Feeling pretty dreamy and unfocused today. Yet somehow, I managed to get lots of grunt work done on the big book production project I've got going on the side right now.

Feels like a million years since I've surfed the web or read another blog.

What's going on out there?

More design drawings:

Monday's shoot was on location at the Arthouse, with the 5x7 show set up as the backdrop.

crew setting up tracking shot on spider dolly:


Meanwhile a chance to look more closely at the 5x7's since I could not afford the cost of entry. Gracefully referring to that very controversy, Michael Sieben planted this delicious landmine:

The captions read, "Asked to contribute / Charged to attend / Eighty-five bucks for me and a friend." Sweet.

I was most strongly attracted to this trio, however, seeing the science in the art:

They turned out to be by my old pal Brad Tucker.

Email I just sent to my New York-trapped friend Brian [in part]:

hey man,

this film shoot has been KICKING MY ASS!! on the set every day 6am to 4pm, then home for more production design work until 2am, but man i am having a great time!! i am using new creative parts i haven't accessed since high school; kind of the craftsy, improvised gadget-making parts. also i'm learning a lot about film making. and diggin' it.

More to come...

Here are nine things that are inspiring me right this second.

Rufus Wainwright, Want One: This gives me visions of flying.

Isaac Julien's film stills (see also Charlie White): Bathe in their slickness, their Hollywood-y sense of excessive lushness.

Morris and Thorne's "Wormholes in Spacetime and Their Use for Interstellar Travel": A seminal article that is basically a blueprint for making wormholes. Includes explanation of how to use exotic matter of negative mass.

1 film in 6 chapters by Cauleen Smith: Shooting starts this weekend, and the imagination has been in overdrive creating a dislocated space of time collapsed in on itself.

Kendra Foster Myriadmorphonic: Haven't been able to get this sister's voice out of my head since I saw her light up the stage with George Clinton and that dude in the diaper.

Carlos Garaicoa: This artist, whose show I saw in LA, builds worlds and systems and futuristic realities.

Malik Sidibe: His weird time-collapsed photographs have been a major starting point for the film production.

A Clockwork Orange: Okay, I only finally just saw this film a few days ago, but nobody told me it has some of the best use of portraiture in American film, ever.

Boeing schematic of the International Space Station: The full-scale replica I saw at the NASA open house was impressive enough, but the 8 1/2 x 11 schematic they handed out as tourist schwag has been one of the artistic highlights of the year so far.

Production design concept drawings:

current music: Rufus Wainwright, Want One

This is probably old news in Austin, but here's what I know so far about AMOA's 20 to Watch.

IN:
Candace Briceño
Sodalitas (Little, Swec & Phillips)
Peat Duggins

OUT:
Cinqué Hicks
Dave Bryant
Eric Gibbons
Hana Hillerova

Unknown, but I assume IN until someone tells me otherwise:
Faith Gay
Young-Min Kang
Jason Singleton

Congratulations, all!

Ring in if you have more info.

Meanwhile, I've finally put the finishing touches on my hipster chain wallet (my new drill allowed me to finish the closing mechanism) and have begun sketches on the production design for Cauleen's film. Admittedly, I'm still not 100% sure of what "production design" means; I figure I'll feel my way along and play it by ear. Back in LA, my brother, who has years of experience in Hollywood, tried to explain it to me by way of example (the Batman films). So now I get the core of it, but still not sure where the outside boundaries are. (right, cast and crew from the film, which still doesn't have a title)

Also, the castmembers had an initial costume fitting today. I'm not sure when shooting starts, but there's still lots to pull together.

current music: David Byrne iTunes radio stream

I'm in LA now--a sort of last-minute, surprise trip out for Mother's Day. As usual in LA, I'm trying to do as little as possible. Just before leaving Austin, Cauleen and I had breakfast with Valerie Cassel Oliver of the CAM (Houston). Valerie is a rare artworld creature: approachable, brilliant, without pretensions. I was as inarticulate as usual, but she did groove on Cauleen and my project to figure out what comes after Afrofuturism, which vibed with her recent curatorial effort at the CAM (Double Consciousness), which although it claimed to be about Conceptualism, was actually slightly more complicated than that...

Take a look at Roy Stanfield's new January Blog (coedited with a couple of others). Roy is thoughtful and smart and loves all the shit the New York art world produces that I can't stand, so it's a good view from the other side, as it were.

By the way, Roy, I'm still waiting for a guest posting from you on this blog...

Meanwhile, my last day at the day job is today, and I'm oddly--surprisingly--nervous about it.

Winding down the day job at last. I told Richard the other day that it's not a great idea to announce your resignation from a job and then proceed to hang out there for the next 3 months. The "let's get on with it" psychic buildup is almost unbearable.

Anyway, a permanent replacement still has not been hired, though one is in the offing.

In the meantime, I've nailed down a couple more contracts to keep me afloat for later this year and next year, so everything is going according to plan so far.

current music: Kendra Foster, Myriadmorphonic

New Mexico is now 2 weeks gone, but the fallout from the meditation, the science, the art has been radiating ever since.

Roswell was mainly all about the International UFO Museum and Research Center, where I spent hours in their library perusing anything they had related to time travel. But that same day I was pleasantly surprised by the Roswell Museum and Art Center, which had more first rate art tucked away in a couple of its galleries than I would have suspected.

Ray Martín Abeyta's religio-historical narrative paintings collapsed late medieval devotional painting with street art, lowrider culture, and Mexican graphics. Another gallery featured Carroll Parrott Blue's projected DVD-rom The Dawn at My Back:
Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing, which was experientially a little tedious, but still had some nice moments. (left, Abeyta, Indios, 2002)

Of course, I also had to suffer the sight of the life-sized, fiberglass sad Indian on a sad horse painted in southwestern colors, except for the horse's neon red eyes. (It can't even be forgiven by the fact that it was made in 1975, the height of the Sad Indian movement.) But then that was more than made up for by the museum's gallery on pre-Manhattan Project rocketry, which showed rocket casings with more than a passing resemblance to African drums:

From Roswell, it was a few hours up the interstate with the Feynman Lectures on quantum mechanics on the CD player. I understood the first CD just fine, but then it was downhill from there. There was an awful lot of "you can see this is not the same as that, but if you move this here then that should look like that," accompanied by the sound of chalk on a blackboard. Pause. More chalk. Appreciative laughter. Great. I still liked the sound of the concepts though.

Santa Fe did not disappoint. Gretchen Wachs at Lew Allen Contemporary was inspiring, and William DeBilzan at (cough, cough) Diane DeBilzan Gallery was at least worth a stop in. I assumed from the daunting white walls and the angry-youth staff dressed all in black, that SITE Santa Fe considers itself the premier art space in the city. OK. In a stroke of good timing, Jim Campbell, who is now one of my favorite artists, had a few galleries devoted to his electronic musings. This is conceptualism done well; the sound of "I Have a Dream" being typed on a typewriter, the movement of a crowd transformed into an undulating sea of glowing lights. In the art world, there are a lot of immersive sound installations using layered, ambient voices, all of which are pretty much the same. Campell's take on this trope was a whole new experience that told the simple, compelling story of a man's insanity and death. Ironically, traditional media not done in a particularly compelling way was to be found in the next gallery over in James Drake's bombastic, larger-than-life charcoal drawings. There was a lot of smoke there, which obscured whatever fire was there.

Uta Barth's tree photographs were cool. Even the mundane light-in-the-living room pictures were nice, if not particularly a revelation.

The trip, however, was supposed to be all about finding quiet space, internally and externally. Such a thing is not easy.

I spent the better part of a day at the Dar al-Islam Mosque outside of Abiquiú, a short drive from Santa Fe (I never did make it to Christ in the Desert). It's tucked in the mountains at the top of a dirt road and completely isolated. No one was there but the caretaker, whom I thought might have been Egyptian or Lebanese, but turned out to be a very suntanned Belgian.

After performing the ablution ritual as described on a poster near the water faucets, I went in and took some pictures for a while. I did some drawing, some writing, some thinking, and I realized how much I'd like to have a whole life set up to make this possible all day, every day.

The Awakening Museum back in Santa Fe is home to a single, massive work of art depicting various biblical scenes, including my favorite: scenes from the Apocalypse of Revelations, though it is given a decidedly humanist spin here. TAM couldn't really be judged as a work of art, more as a spiritual space, and so I lingered for a long time inside, outside in the zen style meditation garden and then in the gift shop where I picked up a copy of Baba Ram Dass's Be Here Now/Be Now Here.

So leafing through that book, I can't help but be impressed that almost everyone seems as interested in time travel in their own way as I am.

Hence NASA last weekend; hence the rereading of Cauleen's movie to realize that it's all about time travel...

All this space-time thinking came to a head this past Friday night when Richard invited me to the P-Funk concert at Auditorium Shores back here in Austin. There they were: all those drugged-out space children grooving in the funk of the eternal now. "To the windows, to the walls, to the sweat running down my balls..." Ah, revelation! Ah, meditation...

current music: The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. 2: Advanced Quantum Mechanics