march 27
saturday was a strange day for me - i left the house early with gk and vasso and tom to the anarchist book fair toting ivan petrov and temp slave and a gaggle of zines (fucktooth, thrift score, crimezine, angry young woman, temp slave)
hours of trying to sell, to be sure i still had that edge -
ivan petrov was new, so it had yet to develop a solid pitch. i guess the best promotion is constantly in motion.
"it's new, you might like it if you like new stuff"
gk was fond of saying, "it's about drinking as social protest" - as the day shined on in a bukowski t-shirt he would hold up one of his two or three olde english malt liquors to be stridently ironicabove our booth was a large banner, "fuck barnes & noble" with only the gcpress typewriter logo, no other words.
as good as our books were it turned out most come-uppers would have loved a t-shirt or bumper sticker wishing ill (or strident passion) for the large book chainthe anarchist book fair, contradictory to what wilner presented, people actually paid for their books. saw al decker promoting pie. saw lots of pretty punk girls. something about that aesthetic - i'm more drawn in proportionally by that crowd maybe?
some zdtv people were on hand. some knew me, some were maybe trolling for content for the network. i have a hard time keeping my vigor up discussing the network - being cut loose is still a sad experience i think and hearing about people who left and such only reinforces my distant feelings. i wish i didn't have a sinking feeling about them. someday i won't.
i left that scene because i had been sneaking some 40 ounces under the table
i went to the car to sleep
later drove back to oakland, picked up my car
drove to john whiteside's house.
then i went back to help amy install more of her final project. her project, which maybe she'll describe in full detail, because there's a lot of depth of thought and poetry of motion that i can't fairly articulate, her final project involves a six foot high mound of clothes and items rummaged and cast off from our house, covered in wax. little lights are stuck in it, some of them blink.yesterday, when i pitched more bandwidth for crazy shit to him, he responded with a party invite. in order to get my ideas an audience, it was clear i needed to be in his community - when i arrived he introduced me to some warm folks doing streaming music and video content on the web. it was a room full of folks who actually drive SUVs because they have babies and just moved to SF and the kind of people Seismic Solutions (who were at the anarchist book fair) and the anarchists don't care to associate with but i found to be ultimately patient and excitable. there were moments when i overshared or we didn't perhaps share the same cultural enthusiasms but they listened to my ideas generally and it was nice to think that maybe if i can talk to enough people about wanting to be a dj online some folks might extend some additional resources to allow for a bigger party.
so john whiteside provides my dsl and now i see that in order to get a full shaft of golden bandwidth i should become a part of his music movers and shakers and new media deal makers community trying to figure out how to make ordinary folks and large corporations lust after large bandwidth. and when i debate that within myself i think, whoa, well, if there is going to be a crazy multimedia future, don't i want to make a small publisher radio station? it ain't much different from web publishing in that way - i feel somehow invested in seeing myself creating there. i mean i'm not personally responsible for ensuring small scale access to internet radio, but with the few other folks i know making and screwing around with music on computers, we might...
granted its size and scope, it's more than a sculpture, it's an installation. accordingly, she's taking up an entire corner of the gallery, which is dark but during the day light diffuses the effect of the little blinking lights. in order to maintain that mood, she wanted to make a ceiling to block out unintended light so she might illuminate the room on her terms.
so i arrived saturday night to help arrange a 30 by 20 foot heavy duty black plastic tarp she'd constructed out of sheet plastic from home depot. in order to ameliorate the heaviness of the black colour i guess, she (and friends, many friends, dedicated wonderful friends) taped up white small trashbags in puffy bumps across the surface of the black tarp. this resulting weighty surface we had to suspend 10 feet over the mound. it was a giant task, and one that kept me and dana there until 6am. wow.
it was a real long day. everyone i was with was nice and fun. except at all you knead, for breakfast on haight with gk tom and vasso, they were playing "roots of robert johnson" an incredible awesome album that made me so happy to hear out of my house. and there was a guy clearly amped up on cocaine, wearing mirrorshades with his frat-girl-girlfriend also in sunglasses, he raised his voice during the ordering to correct their iced-coffee construction methods and challenge the cook and waiter each to a rezendez-vous outside the restaurant. that kind of hyper-self-importance is exciting and unbelievable - i was really drawn to chat with him to see if he knew he was that much of an incredible asshole.
justin hall | <justin at bud dot com>