Axis Mundi PARTAYY

Who doesn't love a good party? Hush, it's a rhetorical question. I know you love it. How about a "truly eclectic musical soiree? Fuck yeah. A bunch of bands are gearing up to play this fantastical shindig on TOMORROW, AUGUST 5th. The caps were necessary to reinforce that I'm really late with this post. "What is Axis Mundi?" you ask. Well, I hope that's a rhetorical question. It's a record label collective. Here, let them tell you.

Axis Mundi is currently comprised of Communist Day Care Center, Algae Records and Tapes, Forget Records, and Sonic Lullaby.  The collective was formed on the simple mission statement of artist success through artist collaboration, and its labels specialize in music ranging from lo-fi tape fuzz, to ambient shoegaze, to country rock. 

So we can all expect to hear No Age Sigur Ros Drive-By-Truckers, not Hawthorne Heights Yanni Toby Keith. Believe me, I know this. I've seen many of the involved bands. Axis Mundi holds showcases some weekday nights at The Berkeley Front. But what excites me is that I've not seen many of the bands, too. Tons of bands that aren't your everyday expected Detroit Pop-Rock. It's like punks and hipsters and nerds all holding hands on stage. If there's anything I can say about the guys in charge of this event, it's that they are hopelessly excited about music in its infinite forms. And they're damn good at bringing people together to enjoy it, no matter what kinds of cliques those people might wanna stay in. Bands that are playing, which stretch all across the board, include Sound and Fury, DandyLyon Whine, Dinosaur Monster, Pupils, Sea Turtle Restoration Project, and other diverse acts, including offshoots of Mother Whale and Jura. One of them, St. Zita, is brand new and is comprised of a viola and a guzheng (pronounced goo-jung) and my nerdy self cannot wait!

This whole thing is going down at North End Studios (known to many as Sparklewood), which is that huge building on Grand Boulevard in Detroit with the teal and pink drip mural. Thanks to Katie for making that lonely building so easy to direct people to.

Because the collective is very much about the fusing of visual and sonic art, they've also made sure this is an art exhibit. Artists that have either worked directly with some of the bands involved or around the collective's orbit have work selected for the gallery. Alana Carlson specializes in allegorical painting, but has shown her installation chops with her involvement in Forget's performances. Steve Gambord experiments with all sorts of mixed media and is continually pushing his own 2D boundaries. Other artists on display include Christin Richards, Mike Ross, photographer Gabriel Banuelos, Eric Peiti, and many others.

It's August. I'm pretty sure August is party month. (Don't tell July, he'll get jealous.) Everything starts at 7:30 on TOMORROW, FRIDAY. It's just $5 for all that fun. Here's the fb page. Come equipped.

 

"hope our poems make things clear..."

I know it's been a month, and I know a lot of my posts tend to be either entirely too cheery or entire downers. But this is going to be mostly the latter. I hope it's got enough of the former.

My friend died today. Or yesterday. It doesn't matter which day. I've always been able to tell others that I feel blessed to have had a great childhood with little grief and strong foundations. Although I have a lot of friends who encountered significant loss early in life, and I have encountered major loss of some kind, I've been lucky in that a peer never unexpectedly left. This is hard.

David Blair is an artist, a poet, a musician, an actor, an author, a thinker, a performer, a teacher, and one of many gods I've hugged in life. I'm so happy, in a way, that I have an opportunity to help cultivate the seeds he's spread. He's not gone, but he did die. I'm expecting him to call and say, Oh, they mixed me up with some other dude. You know how it goes! and then laugh big with a piratey tooth gap. But he left, and he just gave everyone he touched with the next task: to take his lessons and craft them into our own beauty, to give that beauty to other people of all creeds and stations (I don't care how cheesy this is) and to ensure that that beauty is multipliable infinitely. He traveled the whole world and called Detroit home. He introduced me to half of my friends, and the other half just knew him. I played his CD release two years ago, my Birthday Eve. We did an impromptu unrehearsed Purple Rain. I'm rambling but I guess I can't help it.

This loss is such a shock that it requires me to be vigilant of all the amazing people that Blair has touched in his life. He was SO completely uncompromising that he lived 7 lifetimes in his short 50 years. And he didn't lead just by example; hundreds of students can attest to that. I'm one of them.

He has believed so enthusiastically about humanity that typical Detroit cynicism immediately stops being cool as soon as he enters the room. His natural knack for musical and English language commands whatever he points his tongue or pen or guitar toward. He's worked hard his whole fucking amazing life. The things he can see make the most privileged feel blind. Just say "hello" and you may have stopped a war, right?

I'm going to leave you with a poem about this city. Why? Because I can't lie, I hate it here sometimes. But you can't listen to this piece and not fall in love with the insanity like the first time. You just can't. Us mental cases are too sweet.

Flux Sucks.

(Eleanora playing at Club Bart, 2010)

Maybe it doesn't help that I'm listening to Vic Chesnutt's last release before his untimely death, and that I'm drinking merlot, and that my apartment is a mess. But the news that's been hitting lately is throwing my moods into difficult spirals. First, we heard with less than a week's notice that the Belmont was closing. Well, no, actually, first we heard that the Burton Theater was moving. That was a bummer, considering its promise and the fact that I'd only been there once, to find out the night's show was sold out. Then we heard the Belmont had been sold and that there would be a last hurrah on June 11th. I was directly impacted by this, because I was supposed to have a solo art show at the end of July. I didn't attend the closing party because of the competing Lager House filming. Now, with only four days notice, Ferndale's online world has become aware that Club Bart will close and await a transformation into what some are saying will be a French bistro. I was told that last bit a day before it was published, but I thought the bearer was sorely misinformed. He wasn't. I'm devastated.

(Hanging out at Club Bart, 2010)

Of course, everything is in flux, especially when it comes to Detroit musicians, artists, DIY-ers, and young entrepreneurs; the target market hangs at financial threads itself most of the time. I know half the shows I've been to in the last three years, I couldn't afford the cover. I can't say that my own shmuckiness didn't contribute to these places shuttering. I can't say that it wasn't due to poor management, shady employees, asinine customers, or simple geography. In most situations, I guess it's a combination of these, flicked into oblivion by bad luck. It must be expected, I suppose, with stability a rarely used word in the Detroit arts, that our mainstays are not always staying.

While everything around our culture shifts, we must keep tallies on the memories we've shared with one another and the places they're attached to. Being a part of two filming sessions at the Belmont, wearing a beard at Club Bart, passing out 'til dawn on the couches at Trowbridge House of Coffee--these memories, the grittiest, most Detroit, most genuine and at times most frightening moments of my life, lived at bars that worked for years to make sure stupid kids could do stupid things at will with the caveat that they achieve something brilliant once in a while. I think some of us got to those moments. Perhaps the best we self-proclaimed helpless bystanders can do when our little dives and venues disappear really is to realize that that $3 can of Cream Ale was totally worth it.

(Trowbridge House of Coffee, 2009)

(Belmont music video shoot, 2009?)

Things about me at which my friends are amazed when disclosed.

1. I've never seen The Big Lebowski.
2. I come from a Polish family but never had polish food 'til college friends who live in Hamtramck educated me.
3. I once wanted to be a preacher.
4. I once loved really shitty country music. (No, like REALLY shitty.)
5. I've never had collard greens, ribs, or any form of duck, rabbit, or elk.
6. I know how to change oil.
7. I really believe that the government is tracking us through RFIDs and other such things through vaccines and other tools. (Though they just need facebook, already proving useful to them)
8. I still weep when I hear a young voice sing an incredible aria in an incomparable tone.
9. I've never been south of northern Tennessee (other than Hawaii, which I was sick for half of and it's like going to another country so it doesn't count), or west of the Mississippi (read above).
10. I hate. 

No, I'm not posting lyrics.

I realized today that I write far too many "lyrics" to ever put to music. The problem with these little couplets, stanzas, one-liners and phrases is that they would look ridiculous as poems. And the ideas that are deserving of their composition are so varied that they could never be put together in a single "clever" song like Dylan has done well time after time. And so they collect in little notebooks mixed with drawings and exhibition concepts that I hope will overtake the bookshelf eventually, crowding out the leftover textbooks and old Juxtapoz rags that junk it up now. But these are inactive words.

Here, now that I've given you a readable, interesting paragraph, let me confuse the shit out of you and myself and go completely off topic.

The problem with the era of the simulacra is that language and valuable/meaningful action are so vastly set apart that language becomes its own hyperreal action, set apart from valuable/meaningful action. An easy (albeit, very superficial and non-interesting) example of this is the popular facebook copy/paste status that is intended to raise awareness for one thing or another. we've all seen (or posted ourselves) that "90 percent of you won't repost this, but 2 billion people die every year of horcruxes. If you know someone who's been affected by horcruxes, put this as your status for one hour and I'm sure so many people will all of a sudden cry a cure into existence." Thing is, it's an easy way to tell people that you care. The digital world is a funny thing (here I'm jumping ahead; follow me!): you can renege on just about anything you type by indicating your tone wasn't taken in the right light. This is different from previous print-based communications because it takes place on a more immediate context and in much smaller sentences/fewer characters. Twitter statuses can be taken as poetry because they are packed with as much information as possible that anyone with a bit of wile can use to invite all sorts of interpretations. ...Hence, trolls. It's like a triple dog dare to be a troll. And anyone can do it at any time, because there is no font for sarcasm and the anonymity of the web gives so much power to play with serious people. The internet segregates and separates people just like "IRL" because it's language-based, and language is the origin of segregation. So you have well-educated people (who have been shown the tools to use language in a wide variety of ways) and poorly-educated people (who have not) communicating on a single platform--not to mention all the age differences, and they often will separate from one another, or when they clash, more virulent results are seen than when they clash IRL, because of the mask and immaterial nature of digital communication (no bodily risk is associated, usually, with online bickering). The cleverest wins online, and seems to be the ultimate goal of modern Homo Sapiens. So this is the contemporary problem. A platform for an ultimate world community to congregate is invaluable and utopian, but when it is immaterial, the results will ultimately be immaterial. ...Right?

If you actually read all that, then I congratulate you upon your mapping of my brain.

In keeping with the theme, TL;DR version: OMG the world sucks and is awesome too and it's all the internet's fault and it's just like real life dood.

What To Do, Part Two of Infinity, Or: Zombie Dreams Abound

I keep having zombie dreams. Last night I had one for the first time in months. In these dreams there are rarely zombies; in fact often times there are only half a dozen or so people at all. Mostly they consist of the struggle to ransack and seek out everything that will be useful, starting from my own home and then moving with a friend or two to a camp. Many times they are more about exploring houses, and the dreams have a very whimsical aspect. Once in a while, like last night, there will be an element of danger, but the danger isn't zombies (even though they are the reason for this societal meltdown), it's the people who scour the houses for anything useful, rob anyone who might be there, and kill them. Last night I hid in an attic at my parents' house with someone until these people left. Then it was all business, grabbing what to me were the most important items to take in whatever car we were going to find. Almost always, the people I am with, who are allies or camp-mates, are unspecific; that is, they have no identity that I know of. Last night's dream took place near the beginning of the apocalypse, but I have had some where I had been wandering the countryside with a few "friends" (no one I know in real life), mostly in cars, for perhaps years. One dream took place at night, in winter, and we searched for a house that we could settle down in for good, now that the threat was over. It was so peaceful, looking down that line of houses, some porch lights lit (which in the dream just meant that the power grid for that neighborhood was functional), and knowing that there were worlds of architecture to explore with barely any people to get in the way.

What To Do, Part One of Infinity

Is it better to have a goal and no means or means and no goal? I don't know. 

What am I supposed to do in life? What do I want to do in life? Could the twain meet? These are the three most important questions I could have about my future (and my present and past, for they have everything to do with it). "A certain practice of life" ...have I ever done anything exceptional in my practice of life that includes art? Nothing comes to mind. I've made individuals happy while making pictures on canvas or paper, and I've felt joy in imitating shape, exploring texture and context and concept and implication and color and light, but is that really what I want to do? I think not. However, a life devoid of creative expression is a dull death. How related, entwined do my life and my art need to be, though? No matter what I do, I can't imagine it including all the facets of what I love doing. The whole life would mean my work (career!) was meaningful (as the theorists say, meaning is a tricky concept) and inextricably tied to who I am and how the world is. As much as I want to pretend that my happiness is independent from pressures of peers, family and authority, it is not, and it isn't independent of the general social statuses of cultures and facets of groups around the world (and it shouldn't be).

Maybe at my pit I will always be an absorber, an observer and listener. I will never be a teacher. I would make a horrible teacher. I will never be able to relay information to children or adults unless it's trivia. I will never be able to debate anyone. I'm too flustered, distracted, speech-impeded, and sensitive. I can have discussions with people, but cannot successfully confront debate. I could never manage or own a business (for pretty much those same reasons).

I have all sorts of romantic ideas about abandoning everything I own and everyone I know and traveling the globe doing good and learning all I can. They are frivolous ideas, but I can't dismiss their value in helping me decide what I'd be best suited to do. The free consumption of time--that's what I've really learned is ultimate freedom. I'd have to exist outside of the society as I know it in order to be such a pure consumer. More romantic ideas. Seems quite a selfish goal, when it comes down to it, right? I want to do good things. That's all I know. And I don't want to do them in the way that most professions can be twisted to say that they do good. I want to do them in impactful, empowering, direct ways. And I want to be a professional learner. A student of the Earth.

Well, I've gnawed a little bit away at this. Here's to the first step.