Notes from Oaktown I

I live on Martin Luther King in Oakland California and I am an negroid. I don't use this term around the people in my neighborhood because I do enjoy walking home without getting my face stomped in by the boys at Your Muslim Bakery the occasional Black Israelite and your random and insane 5 percenter (they are so crazed that I had to ad the word into my open office spell check memory... they've made up a word and now my work has to suffer for it...bastards.) but I will bust it out when I'm talking to the occasional guilty white intellectual near and around Berkeley and San Francisco, but it is nice to be in a place where there is even an illusory line to keep my racial social experimentation in check .

But somewhere around the edges things are slipping. Now I will say that I have no problem with people being peaceable, as long as it doesn't fuck up my ability to mock other people; the other day I watched as two families; a mother and her two large sons and three bigger daughters on one side of the street and on the other side three big guys and a very loud woman they called "gran ma ma", they were all fresh from the church three blocks down the street, some of the boys were still wearing their pleated slacks and the girls were busy taking down their hair extensions.

As I walked by them on my way to work I saw one of the women drop and flash her ass obviously trying to draw the debate to a close with the heavy gelatinous rebuttal.

Someone once told me that the average dog is only about three free meal away from becoming a wolf and the average cat one meal from becoming a bitchy lynx. So how far away is your doctor from using sharpened stone to lance your boils? From pissing on the wall of his hospital to establish his mating rights to all the females in the candy striper pool?

Religion, Hood-wealth, respect, and drugs are pumped in to the streets of Oakland and a hundred other of her twisted sister cities. They ruin on tragedy and justified pity. People (and you know who you are) need something to pity and some people need to fall.

Or at least that's what I tell myself
Some times when I pass a shack and ramble church I think of Jim Jones and when I see the crack-heads smiling on the porch and hear the people
People are primal because we are the ones who came up with the word its the shadow we run from.

Cats don't worry about going feral

They just go feral and some even enjoy the ride

Children

The Murmur of the Innocents 8 2009
183 cm x 295 cm

Gottfried Helnwein in San Francisco you should there too.

Helnwein's Innocence

Gottfried Helnwein is one of the most accomplished realist of the day and it is a blessing that he's found his way to San Francisco. From May 7th to June 29th 2009 the San Francisco Modernism Gallery will be exhibiting the Helnwein one man show “The Murmur of Innocence" in honor of Francisco de Goya.



The theme of the exhibition, the suffering of children in war time, will be familiar to fan's of Helnwein's work and this exhibition will likely be an articulation of the machines of war, with a raw Nordic sensibility that draws the witnesses of his work to reach back into themselves and delve into whatever tenuous memories of world conflict and violence haunt them. His work acknowledges the universal heritage of globalized conflicts shared by every person on every continent.

Between the painter and the owner: James Cordas

24 hours and three weeks before I saw an exhibition organized by James Cordas and a group of musicians, artists and hangers-on like me, I met James at a house party in a worn-out converted San Francisco high rise hotel. After the party we stumbled to his apartment above Ellis Street in the Tenderloin and he showed me Bread, hanging in his wall.

Three days later James asked if I could help him carry some records to a bar where he was dj-ing. The place was owned by a woman named Ling who liked the art student money so much she let anyone with tight jeans and manicured hair play whatever they wanted until people stop showing up. She expected James and his partner to play top forty hip hop tracks, she got the Animals and Wu Tang Clan instead.

Owners of Tenderloin dive bars have other things to worry about. Two drunken tourist walked in with cuts weeping on their hands. I was chatting with about his peculiar affliction synaesthesia, sound as color when I saw them. The owner scared them off without much effort, her thin little strips of vascular muscle projected high pitched threats of castration over the music and a pool cue waved in the air. James looked up but just for a second and bought me a beer and tried to cram the concept of melodic yellow in beer bleached grey matter.

That is how James's paintings and installations function aesthetically the senses blend like the limited concepts of genre; pop-art fused with an abstract expressionist angst; stark and once playful; like the word Bread deconstruction semiotically and dangled like a banner of meaninglessness at the head of the canvas reassembled into new constructs.

On another canvas covered in clippings from vintage porn magizines; moments of grimy coitus, over miniaturized musical notes in this piece called a five year old and a negro spiritual. Layering colors and mindscapes like, creating with from found detritus, a new thing and thought in a style somewhere in the vein of Billy Apple, Sir Peter Blake and Derek Boshier.

For him the sensory identifiers become a language, fold into one another so the world is a collection of dynamic sensation. It is these sensations that James relays to the viewer through the canvas. Its not the ham-handled expressionism American art schools churn out along with $100,000 diplomas. There is a spirit of active adventure and wonder that keeps the work honest. The kind of honest that can only to late binge paint and bitter beer drinking and bloody hand prints on the door of a bathroom stall.