randomly collected items that will supposedly inform a piece of art within a year of procuring them, if they are not put to actual use.

Beyond the art clutter itself, this philosophy should also be used for clothes, appliances, furniture, mementos, shoes, table settings...significant others.

I think that by doing this I have it in my head that one day I'll whittle my life down and clear the space around me like the kid who lived across the hall from me in college. He was a hipster from Cali back in the mid 90s before there was such a thing, but he had it DOWN on the prototype tip: the dark blue jeans, the fucked up boots with flaps sticking out, the assymetrical bowl cut hair that looked like it was cut with carpenter scissors. He had the right kind of heavy-lidded eyes and crazy bedhead hair. He was a quiet drunk who was always covered with bruises and cuts. He wore a grey fedora along with his usual uniform of white undershirts and jeans and slept with a rotating roster of attractive black women... One nite in spring I ended up drinking with a bunch of folks i didn't usually hang up on the dormitory roof, a big security no-no. And for good reason--the roof was a collection of slants, nooks and crannies, any one of which I feared was waiting to trip me and send me over the side. I tried to play tuff, but thankfullyl we didn't stay up there long and went back to his room. All the time I'd lived across from him I'd never been inside, and I was surprised by what I saw, or, I should say, what i DIDNT see. There was nothing in it except for an old fashioned black typewriter and a stack of white paper that both sat atop the university issued desk. Otherwise the room looked exactly as it had the first second he walked in. I know because my room across the hall was a copy of his and seeing his gave me a flashback of that first instant in my own room, before my posters went on the walls and my books and boxes and clothes and CDs got scattered all about in their various piles.

Damn, i said, cradling my 40 bottle like a baby...is this all yr stuff?

No one answered me. Someone was playing a guitar...someone else threw a bottle against the wall.

We laughed and smoked cigarettes and stared at the bubbling mess of broken glass. Someone had a boombox playing a mixtape. That was back when everyone was into Palace. We blasted "Cat's Blues" and sang along to Will Oldham's psychotic twang, screaming the lines, "If I had a clue what justice was, it would be more than I deserved" and at that moment my prototype hipster neighbor threw open his closet door to reveal a ferreal American flag brightly unfurled down the length of it. Before I could register what was going on the prototype waved an open Zippo lighter along the bottom of the flag and the whole thing BURST into flames. There were screams of joy and fear as everyone stepped back as the yellow flames licked the ceiling. We crunched about in the broken beer bottle glass and watched the flag shrivel up around itself, like an old lady disappearing into her shawl.

I don't know what shocked me more: the sight of such a huge flag in a space so bare or the sight of the flames or the realization that at any second now I might be expelled and my college career would be over and done...

After what seemed like hours but was really only minutes, someone came running in with a fire extinguisher, shouting at us to step aside and spraying the entire wall with cheerful spurts of white foamy mess.

The remains of the flag were thrown away. One less thing to own.

The whole thing was pretty fucking cool and set a standard that i've striven towards (at times unconciously) ever since...


By way of a (necessary?) digression, allow me to point out another level of cool that i've striven towards for many years...Herzog, Kinski and the movie Fitzcarraldo...It's one of my favorite artistic endeavors. A movie about an impossible mission (dragging a ship over a mountain in order to build an opera house in the middle of the Amazon rainforest), the making of itself which was an impossible task--i.e. filming the recreation of this feat with cast and crew in the middle of the Amazon rain forest...

here's a clip in which Herzog, the director, recounts how the indians in the film offered to kill Kinski for Herzog.

Murder offer

Here's a clip that shows why:

Kinki losing it on the set

IDEA THIRTY-ONE: Resist belief in a personal God

To search for the truth, yes; but to think that there is somebody or something we call God, no.

It cannot even be said that He exists. Even that is too concrete. Then you cannot say that He is wise or that He knows. Because if He knows, then there are two things - the known and the One who knows. And that is too detailed for God. He should be an indefinite divinity...

...because the machine of the world is exceedingly complex for the simplicity of men.

IDEA THIRTY: Twitter Tag

TRUE

I guess it's the Heideggerian in me, but in order to discover how to use something in a next level way (and by that I mean a HARDER BETTER FASTER STRONGER way), I have to first see it used in its most assed-out, busted-up, and/or pedestrian state. I want the usefulness of the tool brought down to its lowest possible level. Like tryin to type yr manifesto on an antique typewriter with dirty keys and a dry ribbon using a piece of sandpaper or celluloid instead of paper, or bombing the half-smashed glass of a bus stop shelter during a rainstorm so that the spray paint streaks and splatters and drips psycho style across the cracks like on a Jackson Pollack canvas... A next level moment can happen anywhere, at anytime, as long as you're open to it. I've had it happen where I'll be sitting thru a tedious, dry and overlong presentation, when suddenly there will be a diagram, or a collection of shapes or graphs meant to illustrate some banality and BOO-YA I'll realize a whole new way of thinking about something. It won't be a something that has anything to do with what the presenter was going on about, but oh well.

(Progress is very rarely a linear process that adheres to cause and effect. Sometimes you gotta break shit to see what's next)

Like on the new Twitter joint. What if u blatantly ignore the question ("What are you doing?") that sets the premise and instead use the broadcasting capability to issue news clip mini-posts about a particular subject at regular intervals, like an old school wire service received on cellys.

If you ignore the question you can use Twitter to publish a serialized horror story or you can "twitter" the first lines of books...

Opposite these innovators, on the other side of the room, stand the great mass of Twitterers tweeting in the most basic and obvious way possible. They announce where they are, what they are doing, where they're going and with whom. They also talk about what they're eating, drinking, smoking, watching, downloading and installing. I've clicked on to the "with friends" link of random kids and it's like listening into a conversation, which is pretty hot. This kind of basic "I am here" message, repeated over and over all around the world got me thinking…

What about a game called Twitter Tag? It would work in reverse to regular tag. The person who was "IT" would be in a general location that was made known, (like Union Square, NYC or Golden State Park, San Francisco) nonchalantly posting tweets from their mobile handy about their surroundings (the rule would be that each post has to DESCRIBE someTHING nearby) while those who are following try to get closer to the person and eventually try to tag them. The person who successfully tags the person who is IT becomes the new IT. They receive the password that allows them to go in and take over sending tweets to the IT account.

There could be some good old fashioned running around tag action as the tweeters zeroed in on the person who was IT.

At the end of the allotted time period for the game (a few hours?…a few days?) the person who managed to post the greatest number of tweets over the longest amount of time wins.

The possibilities for advertising and community building and protest staging are endless! I can see hip chains launching new products with an online map of all the locations where Tag will be played with the players converging on store sites or cafes or clubs…

Descriptions in the tweets would make the game a mash-up between tag and treasure hunt.

Likewise, it would be a great way to sell drugs, if one was so inclined!

Other followers who were not in the vicinity could help by tweeting their ideas of where/who the person was.

The whole thing sounds like fun to me but I don't really play games so some people who do should let me know what they think.

IDEA TWENTY-NINE: Twitterpated!

It's spring and I'm twitterpated. You know: horny. Wanting it all ways, all the time. Fast and crazy, slow and insane...

Being good at making love is a lot like being good at writing:

In addition to having patience and mad skills, u have to have a willingness to

tap the alien vein that throbs inside you.

U gotta give in to the bump and grind of it all

Every piece of art has a rhythm, just like a fuck. Even so-called silent pieces like the pillars at Stonehenge and precisely decorated Grecian Urns and still life paintings of fruit positioned upon rumpled tablecloths have a way of dancing through the space that they are in.

I can tell you about this but the only way you'll really get me is if you experience it for yrself...like the bullseye of an orgasm, understanding in and of itself is a gathering up and coming together that outstretches like gigantic unfurled wings--there's the gusty, exhilirating rush, the sense of things falling into place. An unexplainable feeling of being at home.

No matter whether we are at rest, or supposedly thinking about something else, our desires are constantly working for and against us, pulsing thru our blood...widening our pupils and charging our nerves...all for the persistence of something larger than our singular lives.

In the end our most dramatic, Shakespeare-style life altering emotional episodes are the result of boring old chemistry, nothing more.

The same is true of art making. It is a pragmatic business, just like Andy Warhol taught. You go to work and do a job that in the end comes down to numbers.

Ask any musician and he or she will tell you...in the end it's about numbers.

Ask me about my own writing, and I'll tell you that it's less about a motive driven plot and more about how certain groupings of words work together better than other groups of words.

Some words are now. They are of this moment and HAPPENIN.

I never want to lose being of the moment.

My blog BRANDTRUEBOY is having technical issues that may or may not be resolved.

I'm trying not to get overly romantic about my blog's demise.

Every ending is a beginning, I tell myself.

Perhaps the death of BTB is a harbinger of the death of blog culture on a larger scale.

I wonder, what would Andy do? If he had a blog and it got all fucked up and he still wanted to be in touch with his peeps, how would he go about it? And I realize that while I don't know exactly, he would definitely be something quick and easy.



http://twitter.com/true