Technicolor Space Boobs Redux (My Weird Holiday Gift To You)

December is . . . the season for technicolor space boobs!!!

And no matter which December holidays you celebrate (or don't), I believe that decorating one's living space with a bunch of crazy colored twinkle lights makes the world a better place. I mean, it can't really hurt, right? Apart from the increased electric bill and the impending doom of the planet due to fossil fuel induced global warming. But that's where LEDs come in. These strings of light emitting diodes not only use less electricity than conventional xmas lights, they contribute a whole new kind of weird to the holidays. Behold...

Last year marked my induction into the LED xmas light fan club, when I discovered that the Home Depot brand lights cast crazy colored circles all over the place. This year, in addition to the tree, the technicolor space boobs have also colonized my front porch in the form of icicle lights. I attempted to capture their glory in video form, but it was unsuccessful. Maybe this time next year I will have learned how to take a decent movie of my beloved lights. In the meantime, here's a video of someone else's totally insane exterior light display. Happy Weird Holidays!! 

Reminder: Parabola Art Exhibit Today and Tomorrow!

Parabola Wash U grad student art exhibit opens tonight at 6pm, runs until Saturday 12/3 at 6pm: Des Lee Gallery, 1627 Washington Ave., St. Louis, MO. http://desleegallery.com/ Check it out if you're in town.

Recognition! or, The Utterly Naïve "Artist"

Now this is really weird: On December 2, 2011 I will be participating in my first art show at a gallery. One of my collages has been selected for display in a graduate student art show at Washington University in St. Louis. Here is some more information about the show. It is open on December 3 as well.

If you are in St. Louis that weekend, please stop by and see me performing the role of "artist." I am still not sure what this word means, or whether I can be comfortable self-applying it. But I am choosing not to worry about that right now. If you cannot be in St. Louis that weekend (and I can think of no reason why you wouldn't), you can see the piece that will be on display below, along with the explanatory blurb I composed about it for the occasion.

“Your Beautiful Exploding Cerebrum”

            The human cerebrum: home of language, sensory perception, memory and knowledge. As a student and instructor of literature, my work seeks to engage these critical areas as they have been expressed in language across time and culture. My research asks the question: How does literary fiction represent and embody the operations of the human mind, including memory and the imagination? My work analyzes twentieth-century novels written in English and French, which trace a narrative of Transatlantic travels and find the Caribbean as a point of convergence. 

            In “Your Beautiful Exploding Cerebrum,” Caribbean corals mimic the intricate folds of the human brain. Books glow with the illuminating power of the island sun, and also form an arm from which a rebellious hand emerges. A woman expresses her mission: “Freedom Thru Books Not Murder,” an appeal to language, art, and reason over hate and violence.

In a period of history possessed by international terrorism and economic disaster, the study of literature might seem to be a frivolous, academic indulgence. However, the novels I study—primarily written by members of the African diaspora—show us that literature, artistic expression, and the life of the mind each plays a role in the quest for liberty, self-determination, and social harmony. These concerns also lie at the core of the university’s educational mission. I ask my undergraduate students to engage literature as a way to productively “explode” their own cerebrums, in order to better understand the way that we all interact with language and thought on a daily basis.

Collagista

First of all, I know I've been neglecting my lovely blog lately.  But rest assured that there is some major weird in the works, and that I'll be able to report on it soon.  In the meantime, I've put off telling you about my new hobby long enough.

In January, at the birth of The New Weird, I started tinkering with papers and glues, and have been making collages ever since.  My technique is still pretty poor, but I'd like to think that my composition has improved somewhat in the past seven months.  For someone who has (as of yet) shown very little aptitude in the visual arts, this is a weird and fun adventure.  And the images that I'm creating are very weird indeed.  Here are some that I've completed in the past month:

Fidelity in the Age of Digital Self-Reproduction

Collage of magazines and crêpe paper

 Your Beautiful Exploding Cerebrum

Collage of magazines and cocktail parasols

  Hungry Eyes Part 2

Collage of magazines

I like to work in materials that I find in magazines.  They tend to carry a potent graphic punch, and (as you've no doubt already detected) I have little patience for subtlety.  I find idealized or stylized images of the human body to be especially interesting.  These get very weird indeed when you mess them up a bit.  There is probably some critique of some gender/consumer something in these works, but I have to admit that I prefer to leave my analytical hat in the intellectual hat box while creating and considering these collages.  For once, I will leave the interpretation up to others, preferring to bask in the unbridled weirdness that results from the simple combination of papers and glues.

If you'd like to see some more of my collage work, you can find it here.

Weird Travels

I know, Dear Reader, you probably find the title of this post to be reductive, redundant, or both.   Reductive, because travel is one of those richly rewarding experiences that I cannot represent accurately using a single adjective.  Redundant, because travel gives us access to a globe of possibilities and (after all) one human's quotidian is another human's weird.  This post, however, will treat a particular subset of travel: the weird in-between world of the tourist experience.  Existing in a temporary limbo in which she is neither at home nor truly abroad, the tourist packs a bag full of dreams and heads off into a kind of parallel universe.  Thanks to the Houston airport baggage claim for making visible the glowing oddity of tourist travel:

Upon arrival in the unknown locale, this parallel universe might seem normal enough.  The laws of physics remain in place; gravity still keeps her feet rooted to the ground.* Faces and food stuffs might seem uncannily similar to the ones she left at home, but also not quite right all at the same time.  The bed in the hotel room seems normal enough.  So does the water in the tap, but something tells her vulnerable digestive system not to drink it.  The towels are still towels, in substance, but they look like this:

She would never mistake towels for fish at home.  But then, she spends such little time thinking about towels, which occupy her cognitive space in proportion to their functionality.  Do they need to be laundered?  Are they waiting for her when she gets out of the shower?  They rarely ever sprout fins . . . at home.

This uncanny sense that the familiar has become foreign is, I think, one of the most interesting aspects of the tourist experience.  And it is most certainly weird.  Don't get me wrong: sight seeing is lovely; encountering new places and people is not only exciting but essential to the maintenance of one's humanity; practicing a foreign language is a humbling and thrilling challenge.  But being forced to reconsider the basics of daily life can cause us to notice them in more detail than we otherwise would.  Can cause us to discover just how unfamiliar they really are. (Like towels... If you live a towel-less lifestyle, substitute some other object.  Maybe a thimble, wooden spoon, or crescent wrench... I don't know what you do at home.)  

There can be a kind of psychic violence in this.  After all, where does it end?  If towels can become unfamiliar, unreliable, perhaps other things can as well.  Perhaps the tourist might find that in this new place, she will become utterly unfamiliar to herself.  While my own recent vacation days in Mexico were spent in relaxing beachy bliss, I had uncharacteristically violent dreams each night.  Normally my subconscious is more Jarmusch than Peckinpah, but this was a solid week of nightly slasher films.  Was this touristic revelation of the daily weird causing a nocturnal mind-war?  I guess it could just as easily have been brought on by my weirdly handless new amiga:

But maybe not.  I brought these gorgeously weird amigos home with me, and my dreams have returned to their typical pacifism:

Here at home, where my brain can safely assume that a towel is just a towel, I suspect that my mind ceases to make war on itself.

And you, Dear Reader, what experiences and thoughts (weird or otherwise) have crossed your path during this summer travel season?  Leave a comment below, and let's compare weird notes.

For some weird photos of the beach in Playa del Carmen, click here.  May your own travels be weird and wonderful!

*Except in the case of interstellar tourism.

Trombone Flamethrower? Yes Please!

This isn't one of my projects, but it is so amazing that I have to share it with you all.  The Riverfront Times got me hip to this, so props to them and even more props to the crazy kids who made the incendiary instrument.



I especially like the slow-motion sequence at the end of the video.

No. It's not sophisticated, it's not subtle.  And I've never been much of a trombone fan (even though my grandfather was an avid player and went by the moniker "Clyde the Slide").  But I have always found fire to be weird and wonderful.  And fire in unexpected settings is particularly irresistible.  Trombone Flamethrower definitely gets the Make It Weird seal of approval!

Technicolor Space Boobs!!

With heat indices flirting with 100 degrees F here, this will be a very unseasonable post.  But what better way to keep cool than with ultra-cool lighting solutions?  No discussion of The New Weird would be complete without a salute to my new favorite xmas lights:

These are Home Depot brand LED xmas lights, and they are AMAZING.  Yes, they are energy efficient and save the planet, so you don't have to feel bad about all the superfluous fossil fuels that power your holiday (and everyday) decor.  Yes, they are cool to the touch and won't burn down the cone of kerosene and tinder that is your xmas tree.  But, most importantly, they can do this:

Outer-space future xmas!  Brought to you by LED technology.  It's like the Ghost of Christmas Future emerging from my living room wall.  Gorgeous.

Xmas has always been a (wonderfully) arresting and lurid sight, but we're entering a whole new era of awesomeness with this globular, mammarian spectacle. 

Yes.  These lights project technicolor space boobs all over your walls!  And that is weirdness of the highest order.  So why reserve them for the winter months?  These lights are gorgeous enough to light up your life all year round.  I've got plans to class them up a little by turning them into a lamp.  That way, they'll cast weirdo circles on the walls but won't make the place feel like a dorm room at the same time.

Dress Your House, Or, What's in a T-Shirt?

So enough theory, what about praxis?

I had this old Flaming Lips concert t-shirt lurking in one of my drawers for a few years.  Due to the passage of time and the end of the "baby doll" t-shirt trend, it wasn't getting any wear.  But I love the graphic punch and bizarre story it tells; I could never part with it.  Since it had ceased to function as a garment for humans, I thought that it might make a suitable garment for a boring old blue pillow that used to hang out in my living room.  And back in January it became one of my first weird projects of the year.

T-shirt front and back:

After cutting away excess fabric from the t-shirt (which wasn't much, it's a tiny garment), I pinned it right-sides together, and stitched along three of the outer edges, leaving a gap at the bottom.

Then I turned my new pillow cover right-side out, stuffed in the old pillow, and sewed up the bottom by hand.  Voilà...

This makes me so happy. :)

And it earned the Wayne Coyne seal of approval via twitter.

Defamiliarize It

It was Ezra Pound who famously said "Make it new."  Although even I can't seem to figure out where he said it (and I'm supposed to know about these things). As a founder of modernism, the newness inherent in the creative process would be a motivating factor in Pound's writerly aesthetic. 

It was James Brown who said "Make it funky."  Perhaps this is a less fully-formed ethos than Pound's, but on the other hand, maybe it isn't.

Finally, it is I who say, "Make it weird."  Lately I've been very interested in the potential for art to defamiliarize the world; I'm certainly not the first person to find this fascinating, and I take my definition of "defamiliarization" from Viktor Shklovsky, who explains:

"Habituation devours work, clothes, furniture, one's wife, and the fear of war. . . . And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony.  The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known.  The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar,' to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."  From Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays

But it is shocking just how little effort it takes, what a minute adjustment is required to move from blind day-to-day routine to a realization that there is a super amazing world all around us all the time.  It takes only the slight sideways shift of the eye.  So I have been everywhere trying to "make it weird" in the way I look at my surroundings, in the way I use my language, in the way I approach music and the arts.

Here's a defamiliarized tomato:  

In Medias Weird

After affectionately christening 2011 "The New Weird," a not so clever pun on the New Year, I am glad to report that the first (nearly) six months have been quite weird indeed.  Crafting, arting, musicing, writing have all been included in the "make it" part of the formulation to which this blog is dedicated.  Meanwhile wigs, wings, and a new open-minded spirit have contributed an ongoing string of oddities to the "weird."

This blog was intended to chronicle my year as I "make it weird," both in terms of things created and oddness indulged.  And while the first half of The New Weird may have already passed through my temporal fingers, I can begin with some recap posts, and continue on as the weird fancy take me.  In the meantime, check out this link to my Flickr page, where you can preview some very weird collages I've been working on, and stay tuned for future weirdness in all it's forms.

Weirdly yours,
Jess

PS Here are some disco balls that you might enjoy...