In building out this site I've taken to going through old art projects. Picking through things I made from 5 years old, 18, 23 was almost anthropological. Its reminding me of how a drive to make art has always been there. Why? What did it give me? I've absorbed music at a deep level as long back as I can remember - playing records on my fisher price player. My older brother began to run with punk friends and I got into dead kennedys, adolescents, black sabbath and metallica. The first music purchase I ever made was Kill 'Em All on vinyl.
But I also had close friends who were into reggae. A lot of Jamaican acts would come up through Santa Cruz on the west coast circuit and play for the hippies. One friend was American-Indian whose mom took him away from an abusive dad. The other was a child whose dad was in prison with a mom who was away all day in San Jose with her Chiropractor boss who she soon married. We all wanted escape and adventure. They were older but barely. I had honed my ability to pester my older brother's friends to allow me into their own escape rituals, so I plied my trade on Josh and Barry, They could be abusive - but dangled excitement before me. Once, beneath the Kings Chair eukalyptus, they promised me a puff on a roach if I put dog shit on my tongue. They laughed and ran. But I needed their approval, so I followed. We became a wrecking crew. I invited them to sleep over in 3rd grade and we shimmied down the drainspout outside my window on Friday nights and found teen keggers in parks and scored free beer by shocking the revelers with our precociousness. Their parents smoked weed and they would score it off them. I could sometimes get it from my brother. We "shoulder-tapped" at Days market to get alcohol and clove cigarettes, then laid down in the tall grass over looking the "Gully" with the Boardwalk in the distance. At home my parents were screaming and tending to my younger siblings. We went to the Civic Auditorium to see Mikey Dread, Eek-a-Mouse, the Wailers, Ras Michael and the Suns of Negus, Culture and sometimes crap acts like Turnip the Beats, who put baskets of turnips and beats on the stage. I would get high out of my gourd and skank with my eyes closed pressed up against giant speakers. And we did acid. This my brother and his friends had. I remember begging Noah all day for a piece of a Goony Bird. I finally wore him down and spent the night in his room discovering how the neighbor's house looked like a strange orange woman and my face was drippy in the mirror. When my mom called upstairs for me to come down and wash the dishes, I complied but found my hands no longer worked so escaped back upstairs and begged my brother again - this time to go down and wash the dishes for me. Barry eventually took too much acid and after a particularly harrowing experience listening to Iron Man in the dark, he never seemed the same again. We experimented sexually in the dark on other occasions and I still remember the taste of his little dick in my mouth. This, maybe the deepest of secrets, I had probably initiated it through the plausible deniability of "Truth or Dare", a game I had also played being sexual with other friends - Tony, Patrick, Luke. I was discovering my sexuality and it felt good, despite not understanding it, it was maybe in the deepest sense an imaginary practice for my later interest in girls. We were young though - pre-pubescent. Once on the car ride home after an "orgiastic, wtf?" sleepover, Patrick related the events to his mom and she was I think horrified, counseling us to discontinue the practice at once. As I aged these became embarrassing memories, shared with no one. Barry eventually killed himself long after I had moved north to Seattle for high school. I used to help Josh on his paper route, after listening to Depeche Mode and the Sex Pistols and drinking kamikazes. Being drunk may have helped when I once went over the handlebars after the saddlebags were sucked into my tire. I arrived at 4th grade too stoned to focus, late and in trouble from riding my Bmx into a marsh with Josh for an early smoke out. Soon after, Barry got sent home for not listening and barking like a dog on all fours in class. He had been on acid. Our first run in with the police occurred after drinking a bottle and trying to get into Josh's girlfriend's bedroom window. A police cruiser showed up and we fled. Drunken and tired, I thought I might hide behind a clump of grass in the gutter. The officer brought me home and my dad answered the door completely nude. I was told not to hang out with Josh and Barry any more. The drug-induced perceptional shifts, combined with needing to be in a safe and recognized place, and using attention-seeking behaviors to get it must have been highly reinforcing for artistic expressions. The class clown, the "initiated" one - gratifyingly exalted into a position of secret knowledge - positioned by powerful acts taken from venturing into the priestly temples of older children and surviving. My art was writing and drawing in my pre-adolescence. As a teen I became excited by the video camera and into adulthood began thinking of visual storytelling. But by then I had discovered the guitar (via an old banjo upon which I taught myself to make rhythm and melody). As my devotion to the guitar grew, and songwriting advanced, drawing seems to have faded - at least as a singular form of expression and locus of what I needed to say. While I never put down the pen, the images became more realistic and no longer so burdened with narrative. They became, it might be fair to say, icons in a way for other stories of my imagination and reflections, whether more fully realized in song or not reflective at all - mere patient projections unadorned with reason.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Archives
September 2023
Categories |