Photopia @G44

I have work in this year's Photopia at Gallery 44 (401 Richmond St), it is a wee sized editioned print, 12x12 and 12 available.  The opening is tonight, April 26th, from 6pm - 10pm and the exhibit will be running until the 28th.  For more info, click here.

Learning To Love Yourself (More) pt. 22

THERE IS NOTHING MORE TRUE THAN THE WELL-AWARE SENSE OF YOUR GUTS.  By guts I mean heart and by heart I mean intuition and by intuition I mean your soul.

There is something that seems to cloud my awareness of this and I'm pretty sure it is ego and assumption.  There isn't a feeling in those cases I think, "I don't know if I'll ever like this person, they smell, they speak too loud, and they say rather unintelligent things that lack any humor to them."  And then we're friends, drinking beers, howling to the moon, and I realized I was soooooo wrong.  I don't blame myself for thinking this way, nor do I see it as bad, we all have assumptions, and like assholes, they all stink (not really).  What I am trying to really get at here is that assumption, these decisions made by the ego, etcetera are never very strong, you never touch that burning feeling.  That feeling, "Yeah, maybe I shouldn't get involved with this or that thing or person because I KNOW, deep down inside of me, that it won't work."  And yes, you can be seen as a coward for never trying, but fuck those people who think that, dem yo guts, not theirs.  Roll with it homie.

(I didn't mean to make this a self-help article)

I often write when there is a surge of overwhelming thought and emotions, I can try to force words on the off-season but they end up as drafts never to be published or things kinda like this, that don't go anywhere.  So in that case, I often write when I'm either really sad for some reason or that I'm happy, seeing someone, or something (I see trees from time to time).  If my heart is into that something then I'll write, I can't help it, for what I have inside is something too complex too grand for a few shared words, I need to attempt at a novel, get it all out, and document it through words that hover between fiction and experience, but all true.  When there aren't words flowing out of me but that something is there, with me, I try hard to write, I try hard to make it work, and ultimately, Guts.  Yeah man, guts.  The coin has been flipped, it has landed on the palm and flipped to the wrist, and the palm lefts and reveal the coin's facing side, and yet I struggle to create emotion, feeling, and attachment just as one were to force that coin that has already fallen to flip over to the other side.  I should start saying goodbye to these somethings by saying, "See you on the flip-side".  Those somethings will say back, "What?", "Where are you going?", "Why are you smiling, aren't you sad that things didn't work out."  And I'll say, "Nah-nah-nah likeitwaspartofacatchysong, I'll be quuuuuuuuuite fine", as I wave with my hand behind me, with that something behind me, with my past which will forever be dead behind me.  A grand Smellyalater and tah-tah.   My guts, man, like a man polishing his favorite gun in his man shack late at night while his wife and kids are asleep, I look to my guts and go, "We should had some fun over the years, what would we do without each other?".  With me and the married man as the holder, the taker on these adventures, and the gun, the guts, being the trusty device that pulled through, worked every time, youbetyourass, and thus the relationship grew blood, the two being one.  

How well do you know your gut?  How well can you separate the static of the mind and false assumption from that piercing feeling of, "yaiknow", "iknowalright", and "ihaveneverfeltsososorightaboutit"?  

Are you training your gut, working it out, studying it, and seeing how it reacts when life throws some variables?

BIG THANKS to Matt from Xeroxr for this interview.  We started a little more than a year ago and carried on a dialogue over the course of the year.  HERE is what results.  Click Here, HERE, or HERE.

Read about how cheesy I am, how I set out to create work without identity but ending up creating an identity like whoopsy daisy, nightmares of cutting off my fingers, the end of The Barking Wall, and more more more!

Ahhhh spagett!

Pockets Full of Sand

When times change.  When times are changing.  A'changing.

I can could hear the sound of my own thinking.  I was a pit of sorrow and telling myself it really was fine.  The sand slowly shifted towards me and where it gathered it started to swallow me whole.  It felt like the accumulation of every day I spent at the beach in my underwear.  My legs no longer visible had no feeling and it was a strange and uncanny disposition to be both legless and feeling fine about it.  And in a calm and relaxed matter I accepted the fact my legs had left me.  The sand sheets were falling one after another and I did not try struggle, nor panic, nor fear, or have feeling at all.  Each grain was washing me away.  All I could think of is the cyan glow and darkness of night fall on a rainy day.  The atmosphere inside a car, the tapping sound then followed by a distorted view as the raindrops fell against the window.  The wind blowing them aside.  The trees swaying to the wind.  The swoosh sound of tires on water asphalt.  The beams of headlight piercing the darkness.  The feeling of the day ending.  Of leaving the beach after a long day of sun, waves, and fun.  That glowing conclusion, that ocean turning inside of you.  That wonderful feeling that adventure gives birth to.  We had gone to that beach a hundred times and yet here like always that feeling, damn, what a great feeling.  The salt of the sea and damp hair, my pockets full of sand, that sounds like a pop song, "My Pockets Full of Sand".

In your arms tonight (whoa-whoa-whoa).

How long has it been since I allowed my hands their curiosity?  When have I let my legs wrap around and hold.  When was the last time it felt right to evade the boundaries of another without the feeling of evasion.  Philm covered flesh, the thinnest and cleanest of separations, from one property to another.  From me to you.

(stop this before it gets too corny, too rosy, and it becomes an excerpt from a romance novel)

I remember the feeling of powerlessness.  I remember feeling foolish being there, and how that feeling, that grand sense of the fool wasn't out of place, nor had it suddenly appeared like whoa.  That feeling has always been there, hidden, forgotten, pushed aside, and sank into the subconsciousness.  Something Freud would said before talking about my mother.  I remember looking up and seeing a distance too far but yet I could reach.  I remember the feeling of a vibrating pocket, of talking about Zen, about being a romantic or a classical thinker as I walked away from that site.  I remember seeing where you were, in a grassy field somewhere in the Hampton's, surrounded by exquisite foods and drunk journalists.  I remember the parking lot with your bus waiting for all the passengers to return.  You finding a spot to talk, to call me or was it I who called you?  I remember how shitty I felt and how you made me laugh.  And I remember most at how much I learned not to care, not to try and hold on to something too hot to handle, too wild to be tamed, and too far to reach.  You may have never held my hand and pushed me in that direction, but you made me realized something I learned not too long ago: to step back from the edge of one world to the next, and to be my own, to see the world, and know it is a clockwork with gears able to grind your fingers off and you may try your hardest to turn those gears the opposite direction, to hold on dearly, for your life, for love, but it will never fucking happen.  When a heavy object is set into motion, such as a train, or a rolling boulder, they have too much force pushing them forwards that they cannot stop immediately, and if they were to stop on a dime their world would be destroyed.  Going down a steep hill on my bike I saw a taxi cab decide to do a left turn in front of me, I braked hard, that motherfucker, I was going 50kph easy and fear struck my body with the vision of my front wheel hitting the side of that impatient cabby the rest of the bike with me included pivoting from that point and my back lifting to the air, my hair floating upwards, the air being knocked out of my lungs, rising higher and higher and being thrown off my bike and over the car and my hands reaching out in front of me, my legs bashing against my saddle, the side of the car, the hood, the window and clearing the car entirely.  My body will float and I will fly for just a moment.  I will feel zero g only to be crushed like a can against asphalt.  I will be destroyed by the law of gravity.  That harsh harsh harsh thing right now.  And the flow of life will return again, with me breathing heavily, in a ball of blood and broken bones, disoriented and awakening from a dream that isn't a dream.  We need to fall in order to become strong enough to prevent it from happening again.  And when we get soft we fall.

That was the beginning of probably the funnest summers I have ever had.  I lost close to 15lbs from just laughing, hard.  With spring in the air, those ANGRY BIRDS chirping away and being glad to be back, the cherries in blossom, and my goddamn nose and eyes in allergy hell, I am ready for the sequel to last summer.

I Build You Up (i will crush you down)

(Merlin's Magic, 2012)

God only made one of me.


Some brilliant flash in the sky.  Some thunderous roar that you never heard outside of a Transformers' movie hits your face and squeezes into your ears.  YOUR HEART IS RACING.  You need to go to the bathroom but you can't get up.  You are glued to your seat.  You can see from where you are standing that the sky is turning all sorts of crazy colors.  You're thinking, "Holy Shit".  Exactly.  Holy Shit indeed.

When the planets aline and Also Sprach Zarathustra is playing and those drums are a'beating, your chair becomes the front row the grandest of shit shows, what will you have then, in that exact moment?  In a non-preacher-like way, what then, what about all of this (holds life, memory, history, and every experience you have gone through in my hands and hovers it before you).  When all can be erased in a crazy flash in the sky and thunderous roars of instantaneous death, what then.  I guess nothing really, everything that you knew is gone.  But it is the fact that we are still here, that we survived it that we are able to really get our brains and hearts going, thinking, feeling, what we have right now.  And what do we have?

The kid who raps to himself.

I'm living in a haunted house.  I am living in a haunted house.  I have lived in a haunted house, and I am still living in a haunted house.  Wow.  This is frightening and fascinating all at the same time.  I race around my room, I am fourteen in this vision and I am wearing plain white socks for the first time in my life.  I'm going to a party tonight, my last one in this town.  My father and I had spent the past three days packing the house and I can go out tonight (not that I wasn't allowed, my folks were very easy-going and trustworthy).  My sister's friend picks me up, her car is a coup so someone has to get out and pull their seat back and I enter, clearing a way for my feet in all the fast food packaging and bottles on the floor.  I sink into the seat and we take off into what I would now call, "The Hood".

For some reason there are huge blanks in my memory, and I can remember the feeling, which was good, I could remember drinking and seeing my older friends.  Everyone is doing unique handshakes, from this crew to this gang, and they're teaching me them.  I'm wearing my big orange vest I called, My DJ Vest.  I have a small notebook in my back pocket full of poems and tags.  I have spiked hair and buzzed sides, I was somewhere between nu-metal and hip-hop, and I skateboarded.  I got along with the people at the party.  I drank their 40oz, and we talked poetry, about making your initials mean something.


They got to mean something.  Take your time, you won't get it the first time but when you find it you'll remember it your whole life, it's your name after all.

BGK = Beginning Great Kills.  Twelve years later what does that mean?  I'm an artist these days, I've done alright, and I've done a lot and I'm always working.  I manage to slip under the radar for sometime and now it seems like people are catching my name.  It is BGK.  What does that meaning still hold?  It's strange I still remember that man's words, and my own "definition".  I know beginning great doesn't work for me, that I have to work up to it or else if I get it then I feel lost, like I cheated, and that I don't deserve it.  And that applies to just about everything.  Nothing easy.  Damn, I wish I had a "S" in my initials.  Struggle, struggle is everything.  I should've been named, Snake, and just Snake so that my initials are just, S.  They'd call me the Struggling Snake, they'll laugh, I'll get back up and try again, keep on working at it, dancing dancing dancing until I get it.  I am on fire with passion.  No water can put me out.  I am the oil to the watery world.  And I am struggling to hold on, to you, to this world, and everything in-between.  But when I have you, when I have this world, I will feel like I earned it.  You can bet your ass I will.  (And it will be good).

I hear a few of them freestyling.  They're battling.  There's a lot of, "Ooooooo" coming from the crowd circling around them.  They're saying some funny ass shit.  "Your motha....DES NUTS....When you're dead...bury you....just another....I'll build you up only to crush you down."  They were at it for an hour and afterwards they shook hands and laughed.  All that aggression out, they were best friends and they just rapped about personal and real things mixed with fictitious things about their relationship to each other, what gets to them, what bothers them about the other.  It was spoken with volume and wasn't threatening but poetry.  My sister's friend found me and put me in the car.  We were leaving.  Goodbyes, unique handshakes, and I'll-Probably-Never-See-You-Agains thrown around.  In the ride back I remember looking out from the window and seeing Gallup, NM illuminated at night.  A sea of amber lights floating over the hills and street lights coming closer and moving pass me until disappearing and being replaced by an approaching street light.  I remember the fury of words that came flowing out, in my first freestyle in my head.  I was alone and surrounded by drunk kids.  I was leaving this place for good.  And I knew I was going to really miss it.

Tell me more ghost stories.