Okay, The Morgellon was deinstalled just over a year ago.
I was supposed to have finished the Disembody edit by now.
That didn’t happen, did it?
I’ve barely begun the logging.
What’s the hold up?
I’m not real good at focusing.
Fortunately, being behind schedule and overbudget is an important part of any site specific work for Los Angeles.
What are the current distractions?

On September 7, 2011, 23 Entryways Into My Mind, Portal 7: A Mild Informality entered its second year (P7Y2). Year One (P7Y1) consisted of composing - with the collaboration of Daniel Miller, Moe Bowstern and a handful of others - approximately 365 scores for field recording. P7Y2 is a 365 day field recording extravaganza, wherein I am wearing an audio recorder on me 24/7 for an entire year. Yup, I am recording every sound in my environment for 8,760 consecutive hours. Obvs the project owes as much to Tehching Hsieh as John Cage. These are two artists who informed and inspired me as a teen more than just about any others. Well, The Residents, John Zorn and Current 93 were pretty damn important, too.
Those 8,760 hours of field recordings will make up the material for realizing the 365 compositions. I’ve scheduled five years to actually work on the realization. I did a smaller variation on this idea back in 2000, Une Fleuve Maudit (UFM). UFM took five years to complete. I’m hoping the lessons learned then will allow P7 to move at a headier pace.
You may be reading way too much about P7 on here in the coming year. Or given my lack of regularity at posting here, maybe not…

In November, 23E Studios will be creating an etching in an edition of 23 with Caladium Editions, in Champaign, IL.
Caladium Editions found us through the website. They asked us to create a print, curious as to what an installation-driven art collaborative would create when given a blank page. Currently, Honyo is working on two illustrations for the print. He is integrating images from Erin, Phil, Libby and Jack. The owners of Caladium, Walter and Molly, will also be contributing to the image as members of 23E. The images are proper Penrose tiles (P3), following the rules of tenfold symmetry.

23E just sent off an initial proposal to an arts center in New England. The proposal is for us to design, install and co-manage a sculpture garden.
Um, yeah, audacious and ludicrous we are.
That proposal has absorbed the last several months of my life. It was deeply research intensive as it is a site-specific, community work. I now know more about the turn of the century and industrialization in America in the 19th century than I ever could have imagined was possible.

In August My Daddy Ate My Eyes had a great tour. Documentation of the 6 installations should be complete by month’s end.
On September 25th SleepWalks will launch the first of our monthly research performances.
My Special Porpoise expects to perform in Chicago in mid-November.
And I’m nearly finished mixing the Stowe-Pembleton Project’s third and fourth records.

my uncle called me on Wednesday and reminded me I had an apointment. My grandpa and I had tickets to go see his favorite ventriloquist perform in Sioux Falls, SD on friday night.

I totally forgot. I was in LA and my flight didn’t leave until monday the 11th.

I called the only person who could help… Classic Ryan Sargent Style.

He said he was taking his car in to have the passenger seat belt fixed at 8am on thursday, and as soon as he got the car back we could go. We left LA at around 5:30 pm western time on thursday, so that’s basically rush hour. At that point the goal was to meet my grandpa in Omaha, NE in 21 hours.

Once we reached Denver, CO I had Erin figure our time. We would have had to average 93 mph for the next six or seven hours, including time spent getting gas, to get to Omaha on time. The show was in Sioux Falls though. So I asked if I could just meet up there. An average of 93 miles per hour just didn’t seem possible, with construction, traffic and so on.

Ryan got me to the Sioux Falls arena during the 15 minute intermission between the opening and main act.

Which is to say our 25 hour LA to Sioux Falls nonstop road trip was a huge success.

The whole thing was totally insane.

Arthur drove me from the gallery to the jaguar dealer in hollywood to meet CRSS on thursaday afternoon around 3:30pm. He wished us luck. I think that’s what did it (oh that and gorilla spirit + chimp attitude).

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and the awesome name for the catalog in the form of an arcade game, the arcadalogue! what a wordsmith erin is. i also commend her for her fine choice of nickname for me, sudo. really it says it all. and note my fine stamp/temp-tattoo in the picture below (on me head!). that’s commitment! so really i love the whole arcade thing. i always wanted to build me a mame box into an arcade of my design. now jonny carson is doing just that! and jonny is very hip to the graphic-rich action games and all the professional bits like the joystick and big buttons. it’s just well done. so the arcadalogue was sort of an orphan all along. i’m not sure exactly how it came up because i don’t recall talking to lee about it. jonny says it was on the table since last winter but i can’t tell if it was an offshoot of the arcades or if fitting it into an arcade came along later. either way jonny had enough to do so lee asked if i had ideas about how to go about it. jonny pointed out that big hurdle was in making an elegant and rich interface that media saturated audiences expect. of course we’re all thinking about flash or a web site = too much code to produce in just a few days, at least with everything else going on. leep really wanted this to happen. it definitely fits with the idea of the project with all bits of data hanging out to dry but we didn’t want this to just be a blob of data with a plethora of tools to navigate through it. nor did we want an application that guides you through it. it needed to be randomly accessible. throw in that it could very well be the big ticket item and i was sold. from catch all tech helper and network guy (not to mention exec producer) i turn into a puzzle solver. we had to keep it clean and simple so i thought about a catch all type of media player that plays everything and could be customized (open source of course). but kaffeine and vlc didn’t display stuff like pdfs and spreadsheets. that was part of the mix. lee was happy to forgo those but i wasn’t satisfied. so i looked into kiosk mode for kde so that i might hide the fact that multiple applications were being used. it got better. turns out every single file type i’ve got to deal with there is a player/reader that can be embedded into konqueror, the kde browser. so we’re back to browser based but not a web site. and with a rich interface that feels like a data access tool (well, it is) rather than a multi-media application while being just as comfortable to use and pretty, i didn’t feel i was compromising anything! now about the gun…

there were only enough joysticks and buttons for the 3 arcades we were building. it was late to order more and besides, the joysticks didn’t necessarily map to mouse movements (could be done i guess). i had to find something else, and local. i probably spent more of my time on this part than anything else but it paid off. after initially looking for a trackball we can modify (still need external buttons) i found this cool 3D type large knob-like device that looked super slick, like a video editing jog-wheel. at the same time i was chasing down this old school arcade trackball really ripped out of an arcade (fry’s had it on their site). neither of these panned out. the 3D thing needed drivers (none for linux) and the arcade trackball was no longer available (update your site fry!). so i went to fry’s with lee anyway (checked that little computer store in the hood too) and there were a few smaller trackballs, pads, etc. we could rig up. but lee scored big when he took note of the gamer’s gun. we had to get it. gone was my idea of the click built-in feel of the ball, replaced by the kitsch of an icon. it’s just too cool. you move the gun and click to “shoot” the object you want to explore. i’ve got it working nicely. most everyone is giving it the thumbs up. i get so sick of seeing guns in movies (too easy) but this where it belongs. i’ll be jealous of the person who buys this piece. it will be a full archive of everything that went into the project all in a beautiful arcade enclosure, itself a work of art.

i got a lot other work done tonight like the projector station, the 3rd arcade computer (and set up lee with linux), some network improvements, no go on dynamic dns (don’t know what is up with that), tested projection (thanks, alex), tested sound, helped map out seating placement, poured on that spicy salsa verde, bumped all of lee’s camera data for him… very nice day. i’m cranking. everybody’s cranking.

tomorrow i get to show it off to angela when she arrives. she’s been watching the web cam. it was on me when the scaffold obstructed the room view and i get a flattering txt msg from angela. some txts went on and i blew her a kiss. i had to get back to it to clean up, blog, and get to bed. lee had to take over taping up the seating placement. i didn’t want to mess up david but we just couldn’t stay longer to do it tonight.

back at work, things are starting to take shape. Stel is installing software for an arcade/time-lapse/webcam. Erin Is making coffee and David just got here. Lee had David move his car to the free street parking… we get here early enough that thre isn’t much need to park in the paylot. Arthur showed me the street parking a few days ago, it’s only a few hundred feet from the lot. If we save enough money Lee said “we can buy fruits and vegetables” . I guess I pissed my friends off by having them come out to the galler, but then i didn’t have that much time to hang out. … Oh, Carson is here!