Welcome Stranger!

           WILLIAM SCOTT, 

Untitled

, 2015, Watercolor and ink on paper

As a poverty stricken teenager I spent hours and hours sifting through thrift stores searching for hidden treasure. My entire wardrobe and half of my belongings were excavated second hand discoveries. It was one of the happiest times of my life. Today I can afford most of the cheap crap I consume and my time is valuable so I don’t go thrifting anymore. I do waste an incredible amount of time on Instagram and Twitter though. If you didn’t end up here from one of my links on those pages you can follow me on Instagram @spottless_marxx or on Twitter @SpottlessMarxx. One of the reasons I’m so addicted to those sites is that I ‘ve found many hidden treasures there from all around world in the form of people. Interesting, happy, social, active, isolated, alienated, scary, lonely, angry, insanely creative people.

Some of them, but not all, have huge followings. In my online life everybody knows who these stars are but in my offline life nobody has ever heard of them. For this reason I have bestowed upon them the name “secret celebrities.” 

My portrait of @fesignkh brilliant University of Tehran art student on Instagram who did the original Francis Bacon Portrait in a hoodie found in the video below. I added background, "The Blues" by Chuck Barry & snow. 

Iranian artist and student @fesignkh  pictured above only has around 3000 followers at this moment. I consider her a secret celebrity, however, because everything she posts gets hundreds of likes. That means she has a captive audience, which includes me. I don’t consider myself a secret celebrity but I do consider myself worthy of YOUR attention, and here’s why:

Years ago I was a radio journalist. Although I worked in the realm of non-corporate community radio I was constantly being encouraged to produce what was described to me as a clear, natural and professional sounding news product. What that meant was hours and hours of editing interviews, removing any and all  “umms”, pauses, interruptions, awkward phrasing and, most importantly, “cutting to the chase." In other words, eliminating all tangential information and making people sound concise and articulate even if they didn’t actually speak that way. It still fascinates me that nearly every person I interviewed believed that is how they actually spoke. The rare exception was when I was accused of taking something out of context to make somebody look bad. Truth be known, those were bad and/or stupid people who said bad and/or stupid things and got busted. But that’s another story. Pro editing tips I constantly struggled with also included the unofficial requirement that no single soundbite exceed nine to fifteen seconds. Anything longer than that was considered indulgent and distracting. If you haven't seen the movie ROMA I highly recommend it. When I hear people criticize the exrodinary long shots in that graceful film it reminds me of the shit I used to take in the newsroom.

Anyhow this process of making things “professional” was one of the reasons I got out of journalism. It was particularly painful when I was interviewing nuns who were organizing labor in the unholy maquiladora factories in Latin America that NAFTA gave birth too. These strong but peace loving women were receiving government sanctioned death threats as a reward for addressing toxic working conditions, extremely low pay and violent union busting. Meanwhile I’m being forced to censor them to make sure they sound “clear and natural” and respect my audiences short attention spans. 

I'm not saying this is wrong. I appreciate journalists more than ever now that they are being demonized & attacked by our President, arrested by dictators and even killed. One of my favorite protest signs I've been noticing says "Then they came for the journalists and after that... we don't know what happend." Nonetheless, you've probalby already guessed that I'm the wrong person for making complex realities bite sized and digestible.  

The reason I’m telling you this is that you are, at this moment, in a dusty, lonely (and I hope) interesting, corner of the Internet. A hidden treasure. As far as I can tell, Blogger is all but dead. They don't even have an App. You are quite the adventurous one to even click on a link with the word “blogspot” in it. When Blogger was created it was all the rage but had many critics warning of the "Vanity Press.” 

Back then I didn’t think too hard about what "vanity press" actually meant but certainly agreed it was tasteless... and probably something I should be doing. Years later Blogger has gone the way of AOL and MySpace but maybe it's only problem is that it was ahead of it's time? I currently spend many hours watching strangers from all around the world on my phone talk about their menstrual cycle, do their laundry, draw a picture, rant, rave, dance, feed their bird and pet their cat. And I’m not alone. A literal army of  virtual peeping toms are doing the same thing. Why? I think it’s because we crave all that vain, overindulgent, tangential and awkward information that has ended up on the cutting room floor without our knowledge or permission. We’re tired of being force fed rehearsed and hollow talking points coming from corrupt politicians and corporations. We’re not interested in “clear, natural and professional” ... we want the awkward, ugly and often boring truth!

God bless those who do, but I'm not one for sniffing my armpits and spilling my guts to strangers on the Internet. I'm pretty comfortable sharing myself with the few restless, curious and driven voyeurs (aka you) who are willing to go out of your way to click on an obscure link to Blogger. This is sorta the closest thing I have to a diary. If you decide to read more you will learn quite a bit about me. If you stick around you may learn a lot more. If you leave a comment, I'll be thrilled to find out I'm not alone and I'll be more than interested in checking out your neck of the woods, if your into that sort of thing.

Bee...ing Real

Copyright © 2018 Mind Honey Clothing

Many years ago in a land far far away (San Francisco) I had a vivid nightmare that is now becoming a reality. I dreamed that I worked for a corporation that discovered that it's main product, cell phones, were killing off bees. Bees are pollinators. This may not seem important until you find out that one third of all food humans consume will disappear without them. Immediately my corporate bosses realized that the loss of bees would threaten life on Earth as we know it. Instead of solving the potentially catastrophic problem, however, we decided to cover it up. It was my job to invent a replacement for bees before anybody found out the truth. 

For well over a decade I've been taking college classes to avoid defaulting on my student loans. At the time of this dream I was taking a late night City College class in contemporary art history located in a tiny, hot and cramped  theater on the upper floors of a generic downtown high-rise. We were studying the scholarly article by Jean Baudrillard "Simulacra and Simulation" that is at the heart of Postmodernism. According to Baudrillard we are moving into a reality where simulated versions of our experience are becoming more "real" than the original. In fact, many of us have long forgotten the original. According to Baudrillard, we don't visit Disneyland anymore. We eat, breath, shit and live in Disneyland. 

While I was taking this class the public was becoming aware for the first time of the troubling phenomenon that bee colony’s all around the world were abruptly disappearing for no apparent reason. Many were speculating that cell phones were the cause. I remember this because a survey came out of cell phone use among teens howling that many of our youth would rather die than give up their cell phones. Deep down I thought we were all going to die with our cell phones firmly in hand.

Today the bees are still dying in mass. While I don't hear any blame going to cell phones anymore, it's still an urgent and complicated problem with the billion dollar pesticide industry pumping out fake "studies" not unlike those funded by the global warming deniers who are obvious puppets of their fossil fuel overlords.   



In the meantime, scientists are working on the task right out of my nightmare. Developing a robot replacement for the bees. Obviously there are colossal  challenges to pulling this off but we already have models and scientists are  supposedly optimistic about the chances of eventual success. Given our capacity for greed and the lack of political will to save the bees, it's no exaggeration to say we have a lot riding on this particular simulacra. 

 
Right after awaking from this nightmare, I laid in bed wondering what will happen to the last of the real bees once we have replaced them. Perhaps they would become isolated and confused, performing some cryptic and obscure version of their original rituals and function. Then I began to wonder if we have similar lost souls among us today. We know that traditional seers and healers became "Witch Doctors" & later the more politically correct "Shaman" in the skeptical eyes of Western science and medicine.  These individuals and their ways are still holding on and seem to have growing influence among those of us who are looking for new ways of understanding and coping with what appears on the surface to be a growing mess on an epic scale. A wise man recently asked me how many diseases Native Americans inflicted on the white invaders. I don't know enough history to honestly answer that question (and I don't want to be accused of romanticizing the past) but I can say this, I understand what he was trying to say. Black Elk... I for one, am listening.




One of my favorite definitions of art is that it is the religion for those who don't have a religion. For me there has always been something profound but a little "off" about art and the people who make it. Myself included. 

Bees took evolution millions of years to perfect. Now human life may depend on humans developing an effective but flimsy (in comparison) replacement in a few decades. Perhaps we artists are the last of the real bees who have had our real work and identity hijacked from us by some shallow impersonator? While I may draw inspiration from the per-historic cave painters, alchemists and even the shaman living today, I don't have a cave, a tribe or artifacts to inform and define me. So 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.

It's been four years since my last entry. I wish I could say I was busy getting my life together and moved on from this silly blog. Instead I've been living in denial. I just turned 50 today, July 4th. I now have high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, no kids and more cats than I care to admit. All of this in the wake of growing fascism (thinly veiled as populism) around the world with the center of gravity being right here in the good O'l US of A with the election of Donald Trump.  

Baudrillard has never made more sense to me. 

Making art has never made more sense to me.

Still Doing It Myself

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 culture. Belieiving 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 what I call “at a glance” cinema.

My current work is the 2-minute epic video The Gunfighters. While gun violence terrorizes our communities, we still lack the political will necessary to change course. Gunshots have ended the lives of my three closest friends, my youngest uncle and, most recently, my 86 year old neighbor. He survived combat in Germany on the battlefields of WWII but his life ended in his own living room with a single shot from an intruder whom he refused to give a cigarette. The Gunfighters was assembled entirely from found bits and pieces from the Internet and explores the visceral experience of staring down the barrel of a gun.

The Gunfighters

Ungodly Glitch Experiment  * Music by Wax Tailor