Sketches/drawings for larger pieces. I continue to explore new approaches to artmaking--new for me, that is--illustrations of the mythological world I've created.

The top drawing delineates some of the main rules by which Star Trippers must live, (e.g., "No one alive will ever know what you discover. An entire universe will be your own") accompanied by a loose schematic drawing of the star tripper's tower. The bottom sketch is "Fig. 2.4. The star tripper's dreams are tracked and correlated to their universe of optimum expression."

It just occurred to me that I have done this sort of radical recalculation before, stopping one approach to art and picking up another overnight. It was a little different back in '99 though considering I was changing from not having an approach to having an approach. Then I was completely pulled from the front, that is to say, drawn by an excitement over exploring a new way of seeing things. That excitement gave rise to all the gridded portraits.

This time it's equal parts being pushed from behind and pulled from in front. That's hard to admit. But it's true that a very large part of doing this new work was out of the realization that the portraits were for me exhausted, limiting and ultimately a statement that had finished being stated. So I pry a new world open, crack its splintery shell and poke around at what's inside.

I stopped by AMOA in a rare morning visit to the museum, went back to look at what I had missed during the opening of "22 to Watch." It was about what I'd remembered, although without the crowd in the way, I finally "got" Lidia Carroll's (I'm sure that's spelled wrong) amazing indoor/outdoor sculpture of transparent plastic tubing that moved the museum's fountain water throughout the space of the building. Nice work. And no, Roy, photography is not allowed at the museum. "Insurance reasons," I was told.

current music: Citizen Cope, Clarence Greenberg Recordings

They were predicting tropical-storm force winds and rain for Austin this weekend. Instead we got:

luck.
current music: Vacation Gold, December 1972

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston announced last Friday the launch of the Katrina Artists Trust (KAT), a grant-making trust to provide financial support for visual artists in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. "By focusing its support on the painters, sculptors, and other visual artists who lived in the regions damaged by the hurricane, the Museum’s KAT program provides a unique source of revitalization for a community with a long artistic tradition." More info here: http://www.camh.org/kat

Also, the Austin Convention Center still needs computer volunteers for the evacuees still housed there. http://www.austinfree.net/katrinavolunteer.htm

current music: 2001: A Space Odyssey (in my head)

Checked out the Texas Prize show the other night at Arthouse. Robyn O'Neil's drawings were sublime, though I admit I may be biased because we share the same obsession with environmental sci-fi wierdness. Everything else I will have to go back and see another time as I seem not to have learned my lesson yet about openings. They are the worst possible time to try and see art. (left, Robyn O'Neil, "Prelude #2, 2003")

Meanwhile, I have been spending more time in the new studio, getting used to the larger space. Continuing to do more drawings (and minimal painting) of towers, power lines and such. I'm focused in now on executing these as illustrations to this vast and sprawling mythology I'm developing--designs for the Transmitter machines, Star Tripper towers, etc. Previews to come soon.

One thing I notice while in the studio is how reluctant I've become to go for the jugular, so to speak. I'm very careful, and not in a good way. This is interesting to me, because when I first started doing art this was not a problem. Is this something that happens to all artists? It's like I became of aware of what I was doing and so suddenly there was much more at stake, and it became harder to do truly off-the-wall stuff. This is what I think was the genius of Basquiat--that he so thoroughly worked through that self-conscious stage (or never experienced it to begin with) to get right at the one true and immediate impulse of speaking.

Anyway, so now I find all my work feeling very restrained and constrained. I'm not fighting that tendency so much as noticing it and living through it. See, aren't you proud of me, Bob? No judging, just noticing...

OK, so I'm rather proud of my alma mater right about now. Sure, Harvard was among the last of the major US schools to stop doing business with South Africa. Sure, its relationship with the surrounding community is inconsistent on a good week. But the university is now, among other things, offering 50 tuition-free enrollment spots to students who would otherwise have gone to school in the Katrina flooded areas, but are now homeless.

If something this horrible happens to you, you might as well get a free Harvard education out of it.

UPDATE: MIT is doing something similar. (Yale is, too, but sloppily of course.)

I can't believe I just found out about this. (via The Year 2015.)

Meanwhile, The Carbonist School, as our group of post-Afrofuturist artists has come to dub itself, met at Flightpath on Duval to keep on hammering out our ideas, the manifesto as it's becoming. We're trying to get something solid together to present at the Afrofuturism show in Minneapolis in October. Halfway through, somebody (I think it may have been me) said "New Orleans" and the cap came off with everyone venting and expressing their disbelief.

We weren't too far into it, when a scraggly white guy came over. He was barely able to contain himself, so overwrought was he with anger and grief. He was a Tulane professor as it turned out and had escaped a couple of days before the storm hit. His whole neighborhood has been wiped out, and it wasn't clear what his next step would be.

He confirmed though that the feds had plenty of warning about what would happen here (citing some work that began under Clinton, but was halted when Bush took office), that the lack of preparedness is criminal, and that many of the excuses about inaccessibility just didn't wash for someone familiar with the local geography. One does have to ask how Walmart and various news crews, Austin's among them, managed to get to ground zero in significant numbers literally as the feds were claiming the areas were inaccessible. I don't suspect conspiracy here; it's just that it took too long to consider the lives at stake (mostly poor, black and white, countrified folk with funny accents) important enough to pull out all the stops in a rescue effort.

North-south tensions still run high, and you'll find it mainly in southern whites (directed against northern whites). In case there was any doubt, our friend from Tulane took personal umbrage over the yankees hinting around about abandoning New Orleans. "Oh yeah," he spat out, "and next time there's a snowstorm in Chicago, let's just fuckin' bulldoze the place."

The south has a very long memory.

Paul and I are leaving for Marfa in the morning. His plan had been to drive down to Florida to visit friends this weekend, but I-10 runs right through New Orleans, so he's coming with me to stay in a hipster hotel and take a trip out to Judd country.

I've been thinking about New Orleans all day, relying on James W. Bailey of all people for some perspective. The more I read about the disaster, and the slow response, the angrier I get. I know the anger does no good, and yet there it is. Apparently, the Dutch--who are very sensitive to flooding issues--and the British are outraged and baffled that the wealthiest nation on earth can't respond more quickly to its own people in crisis. Not to mention emergency management experts who agree that post 9-11, this sort of situation should actually be easy to contain, relatively speaking of course. Terrorists can outwit you, but you can always count on a devastating hurricane to hit the Gulf Coast. They don't hide themselves.

Hurricane Katrina is a manmade disaster, New Orleans a disaster waiting to happen. Yes, the storm would have hit with or without a population there, but the path to disaster was cleared for landing by a system of levees, drainages and canals that essentially caused the city to sink faster than it otherwise would have. Geologists have known this for years. And news outlets have been reporting it almost as long. Even more damning is a long record of New Orleans petitioning the feds for help to avert the disaster only to be turned down and have the city's levee maintenance funds redirected to war in Iraq. Truly, there's your "perfect storm." And the process was facilitated of course by a city government so corrupt, so nasty that hundreds of thousands could live in third world poverty in one of America's most frequently visited tourist cities.

So Dennis Hastert's slimy suggestion to abandon New Orleans (since retracted) is ludicrous, because New Orleans is not unique. Parts of Houston are sinking faster than New Orleans. It's just a matter of time.

Meanwhile editorials squawk that people get what they deserve by living in low lying areas.

"Americans' hearts go out to the people in Katrina's path. But if the people of New Orleans and other low-lying areas insist upon living in harm's way, they ought to accept responsibility for what happens to them and their property."

Ignore for a moment the fact that this is obviously written by someone with about a third-grade understanding of economics, demographics and logistics. Put that aside and let's at least be clear about whom we are casting aspersions upon: New Orleans's low point is about 8 feet below sea level. Long Beach, California's sits about 7 feet below sea level. And here are the major US cities whose low points lie right at sea level:

New York
Los Angeles
Houston
Philadelphia
San Diego
San Jose
San Francisco
Jacksonville
Baltimore
Boston
Seattle
Portland
Honolulu
Miami
Oakland

Good chance you're on that list somewhere, my friend. Oh, and DC sits about a foot above sea level. Maybe building on doomed land is a bad idea, but there's an awful lot of doomed land out there with a lot of people living on it and the fact is we're going to build there anyway, so let's just set about doing it wisely.

I'm looking forward to the road tomorrow, as I usually do. I'm looking forward to Dan Flavin, and trying to keep an open mind about Tony Feher. I keep thoughts and prayers for Mississippi and Louisiana, where all my father's people are from. I'm glad I'm going west, not east. The refugees are streaming into Austin, have been for days, coming up through Houston, looking for work. It's times like this that I wish I owned an actual business, you know, with employees. Too much.

I'll see you in Marfa.