Happy Birthday To Me

ABOUT ME:

Today is my birthday. I have nowhere to go and nothing to do. The pandemic has made Los Angeles feel so small to me right now. I feel like a rat in a cage. Instead of celebrating I’ve been reflecting on my life’s journey and trying to say something about myself and my art that is honest and sincere. This is what I came up with. Most of it is cut and paste from other posts below: 

I would have been destroyed from the inside out as a kid had I not been rescued by a band of drug dealing hoodlums on skateboards. Growing up as a moody poor kid on the outskirts of a pristine and wealthy college town, I was an insecure misfit yearning to belong. I had almost given up trying when I was adopted into the “do it yourself” ethic of punk rock and graffiti. I learned to embrace my informal education gathered bit by bit from thousands of hours of watching TV, reading comic books and science fiction and experimenting with drugs and alcohol.

As I figured out how to cope and adapt to poverty and loneliness in a yuppie paradise, I also became concerned with the social and political cause of other underdogs. Today I’m the reluctant champion to the bitches, freaks, psychotics, bums, thugs and junkies of the world. This focus has exposed me to many of the deep rooted contradictions and injustices imbedded in our corporate capitalist culture. Believing in the promise of technology to level the playing field, I’ve immersed myself in every digital craze to come along since the arrival of desktop computers. My latest quest is to master Phone Apps & filters in what I call “at a glance” cinema.This, combined with the opportunity offered to me by the pandemic to work at home, I’m currently 50 cards into a life long dream of making an animated, experiential, Tarot Deck. 

While I may draw inspiration from the per-historic cave painters, alchemists and even real shaman and mystics living today, the harsh reality is that most of my creative energy & enthusiasm has been tapped from working full-time since I was a teenager just to keep a roof over the head of my wife (who I met when I was 18 and she was 17) and I and food on our plates. I barely know who I am.  I don't have a cave, a tribe or artifacts to inform and define me. So, with the precious energy I have kept for myself, I create my own. The Internet is my fountain, computer my archive and the smart phone my tool and the local copy store my laboratory.

Spottless Marxx