Other Than Mine

Acrylic on Canvas

h: 48 x w: 72 in

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Growing up I never had much self worth. I never felt like I even deserved to to be happy so when I wasn't it didn't seem that surprising. As I grew into adulthood, I was so kind of amazed to have even have survived the horror show that was my childhood that for a while it seemed greedy to ask for more than contentment, mainly because anything other than misery was something beyond my wildest dreams for so long. But now for the first time in my life I feel like not only is real happiness something I deserve but even something that might be attainable. This painting deals with all the emotions this realization stirs inside of me.

Ziggy Stardust and The Kids are Alright

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about Bowie, Bolan, Brian Ferry and the whole Glam Revolution of the early 1970s lately. This moment is often heralded as the first stiletto-heal to drop in the coming post gender era. Bowie via his alter ego of Ziggy Stardust is often seen as giving a voice to a generation of swish boys and butch girls who would grow up to abandon the centuries old nonsense of gender. Although I agree that the glam guys were the first kind of mass-market version of a post identity culture that would change the world in the coming decades, I also feel that this was not the only game that they changed. Since the first British Invasion of the early 60s British Popular Music had been primarily about location. The Beatles music was rooted in their hometown of Liverpool. The whole Mersey Beat Sound of the first wave of British RockNRoll was rooted in a mixing of American Roots music and a certain working class English ethos and sound. The second wave of British bands would wave a sort of Nationalist flag for all of England. Mick and Keith wrapped themselves in the Union Jack and their music was rooted in their very Englishness. No band did this more effectively than The Who, a band that even took the colours of Britannia as the palette for their logo. British Music of the post war era was about where you were from and about how music was a path to where you were going. It dealt with the class struggles and desires of upward mobility that had defined British Youth culture for generations. The early bands masked their working class accents in a sort of mimicry of the vocal styles of Black American bluesman. By the time you get to records like The Who’s My Generation you have Roger Daltrey mining the working class vernacular and colloquial expressions of his generation not just in interviews but in the very lyrics and style of singing on the records themselves. Where is an artist like David Bowie or Marc Bolan to go from there? Bowie wasn’t even working class for starters. This is where the story of the second revolution in British Pop Music begins; Bowie and the boys made music that would forgo the class politics that had defined pop music and in doing so would open up a whole new world of musical and narrative possibilities within the framework of RockNRoll. Glam wasn’t about Liverpool or London, it wasn’t about Britannia or the artist’s working class world. Hell, it wasn’t even about this world at all. With Glam, Bowie and all the other boys shot the narrative straight into outerspace. From this moment on anything was game. Not only weren’t artists limited by gender they didn’t even have to be of this world. This shedding of the skin allowed music to become about anything the artist could imagine. In doing so it abandoned the need for authenticity that had plagued music for so long. Artists no longer felt the need to prove that they were still neighborhood boys with all the working class bullshit that accompanied that. Music was no longer about the world around you but also about the world inside you. If you wanted to be an androgynous alien with a snow-white tan glam said you could. Glam laid the groundwork for music that explored the internal world where anything was possible and in doing so escaped Hegel’s dialectic of working class guilt butting up against aspirations of upward mobility. Glam freed artists to write about their dreams no matter how strange those dreams might be and thus spawned not just the Eurythmics but also bands as diverse as Fugazi and The Flaming Lips. Bands that would grow up in a contemporary world that would not limit them to creating art that addressed their external reality but also their inner conflicts and demons as well as their inner space alien. Glam changed the lives of people who never even think to put on a T Rex record and for that it deserves more credit than it will ever receive.

Momentum: The Opening

Momentum: Set Up

Vampire Weekend

a New York State of Mind

New York City has one of the nation’s richest musical histories. From Gershwin’s Rhapsody In Blue to Sinatra’s ode to the city that never sleeps and all the way up to Brill Building Pop and The Velvet Underground. Only maybe Nashville and New Orleans have a stronger case for America’s musical capitol. However in the canon of contemporary (read as Post Beatlemania) music produced in and around New York and with New York as an over arching theme Vampire Weekend has a particular original place. From the Velvets to the Dolls to the Ramones and even Springsteen (if the outer boroughs count, why not Jersey?) and the Strokes, music of a New York sensibility has always either been the product of working class kids of a bridge and tunnel persuasion or in the case of the Strokes rich kids aping a working class aesthetic. Vampire Weekend is especially unique in this manner. Unlike all the aforementioned bands Vampire Weekend are both neither working class nor particularly embarrassed by their prep school pedigree. They are unabashedly posh and in a city with a notoriously complex relationship to class this ambivalence is often perceived as arrogance. Vampire Weekend exist in a particularly contemporary spot that is in a broad sense a bi-product of their generation. A generation born under Reagan and Bush and who came of age during the greatest economic boom in a generation; however in a macro sense Vampire Weekend are not just products of Reagan Bush Clinton Bush but also Giuliani. Vampire Weekend grew up in the most sanitized and privileged New York ever. They are too young to remember the AIDS crisis or the Washington Square Riots. They grew up in a city where even the rats had an Amex and a chauffer. The New York of drag queens and junkies that inspired Sweet Lou is as ancient history to them as the gas crisis or legionnaires disease. Never mind the class resentment that fueled bands like the Ramones to make music informed by the fact that being from the outer boroughs might well as made you the redheaded stepchild. Their New York was not only one of sanitized streets but also sanitized memories. Not only was the New York of pimps and peep shows dead and gone, but New York was all the better for it. Much as someone born with no olfactory glands can never understand the subtle differences between a Cadbury and a Hershey Bar their ignorance of a New York before Rudy allows them to be posh without shame. How can they realize a faux pas when they are a product of a city that has come to see it’s seedy past as vice and not a virtue. In short they play a sincere game of idiots delight. And make no mistake, their aim is both true and sincere. There is no nodding gesture or knowing tongue in cheek. Much like the city that made them they are totally comfortable in their sincere ambivalence, ne total ignorance of the class struggles that have since Dickens defined a city that is lit by the torch of lady liberty who proclaims give me your poor your tired your hungry but whose median real estate prices those very immigrants will never be able to afford. New York has always fed on the dreams of those who have little more than dreams but the New York that reared the lads of Vampire Weekend is a city without shame. It is this callous and gentrified New York that informs Vampire Weekend’s work and it is this very indulgence that may well be their crutch. They have done what neither the Strokes nor the Dolls were capable of, make two records that are both distinctly New York and distinctly great, one better than the last. They have also done what the Velvets and Ramones were unable to do; sell records, lots of records actually. Now the question is, if they are the band that Rudy birthed than how will they grow and adapt to a New York that itself is changing. The rich are still getting richer but there quite simply aren’t as many of them. Furthermore, as a result of the shrinking of the globe brought about by the internet paired with rents that are still out of the reach of most Americans let alone most human beings in general New York will never again hold the cache that it once held. With Youtube and Myspace will the next Bruce even feel a need to cross the river to find their voice. Vampire Weekend may end up being the penultimate New York band and if that is the case then isn’t it interesting that they would deliver on the promise of every great New York band before them by sounding and looking so little like them while still being so New York.

In Grass (Green): Second Draft of Proposal for Historic Lancaster Amtrack Station Mural

This is the second draft of a proposal I might submit for a public art project in Lancaster County, PA. The project calls for a work of public art that melds visual art with poetry in a unique way. Given my propensity for text based work I found the idea extremely appealing.

Momentum: 2010 post-baccalaureate exhibition