Dancing Shape Thing and Birds, of Shapes 2024. Acrylic on loose canvas, 20 x 23"
Hi Ecency and the Hive machine,
I am 14 weeks into a year long project where I keep my income and expenses below the poverty line in order to avoid paying taxes to the United States military industrial complex. I am back into crypto-social media because it is crazy that I ever disregarded it:) Over the next several days I will get readers up to speed on how it’s been going since I began accounting for every penny, and staying low so I don’t vicariously murder earthling flora and fauna with U.S. explosives. I wrote the following in late January (I was still in my fourth week):
20 days into a year of breaking my class position to weaken the United States government. I have this little journal my daughter made me for Christmas where I keep my notes and ledger for the project. I grab for it whenever I feel my fortitude flounder. The act strengthens my resolve. I get in focus and back to work. Add regular attention to nose-breathing, rice-steaming, looking in the mirror to take in the breadth of a new January hermitage, and 345 more days of living with less doesn’t appear that difficult. This is the way for me. Frequent forays in hair shirting. Just keep the journal close. The weather keeps me inside, painting in the day, cooking in the afternoon, and playing cards and Sudoku with Rose in the evening. First the sun (blocked by cloud cover in winter), and then the moon (ditto). A seasonal routine that will change naturally with increased warmth and sunlight to come. In March we take a pre-paid trip to London to celebrate ourselves and a fellow artist doing the Stuckist thing better than anybody else on earth at present. (There is a Russian and Spaniard who can hold a candle to him, but we’re not going there, so attention postponed). Although the trip is pre-paid, I plan to figure expenses dutifully. I am saving all my pennies. It appears that at month’s end, I will be able to put a couple hundred dollars into savings. Also, any money I receive from selling paintings, books, or outright begging on the Internet will go into the London pot, tax free, since it will never amount to a profit worth claiming. Ah, the creative life. It’s wonderful!
Elephant-nose was a Little Annoyed With Them Bossing Each Other Around 2024. Acrylic on loose canvas, 20 x 23"
I had my Stuckist mini-exhibition Friday. Mostly the honored usual suspects, and a cameo video visit from Eddie Vedder, singing an original birthday song to a brother of a sister in attendance. That I’ll remember. But the rest, I don’t know. I was drinking more than usual, probably because of the genocide our government is partaking in. After three weeks of purchasing abstinence due to the poverty project, I was seriously jonesin’ for some tall hoppy beers. I baked bread and a cake, made soup, tacked paintings on the wall, poured myself a bourbon, opened a beer chaser, and simmered like a stew. People came. We played a game, sang songs, laughed a lot. It is quite the effort opening the house to weekly gatherings, resetting the mind to host-mode every Friday, especially in such a depressed state of self-in-universe. In art as in life I am prolific and messy. I’ll put up the work here. You’ll get some visual clue (I hope) of what it looks like to sit in a basement 30 hours a week and feel like a Greek god. Fortunately I had just one super-keening episode, on Wednesday, somewhere in between the creation of Lopacant and Elephant-nose. It was loud and watery. The gods are human all too human. Flawed exhibitionists of awesome power. Yes we laugh and cry, are haughty and humble. We express. Loudly. Music is the catalyst to my over-elaboration. Certain melodies knock me way high, and others much too low. I inform the silence immediately, to the detriment of my cat’s homeostasis. I can go higher than a cloud—dancing, punching air, dreaming with the greatest delusions of grandeur… Or, with the right tune, sink so low, howling like a mama bunny watching her babies blown to fur clumps by a U.S. made warren-wasting bomb.
Personally, I don’t think the finished paintings can ever express the process of painting them. It’s then when heaven and hell happen.
Lopacant Pining for Ancestor’s Freedom 2024. Acrylic on loose canvas, 20 x 23"
I just returned from my weekly trip for groceries. I charge my expense account $10.25 for one way to the supermarket. Rose has to pay for the way back because she also benefits from eating. I do not anticipate using the car again until next Sunday. My birthday is Wednesday. I’ve asked Rose to treat me to a bus ride downtown, maybe for a movie and dinner. Or just a walkabout, I don’t care. I need to learn some bus routes to help stave off the urge to quit the quitting of buying into this mafioso crap stain government.
And yes, there are many corrupt governments in the world. Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Canada… I just don’t contribute to those mafias. They control their own misused citizenry that could choose to become poor to non-violently waste the morbidly rich and ugly powerful. To each his own country, then, and let’s get down to business. Rather, anti-business. This world of nation states, how old is it anyway? A few centuries? Are there other, more imaginative ways to structure a civilization? After 300,000 years, do we really need the existence of gang leaders to facilitate the distribution of toothpaste? I say divest in the system asap to improve the imagination and save humanity another round of grandchildren. Take the following advice from the painter who always fails whenever he seeks from the other what he himself ain’t got already—there’s no selling if there isn’t any buying. Can’t sell a genocide if you don’t buy it. Even without the relentless carpet bombing, it’s still a bad deal when all government can offer is more bottom line corporate comfort to the living death. Jesus, how many SUVs must we rust before giving up the ghost? Twelve? I think we’re the poorest peoples existing in the ugliest and wealthiest nation, paying non-stop for our top spot at being the world’s greatest bores.
All Power to the Imagination, Why Not? 2024. Acrylic on loose canvas, 20 x 23"
All power to the imagination! Timmy Leary and his 60’s kids had it part right. “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” What if the good doc added a fourth command, “…and behead the killers”? Maybe Johnson would have gone the way of the guillotine and Dr. Leary become the next President. Then who knows? Perhaps greater anti-militarists, Boeing making hydrogen jetpacks, Sagan re-elected, nuclear weapons abolished, a world constitution to trump nation-state slave codes, and kids being kids everywhere on earth at all times.
If I can imagine it, then it could have happened. And it still might. But you can’t just live a life of imagination and hope, and then talk, talk, talk, endless talk, and blah, blah, blah, and watch on TV. One must do something. One must act, even in the small. I’m going broke. That’s my imagination. You got a mirror. Look into it. Find your own solution.
On a happy note, I wrote a letter to my granddaughter. I have two, but she is the oldest, and reading very well. I hope she writes back. On Wednesday I turn 57. I have 30 years and 10 months left to breathe. I won’t stop until these granddaughters are promised grandchildren.
My total living expenses this week: $214.10
Thank you so much for reading and looking. Your kind act fuels the passion that burns.
Here is a song with Neil Young and Friday’s crazy guest Mr. Eddie Vedder. Watch Neil. Especially at 3:08 and 4:40. His are the movements of my solar plexus on any given Monday.
