I played Calvin Mather in the short film “No Real Than You Are.” During the four weeks I was in town to work on the movie, I tried to pitch in with whatever I could to be helpful. This is some of my “prop work”: a perfect replica of a Walgreens prescription label. Every detail is exactly as it would be if Calvin were… you know… not a character in a movie. That’s the address and phone number for the Walgreens closest to the address I chose for him (my last address before going to rehab in December 2011). It was a shitty little box of a studio apartment that had mushrooms growing out of the carpet. I pulled ’em out, sprayed fungicide and other assorted chemicals, but they’d always grow back. Eventually I relented and just accepted them as part of my home. I kinda liked ’em.
So while this isn’t anything like my usual “art,” I think it counts. I didn’t have a scanner so I had to create it from scratch – and everything is 100% dead on. (Go ahead! Pull out a prescription bottle from Walgreens and see how it measures up!)
Another project I did for the movie… The night before the filming of the first scene in which a character would be sniffing oxycodone, I found out that the powder the crew had been planning to use (instead of real drugs) wasn’t going to work. So Chris Spillane and I went to Walmart at 2am and bought vitamins, food dye, hose clamps, bowls, a lamp, and a lightbulb and cooked up a pile of “oxycodone” that looked extraordinarily like the real thing. Walmart probably gets its share of sketchy characters during the third shift, but I think Chris and I won the contest that night. We both had a pretty good time with the whole thing. I remember laughing a lot that night, especially while we were still in the store. Back at the apartment, I was reminded of being a seventeen year old drug dealer, cutting cocaine with vitamins and acetone.
A couple days later, when we ran out of the stuff and needed more, I had Chris – plus Tola and Alex (the production designer and leadman) – sitting on the floor in my apartment, grinding away at vitamins as I mixed, colored, and cooked them. It felt like I was actually running a fake drug manufacture scam!
I would have loved to have been the cashier that rang us up.I had to sleep with the light on so our “drugs” would be ready for the shoot in the morning.
In case you’re wondering… while this is what went up the noses of the actors that sniffed “drugs,” it is not what my character was injecting whenever he did a shot. For that, I used blue Gatorade. While there were some concerns that injecting Gatorade might be dangerous… Back when I was shooting heroin everyday, I was pretty shiftless; if there was no water within reach but a bottle of Gatorade sitting next to me, I’d just put that in my spoon instead. Electrolytes are good for you, you guys.
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“No Real Than You Are” is currently raising money to help with the costs of post-production. If you’d like to contribute (or just watch the trailer), check out their Kickstarter page.
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Bent Outta Shape fans will probably enjoy that the RX# on Calvin’s prescription is telephone spelling for “IYDKMRNIGE.”
“I Can’t Compete With Harry Potter.” 5/20/13. Pencil, watercolor, and pen. 16×20″.
Taylor really likes Harry Potter. She’d watch the movies on an endless loop as I sat next to her working on Traffic Street stuff. Even after she broke up with me and I moved seventeen hours south, she called on the eve of the last movie’s release. “You should go see it at midnight too and it’ll be like we’re going to see it together!”
Hilarious!
Heather and I had been dating for three months and had plans to hang out. I called her. “Oh – I just finished reading the first Harry Potter book and now I’m watching the movie – I’ll call you when it’s over.”
“Punched in the Dick By a Baby Gorilla.” 9/21/13. Pencil and marker on vellum. 8×10″.
After a couple of days, not having Adderall really drastically hurts my mood, energy, and outlook but – if I just miss a dose – the only consequence is… silliness.
Months ago, riding in the car with Heather back in Bradenton, I had gone longer than I should have without Adderall and I decided that my having been “punched in the dick by a baby gorilla” was the funniest thing ever. I spent ten minutes finding any excuse at all to say the words, “punched in the dick by a baby gorilla.” It’s not at all in line with my usual sense of humor, is totally stupid, and – it’s just absurd. Which is probably why I thought it was so funny at the time; it was funny that I’d even had a thought like that.
Last night, after I started to feel a little better, I spent a couple hours painting. Smoking a cigarette, looking at Instagram, I saw something my friend Trey made. I like my art a lot, but every now and then I wish that I actually had the talent to put an image on my canvas exactly as it appears in my head. Unfortunately, that takes practice. Which is what Trey’s sketch inspired me to do. For some reason, the baby gorilla thing came to mind so I went with that.
I realize that any high school art student could bang this out in two minutes or less but anything other than a cartoon Sam standing perfectly upright is still pretty tough for me. It took me two hours to get to the point where I was ready to color and outline this. It was good practice though and I had fun making it.
I’m in the middle of a silent temper tantrum, by which I mean I’m not talking and have dedicated myself to staying miserable until I exhaust myself. I used to do this almost every day, but they’ve been pretty few and far between since the day that I consider my “emotional sobriety date.” So – of course – I’m angry and now I’m even angrier with myself for this than I am about the stupid incident that sparked this episode.
Here’s the other of my two 9×12″ learning to draw with charcoal sketches from January.
“Pulp.” 1/17/13. Charcoal. 9×12″.
In February 2012, I was kicked out of my second rehab in as many months. I found myself running around Delray Beach with the girl I had been kicked out with. I’m not going to try and diagnose her state back then but – if I did something that bothered her – she could flip a switch and go from being totally in love with me to telling me what an ugly, worthless, pathetic, despicable piece of shit I was. On one occasion in our first week out on our own, we were staying in some little shitbox motel. (If you’re familiar with Delray, I’m sure you know it). I don’t remember exactly what went wrong, but it had something to do with heroin or getting more heroin. And – in case I didn’t already hate myself enough (I did) – she was really piling on as much hatred and vitriol as she could manage, to ensure that there wasn’t so much as a shred of self-esteem left in me.
I went into the bathroom. I was crying. I looked at myself in the mirror and couldn’t fucking stand the sight. It made me angry that I was the person looking back at me. So I started punching myself in the face. I don’t remember how many times. Enough that, for a good while after, I looked like someone had kicked the shit out of me pretty well.
Which I’ve always been good at. I’ve always been good at beating myself up. But that was the one time when it was most literal.
I’ve had thoughts like these today. I have had these impulses today.
In writing this statement, I struggled with a tendency to dwell on details that aren’t significant because to skim over them or take anything for granted would run the risk of someone getting the wrong idea. And with something like this, that’s not really a risk I want to take. My intention is not, after all, to upset anyone.
Still, I don’t want to waste anyone’s time “defending myself” either. There’s enough of me up on this website for any interested parties to get a pretty good idea of what kind of a person I am.
I wrote this statement months ago, but spent the last two hours trying to find the right balances concerning caution, brevity, honesty, and intention.
“Toilet Humor.” 11/10/12. Watercolor paint, colored pencil, white kids paint, and black crayon. 9×12″.
Pedophilia is a mental illness characterized by sexual attraction to prepubescent (undeveloped) boys or girls. People can’t control whom they’re attracted to. It’s a mental disorder. I don’t suffer from pedophilia, but I have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. I understand what it’s like to have a brain that causes a person to think in ways that they’d rather not. However, just as it’s not okay for me to let my thoughts or feelings control my actions to any extent that would cause harm to another person, it’s not okay for anyone else to do so either – regardless of their specific mental disorder. Being attracted to someone doesn’t give you the right to have sex with them. And since a child isn’t capable of intelligently consenting to sex, it’s not ever okay to have sex with a child.
Shit gets a little bit less clear-cut when we’re talking about adolescents though. An adolescent is a person that has reached physical maturity, and that’s the point when, by nature, others (regardless of age) will begin to find them sexually attractive. Sixteen is the age, in Florida, at which people are (legislatively) deemed to have hit puberty and are thus legally capable of consenting to sex.
Personally, I’m not particularly interested in talking to a sixteen year old, let alone having sex with one. Physical maturity doesn’t equate to emotional maturity and any kind of intimate interaction with someone who’s still emotionally a “child” is nothing I want to experience.
The phrase “sex with children” is interesting to me. Because the word “children” is ambiguous, because teenagers are marketed as sex objects, because statutory rape laws are inconsistent between the states (and are sometimes totally fucked), and because there’s nothing in the world that can spark feelings as intense and hateful as pedophilia.
And because when I was eighteen, I started dating a girl two months before she turned sixteen. So – according to Florida law – I could have been convicted of statutory rape and – had that happened – even now, nine years later, everyone in my neighborhood would have gotten a notice in the mail to inform them that I, a sex offender, was now living in the area.
Adolescents are adults physically, but children emotionally. If two of them have sex with one another, it’s absurd that one should be convicted of a crime. Especially when that conviction (and mandated registration) carries the same stigma as being branded as a pedophile or a rapist.
I’m not eighteen anymore though so that part of this is no longer personally relevant. And while it’s possible that I could still potentially see or meet a sixteen year old that I found attractive, as soon as I found out her age, that would totally overpower any physical attraction that I felt and kill every shred of my interest in her. Still, despite the fact that I live in a culture in which girls that age are marketed to adults, as adults – with sex – to sell [whatever]… it’s still uncomfortable for me to acknowledge. That (and that it’s such a delicate issue, generally), I feel, makes it worth examining.
The decision to paint something with a swastika came as the result of a really silly conversation (earlier on the day that I painted this) that got me thinking about context and symbols (or statements) that evoke powerful emotional responses.
A piece of art communicates a lot of different messages (whether intended or not) and the nature of art is such that the intentional messages aren’t always immediately clear. For that reason, while I understand that art can upset a person for any number of reasons, it seems pretty unreasonable that anyone should ever become angry (or, specifically, angry with the artist) on the sole basis of their interpretation of a piece. So I wanted to play with that, using the most powerful symbol of hate that I know: the swastika.
Since I was already plotting to paint something as prima facie controversial as “Sex With Children,” I figured it made sense to do this all in one blast. By putting that phrase and this (totally unrelated) symbol together, I thought I could accomplish everything that I wanted by bringing these things to the surface in a way that is so absurdly offensive that no one could possibly walk away from it thinking that it was created with malice of any kind. To believe otherwise would be to think the piece is a declaration that I support (and enjoy!) the fucking of children BUT HATE JEWS. I’d like to think that it’s totally implausible that there exists in the world anyone who’d feel the need to paint something with that communiqué as his or her end.
I would be really upset to find out that anyone was personally offended by this. On the other hand, anyone who has a problem with it because “it’s [potentially] offensive [to someone else]” (and hasn’t themselves been the victim of pedophilia or anti-Semitism) can fuck off.
On the other hand, anyone that has a problem with this because “it’s stupid” – well, that I totally understand. I’m not sure that I’d even disagree with you. Everything I’ve written is true but also, admittedly, I probably painted this just to fuck with people a little bit. I might enjoy making people just a little uncomfortable.
The Google search that brings the most traffic to my Storenvy site is “rough sex images.” Something tells me these people might not be finding what they’re looking for…
I got an awesome package in the mail from Justin at Underground Conmunique today. And just in time to utilize my new li’l record listening station that I set up yesterday.
Adorable. (Right???)
Every song by The Heat Tape sounds like another song by The Heat Tape. It’s a good thing that they’re all really, really good.
VBS thanked me on their record insert (which warms the cockles of my little heart). Wanna hear a funny story? When I first agreed to do the Vacation Bible School split with The Brokedowns (which as we know, wound up on It’s Alive after Traffic Street crumbled) I requested that VBS record extra songs so that I could pick and choose since I thought their track record was a little spotty. Before that happened, I wound up releasing their split with The God Damn Doo Wop Band, which featured “The Swarming” (a song better than anything most bands ever record) and since then, they’ve yet to record a single song that I wouldn’t be proud to release. If anyone’s ever (inadvertently) “shown me,” it’s definitely those guys. I might only just now be getting a physical copy of their album (“Ruined the Scene”) but I’ve been listening to it since it came out (two plus years ago) more consistently than (maybe) any other record to come out in that time. If you haven’t heard it / don’t own it, do yourself a favor and correct that.
And so long as I’m rambling – speaking of awesome packages from Justin… he was the first person to send me a care package when I was in treatment at Tranquil Shores. We’ve only met (briefly) a couple of times, in the midst of whirlwind fests, so for him to go out of his way like that for me / show me that he cared… it really meant a lot to me.
It’s really easy to bum out about how awful this planet can be, but it’s not all that much harder to take a step back and really recognize just how outstanding it can be. People can be rotten sometimes, but – far more often – (in my daily life anyway) I see, again and again, evidence of just how wonderful a lot of us are.
Originally this update was just gonna be a couple sentences but since it’s gone this far…
“Eye.” 1/17/13. Charcoal. 9×12″.
I think this piece fits in well with what I’ve been writing about. My friend, Mary Beth, was about to leave treatment and go back to Atlanta so she was granted a day pass to go out with her nephew. When she came back, she had a bag of art supplies that she had bought for me. Stuff that I had never used before. This is one of my nine “learning-to-draw-with-charcoal” sketches that I did shortly thereafter.
And it’s funny that the only person that currently owns a print of this piece is my friend, Doug, who I met at Awesome Fest 4 when he invited me to stay in the room he had reserved at [whatever that hotel in San Diego that used to be cool is called]. Not only did he let me stay for free, but when I found out that Dead Mechanical had nowhere to sleep, I sheepishly asked if … could they maybe… possibly… also sleep in the room? “Of course!” he said without a second thought. AF4 was the most fun I’ve ever had at any fest and Doug was definitely one of the people that made it what it was.
So… here’s to people like Doug, Mary Beth, Justin, and those lovable tykes in Vacation Bible School. I wouldn’t wanna live in a world without ’em.
Here’s a video of Vacation Bible School playing at Awesome Fest 4. (Perfect!)
I’m gonna take a little time now to do something nice for someone. (If you’re not at work right now, you should try it too!)
When I was way too young to see something like… [oh… I don’t know, let’s say…] a bunch of guys wearing pig masks gang-raping a girl – I saw a video of… a bunch of guys in pig masks gang-raping a girl.
It… made me really uncomfortable. I don’t think I looked at the screen for more than a couple seconds.
When I was even younger [insert stuff I don’t want to write about here].
And then later [insert other stuff I don’t want to write about here].
In February, I saw a halloween mask that put the images from that video back in my head. And then I painted this. It was the first thing I made after moving out of Tranquil Shores. It’s the first thing I ever made that I can say isn’t really “rehab art.”
“Pornographic Images For Children.” 2/21/13. Acrylic painting on canvas. 10×12″.
