Wednesday, March 31, 2010

let there be blood

it feels like lately i have been growing complacent, like the hunger is gone. the bloodlust and anger have subsided in the last few years and sometimes i don't even know if i am myself. but fuck all that, it's time for some carnage.







Monday, March 29, 2010

best friends

when i was young i remember i had a best friend named greg. i had just come to america so communication was hard, but most friendships are based on activities and shared interests, so
talking isn't always necessary. his mom picked me up after elementary school sometimes and even taught me the alphabets. he was my only friend for a long time since i couldn't speak to any of the other kids and when i look back i thank him for that because without him i would have been alone.

greg and i spent many afternoons together, playing video games, watching movies, exploring the outdoor expanse of his backyard. one summer we really got into mountain biking, the next he introduced me to footbll. somehow when i went to go visit him, i felt that my life was much more incomplete. his dad was a gadget junkie so his house was always furnished with newest toys, nestled cozily into the modern decor picked out by his stay at home mom. they always ate dinner together at the table, while their yellow lab, casey, begged imploringly with her doggie eyez.

at my house, it was me, my brother, my mom, and grandparents. pops was back in taiwan getting his grind on, and it was anything, but a typical american household. i remember wishing that my family were more like greg's, americanized, modern, normal.

greg was my portal to american culture since at my home, only mandarin and taiwanese were spoken, while my grandparents held stringent ties to the taiwanese green indepedent party. i remember wishing that i didn't have to miss weekend morning cartoons due to chinese school and church.

me and greg's were both made to learn piano during the 1st grade and i ended staying with it through junior year of high school, although at the end I could hardly stand it anymore. my mom even started making me play for her church on sundays and i began to feel very much like a highly trained show dog.

me and greg were pretty much best friends through all of grade school up through middle school and as a kid you don't realize that sometimes interests change and that friendships don't last forever. i remember during the '89 earthquake i was still in kindergarten and all of like 4 kids showed up for school the next day. it mostly kids with hard ass asian parents, and also oscar, but oscar was that kid who liked to eat his boogers and elmer's white paste so i didn't really hang out with him much. i remember wondering why greg didn't show up for school and i knew then that we were from different worlds.

we developed different interests through middle school and the only things we really had in common anymore was the advance math class at school and piano on wednesdays. i started playing little league baseball, while he joined the ultimate club.

i don't know what happened in high school. i tried to be good, tried to fulfill my filial duty, but something inside snapped and i just really didn't want to be a good little boy anymore. greg kept doing his thing, excelling at school, formed a garage band, won merit awards and national recognition. i began experimenting with drugs, sex, hung out with the wrong crowd and basically tried very hard to get into trouble, but never quite trying hard enough.

i still did pretty well in school, because to me high school was very much a joke. i cheated just enough in the classes that i hated to get by and thought that i could get by okay with sitting in cruise control through life. this ideology continued throughout college, a debilitating conceit, complemented with bouts of alcoholism and drug abuse.

me and greg stopped being friends in high school, but i think that is mostly due to my own proficiencies as a bridge burner. he has since continued to be a good, nice boy, graduating from a nice school, getting a nice job, finding a nice girlfriend, and buying a nice safe condo. but i suppose that is one of the many reasons that we stopped being friends in the first place.

sometimes doubt creeps into my head and i wish that i had lived that life and continued to be a nice boy. but fuck that asshole doubt.

maybe sometimes friendships are only made in times of circumstance and situation. maybe sometimes friendships are only made for proximity and necessity. maybe all things in life are only meant to be temporal.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

wednesday beers

during the summer i would always go to the 21st amendment for lunch because the weather was extremely pleasant and they have tasty beers and it is nice to paint in the early afternoon with a slight buzz going. there was a cute redhead in my class who was always pretty curt to everyone, but she was really nice to look at, so the flaw seemed to be a little less harsh. she started showing up to the bar on wednesday's and we had our little routine going. we would be pretty distant and reticent in class, but we were wednesday beer buddies during lunch.

she was an avid boxer at her local gym where she had met her husband who she was living with now. she had wicked talent in the studio and i always looked forward to lunch with her because she was like no one i had ever met before. she had grown up in a little town of nevada, with 7 brother and sisters, strictly mormon. i had grown up with mormons in the k-12 system, but i had never befriended one.

I had talked to several of my friends and they insisted that pursuing a married chick was out of bounds like big time so I cooled the jets off that mess and just kept it in the friend zone. I learned that she was going to introduce her husband to her family for the first time over christmas break. she seemed pretty anxious about the whole ordeal.

we talked about art and our lives and where we wanted to take all this mess, but mostly i liked to look at her pretty face. we talked about maybe doing shows together in the future and all that. i remember right before finals she got a huge cut on her brow from an amateur bout and i thought it was pretty sexy an all. we traded information and then finals came and i hopped straight out to thailand so we really didn't get a chance to say bye, but i figured she would always be at the 21st next semester because that was just the way things were going to be.

i remember receiving an email from an event coordinator about possibly curating a show in early february while i was on vacation in thailand. i emailed the redhead from class but never got a reply back. the show came and went and school started and i've been back to the 21st, but i have not seen her since. i suppose that maybe most likely she just couldn't afford to go to school anymore and probably had to take up a job somewhere to support her beer habit. but the way i like to look at things, she probably got shamed into divorcing her husband when she went back to nevada because he wasn't a mormon and is now living in a little town back home wishing that she could have beers at the 21st with me on wednesday so we could bullshit about where we could see the future taking us.

Thursday, March 4, 2010

art dump

so i was thinking yesterday and it's about two years since i started on this art journey and it's been both good and bad times. all i know is it takes more than boyish good looks, charm, and general badassery to make it big in the art world.

i want to do a big solo show and destroy the space and hang up dirty pictures that people will probably sneer at, but it's okay because i'll probably be drunk at the opening. i've been trying to get in contact with gallery people, but my strong suits aren't within the realm of verbal negotiation. i'm trying though.

until that big break through, i'm gonna keep chugging along.

if you know of a big wall space that needs to be destroyed, i will do it for freezy as long as you follow these rules.

1. i will not paint on large plywood nailed to the wall, because then you are just asking for free shit and that is just not going to happen unless you are a hot chick.

2. give me lunch


lil weezy and friends in progress

yaager in water color

young lady with handgun oils

killer mixed media


liana water color

you know what it's about.

nick: dude, her vagina looks too much like meat curtains.

me: you think?

nick: yeah it doesn't look as appetizing.

going big at auto logic san bruno

N.K.F x d.chen

trip mao shocker for your mother fucking ass

nicola helping hang and sippin brew at the fatal attraction show

do the damn thing.

live painting for the first time.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

dog fight.

As i was driving home yesterday all i could think about was veggin out for a little bit and procrastinating on all the shit i had to do for the upcoming week. rounding the last right up to my street i see two dogs in stride trotting up to my house. they must smell emma because they stop at my front yard and smell about. i pull up on my driveway and step out. one looks like a mastiff/boxer mix while the second one looks like a rottweiler/german shepard. They are both males with collars on. i walk up to the rott, which barks and walks away, the mastiff is friendly and lets me handle it no problem. his collar has no tags which means i can't call the owner.

the mastiff is friendly and is under voice command. in hindsight i should have gone inside and grabbed leashes from inside so i could have controlled the dogs better. i let them both go so i can get my phone out of my car and see my neighbor johnny coming up the block with his snow white pomeranian mix on a walk yapping loudly ferociously at the two strays.

"hey, you ever seen these dogs before?" i call out to him as he makes his way towards me.

"nah, you just spot them outside?"

"yeah"

suddenly as johnny approaches i see the two stray dogs stop, focus, and attack. my friend johnny's eye's go wide with fear and out of no where is as flurry of teeth, snarls, fur, growls, and cries. johnny is yelling madly, frenzied with rage, his body a blur of kicks and fists. the pomeranian is on his back, yelping with the fear of death and i was pretty sure that we had a dead dog on our hands as i ran up to the scene. i manage to grab a hold of both collars and drag the fight apart.

johnny is overcome with rage and a torn knee hole on his pair of jeans and runs up to the dogs and "yells i'll fucking kill you" as he squares up to kick one of the dogs in the face while i yell out "no it's cool, i've got them" and he slows and calms down and goes back to his shrieking dog. the rott starts to lunge on his collar and it snaps at the buckle and he goes right for the pomeranian and the dogs and johnny go yelling down the block.

i just stand where i am with the mastiff in one hand and the broken dog leash in the other and think that if the pomeranian hadn't died or escaped terrible injury the first time, this had to be it, and i felt a little bad for johnny who was just on a nice stroll with his lap dog and now it might be dead.

after awhile, the shrieking form the pomeranian stops so i yell out to johnny "is your dog okay?" and he yells back "no!" he is on the phone describing the situation to what i assume is the cops. as i am walking up to the johnny's house with the mastiff in hand i see another gentlemen approaching, he is wearing a balack hoody and work boots, with a goatee. he grabs the rott and uses his belt as a makeshift leash.

i walk up to him and ask if these are his dogs and he says yes. he then goes on to tell me how the pg&e guy opened the side gate and the dogs ran loose and all that and i am glad to be able to walk away from the situation. i check up on the pomeranian cowering on johnny's stoop. besides a damp mat of fur around the jugular, there is absolutely wrong with the dog. no lesions, fractures, punctures, nothing. it is not hurt at all.

the cops come and they do the whole trading of information business and i get to walk away from all of that. i thought about how i quite liked the mastiff and that maybe after another year or so i could finally get a second dog. also i thought about how much i dislike most little dogs because their owners are horrible dog owners and do not properly socialize and train their pets.