9th
I made a commercial for men’s jeans wear! You can hear the tail-end of Caleb Crain reading from a Melville essay at the beginning. Gratuitous.
This is an excerpted and expanded part of the video art project Takers. I take a beating in a lot of my work, which, at the time, always seems funny, but then during class presentation the whole piece congeals into a dirge of sorts with over-determinedly sad or mysterious musical interludes. In the first part of the movie, I throw up Christmas lights into a toilet bowl. I’m naked. It’s a very “graduate student” thing to do. My thinking was, “I really need to purge my fascination with LED Christmas lights. Why not do this through a sequence of humiliating pretension?” And so on.
I edited this in the Mac lab where all the undergrads are finishing up digital photo projects and talking about “buying cigarettes” and then “smoking” them, it’s like a thing young art students get a lot of mileage out of. I ate six York peppermint paddies and tried not to roll my eyes. I feel very old! The large styrofoam cauldron resting beside my elbow contains enough coffee to make me feel young again.
I am finished with my first year of graduate school. I shipped off my Liam Gillick essay—the most incoherent and unnecessary piece of scholarship I have ever written—this morning. The paper included three figures, one such takes up an entire page.
On the menu this evening: beer, chocolate cake, reviewing footage with Pavel.
