Tiny Anthem

The research field of Pataphysical Medical Technology can best be described as seeking out unscientific applications of scientific methodology. Put in a more lemniscular fashion: pataphysical medical technology and it's ancillary disciplines seek to invert the old axiom of beating swords into ploughshares, instead trying to beat ploughshares into a collection of tiny souvenier spoons that convincingly tell the story of a vacation that was never taken to a series of tourist destinations that never existed.

Laboratory notes on the Process of Laudanal Mafipulation:

Let's get something straight... I am not actively trying to kill myself. That would be foolish. I am merely trying to attenuate some of my more valetudinarian tendencies.

Where are you going, when are you coming home?

"Super Dimension Century Orguss" was an anime created by japanese animation company "Big West" in 1983. It was not an actual sequel to "Macross", but it reunited the same creative team in the hopes of creating another big hit. Sadly, it was just too different from Macross and any other SF anime, for that matter, and it was not very successful in japan. In the states, it is remembered only for the huge pile of Orguss toy and model merchandise that made it to american toystores... and that is quite a pity, because it was such a unique, quirky, and charming show. Not quite as brainy as "Hitchhiker's Guide", not quite as slapstick as "Futurama", but certainly in that same vein of bizzarre, mutiverse-hopping adventures and ontological puzzles.

The simplest explanation I can offer of ORGUSS's very un-simple plot goes as follows: on the eve of world war 3, cocky mech pilot Kei Katsuragi tries to detonate an experimental "dimensional bomb" to break a bitter stalemate on the battlefield. The untested bomb malfunctions, creating a bizarre aggregate of 100 different alternate realities all crammed onto the same earth, which is imprisoned inside of an impenetrable forcefield that traps heat and greenhouse gases along with it's various denizens. Kei joins up with crew of the Glomar (see picture above), a hovering land battleship inhabited by the Emaan, a very humanoid race from an alternate reality in which humanity got their act just a little bit more together. The libertarian society of the matriarchal Emaan becomes explored in depth during the show's run, their nomadic lifestyle, their compulsive drive to turn a profit in trading technology with alien races, and their oddly utopian sexual behaviour (all emaanian tribes/clans are expected to sleep in one big collective bedroom, with adjacent "privacy" rooms reserved for sexual trysts).

So this weird patchwork world is extremely unstable, given "dimensional storms" where large areas can suddenly shift from the distant past to the future. Along the way, the crew of Glomar (again, see above picture) encounter dragon's, dalek-esque robot empires, future nazis, barbarians, carnivorous plants, giant vampire bats, and all other manner of strange creatures and antagonists from earth's possible futures and pasts. Just awesome, completely awesome.

Like I said, it really is a shame that more people didn't watch this show. Giant robot shows, and sadly, anime in general, have fallen into a system of cliches and tropes that are still repeated today (the reluctant pacifist hero who doesn't want to fight has been done over and over since Gundam), but Orguss has no time for such cliches... it's too busy playing weird games with shifting settings and timelines, and sneaking in an obsession with Lewis Carrol under the surface.

Virtually all of the show's very unique robots showed up as model kits and AMAZING toys by the innovative (and much lamented) Takatoku toy company, but as far as I can tell, there never were any models of the Glomar, not even fan-produced or scratchbuilt. If you can find one, you are looking harder than me. So I built the one you see above, a big heavy doorstop type thing made out of sculpey.

It is also worth mentioning that the interior of the Glomar has a weird Jules Verne thing going on; lots of ornamental brass and mahogany. And the ship seems to be constantly floating across a pink sunset, with the characters chatting lazily on the deck, cheerfully discussing the possibility that they, and the earth itself, are most likely doomed.

Boys Becoming Men, Men Becoming Wolves

Today at work I got burned on both wrists by battery acid. (I was wearing protective gloves, which made a noble effort but failed, nonetheless).
And you know what? It wasn't at all like Fight Club: I did not have a nietzchean epiphany in which my atavistic self confronted my repressed neurotic self. It just itches. Itches a lot.

Mind you, not a stanley kowalski/method acting/just-took-a-bunch-of-oxycontin and-can't-stop-scratching-my-belly-detachedly... more like just a bad allergic reaction, mildly toxic bugbite kind of itch.

Please send me a remedy.

The Girl with the Vagina Made of Glass

"What style, what class

                                                     The girl with the vagina made of glass
                                                                   So perfect and pure
                                                             And gynecologically demure
                                               And the way her buttocks chews on her shorts
                                                          Is very nice, oh yes, it's very nice
                                              And the way her perfect bosoms need no support
                                                           Oh yes, that too is very nice
                                             And wherever she may go all heaven surrounds her
                                                 Envy's green-eyed monsters confound her
                                                     Age-old myths and legends come true
                                                      Ancient prophecies all come to pass
                                                          All this, and all because of you
                                                     The girl with the vagina made of glass"

--Cory McAbee

(sculptural detail 2012 Alex P. Rodriguez)

Stormtrooper in drag

I dreamt that I lived with my mom in a little townhouse by the sea. She lived downstairs and drank constantly and I lived upstairs and we avoided each other aggressively. 

I looked out at the shore and saw a huge American fleet being assembled to invade another country. It looked like the world's greatest set of toy soldiers. Aircraft carriers and battleships and landing craft. Gigantic U.N helicopters twice the size of Sikorsky seakings. And these great big boxy square things, looked like boxcars but they were huge and each one could carry one Space Shuttle inside. The boxy things floated 10 feet above the water as the shuttles were being loaded into them, and I hadn't the foggiest notion what kept them airborne.

I walked outside, trying to take pictures, but my cameras didn't work. I had 2 digital cameras, a bunch of memory cards, but I couldn't get a single shot to work. I ran in and out of the house looking for batteries, memory cards, but nothing worked.

There were amusement parks and carnivals set up on the decks of aircraft carriers so that the troops could enjoy one last afternoon with their families before they shipped out. I walked right out to the edge of the shore trying to get a better look, but a wave swept me out to sea. The same wave swept a squad of troops off the deck of their landing craft, they were dressed like WW1 doughboys, armed with bolt action rifles. We climbed onto some debris and tried to paddle under a pier, but troops on a nearby ship saw us and thought we were enemies in disguise or possibly deserters, started shooting at us. We hid under a pier, a huge orange fish swam up alongside us and told us to just give ourselves up, explain it was all a misunderstanding, but we told the fish they were shooting at us and the fishe's eyes got big and black and he swam away. We snuck inside a ship that was so big, it had old fashioned trolleys and trains running inside it.

The dream became a violent comedy of trying to sneak back into friendly ships, gaining more lost soldiers, being shot at, losing some of our refugees before gaining more, and just generally sinking into more and more hopeless confusion and mistaken identity. 

At one point I found  "Fred Flinstone" and "Barney Rubble" costumes and I told the doughboys under my care that they had to pick the shortest, blondest soldier in the group to play Barney to my Fred and the giant orange fish reappeared and told us that we were already back home on shore and further subterfuge would be unnecessary. 

He was right. We walked into the living room of my little split level house and my mother's apparent boyfriend came upstairs, it was Robert Carlisle in his "Begbie" character from "Trainspotting". He looked at my refugee soldier friends suspiciously and was maybe about to start trouble when there was a knock at the door. It was a different group of lost soldiers, they had obviously been attacked like us so they decided that if their authentic uniforms and loyal identities made them suspected as infiltrators, they would try the opposite strategy and pose as nazis, but not just regular nazis but totally fucked-up transvestite nazis. There was a Josef Goebbels impersonator wearing an alpine maiden's drndl and a Rudi Steiner in drag and the shortest one was the leader, a hastily put-together adolph hitler with a greasepaint moustache and pink tutu. Hitler spoke to me through the screen door: "Zo, you zee zat vee are obfiously chermans" and I said "Yess, I can zee zat you are chermans" and the little guy in the hitler disguise dropped his accent and said "Wow, your fake german accent is better than mine" and I shouted: "By pretending not to be cherman, you haz giffen avay zat you really are zee cherman shpies, und I vill killink you!" and I took a long knife and stabbed hitler in the gut through the screen door, slowly twisting the knife to the dismay and horror of his compatriots. I woke up feeling incredibly refreshed and pleasant, this being the second dream in which I killed hitler. Killing hitler in your dreams is always an awesome feeling.

Pataphysical Fable

This is my latest piece, a little diorama called "Pataphysical Fable". It has it's impetus in a very unhappy stretch of my life around 15 years ago. I was miserable, absolutely miserable. If my life had not already been horrific at the time, my drug habit would have surely been enough to push me over the edge. If I did not already have a terrible drug habit at the time, my life would have been repulsive enough on it's own.

 Added together, these two factors made a perfect shitstorm of awful. One day, I wheeled my nasty, hemiplegic, terminally ill mother to her favourite restaurant in silverlake and cut up her breakfast for her and poured her a cup of coffee. I wandered outside to get a newspaper (remember those? Newspapers, awkward noisy things that krinkled and stained your fingers?)
I got this newspaper and continued the train of thought that had come to obsess me all the time at that point in my life:
That life was horrible and nothing surprising, good or bad, ever happened anymore. It was all just a repetive sequence of grotesque events and humiliations, and that my life had become an obligation that I no longer wanted to be a part of. I was slowly working out the logistics of suicide, how I would do it, what chain of events would have to be set into motion, how to go about shutting it all down cleanly and logically. My affairs would have to be put in order, but what did that even mean? Where would I start, and what was the checklist I had to tick off?

I got back to my mom at her jentacular table. She regarded me hatefully and I just kind of gave a little nod that acknowleged "Yeah, I hate you too." I breezily tuned out whatever crazy, stupid, cancer-patient blather she was dribbling from her mouth.
I opened up the paper and saw a story about a mama cat in the netherlands who had a litter and one of the kittens was born green, and nobody could explain why. And that shocked me, pleasantly shocked. Suddenly my whole world fractured right down the middle and revealed a bizarre, unpredictable universe that still held surprises, if only I could stick around long enough to witness these anomalies.

The placemats in the restaurant had little drawings of pies on them, and I imagined one of them bursting open and a little green kitten jumping out. I had a vision of sick, diseased, evil old birds sitting around, drooling over this pie they were going to eat, and then this vital, life-affirming green kitty jumped out and sabotaged their meal.

I decided that morning not to kill myself. Simple as that.

Months later, the same newspaper revealed that the kitten had faded to normal gray cat colours as it grew, that the whole thing was explained because the mama cat drank from a stream polluted with chemicals and dyes from a factory.

By that time, my mother had slipped into a coma from which she would never awake. I had made up my mind to get sober and develop some kind of strategy to get on with the rest of my life.

In the fifteen or so years that followed, I have wanted, again, to kill myself. And I have even tried and failed a couple of times. And I am sure that in the future, I will want to again, and eventually succeed at some big, irreversable adventure of self-destruction, and then no more blogs, no more art, and no more complaining.

But I have seen a few other things since that green kitten that were absurd and beautiful and alien and unexpected, and I was glad I stuck around to see them.

(this is me at the gallery, pretending I am the kitty jumping out of the pie)