SKULLPTURES

All sculptures clay and acrylic.

Prometheus (detail):

Uncle Creepy:

Professor Haunted:

Craft

Absolom

BACKWARD MASKING II

Strange video montage of Elvis footage to Danzig's 'Blood and Tears.' No masks there ;)

I put some more work into my Grizzly spirit animal mask. Here is the photographic evidence:

He got an earlift, made out of pipecleaners and draping strips of plaster to create a skin like effect. I looked at eleven pictures of grizzly bears to get the look down, which doesn't necessarily translate well in these hands. I looked at the snout and shook my head. What was going on there? Like someone hit Yogi in the mouth with a baseball bat. Not so aesthetically pleasing.

Diamanda Galas 'Let My People Go'

Clearer shot of the top of his head, where I saw an opportunity to do something daring, something unhinged. My bear needed a third eye to enable his vision quests and phantom plundering. I took out my psychic scalpel and here's where things get, I don't know, kinda cosmic...

Willie Nelson 'I Never Cared For You'

I built a plain round mirror into the third eye chakra position, confident it would behave like a spiritual amplifier when worn by the celebrant. I did some reconstructive surgery on his mouth. I did what I could.

I got out my watercolors and did some design work on the crown of the mask, a spiritual conduit to gather cast off daydreams and psychic debris discharged in any given area at any given moment. The Grizzly gathers the sprinkles and the stardust and saves it for when he is worn.

Plans for this mask include being fitted to a head covering that will secure the atavistic beast to to the wearer's face.

A candy colored clown they call the Sandman...

BACKWARD MASKING

The mythos of the mythics and the minotaur that headbutts me in my sleep...

I had an urge to build a cage around the sun
I couldn't find a way to say no
I took a check on all the meters in my room
I kicked the dog and said let's go
The clouds were hanging low above the path
I had my arm around a sundial
I pinned my baby into yanking satan's crank
Bum deals with a thin smile.....oh yeah

Pushin up and pushin down against the sky
Like there's muscles 'round my torso
Fourth dimension of smiles, strokes and knifes
This little piggie's gotta go go
To live and blow all of that piss into your heart
You got veins of iron, baby
Oh man this egg is way too hot
Lay on a rock and split open.....oh yeah
(Unrelated lyrics)

So in the end I had a cage around the sun
Looked pretty horny if I do say
The dog is dead and the sacrifice is done

All in all a pretty good day
The ocean parts and the meteors come down
Laid out in amber baby
Fate c'mon and slap me in the head
Punch the switch arrivederci

Monster Magnet sang about the creation of something sinister out of everyday objects like housepets and sundials; while such items are handy it is hardly practical to get so far out, Mr. Wyndorf. So sometimes, we suburban shaman get an urge to maybe not build a Cage around the Sun, but maskmaking seems to be a worthwhile endeavor. I went to my local craft store and took a look around and chose some paints and some plaster strip they sold in a roll to build an archetypal animal force mask. I'm particularly fascinated by shapeshifting and the legend and lore that connects to it so this pursuit allows me to pursue the psychic zeitgeist and make something out out of nothing at all.

I bought a bag of black balloons (see: Superjudge) and tied off a fat headed dummy. I dipped wet strips of plaster to mark out some vestigial traces of face. I couldn't help but think of Iron Maiden as their poster boy stared up at me with black latex eyeholes. I let him dry in the sink and I played some awesome music for Lindsey. Well, I played it mostly for me.

I guess my first spirit beast will look like a lucha libre reject. Too wimpy to be a rudo, and I only makes lucha masks for the rudos.

I don't know if it will end up being a snout or a beak, but something's poking out of the face, a sorta contorted grimace built up with a scissored Dixie cup, some foil, and more plaster strips. I should be painting this instead of sitting here listening to Iron Maiden and typing. Oh well. Here's a side shot:

Slumberland's calling, off to frolic with the mythical beasts, free to flee...

edit---so I went and did some painting.

I think I have a bear face, a very fancy bear with a golden honey smeared nose and delicious blue eye shadow. His existence bends in the pixels in the material world around him.

Looks like the leftovers of a bear cookoff. Do people eat bears? People probably shouldn't eat bears. Bears are good reasons to stay out of the woods, safe in your houses you can look out the window in your bear mask and know you are the alpha bear. You are the alpha bear.

The dead eyed stare of a plaster spiritual guardian.

Diamonds and Rust

Linda

So Monday is my sister Linda's birthday. I won't tell you how old she is, but I will say I have known her all my life. I've seen and done a lot of crazy shit with Linda around(note to my Mom, that part's made up! Haha!). I may not choose to implicate my dear sister in any infractions of the law(again, Mom, figuratively speaking!), but just know we've been chased in the car fearing for our lives on two separate occasions(exaggeration), and both times she was driving(and wearing her seatbelt). And I'm still here, so thanks to her quick maneuvering and thinking we got out of a lot of sticky jams. She taught me the joys of vandalism(which we have never committed, my dear nephews! Toilet paper belongs in the bathroom), which would one day turn around on me, but at the time it was a blast. We were pros with the toilet paper and the jumbo sized bottle of dish soap, ready to squeeze driveby style on a car window as we drove through a sleeping neighborhood and blasted everything we saw. We were assholes, but for a while it felt so liberating to be such assholes(note to Linda's sons--don't be assholes). We salted dirty words into front lawns, to kill the letters a dead yellow against the green. We threw slices of deli bologna onto the hoods of those who trespassed us. (All right, we did do all that. I can't keep up with all these edits. I'm done!)

It's too bad you, the reader, never had such a badass sister like I do. I remember one time I was fighting with my friend Joe and she trapped him in our garage and lectured him for nearly an hour about the virtues of me and my friendship, and at the end of the interrogation/lecture Joe came out and hugged me, and told me he was sorry. She did something terrible to his brain and his psyche, but he bounced back ok, and we became much closer after that. Me and Joey, I mean.

But it wasn't always the good times growing up with Linda as my big sister. One time was kind of a drag, and I call that the Story About The Time I Got a Fish Hook Stuck in Linda's Head. It's a little gruesome, so the more queasy of you, maybe skip this one. All right.

So, my brother Scott was dating a girl named Kat, whose father had a pond on his property that he kept stocked with various fishes, some of them so nasty he'd feed them roadkill he'd scraped from the sides of the road. He kept a shovel in the back of his truck for that express purpose. So, I guess someone thought it would be a good idea for Scott to take us out there and go fishing for fish that eat dead mammals. Makes plenty of sense. I think me and Linda were at that age where we were at perpetual war. Our battles always began with her verbal taunting, a sort of soul crushing chatter that could make someone just lose their shit and start beating ass. And it wouldn't take long until I had suplexed her onto the floor or wherever. She'd get in my head and tell me wrestling was "fake," and I'd boil until the lid blew off and I'd have her in a figure four leglock, yelling, "Does this feel fake? Does it?" And then she'd say I hurt her, and I'd stop and feel guilty and she'd make me feel worse.

So, this went on for a few years, and I may have given her a beating on that day, but I don't remember. I just remember casting my line into the water and not catching a thing. The bait would be nibbled and gone, but I never would feel it getting taken. And my brother was off somewhere balling his girlfriend so we had nowhere else to be. But after a while it was time to go when they came back and I guess I wasn't ready to leave then. I knew I didn't have any bait on the hook, but I kept casting out and reeling it back in. Like a dumb little robot on repeat, cast the line, reel it in. Scott was packing up his tacklebox and I took one last cast but when I went to throw my arm foreword, it wasn't snapping through the air. And I tugged, a few times pretty hard, and i guess I didn't realize the bare hook got stuck on something. Or, in this case, in something.

I couldn't get it in the water because I'd hooked Linda in the back of her scalp and somehow worked the hook into her skin. I don't remember her screaming, not at least until I turned around and realized what had happened. It's pretty gross to see a fish hook stuck in your sister's head. Overwhelming, even.

And sometimes it felt like I was born with an overwhelming sense of guilt, so seeing Linda with the line leading down into her hair, still hooked by my fishing pole, it broke my brain. I felt like I had killed her. I don't remember how we got there but all of a sudden we were all inside and grown-ups were holding her under the lights and smoothing her hair along the part so they could see where the hook went in. Things were further complicated by the barb on the hook, a nifty metal prong added to hooks to keep it good and stuck inside the fish's mouth. This barb was lodged in her head pretty good. They worked it out somehow with some careful amateur doctoring and we eventually went home. I don't remember what my Mom said when we came home and Scott told her what happened. I seem to be mentally blocked there!

But she survived her head hooking and we grew up some and became better friends, but sometimes we'd fight, never long enough for it to stick, I guess.

And we became adults and had more crazy adventures, too insane to recount here, but I've found that spending time with my sister meant there was going to be some sort of pursuit of cataclysm, but despite the years of wreck and ruin, she's gone on to do some amazing things, and raise three radical boys. And a year and a half ago she drove to NJ in the middle of the night when I had some, shall we say, personal issues. She was right there and knew what to say to me to get my thinking straight. But then, this is the same girl who put a hole in the upstairs bedroom drywall when we were practicing our breakdancing moves in the house in Petersburg. It was some sort of freestyle knee lift/push off that made a giant hole in the wall. She wanted me to take the blame for it, but eventually Linda made us come to an agreement that we wouldn't tell our Mom where the hole in the hall came from, and we knew then our breakdancing dreams would never be realized. But we had other dreams, and we lived them.

And, it seems to me, that for the first time in a long time my sister is emerging from the murky black cloud and feels new again, and in that spirit I propose a new Year One, a new beginning and challenges that seem trifling compared to past victories. The years that have passed have taken with them the unfaceable challenges and overcomeable odds and she has arrived at a place where she can be her own woman. And I am really freaking happy for her. No more fishhooks or piledrivers or concussions (that's not a funny story though, the concussion one), no more near death experiences, that shit's so passe.

Happy birthday to my stupid sister Linda. I guess I could have sent you an anatomically correct female reproductive organ model from a medical supply house, but this just seems more personal.