Westward Invasion Complete. Commencing Overthrow of L.A.

Not to get too militaresque here.

This is just a quick update for all those who follow this blog and want to know where I am at. I hope this answers a few questions.

The road trip was a success. Katherine and I had a complete ball exploring the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and most important, the people of these United States. We slept and spent time in a total of seven cities: Wichita, Dallas, Las Cruces, Tucson, Tempe, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. We made day excursions to White Sands, the Saguaro National Forest, and Sedona. Katherine's journey is still on, but my move is complete.

Wichita: We spent one night here. Our hosts were young professional classical musicians, and together constituted the very best first CouchSurfing.org experience I could possible have asked for.

Dallas: Five nights here. Our host Ramano is an ER doctor and fitness buff with a very active social life. He and his friends showed Katherine and me a Dallas that we could never have experienced without such insider knowledge as has Ramano. We hung out at some beautiful restaurants and partook of two restaurant promotions in which we were served free Italian food and pizza. We visited the Sixth Floor Museum, where the alleged lone assassin shot JFK and lounged upon the grassy knoll. I attended a play called Hunter Gatherers, which was a perfect 10 (full review with video interviews forthcoming, for those of you who are still waiting for me to make good on that.)

Las Cruces: Our hosts David and Jessica were very sweet. Katherine and I were their second couch surfers ever. They took us out to a local joint for southwestern food. We had a great time joking and opining about the State of Things.

Tucson: If I can pick favorites (I can't), Tucson was my favorite city. Our host Kisani, a medical doctor training to become a psychiatrist, was lovely. She handed us party masks upon our arrival and pointed us to a warehouse masquerade ball full of dance performances, aerial acrobatics, feats of self-mutilation, great live music, and hundreds of Tucson denizens dressed in their finest masked attire. Katherine and I spent much of our time in Tucson frequenting the coffee shops in the area, two or three of which are 24-hour joints. I walked around downtown and along 4th Avenue a lot, taking in the aristic vagrant hippie atmosphere.

Phoenix/Tempe: We spent one night here. I hung out on the Arizona State University campus a bit, working and blogging, while Katherine was outon one of her many research meetings. We stayed with a group of guys in Tempe that were just really cool. One works for an airline, another is a political science major, and the third is a Finish immigrant exploring American culture. We all hung out over beer at their house.

Las Vegas: Katherine and I didn't stay on a CouchSurfing person's couch. Instead we stayed at the home of Ajay and Allison, who are friends of a friend of Katherine's. Now we are all just friends, without the "friend of a" prefix. I like when that happens.

L.A.: I took a Chinatown Bus from Vegas to my new home here, while Katherine stayed back a week in Vegas to do some more research for her long-term book project. My roommates/hosts/landlords/friends Paula and Aaron are great to hang with. Katherine will be staying on a couch here in my new nest for five days starting this evening.

That's the history of Westward Invasion. Currently I am working on catching up with finances, as the road trip tore my wallet limb from limb. After I am caught up I intend to explore L.A., as well as the West at large. Concurrently I will be creating thigns. I will write, shoot and edit video of things, find out where the hip hop and poetry open mics are in the area, maybe hit up a few auditions for plays and films, whatever comes to mind.

I look forward to finding out how I can contribute to the arts and cultural scene of Los Angeles. As Emma, a friend and collaborator, and I say, "We're going to rock this little hamlet to its knees."

Joseph Skewers Own Face at Masquerade Ball in Tucson

Joseph is a fascinating artist. He does all manner of art, including face skewering, playing double-reeded woodwind instruments, DJing, painting, dressing up all rad, and being a nice guy. He is one tough mutha. I had the opportunity to record him on my Flip cam at Saturday's warehouse masquerade ball in Tucson, AZ and interview him a few times before and after his performances. Check out his extreme closeup near the end of the video, and what he says when I ask him how much it hurts.

Posted via web from Will Conley's Random Things

Sexy Silk Acrobatics at a Warehouse Masquerade Ball in Tucscon

We got into town two nights ago. Our host Kisani handed Katherine and me each a $2.99 party mask and told us there would be a warehouse masquerade ball that night, replete with silk scarf aerial acrobats, opera singers on stilts, self-mutilation performance artists, live bands and DJs, and much more. There were about 300 people in attendance, most of them wearing all manner of masks. In this video you will see those masks, as well as a clip of the silks performance.

More to come. This blogging thing is hard from the road. Videos take so long to upload and process when you're sitting in a WiFi coffee shop.

Posted via web from Will Conley's Random Things

Merry Christmas in Graffiti!

Photo by way of The Osterley Times, my favorite political blog of all time!

Stick Dude in Albuquerque

I don't know what this art is called, but this dude is pretty graceful at it. This public park is off Central Ave. SW and 10th St. near downtown, a block away from Java Joe's.

Hello There, Minnesota!

Many of you found Man of Many Words today through a link associated with an article I wrote for Minnesota Artists Online about street artists in my current home base of New Haven, Connecticut. To my fellow Minnesotans I say Welcome and Long Time No See. I lived in the Twin Cities from age 1 to age 24 (with breaks for world travel and a drive out to see the very exciting twine ball in Darwin, Minnesota.) I have occasional nostalgia pangs after three years of absence. I will return one day.

To those of you who did not find Many of Many Words via that article, I invite you to go over there and check out mnartists.org. The weekly arts magazine is funded through the world-class Walker Art Center and the McKnight Foundation. Their editorial staff are deeply involved with the arts scene at all levels, from creation to organization to criticism and more. The magazine has become the epicenter of all things artistic in Minnesota. So get on over there and see what Minnesota artists, poets, musicians, spoken word artists, filmmakers, and arts movers and shakers are doing.

After that, come on back to Man of Many Words and get some more daily news embedded in personal narrative embedded in magic. While you're at it, please allow me to pimp the donation buttons located in the left sidebar. There they are. See them? Click, click. Your help is appreciated.

Saturday Afternoon Follies

My landlady, Faith, drove me to the train station this morning, from whence I rode down to Bridgeport, which is Connecticut’s most murderous city. Last year it clocked in at 30 murders, surpassing New Haven and Hartford. High five!

City Lights Gallery in Bridgeport was my destination.

City Lights is where I figure model on the occasional Saturday. This involves taking off my clothes and donning a robe. I lost my white robe last month in the Great Ides of March Stampede of One when my landlord, whom shall heretoforth be known as Ghetto Thunder, did away with our lease at fistpoint and I had to leave everything behind except for a suitcase and a backpack. My replacement robe – which was graciously provided by the sweet and saucy figure drawing moderator whom I shall here dub Annabelle Cash Money – turned out to be a very femmy, satiny, Asian-looking thing that barely covered my white ass. (The robe, not Annabelle Cash Money.) I wore it once a few weeks ago and immediately vowed never to wear it again. (Again, the robe, not Annabelle.) (Editor's note: we apologize for all the dangling modifiers. The author apparently knows no other sentence form, so to edit them would be to rewrite the entire article, and frankly we don't have that kind of patience. Besides, Man of Many Words is currently the only writer we have. We thank you for your patience as we figure out a way to fire his ass.) The robe made me feel soft and vulnerable. It made me want to talk about my needs. Annabelle Cash Money has a great sense of humor, don’t you think? So I left the robe at home and planned on just using my cargo pants and shirt as a robe. But when I got to City Lights, another model was already there. Annabelle Cash Money had accidentally booked two models, so she gave me a kill fee of $25 and let me off the hook for the day.

I decided to stick around and peruse the art and hang out with my friend, whom I hereby christen Spectacular Monster Lightning. He works at the gallery as a framer, salesman, and all-around gladhander. He's also an accomplished artist at a young age. The man is a master at everything he does. I really like him. He’s always digging on my hip hop lyric stylings. I launch a verse at him here and there. He nicknamed me Mister Unassuming today, because I generally don’t advertise my massive prowess as a passably cool white rapper. Spectacular Monster Lightning introduced me to a couple of the black guys who work next door at the restaurant as caterers, one of whom hit me up for a verse.

It’s always an especial pleasure to rap for black folks. They generally treat me politely when they first learn I can rap. They give me a chance. Then I rap, and then they’re smiling and telling me to go make a million bucks. Call me indulgent and self-serving, but I really do enjoy impressing black folks within their own genre, on their own terms. I don't know why. Maybe it assuages all my white guilt. Maybe I don't give a damn why. You can relax, you know.

One of the black guys today, Pee Wee is his real name, said he wanted to parade me around his turf and place bets on me in any battles we can hustle up. I guess that would be cool. I just don’t battle that well. My stuff is better when it’s written. Whatever. I’ll throw down anyhow. Not that I see Pee Wee’s plan ever getting off the ground. People of all colors and lacks thereof talk big. And frankly I just don’t have the interest in going around puffing up my peacock feathers when there’s probably not a lot of money in it.

Back inside, I perused every square inch of the gallery, except for the area beyond the partition where the figure drawing was in session. It’s bad form to walk in on a naked model. I rummaged through all the stacks of limited edition prints, some of which I really liked. There was an extremely well done and detailed painting of an old sailing ship, its sails at full billow and outrunning a storm, entitled “Homeward Bound”, with the sky all dark and blue and achingly beautiful. It made me want to cry for my good old pier on the New Haven Harbor. Made me want to boatjack a skiff from the Sound School and hit the high seas.

There were some figure drawings by Annabelle Cash Money, one of which I think I recognized as myself. I cost $100. Fair enough. Go buy me.

Spectacular Monster Lightning threw me a couple of freebie postcards that featured photographs of this one sculptor’s little tiny pencil carvings. The guy spent six months making this:

And two years making this:

That’s one pencil, pal. One piece of graphite there, my people. Each link moves freely. No glue was involved. You’ve got to wonder what kind of job this guy has. Security desk in an abandoned building? I mean that is some serious time to have on your hands. What patience! I am somewhat envious of that patience. Is he happy, I wonder? Anyway, his name is Dalton Ghetti. Look him up and go buy something from him. He can’t afford to keep his website up.

I hung out with Spectacular Monster Lightning awhile longer, sipping my Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, while he did up some frames. I looked at the invoice for the little tiny frames he was making. Hundred bucks apiece for ten of them. A grand. But he gave the customer a 30% discount “because she’s cool”. I think that’s cool. And now I think I should open a frame shop and get rich. Or Spec should. That’s more likely.

I hopped the 2:30 train back to New Haven.

And then everybody died. Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Operatic!

Note: Some names were invented. Maybe all of them. You be the judge. And if you run into Marvel, tell them I've got some names to sell them. Thanks.

The Shakespeare Lady

The Shakespeare Lady is performing a passage from a play I do not recognize. I am the only patron in attendance. The admission price for the show is two dollars. The venue is a sidewalk.

"What feeble night bird overcome by misfortunes beats at my door?”

It’s a passage from the Robinson Jeffers version of Medea by Euripides – one of the Shakespeare Lady’s signature acts. We are standing outside an overpriced health food store. Customers are going in and out. Nobody stops to listen tonight.

“Can this be that great adventurer, the famous lord of the seas and delight of women, the heir of rich Corinth, this crying drunkard on the dark doorstep?”

The training she received at Bennington College in Vermont and the Yale School of Drama shines through. Her voice is strong and singsong, her physical gestures measured and effective yet sweeping. The lines from the passage seem to be directed at both herself and at the invisible character she is supposed to be addressing. At times, it feels as though she is addressing me. I feel included, somehow.

“Yet you've not had enough.”

No, I have not had enough. I am the feeble night bird. I am the boastful adventurer, the privileged middle class citizen, cut down to size. I hang on her every word. I know where this woman has been. I learned about her from first hand experience, word on the street, talking to the locals, and reading the news. She has a rare form of schizophrenia, an ailment she and someone at UCLA have described as “tactile demons”. She hears voices. They have been tormenting her since her days as a Yale student. Her Master’s Thesis was entitled “A Theatre of Hunger”.

In the early 1980s, she got into a physical argument with the voices and destroyed her apartment. She has been living on the streets and in mental hospitals, women’s shelters, and rooming houses ever since. The business owners around this neighborhood, which just so ironically happens to be the designated “arts district”, don’t like her much. She can get overly assertive. Sometimes she performs so close to the storefronts that the customers have to walk right by her, both coming and going. Apparently, people have complained, because the neighborhood business community is trying to put the kibosh on her performances. She has been arrested, thrown in jail, and tried for trespassing and disturbing the peace numerous times each.

Luckily, she is not all alone in the system. She has won allies through her performances. Many have advocated in the press for leniency for her minor “offenses”. Filmmakers and musicians have created documentaries and music videos in tribute to her. She even has a lawyer friend who defends her pro bono every time she goes to court. Even the mayor of New Haven likes her, and has been quoted as saying he admires the dignity she maintains despite her difficult lifestyle. Still, she continues living her own Theatre of Hunger.

“You have come to drink the last bitter drops. I'll pour them for you."

The rats took over her rooming house last June. The city condemned the place and kicked out all the tenants. I once saw what the place looked like when I myself was looking for a cheap place to live. It was frighteningly filthy. In an abandoned room I saw an open refrigerator, unplugged, with food still inside. The refrigerator was tilting, sadly, on broken feet. I didn’t dare look at the shared shower rooms.

The Shakespeare Lady still performs on the streets. Some say she smokes crack. I don’t judge it. Does your boss ask you what you’re going to spend your money on when he cuts your paychecks? The Shakespeare Lady’s performances are the best deal in town. Her eyes bulge from their sockets when performing, but rest easy and hooded when just walking. Her voice is natural and conversational as she again trots up the street towards me again:

“Hey baby, my name is the Shakespeare Lady,” goes the usual introductory line. “Mind if I read you a poem for a couple of dollars so I can get into a shelter?” By “poem” she means “theatrical performance”. She probably says “poem” because it’s quicker to say when you’re trying to hustle up a rush hour audience.

“Sure, Margaret, I remember you,” I reply, reaching into my pocket.

She readies herself by closing her eyes for a moment. She seems to be crouching internally, as if a cat before the pounce. She launches into the “To be or not to be” monolog from Hamlet. The cat has pounced, and she is clawing. A few lines go by before she is suddenly doing the “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. Suddenly the speech has morphed to become the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. I can’t tell where she made the switches. Is she twisting her lines on purpose, or is this some manifestation of the schizophrenia? Is she confused? And does it even matter? The “mash-up”, if you will, is seamless. A DJ or collage artist should be so proficient at blending the arts of completely many different epochs of human history into one cohesive narrative. The result is a timeless wailing of the soul. A longing, a yearning, a sadness and a strength. For my two bucks, the Shakespeare Lady ain’t holding back.

I, for one, appreciate her performances.

“Thank you, Shakespeare Lady, for throwing a wrench into my day,” I should say. “For making me stop and look somewhere besides straight forward. For making me look up at the sky, where you are looking, Shakespeare Lady. Thank you for speaking loudly, for not being ashamed of yourself, and for being a human being and an actor and alive. Thank you for reminding ‘sane’ people of the raw underbelly of their own psyche. Thank you for all the debts you’ve paid so that I can have this moment with you.”

I never say all that. Instead, it’s just, “Thank you, Margaret.” I look her in the eye, clasp her hand in my two hands when I give her the money, and figure she understands.

“Thanks, baby, you have a good night now.”

Tough Questions for Artists

Hey artist, I got a few questions for you. Yeah, you. Are you an artist? Then read on.

People like us, artists I mean, are always sticking our neck on the public chopping block. Through the morbid ritual of bearing our souls to strangers, we learned that our heads are unseverable. Dizzyable, certainly, but bolted securely to our necks. We create almost as if making things were an involuntary tick. We capture that tick and replay it for the world over and over and over, often to our own undoing. The unmistakable scent of spontaneity that we exude belies that sulfuric compulsion of ours that wells up from our very marrow and explodes as “painting, writing, drama, dance, photography, carpentry, crafts, love, and love”, to quote the poet Saul Williams. In short, experience is what we are interested in here. All else is negotiable. Am I right or am I wrong? Eh?

Looks like the interview has begun.

My main question to you, artist, is this: how important is your creativity to you? Is it right up there with food and shelter? If suddenly you were stripped of all ability to create anything artistic ever again, could you even go on living?

I also want to ask you about your "hopes and dreams", if I may use the cliché as a placeholder for now. What types of projects would you like to undertake next? Is money an object in this regard? I am always interested in what holds artists back, so let me ask this as well, if it's not too personal: what's holding you back from achieving the next level or accomplishing your next artistic mission? I ask this out of a basic assumption that most artists have a backlog of ideas with which they can never keep up. Finally, is it the knowledge that there is always some new creative endeavor waiting for you over the horizon that keeps you alive?

I ain’t done with you yet.

Bear in mind that none of these are yes-or-no answers, per se, just conversation starters. Look at all your art. Every last thing. Look at it all. Are you impressed with your breadth of experimentation? Are there any recurring themes? Have you ever tried humor? Art should be fun. Look in the mirror. Just to get a sense of your own humanity. Be grateful you’re there to see yourself. You could have been somewhere else.

Sorry, not all of these are questions. Some of them are just do what I say. Whatever. I’ve got a lot of things on my mind. Some of the things are advice.

Moving right along, tell me something. I mean just for the hellavitt. Does your hometown rock? Or does it suck? Actually, that's not a fair question, is it. It both rocks and sucks, doesn't it. A tale of two cities, yadda yadda. So let me ask you this: in your opinion, in which ways does your town rock? In which ways does it suck? What are some crappy experiences you've gone through there? And what are some really special and personal moments of happiness you've had there?

Tell me your thoughts about life, the universe, and everything, especially in the context of your personal struggle, and put a lot of talk about art in there, obviously. Make me care more about you than I already do. I want exclusive info! New info is always the best. I find that, as artists, we tend to repeat the same old credentials and accomplishments, when in fact the real accomplishments are getting out of bed in the morning, being able to afford new batteries for your camcorder – you, not me, for I own neither a camcorder nor a camera nor a wristwatch – falling in love, healing old wounds…you know, the human stuff. Not the resumé stuff. On the other hand, resumé stuff is cool too, just as long as you feel proud of it.

All that. Talk. Don't worry about formulating your sentences too hard. Just rattle off your thoughts. Freewrite. It’ll be good for you, and besides, I'm sincerely dying to know. Give me a sense of your whole person, the themes in your life, and the texture of your days.

That is, if you’re not too busy playing chicken with a guillotine.

Dreams of the East

The following is an art review I wrote for Art New England. The show I reviewed was called Dreams of the East. The artist's name is David Shapiro (view his website here), who operates out of Brooklyn, New York City. The New Haven, CT venue in which the show appeared is an upscale backyard garage operation called Grand Projects (view their website here).

*****
Dreams of the East is a unique eight-painting installation incorporating Orientalist themes culled from the contemporary mass media. The images were rendered in fluorescent paint on canvas, and brought to life under black light. (To this reviewer’s knowledge, the technique has never been used.) The black light is flipped on and off at five-minute intervals, illustrating how the West selectively tunes in and tunes out the Pantheons of fame and the Underworlds of otherness.

When the black lights are off, the paintings are dull red or violet silhouettes. When the black light flips on, the paintings take on an eerie glow similar to television screens. They are freeze frames of famous white women in Arab harems; masked revolutionaries running towards the screen; celebrities like Whitney Houston, Angelina Jolie, and Brad Pitt visiting downtrodden peoples; and early Danish Internet pornography. Some of the images were faked on many levels, such as Anna Kournikova: Hot! Fake! Pic!, which is a photo of the tennis star’s face superimposed on the body of an anonymous porn star posing in a harem. Therefore, the image is triply or even quaternarily removed from reality.

The contemporary images in Dreams were culled from the Internet and television, yet the subjects recapitulate the works of such masters as Duccio, Gros, and Delacroix. Nobody Leading the People, for example, is a twist on Delecroix’s Liberty Leading the People. While Liberty depicts a violent revolutionary charge led by an ideal manifested as a common woman, Nobody depicts Haitian rebels charging towards the camera, storming the viewer.

Dreams of the East is a veritable catacombs of ideas, themes, subtexts, tropes, and theories. There are multitudes of access points into the catacombs, and every turn yields another series of choices. The intensity and thoroughness of both technique and concept make this installation a true original.

Mamzer Loshen

The following is an art review I wrote for the print edition of Art New England. The show I reviewed was called Mamzer Loshen/Bastard Tongue, named for the traditionalist Yiddish pejorative term for the English language. The artist's name is Johanna Bresnick (view her website here), who operates out of New Haven, Connecticut. The venue in which the show appeared is an upscale backyard garage operation called Grand Projects (view their website here).

*****

Mamzer Loshen/Bastard Tongue is a freewheeling exploration of the tumultuous Jewish identities of Johanna Bresnick and Mike Cloud. Its inspiration was found in a recent standoff between an illegal Israeli settlement and the Israeli Army. As both parties had eschewed using guns against kinsmen, the settlers resorted to some rather comical battle tactics, as commemorated in The Upsetters (Set it off). Here, surrounded by an oil slick and draped in razorwire, a drywall barricade is found stocked with an arsenal of harmless but potentially annoying projectiles: paint-filled light bulbs, plastic bottles full of colored water, spray foam, and small rocks.

The installation turns satirical in Tigers of Long Island (Plagues). When viewed from above, the top edges of this elegant paper structure spell out the Ten Plagues in script. Frogs, hail, death of the firstborn, and the other plagues are all duly cited, along with some new ones: gas, migraine, gingivitis, ulcer, and so on.

Elevating satire to outright rebuke, From Mouth to Mouth brazenly flouts a Tanakh, the sacred book of Judaism, rent to pieces and stuffed into gel caps for easy consumption.

The structurally inventive Divine Image (Cosmic Tree Remix) seamlessly integrates the Burning Bush with the Kabbalah Tree of Life as a crimson wax candle with many wicks. The fallen leaves beneath the bush resemble tongues – the Bastard Tongues of semi-estranged Jews.

The most deeply layered – and funniest – component of Mamzer Loshen is a bedsheet emblazoned with a small image of Russian figure skating champion Oksana Baiul, and punctured to create a hole with the width of a phallus. This constellation of symbols cleverly re-contextualizes various sexual fetishes and myths.

Mamzer Loshen is jarring. It alternately antagonizes and cracks wise, restates questions and dismisses answers – and ultimately transmits the essential tumult of a modern Jewish-American heart.