Black Rock Arts Proposal 1 of 2

Studio 13 Portable Rehearsal Space

This art car aims at realty greed. There is a lack of spaces for SF musicians to rehearse, especially if they're working hard to ends meet. SF is one of the most expensive places to live, so the local scene lacks diversity compared to other places. Inspired by my virgin Playa adventure in 2011, the Studio 13 art car will be used by over half a dozen local bands ranging from hip-hop, dj-ing and turntablism, to hardcore and pop-punk bands among others. The name Studio 13 is in honor of the rehearsal space at Tommy Guerrero's Audiobox Studios that housed the Freshkimos, Golda Supernova, Slashton, Ghosts and Strings, among others, for over a year, a prolific time for all the bands before the two leasees could no longer afford the rent.

Aside from dedicated rehearsal space, the goals for the art car include:

1. Helping local music/education foundations.

2. Coordinating with activists communities like #OccupySF, S.F. Bike Coalition, Sunday Streets and Bindlestiff Studios to provide portable audio for hedonistic and political actions.

3. Creating a public talk show, Manafrio radio, coordinated with internet broadcast capabilities through fccfree radio and ustream.com. Local activists and journalists will be free to hold panels, interviews and give speeches. When no scheduled speakers are available and no band is using the car, people in public will be allowed to use the microphones to hold a conversation.

4. Bringing the Playa spirit to the S.F. streets by offering free rides to S.F. revelers at night, circling from the Mission to Potrero and through SoMa. This will cut down on drunk drivers and offer a magical experience for passengers. Hopefully this will spur other people with art cars to do the same.

Aesthetic

The joyful pilot art car of Studio 13 is a converted van outfitted with dozens of mirrors within a metal frame. The mirrors, "The Sea of Vanity", creates an everchanging dance of color and reflective light while masking "the guts" of the car--a plug-in portable rehearsal space! The second level of the car is a wooden boat crafted by CCA masters student Peter L'abbe and inspired by outrigger construction of Southeast Asian boats (with removable outriggers), which will be adjoined by a spiral staircase and surrounded by a safety bar with perimeter benches, and cushions.

Our hope is that the voyage of Studio 13 helps bands who've been unable to rehearse and inspires the next generation of musicians through visits with our art car. Our intention is to be on a regular schedule with those involved in music education, help local bands rehearse and provide audio for a wide-range of purposes and activities in San Francisco.

Regular Stops

Dolores Park
Justin Herman Plaza
Powell St.
Sloat and Great Hwy.
Haight St. food truck outpost
Noe St. Farmers Market

I first learned of the Enclosure Movement in England in a renaissance literature class at S.F. State. Though the professor's droning reading of his own papers brought yawns and prevented my full attention, this idea of the beginning of fences and borders that would lead to Manifest Destiny in the Americas stuck with me. When Orwell speaks of Oceania in the digest section of 1984 he includes the Americas, the British Isles and parts of Western Europe.

I have no claim to expertise in what went into the movement and online sources are slim. One short definition in thefreedictionary.com summarizes:

"Division or consolidation of communal lands in Western Europe into the carefully delineated and individually owned farm plots of modern times. Before enclosure, farmland was under the control of individual cultivators only during the growing season; after harvest and before the next growing season, the land was used by the community for the grazing of livestock and other purposes. In England the movement for enclosure began in the 12th century and proceeded rapidly from 1450 to 1640; the process was virtually complete by the end of the 19th century. In the rest of Europe, enclosure made little progress until the 19th century. Common rights over arable land have now been largely eliminated."

Four centuries since the time of Shakespeare, it seems we've reached another milepost at the end of industrial revolution. It's become clear that as civilized animals who have technology, we may have gone as far as we can in "manifesting destiny". Postwar suburban sprawl has proven itself as unsustainable if abandoned towns and bankrupt city governments are any indication and Orwell's 1984 is prophetic. His claim of the State controlling the populace with armed police and control over resources--limiting access to food, shelter, etc. depending on your place within the caste sytem--would be seen as "paranoid" and "crazy" if not for events that have occurred over the last few years.

Naomi Klein's viral article "The Truth About the Crackdown on the Occupy Movement" from the Guardian U.K. lays out in clear terms that Occupy's "dissent"--a term which ironically fits of a movement who many claim to have no message or demand--is not welcome in our current climate of governmental shakeup. Klein writes, "The picture darkened still further when Wonkette and Washingtonsblog.com reported that the Mayor of Oakland acknowledged that the Department of Homeland Security had participated in an 18-city mayor conference call advising mayors on "how to suppress" Occupy protests."

The Department of Homeland Security defines centralized policing and security. Folks who would dispute that will also be not-so-politely asked to remove their shoes when traveling freely by airplane, a humiliating new reminder of control for Nietzsche's beasts (Genealogy of Morals).

Anyway, please excuse the pretentious exercise of reference and paraphrase. I will continually rewrite this essay (second day) till it is streamlined and informative.

The aesthetic argument of OWS is the most telling because it rejects : people are outside camping. This is a rejection of the status quo and in the bigger picture, the enclosure movement that has marked Oceanic culture since the invention of the printing press.

Find joy always, first and foremost, apart from bottom line. Outside of this simple physical/aesthetic decision, the matrix of words and politics must be objectified. You are not a number or a commodity. You are spirit incarnate. You must scramble and redefine what they are giving us, bending the matrix like an artist (Nietzsche said the artist is the one who changes the symbols). Everything must start over: university, spirituality, exchange of goods. There must be a hermetic seal with full awareness of how the power center operates at its borders. An organization like Burning Man is fully aware of its transcendent nature and maintains a relationship with law enforcement, thus, citizens of the temporary Black Rock City are more insulated from oppression than they are at an event like Love Evolution.

In a sense, we return to tribalism and natural law in our physical lives. As strange as it feels, we exist tribally--communicating physically--more than we realize. In our modernity, we've numbed ourselves to this fact. You are grumpy with a courageous soft heart. It's not going to be easy because we have to learn trust. I love you with all my heart. You are the children of the revolution.

Morning in Davao

Now the mysterious familiarity of the now-defunct Surf Maniac Camp is explainable. In 2000 there was an internal clock of comfort that went off when we entered the traditionally built, three story building crawling with ants and geckos, the skinny, crazy-eyed owner offering coffee and massages that felt like death pinches, the highest point on the hill above Uluwatu. I'm now the non-tagalog speaking gnomon at the circle gathered around the bottles of beer. My cousin keeps offering me smokes and I cut myself off at two. Bicycles with sidecars and umbrellas pass in front of the neighbors, who've set up a pink tent over the barbecue that sits streetside with the backlight of fluorescent lights.

There's an equilibrium, as if the failure of western economies and infrastructure is just theatre, a flawed tragedy that has nothing to do with how we're really supposed to live and interact with each other. The child at the end of 100 Years of Solitude, dead and crawling with ants, has another meaning now. There's still time. In my ignorance I didn't know why they were calling Marquez's book as important as the bible till this family reunion.

Don't know how women withstand the mental stimulation of so many winks, pokes and inane messages online: facebook, okcupid, twitter. Locked to a keyboard, no fear of carpal tunnel, we're jailed. Bank of America now has bullet proof glass surrounding their tellers. Whole Foods has computer monitors giving numbers of the next available cashier in a snaking airport security line, doors safely surrounded by glass partitions. The underlying theme of these designs is maximizing safety, controlling interaction with the public. It's unclear whether we feel the cynicism behind these societal changes.

But it begs the question: are we already trapped in the system? and how guilty am I for my own winks, pokes and inane messages online?

bye bye

Fuck it. Yeah, I don't need to be doing this anymore. I'm too exposed when typing my life into a desperate news real over the internet. Invitations occur regardless of the pool of life that is scrambling and swirling our minds and feelings. The past floats in and out of my life, a constant reminder of triumphs and failures. My good friend Nathan did it first. And now I have in a sense freed myself. It's melting my mind. Just put the computer back to its correct place as a tool. I'm about to lose my mind. I'm wondering if this technology has something to do with it. I haven't felt normal for the last two years and I've been on facebook for about two. It's time. Countdown to reality. Dive back in...

Decompression

He dropped down from the rock-and-roll floater, tail two feet below the nose of his board, hands at 12 and 6 o'clock, feet cross body, front knee to back elbow for the recoil from the drop. Andy Irons taildrop body english was etched in my mind. I could hear Perry Ferrell covering the Stones in that last great ...lost video, Lost at Sea, "Please allow me to introduce myself..." Just a bunch of friends who ripped and lived life to its fullest.

That's what I imagined before the sun set, October 10th, 10-10-10, paint brush in my hand, negative space shadows of figures in the barrel, airs, mist blowing out the back of the waves, painting before a crowd of strange, energized people, on one of two pieces of plywood my friend and I worked on from noon to midnight, under the freeway in San Francisco. I drew Andy right over a barrel like it was that same wave at Lance's.

The Mermen jammed out electronic fuzz and high octane 64th note delays, surf guitars on acid, and I was dressed like Hunter S. Thompson painting on chocolate covered mushrooms...it felt like my scene. Billy Shatner had run off into the crowd after his muse, down by the sculptures, closer to the techno. I'd paint for an hour, feigning some kind of structuralism, overly intellectual, cryptic lazy scrawls, some homage to Jean-Michel Basquiat, "Don't ever be sad", "I have a strange anthropomorphic bent", then Shatner would come back, the wild-eyed, dialated Aquarian, absorbing drama from his girl's intense feminism and paint fluorescent green over my shadow figures and waves I worked so hard on, Pollock splashes with the paint water, hand washes over psychedelic pastoral moment I imagined, gone forever. "He's so subtle," I heard earlier. The hippy girl in the half-vest snuck up behind me at one point and shot video, so subtly I didn't have time to think about her--curly brown locks, caramel skin--a moment of synchronicity, then she was gone.

I'm painting surf scenes stage left while the Mermen plug everyone into the air. Vanity strikes: First wave stood on, 1987, Lindamar Beach; surf, punk rock third wave, Mission gentrification opens the door to masses with tech money, bio, computer, hipsters in waves, 2000, the Albion becomes Delirium, 2007, Member's Only jackets, nylons and bicycles, Valencia looking like Sunset Blvd...live music, Frieda Kahlo parades on Dia De Los Muertos, playing a cello as a bass 23rd and Folsom, banging a floor tom with Ghost, 24th and Bryant, and the sun is setting, the Giants are about to win the penant, I had my first Giants hat when I was six. I was there--inside my head I'm screaming at Billy "SHE SAID SHE WOULD PAY $500!!!!! STOP PAINTING ON IT!!! WHY DID YOU PAINT OVER MY WAVES!!!!!"

I would wander off through the crowd for an hour while he painted, then we'd switch. Toward the end of the night he was quickly leaving for another world, his eyes the only thing to read. Hurt, worry...the muse is still open, his dad is still sick in the hospital...The sea is swirling, fluorescent, pagan, electric, tribal, weird shit is happening everywhere. They wanna look for more drugs. They're gonna wander down the block. The boys are young, talented, we're all friends. We're just looking to have a good time, she says. The look says, don't take her away. Don't take him either, not now.

I remember this, I swear. We're all in this together. Let's have another drink. Smoke a J. Furry hats and jackets, topless girls with face paint. None of that matters. That lady wasn't gonna buy the painting anyway. The money doesn't matter. We'll probably never see her again. It's not about the money. She was drunk off her ass...Let's get this shit done. Let's get you home. Yeah, I can drive. She's already there...

It all washed away. The moment was eternal, maximum. The sun set like a wave crashing. Two weeks later a parachute drew fire by the sea, in the rain, under a full moon. The Giants won the World Series on Dia De Los Muertos in Texas. Andy Irons died that same night in Dallas. Everything was different after that. I don't know how, but it was. The gates had opened. Now, sometimes I just don't wanna go to sleep...

So...

The coincidences led me forward. Yes, in a hippy-mystical way like James Redfield's book, "The Celestine Prophecy"...synchronicity leads you forward in a moment of indecision when you don't know what direction you're life should go. The higher power in whatever form shows you signs that you just need to be ready for, awake, alert, conscious: you've been thinking about going to Mexico and suddenly a commercial comes on TV to visit the Yucatan or you overhear a conversation where someone just got back from Cabo. You wonder whether you should study biology and your friend asks you if you want to go to the zoo.

But let me get rid of any vanity of being destined for something, even if it could be true. I've been drifting because I'm lazy, not because of a dizzying encounter with a chasm in my life. Yes, I do believe in the void, but it's ruined many a moment where I should've just put my arms around a girl instead of dragging her to the edge as if she didn't know that the dark existed.

In the last six months, where my sanity has been in question, I had moments roaming around San Francisco, drunk, stoned, with a guitar occasionally, trying to figure out where to go. I worked at Whole Foods for five years up until last June. The work paid just enough to keep me from complaining, but not enough to really ever get ahead. My coworkers and I shared a sort of entitled bohemian existence where nights out drinking helped ignore the question of whether we or not we deserved better then working in a grocery store. It's easy to say "yes, of course. Fuck that, I know..." But this question is deeply political and sociological. What is this better life we deserve? The tech nerds are rich and they can afford to shop at a place like Whole Foods. Their occasional displays of class conscious arrogance are the bain of many a charming artist jockying a cash register when they want to ring up a case of twelve bottles of champaigne in the 8 items or less express lane. They can afford to go out whenever they want and numb their brains with alcohol and drugs much more frequently and with better taste then the struggling Joe.

I don't know. I cannot wrap my head around this comparison. But I can say that their materialism is not going to change the world. That's all. Some of my good friends genuinely want to change the world, even if it's just their own.

In any event, there was synchronicity, strange conversations about the collective unconscious, characters that seemed out of the movies, so strange, sharp and genuine that I believed what they said. Some checked out online. Others I'll have to wait and see if they show up again.