Living almost too fast to write about it. Just got a little inspired by The Flaming Lips movie Fearless Freaks (endless adrenaline, risk, unvarnished awkwardness), and very, very inspired by the Johnson Space Center open house in Houston, where I was for the last couple of days with Cauleen. (Diagrams, machines, explosive physics.)

If I had a 4th or 5th life, I'd spend it as a NASA physicist.

Still catching up from a week away, but the photos from the trip are up here. Looking back at the pictures, I now see how obvious it was that this trip was about stillness, quiet and solitude.

current music: The Prayer Cycle, Jonathan Elias

Tomorrow morning--or rather, later this morning--I'll be taking off for a week or so, an excursion into the desert and lower Rockies of New Mexico, first to Roswell and then to Santa Fe and beyond.

I'm counting on the desert to give me some perspective. I'm looking to the quiet to help me give voice to the unashamed awe that is the prerequisite of being curious about the universe. One of my destinations, a monastery outside of Alquiu, has literature that speaks of our "noise-filled life." Our lives are noisy, and I'm looking forward to the silence of the road to give my thoughts a chance to wind down, rest and recompose themselves in new ways.

There is a part of me that wants to be completely open and to find redemptive value in everything. That is the part of me that wants to look at art and let everything, anything go. That's the part that never wants to say a disparaging word, that wants to think everything is beautiful, or at least that everything is its own justification. That part wants to see and not judge.

That part is at war with another part: the part that wants to be rigorous and excellent, that wants to see rigor and excellence, and above all honesty. That is the part of me that says, "Jesus Christ, someone please stop this woman from making any more art!" All affect, all show. That part wants to find the most pure kinds of truth we are capable of and wants to reject anything that leads away from it.

Honesty is hard to put one's finger on. How does one know when one encounters honesty? How does a person sniff out insincerity? Outright lies?

I don't know.

Sincerity has taken some hard knocks lately, but for the record, I for one believe that it's entirely possible to be sincerely ironic, to be sincerely flippant, to be sincerely blasé, or to be sincerely hilarious. I believe it's possible for an artist, for example, to arrive at detached irony (for example) as the most appropriate means of expression because any other means would be a betrayal to the subject matter. But when I see those art world accessories deployed as default signifiers of cool, or even worse, as signifiers of thinking, well it drives me nuts.

The open road can be lonely. America is good for that; vast expanses of isolation. I'm looking for a certain humility before the road, a helplessness before the cosmos, an innocent and hungry eye toward art and life and the physics of particles. I wonder if I can touch that just for a minute. In any case, I will have time, silence and space. And really, those are all the ingredients of the universe.

current music: Stephen Frick, The Downswing

You'll notice that while I'm away, I've temporarily disabled the comments feature. This is because I get spammed 10 to 15 times a day with bogus "comments" directing people usually to some gambling site. For now, I've been cleaning up these spams manually, but won't have reliable computer access on the road, so I've suspended the commenting feature temporarily.

I had heard this happens once a blog gets a certain amount of traffic. Comments will go back on next week.

Peace!

Great new development!! Jacqueline Rush Rivera, a friend and someone who helped me out with Global Nomads 2 years ago, has stepped forward to assume the editorship of Electric Skin. So all you fellow bloggers: don't kill your Skin links just yet! She'll need a couple of weeks to ramp up, but then we should be back online. Woohoo! I'm actually looking forward to having it change over to a female perspective.

current music: Get By on Love Neo-Soul Mix

Greg and Eric's show, "You Still Painting?" opened at Fresh Up tonight. I always like both those guy's work, so it won't surprise anyone that I liked the show tonight. Short review: definitely worth a trip. I especially noticed the very subtle tactile qualities of Greg's work. It's like slow accumulation of feeling with the fingertips. (left, Greg Piwonka, "Pfunk Alien," 2005)

Meanwhile, last night I got together with Cauleen for another meeting of the unpopular techno-culture salon. It was even better than last time, as we were going into it with some momentum and ideas carrying forward. This time we not only talked art, but got heavy into the science side, bouncing back and forth between the artistic, scientific, political and psychological implications of time travel and covering very concretely ideas like tachyons, redshifting, event horizons, etc. We agreed that cross-time communication with radio waves is a good place to start, versus trying to deal with moving actual matter through time.

I'm now the production designer on her new series of short films, too and we talked about locations, and about possibly going for a kind of lo-fi futurist aesthetic inspired by Malick Sidibé.

So we had a good time. Nailah Sankofa says she may join us and if I can get on the phone at the same time as Larry Williams, he might be in on it, too.

Valerie Cassel Oliver, curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will be in Austin Thursday, April 28, speaking at the Dougherty Arts Center from 4 to 6pm. Oliver was one of the architects behind the whole "post-black" phenomenon centered at the Studio Museum in Harlem, among other things, and I spoke to her last year for my Afrofuturism article.

In what appears to be an ominous, yet predictable sign of the future, The Carver Museum passed on having her speak there, even though that event would have been perfect for the beautiful new theater space. Told ya this would happen.

Arturo Palacios over at the DAC, however, jumped at the opportunity and so there she will be. The more things change...

UPDATE: Oliver will be in town on May 4, not April 28 as previously stated.

The random art world blinks its blinded eye once again as Eric Gibbons tells me he's been cut from the short list for AMOA's 20 to Watch show without so much as a studio visit, which as I understood it all the short listers were supposed to get. (left, "Hey, Nature Girl!" 2003)

It never occurred to me for even a moment that Eric would not end up in this show. But maybe this was just my personal bias. It at least seems unprofessional that he would be denied the courtesy of a studio visit to plead his case since that was supposed to be part of the bargain.

Here are the leading theories I've heard behind the seemingly abrupt decision:

1. They're saving him for something better (seems unlikely they'd have this ulterior motive without some discussion with him about it).

2. He was in fact disqualified by having a major show in Dallas that just came down (again, seems like they would have mentioned something to that effect).

3. They just realized they're full up on large-scale, abstract painters. (That's always possible of course, and you can never really do anything about curatorial quotas like that short of changing what you do.)

4. The world is just a crazy place.

current music: The Polyphonic Spree, The Beginning Stages Of...

Uncle Nicky said
No problem can't be solved.
Now I dissect astral planes
And solve the mystery
Of disparate clocks.
I can hold
All these moments
Future and past
Together in a string
That's tied
To the other end of the universe.