Tag: art

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Dream Journal

A Whole Community Summer

Woke up from dreams… a dream of a whole summer of community…

My wife surprised me with a gift. I walk up to the open car door cuz there’s a whole crowd there, marching band even. They’re gathered around the car, and presented on the couch is an elaborately embroidered pair of pants — Chinese or maybe Tibetan patterns, zippers on both sides of the legs and snaps at the bottom so you can take them off quickly.. I found out later there’s snaps at the top so they can be taken off completely like that. There’s a tag reading $1,000… I can’t accept a pair of pants for $1,000, that’s too much responsibility for an item that I’ll actually wear. Looking closer, it seems to have been overwritten with a little orange sticker at… 64 cents!? I actually think this is a bit of joke-y marketing, and the real tag says $40 (which is an incredible price for a pair of pants like this). I don’t think I can stress enough: they’re simply gorgeous.

My cousin Kelly is begging me to tell him how to convince me to let him play a new PS2 game I have, some popular zeitgeist video game moment. But I explained the only thing I want is for him to not play it because I played it and I can tell it wouldn’t be good for him. I had to explain that, since my only goal was for him *not* to play it, there wasn’t any argument he could make to change my mind.

I have a big bag of metal cut-out letters, vintage cookie cutters I think. It’s my personal collection. I’m using it it an project, making text art on an inset wall of shelves. It’s several lines I can’t recall, but the message ends with “luv you cuz”. I end up having to monitor it because it’s super tempting for people to steal the little die cuts. I follow a shrugging gangster-looking guy who I see slip a little heart symbol in his back pocket, stomping his ass when I get him alone, crushing the little stolen heart in his back pocket and bruising his poor thieving ass. Reckon it left a heart-print that wouldn’t seem to jibe with the story of how he got it. I ask him why he would steal something like that… though oddly, I’m not mad, I just want to teach him a lesson.

Walking down a long slope to a beach like some place in Southern California, I see that Nautilus here are able to walk on their thin little tentacles like dogs, cavorting with people’s leashed dogs along the sandy sloped pathway down. I backtrack after I reach the beach wanting to get photo or video of these things, realizing they’re basically only found on that one path for now. They’re very playful, like little dogs, much more fascinating to watch than I can describe.

I’m going to hitch a ride with an expert Captain who pilots her own houseboat, getting to somewhere further away than where I want to go and backtracking closer to where I want to be. She has dramatic trouble turning out of the narrow waterway that is the port, having to perform hard turns a couple times. Something in the boat’s shaky mechanics, or maybe her captaining, is causing the massive and unwieldy houseboat to move unpredictably. After a few hard turns and close calls close (enough to get heckled by a group of vacationing Canadians drinking in lawn chairs) the boat grounds on a tiny gap of sand beach right next to the dock where it started.

Sitting in a crowd. Dara V. is about to depart, but before she does the medical guy she had hired to serve nitrous via a plastic tube (it’s tip covered with a snipped-off condom for improvised protection). He kind of beckons her, gesturing as if to say “I mean you already paid for it”. She kind of goes “ehhhh I mean… I could”. As she’s standing there I have time to study her face, and unexpectedly notice some of the subtle hints of how it’s aging, trying to imagine what it might look like when she’s even older. There’s weirdly nothing as specific as lines around the eyes or something… but I can kind of see it? There’s some distortion too, as I consider how Mar-a-Lago Face impacts visual expectations of age. I’ve been surprised before that she looked older at all — there’s always been a kind of an immortal or ethereal quality to her. Also… I didn’t even know she was into nitrous.

The tube get passed around and, comically, one of the brash younger gay guys in the crowd has a moment choking trying to deep-throat the tube. It’s unclear if this is a prank involving an actual dildo, or whether he intentionally used part of the apparatus *as a dildo* as a reference to not being able to deep-throat.

Two people have been in competition with each other all summer: a portly hip Black guy with a thick beard, and an effusive heavy-set blonde girl barfly-type. They’re dramatically playful, but still honestly trying to beat each other. He’s been trouncing her though, by a long way. He’s regularly working on stuff and has basically been making projects all summer, while she keeps dropping the ball either unluckily or sheer misjudgment. Sitting in a crowd he jokingly confronts her to do a final evaluation of their mutual efforts, which of course she laughs heartily about. He’s the winner and he seems to be bragging, but it’s the nicest way to go about winning for such a situation. She’s failed even on her own terms regardless of luck or anything else.

How does the dream end? I can’t remember. I heard a snippet of landlord outside. Nevertheless, I wrote it down. Tried a new journal app on my phone because the Oneirographer PWA was broken, again. I know these are the kind of life details that you, my dear reader, appreciate so you have proper context for all these. You’re welcome. You’re… you’re me in the future, aren’t you?

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Dream Journal

Big Art District Failuretown

My wife and I are holed up in something like hotel, or a guest house, waiting excitedly for an planned experience. Our bed is in a room with only three walls, one side open to a shared courtyard or parking lot. On a ledge high in this courtyard a TV is mounted. It shows a roster of custom TV spots, made as lore and instructions for our event, which I eagerly try to absorb. We stay in the guest house overnight, during which time a food truck shows up — then another food truck, which upsets the staff of the first.

The next day we pass through a gift shop before boarding special transit to the actual big cool thing. The glass counter is laid with bright custom-made floral miniatures. I ask if they have natural fennel growing in field (I heard about these specific miniatures somewhere long ago). They show me a mini vase holding cut fennel stems, which somehow sloshes raw water over the edge and also has grainy gel creeping up the stalks. A short rocket ride takes us to what is called Carlas’s Place, supposedly hidden in the center of pointy mountain. This is an attraction and experience somewhat like Meow Wolf, yet also an exclusive gathering space and elite artist venue. Here there are plans plotted; showpieces shown; careers made.

I arrive and I head straight forward down a long massive ramp of scree into a yawning neon underground. I can only make out a little of it as the image of it seem scrawled, broken. Instead my wife pulls me aside and tells me I’m supposed to use the map on the back of the computer mouse visitors are each given. I can then exchange it at the location for a travelling vehicle. Although I somehow missed this tip in all my preparation, I take it as my first task.

The imprinted map shows the district. It is large, while the map small. The place swarms with people and activity, and I figure it must actually be somewhere like a neighborhood (with a normal entrance I just never knew about).

I try to find the indicated dot on my computer mouse map, and come into a giant video arcade with rows and rows of vintage machines. The place is crammed with people actually playing them, all lights and noise and crazy carpet like a casino. There are even big overhead displays which cycle though game screens, showing action happening somewhere on the vast arcade floor.

I leave the arcade far from where I entered. The arched and collonaded high-atrium mall is elegant, rectilinear, easily navigable. So it seems. I pass through the a central plaza (I don’t even look to the side, though the windows — why?) and into a cozier passage of stores and jauntily angled hallways. Some stores are recently set up for Christmas here. Dining outside on a barstool of a cafe, I pass a man I strongly recognize. He notices me noticing him and quickly names a news program, tucking his chin down in acknowledgement; as a new anchor he must get this a lot. So, I take it to this place is a place celebrities sometimes hang out.

I am left wandering the streets, which feel like a city all their own. It is like nowhere quite familiar, exactly. Alaska? Denver? 1940s movie set? There are steep mountains in the near distance. I happen to walk by a building-sized prop, a vast art deco hotel with a detailed façade. Closely inspecting the green tiles of the sweeping rounded corner, I find statues of exquisite alien dancers, their appearance like skinny insectoid bears. The style itself is Pacific Northwest native blended with Balinese temple deities, exaggerated poses and dramatically cut forms. I take pictures of this work from many angles. It is clear, at least, that this place has had a lot of effort put into it.

Suddenly my timer runs out. Was I told this was a timed experience? I’m teleportationally kicked back to normaltown, a 20-part survey immediately plonked in front of me. The first inquiry: I am asked to rate the vehicles I found. I start selecting every vehicle, laying heavy red shapes over them, indulging my impulse to rate them all zero. I’m disgusted and furious, not having even gotten past step one. I realize partway that my “feedback” has no chance to be recognized. For real feedback I have to yell at someone directly. If this has become so developed, if the experience cost so much money, yet they don’t even care if people are actually able to *do anything* of what they are meant to do? If the little survey doesn’t even know what you did? If they think they should even ask? Then, I will find someone to yell at.

I wake up mentally listing the things I will say. The many things.

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Dream Journal

Stolen Cyberpunk Timelines of Plarvolia

I come across Plarvolia who is sitting in a clear box for her art project. I can see her getting mildly harassed by children tapping on the glass among other things. Though I feel moved to intervene, I understand that I shouldn’t be the one to try. After her shift inside is up, I inspect café baked goods where she had been stationed. She was promoting/selling a new line of rainbow spectrum lights from General Electric — one of which, interestingly, is a strong bright black. Also notable is that I now know she actually does make money from her art (at least sometimes).

There is a unique cyberpunk setting that feels somehow European, old world. Inside a building are haphazard beds in a place seemingly used as a squat. I break through multiple walls of the interior in what feels like a sequence puzzle. Beyond, a darkened (but daytime) town square is buzzing with various activities.

I steal an invisible scooter-skateboard from a man riding it in the square. It’s broken in the process and gluing it back together proves problematic. Not only is this invisible kind a special color, the connections are finicky. It’s a specific brand that others feel is reputable called “Eaver” or “Matric” or something. I later go with someone who encourages me to try to buy one. The store has the feel of a cyber-renovated luxury 19th-century “Robber Baron” era place — dark wood columns and sophisticated electronic monitoring. I find a new board for $35 up on a shelf inside a bag, but decide it’s too expensive and I don’t want to try stealing it.

At the checkout area for this town square zone, I encounter my Homepie friends Juicy and Coco lounging having drinks. They’ve already paid for theirs, and when I look to pay they’ve already paid for mine too — though confusingly I don’t see them on the check. Perhaps they were omitted, which is all the same. Juicy notices he has to have a charge corrected before he goes, as the pipe he picked out was supposed to be on sale. He went to that same Robber Baron store as I did earlier.

There is a complex sorting-out of the timeline of interactions with Plarvolia. Time travel seems at play, nonlinearity, acausality. I put on a colorful fur-trimmed vest before I talk to her. I’m preparing for her timeline which is about to finish, and finally her timeline happens to line up with my own.

I revisit these narratives of Plarvolia for two hours. Retelling the story out of order; I can’t play out the events. I perceive parts where I saw perfectly from her perspective. But when did we talk? Wasn’t there more scenes with her? At some point I was explicitly instructed (or conclude?) that I need to write this one down. But now it hardly seems profound or important. But this dream feels different than other Plarvolia ones… I admit I even have a hard time thinking of her as Plarvolia, but instead think of her as her real self, as something outside her relation to me and what happened. I think of her with her real name and her real life.

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Dream Journal

Moving Bits and Pieces

Taking down the living room wall mural at our old house. It’s assembled from big pieces of vinyl, some in smaller squares as if it were tiles. As I peel off a square, I hold it in my hand and think about how the mural is certainly big art, but only big enough the fit the space. I think about how we would need a new one for the new place because the living room wall is even bigger. Originally, this mural was just found art, but after these years looking at it I have a subtle understanding of the shades of meaning it gives, how it affects you. I realize I have insight into the message it gives when you slowly absorb it. It affects you a certain way.

Underneath the mural is the “radio cabinet” with a sliding door, which used to house a radio station transmitter many years ago. I deal with it separately out on the lawn or elsewhere. In the dream, it’s exactly the furniture piece we’ve had in the living room for many years, but in this incarnation there are circular beams which would block part of the TV — if you kept a TV in there, like they might’ve in the 60s. These support arms are worn from years of minute bouncing, as if the small motions from the rat cage above gradually wore it to splintering bits.

A few rats get loose (or I let them loose). Three scramble away immediately onto a nighttime sidewalk yet I can easily grab their tails so they don’t get away. I notice two rats performing a “leg up” maneuver to climb up a wall — though they’re far too small to get all the way over. Very cute escape artists. I help by grabbing them in my hand and placing them atop the wall. They don’t seem to know what to do!

A few fragments:

Sitting at a desk in class, my rat Porkpie climbs onto a desk of the student behind me. I grab him so he doesn’t bother them.

I joke with my friend Nancy Kleppe acting as though her name was Norma (obviously I know it’s not her name.I’m talking with her about moving.

Remember being in Punjab Chinese food while it was closed. I discover three RAM sticks (that I once pilfered from there) have since been taken out of my computer, but I think the one stick that’s left isn’t in the correct slot.

(the custom font I chose to write in today, which I may implement someday, was called “Lambrada”)

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Dream Journal

My Old Camera-on-the-Curb Project

Setting is some low-slung community living/art space that feels like a janky maze — almost a stock location for me. I notice there’s some high-ranking politician here on an official visit, along with his security. I don’t even think about it; I immediately navigate a back route. There room he’s in was made from a shipping container box, with a wall of various switches near the unguarded rear door where I emerge. I walk directly past a secret service guard without him even having time to get off his phone call.

I take an Orc-lord up on a standing offer. Given a nominal fee, I am allowed to eat any orc from the Orc-band I choose. Several distinct and varied orcs line up for me by height. The catch is that the orc I choose won’t just sacrifice itself, it will fight me — but if I win, eating it’s fair game. The trick then is to choose the right size orc. I stand in front of them one-by-one.

Finally, I successfully download a rare Russian track I’ve been searching for forever. It’s album art — or maybe it’s actual shape? — is a bulbous grey game controller.

Walking through my neighborhood here in the Mission, the streets near Cesar Chavez are like a calm colorful French Quarter. Despite having passed by it many times over the years today I stumble upon one of my projects from long ago: a point-and-shoot camera mounted on curb. It’s remarkable that it’s still there considering I installed it in… 2013? People can take whatever photos they want, then retreive them or give them to others. Some are given a surf background — now faded to a dingy grey.

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Dream Journal

Fossil Comes to Life

Finally invited over to home of acquaintance Colin F. and put to work draining oil from classic 1950s car. Not great at it, and I’ve attempted this job in the past. It’s cool checking out his space though. A plastic 3/4 profile relief head of my friend Autumn T. is attached high on a wall. It occurs to me that this angle, while unusual for a relief, looks better than the dead-on one of her I previously have seen.

In a shallow riverbed I stumble across a perfectly intact fossil skeleton of a raptor (or primitive human) embedded just under the water. I know I’m either very lucky or someone must’ve found this before and left it here. Ritualistically, my partner and I light a tall candle and the fossil comes to life, darting all over and wreaking havoc. I start filming on my phone as this terrifying moment has become a cautionary tale, for young people perhaps. I perform a secret move by cutting off the video to abruptly stop the experience.

While leaning against an L-shaped fence with a middle-school classmate, Amy Pollard, I impulsively tell her she’s pretty. But she calls my bluff and asks me to repeat it. I mangle and abstract my rephrasing into something barely relatable along a formula like “___ is she; ___ is he”. I then openly chide myself for phrasing both people as objects — objects of a sentence, thus objectifying them.

Artistic sequence of a herd of animals, the animal models doubling then all morphing into a different bigger animals. So a rat is stacked on rat which then blends into cat, those cats are then doubled and form dogs etc. I get excited to see what larger animal will be chosen next; the sequence gets to doubles of cows but the next animal is a bizarre model of a cow with two independent heads one on top of another.

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Dream Journal

No Rules Govern the Instant

Generational epic on an ocean liner evading a single alien xenomorph. Stories piled on, variations on a theme, successive generations remixed between earlier characters.

On the last day of the long ship journey, about to pull into port, I share a very specific old sailor’s tale I learned. There’s a brief moment when the ship has come to rest at the dock, yet before the rope is tied fast to a mooring. You can do anything in that moment, the situation is a technical gap in maritime law. No rules officially govern that instant. One of my companions asks if that means someone could murder you and get away with it… I presented this as a fun curiosity so this isn’t the reaction I was hoping for.

Giving a presentation over a projector to an audience with a front row that includes my wife, her boyfriend, and his wife. Part of it involves signing up for new internet (or mobile) service. One reason for that is the signup sequence which has a classy pixel art retro vibe. It unexpectedly reminds me of something my former crush would really like. I get a bit sad when I remember we don’t speak anymore.

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Dream Journal

Vacated House, Last School Day, Old Floppy Disks

Big empty house that I can move into with a group. The house is recently vacant — so recent there’s still laundry on a bathroom island, a teacup with Earl Gray mixed with gin & tonic made on a big pullout bed. The bed has a big frame headboard like my Nana’s bedroom.

It’s the final class on the last day of school. My history teacher Mr. Conklin is in the classroom of my English teacher Mrs. Snowden at my middle school. The room is rotated so it’s facing what would be the back wall. Students are excited and animated, gradually catching on that we have to stop participating in whatever activity there is before we get to go home. A kid at the end of the front row throws around a pistol carelessly, causing it to land on the ground.

Hanging around former crush in a space that’s hers. Been long enough since she was a jerk to me that I realize she should I’ve already trusted me by now. I consider asking to take one of the floppy disks she has sitting in a pile, the ones she was saving for an art project. Despite that, it occurs to me that if it’s a floppy disk it most likely contains ancient financial documents from her parents or something equally benal yet private.

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Dream Journal

Prince Andrew’s Art Class

My third grade crush is swearing and idly playing with her junk, talking about “cunt cunt cunt”.

Prince Andrew (or George W. Bush) is teaching an art class. Has some hapless young students, some journalists fishing for stories. Hard to learn anything as he actually doesn’t have ability to communicate his aesthetic sense, if his royal one is worth communicating.

I pack up to leave early on my motorcycle, as  this class is on a Friday. The Prince is rambling about his mistress/lover not showing up. I clean around the sink during my many attempts to get out of there, and leave a bin of pancakes with a lid for the next folks who will use that space. On the way out I take an old bag someone has left behind so it doesn’t rot there, but it has an Apple Watch clipped to it — now I wonder if this good deed is essentially stealing the expensive watch.

“Patrick library” written on a sign with a photo of a forest fire. Trying to figure out what that means, and show someone else, but the words become more faded and harder to find the more I look around. I end up in a back room, with a few parking spots for rented electric trikes behind a hospital’s ER. I give my parking spot up voluntarily for a frazzled mom.

Planting trees in a backyard which represents America, possibly. Two of the pines will grow oddly where they’re sited, I reckon, but I’ll wait till they grow in and harvest them. The credits roll with soft music (which is an unusually on-the-nose ending for a dream).

But interestingly, what actually ends the dream is me repeatedly rehearsing what notes I will take upon waking. So, here we are then.

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Dream Journal

Egyptian Hallway Art, Archeology Property Snafu

In the hallway of our home I notice Egyptian art hanging on the walls. It’s been up so long, nearly since we moved in, we’d just about forgotten it. But, what to do since I realize it’s there now.

Tall hexagonal barriers (maybe like the shape of coffins?) contain a flow that fills up the hall like a tank. I can’t recall what substance it was, but I feel like it wasn’t a liquid, but an actual everyday thing.

A shack in the middle of a pasture that serves as both museum and archeological site. Spending my days in dusty careful study without electricity, I’m part of a small group of young people dedicated to its special care. A respectable older man, my teacher, has spent years of his life creating it.

By way of a simple legal trick, a younger female (possibly an estranged member of our group) gets the property line reassigned. We are forced to close up the building and shut the gate till the legal wranglings are sorted through. Knowing the site is in danger without care, I sneak back in one sunny afternoon. I just walk back in. No one stops me, no one seems to even notice though I walk down a gravel road in a broad field. I start to feel the people involved and obeying the law are acting downright foolish.