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Underworld
Sep 23, 2008 — 2 comments
There was something irresistible about the building, of course, even an unyielding ruin such as this, slabbed private and tight. It stood alone here, with mountains behind it, and carried the tilted lyric of a misplaced object, like some prairie drive-in shut down for years with the audio hookups all askew and the huge screen facing blankly toward a cornfield. It’s the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response—not regret so much as a sense of time’s own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.
Don DeLillo, Underworld, page 460.
The Sensory Deprivation Tank
Sep 18, 2008
This post can be described as “wordy,” but if you’re interested in this sort of thing, it might be worthwhile. Below is an attempt to describe my experience in a sensory deprivation tank, which is basically a chamber filled with about a foot of epsom salt-saturated, body temperature water, with no light and no sound. You float on your back, deprived of any external input, the idea being that your mind, used to constantly focusing on physical stimuli, will overcompensate and focus instead on itself. A lot of people have asked me what it’s like, and beyond the description below (which, considering my strange mind, is probably way out there and perhaps not what an average person would experience), I always say this: you know when you are almost asleep, like in early stage 1, and you have these bizarre sort of dream-thoughts that are perfectly clear but absurdly strange? It’s like an extended, superamplified version of that.
So here goes:
You take a shower, put in ear plugs, open the door on the tank, which looks like this cross section like this, close the door, lay back in the water, turn off the green pool light, and basically float on your back, with about half of your body in and half out of the water. It’s weird as shit laying there like that, because you first feel like you need to support yourself or at least use a muscle here or there to do something, but you don’t. And you’re naked, which the girls I work with thought was weird, but I guess I didn’t. I was sort of bobbing at first, moving back and forth in slow motion, but once the water calmed down there was no movement at all, and I think the only motion I felt after that was more a result of my mind searching for something physical to feel. You literally float without gravitational stress of any kind, basically no physical stimulation whatsoever. After what seemed like a few minutes I started to relax, my brain started slowing down, and all I saw in my mind’s eye was black, nothing at all, which was weird for me, generally my mind is insane with strange thoughts and visuals. Then it sort of slowed down more and I started seeing some weird images, slowly moving pictures, and eventually I had this slow continuous barrage of pulsing weird shit. I realized that basically everything I saw was either an animal or a machine, or something that symbolized a penis or a vagina. One I remember specifically was a woman kissed a pane of glass, leaving lip marks in the shape of an ‘o,’ then a fist punched through the ‘o,’ -an obvious sexual reference. Lots of those, in various forms. Nails, holes in walls, holes in people’s faces, swords, long metal machine parts, like steel beams, with ends that could open, hands, palms together with a slight opening between them, various tunnels; everything was a penis or a vagina. So I started trying to figure out why that was, and I apparently decided it was because my mind was moving backward toward its most basic processes, which are oriented toward the genetic, bacterial need for reproduction, and it was juxtaposing conscious images with the latent inherent human desire/need to reproduce. I guess that made sense. I saw a sea at dusk with a rock mound coming out of it, and in the foreground an owl in shadows. Then rows of hundreds of hands pressed together, next to each other in an arc, moving in a semi circle. Stone pillars with two carved heads. Then a bunch of sets of people and animals that were all in pairs, which I couldn’t really figure out.
As I was going through this, I remember thinking, “ok, see there it is, my mind horizon.” I have no idea what a mind horizon is, but there it was, I was looking right at it. It’s a circular line that cuts your face in half, opening a hole in it, in a shape that somewhat resembles a vagina. Apparently that’s where your consciousness is. When I was really focused on what was going on, my mind horizon was open. Anything that came up physically, if I had to swallow, any small noise from the water heater or anything, totally distracted me and I lost focus for a second, my mind horizon pulled in on itself like a flower in time-lapse and disappeared. When I regained focus, I was like “ok where is it, there it is, there’s my mind horizon.” But it was closed off, with a sort of shell, like a round steel ball over it, protruding from my skull. Once I focused more completely, it opened. Yeah, I know that is bizarre, but that is what happened. At some point I tried to figure out why every image that I saw was so dark and unpleasant. I know I have always had an interest in that sort of thing, but now I was trying to see if it was my mind’s natural state that was dark, or if it was something else polluting my thoughts, something I thought was “south of my mind horizon.” I focused on my breathing, which seemed really loud, like an engine in a long tunnel, my face folded over itself and had a sort of tube/shaft thing in it that was echoing and reverberating every time I breathed. There were a few times where I didn’t really want to breathe, didn’t feel any need to, and I don’t think I did at all, which didn’t make me feel the normal semi-panic sort of feeling you get when you hold your breath too long, it was more like breathing was extraneous and not really necessary at that point, so I didn’t do it. When it became necessary again, I breathed again. Anyway, I’m not sure I can accurately describe anything else during that whole time, not that any of this seems accurate. It’s basically impossible to describe.
So all this was going on, time was completely irrelevant, and out of the blue, clear as hell, I hear an owl. I freaked out for a second, remembering that the first sort of hallucinatory thought I had was of an owl, but then some sort of new age music came in and I remembered that the signal that my time was up was music played through the underwater speakers. Coming out of this weird sort of hibernation mind-only state was totally bizarre. I became extremely aware that I was floating, like in space not in water, and I sort of contorted myself, not touching anything and not feeling any resistance or change in temperature, just suspended in a void. That was awesome. I rolled my head back and forth, and this sort of energy wreath/helmet thing went back and forth with it through the water. I was in super slow motion when I got out of the thing, went in and looked at myself in the mirror, and got in the shower. I still had earplugs in, and the shower felt like a jet engine was blowing on the back of my head, which was awesome. Everything seemed really really close up.
So there you go. I did the drawing above a few days ago, this is the moment after I heard the owl, when I came out of my trance-like state and felt I was floating in a void. You can see the water line in there as well. If you have questions or comments, definitely post them below or email me.
Spectre, Phantasm
Sep 12, 2008 — 2 comments
I took this picture because I like the way florescent lights show up in digital photos. It always ends up looking strange somehow. Here the light is coming through a translucent plastic wall, and through an old box fan.
Above is the current progress of the yet-to-be-titled painting. Just a few things to fix and then it will be finished. If you want a nice challenge for yourself, try to paint a really straight, really thin line, without messing up the background. Then try to juggle hatchets. That are on fire.
There was a pretty good fog the other day as I was coming into work, I took this picture of the construction site behind our building because I thought it looked cool, but also because it reminded me a lot of the Beksinski painting below it. Fog creeps me out. The term “spectre of death” inevitably comes to mind when I see fog, especially at night. That or the word “phantasm,” which is simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous.
Francis Bacon, Diego Velázquez and the Battleship Potemkin
Sep 08, 2008 — 96 comments
I recently rewatched Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin (you can watch it for free here), one of the earliest true cinematic masterpieces.
Not as well known as Metropolis or The Wizard of Oz, it was equally, if not more of an influence on the history of film. The brilliant editing and cinematography in the famous The Odessa Staircase scene is enough to file Eisenstein under the “genius” category, especially considering how early this movie was made (1925). The images are graphic and somewhat startling even in our current violence-supersaturated culture, and still make a deep impression on many artists and filmmakers.
Francis Bacon, so disturbed by the image of the woman being shot in the eye, became obsessed with it, using it in numerous drawings and paintings. It happened to be that Bacon was also obsessed with Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (below), which has been considered by many to be the greatest portrait ever painted. Combine these two images, filter them through Bacon’s semi-psychotic mind, and you end up with one of my favorite paintings of all time, the Study after Velazquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (above).
Above- still image from the movie Battleship Potemkin
Below- Bacon’s “Screaming Popes” series, details
Some people will tell you that these paintings are in some way related to Edvard Munch’s The Scream those people are wrong (even though Edvard Munch is an awesome name). Bacon was definitely interested in existentialism and Nietzsche and all that, and the painting can be seen through those lenses, but it is an extreme oversimplification to superficially relate those two pieces.
The painting itself is now in Des Moines, Iowa, naturally. What a bizarre amalgam of forces: a renegade Russian film director, existentialism, nihilism, religion, the Spanish painter who painted Las Meninas and a pope from the 1640’s, all brought together in a dark and brilliant work by a homosexual British painter that is now sitting in the middle of Iowa.