Patrick is to the Left of You

Definitions for Only Now

2012-01-03T15:02:00.000-08:00

To be read by this computer's speech setting.

Interface. Everything else is alien to you and to us, it is the Other. We only make use of the Other through the interface. The interface is the custom or system of engagement and the physical connection we make between our bodies and the Other. Everything else is an Other. We are self-conscious and this allows us to distinguish three things: ourself, the others, and the interface bridging the first two. This distinction alone, remains contrived.

Switches. The specific point of activation and, deactivation. Switches, are typically binary but should not always be limited to the positions we call on, or off. The in-between is usually the most vital, fertile place.

Timing. Despite heroic effort to lock a single moment into a confined and re-examinable fixture or record. The experience and perception of everything progresses. We are pulled through this experience and any attempt to freeze or immobilize that experience results in... illusion. Narrative continues, even if we re-experience some previous narrative, made into a record, by an Other, we still add our own perception of this particular now and this specific version of a moment to that previously constructed record. No record is universal, or totally repriseable, every new presentation is a version. Every bite of the same apple is different.

Placement. There is not a here, and that perception matters. Knowledge of difference and specific characteristics of one locale to another allows for a great amount of understanding and orchestration. Using placement can be a very interesting practice. Not caring about placement... is lazy.

Now turn speech off, and it will be the same but different... again.

Dead End vs. Not A Through Street

2012-01-02T00:54:00.000-08:00

The couch in our living room looks out a picture window onto a dead end street. At night the street light on the corner flickers out with an unwieldy randomness. It blinks out or just goes dark like power was cut and then twinkles back into orange glow on its own specific timetable. Sometimes when it starts to relight it suddenly quacks out mid resurrection. The light shutting down always catches the corner of my eye and turns my attention street ward. Other lights at night do this. Headlights of cars coming unexpectedly to the end of our short street, most figure out the terminalness of our road, still others drive all the way down and turn around in our driveway. The sign on the corner below the streetlight reads “Not A Through Street”

My brother lives on a dead-end, my sister and the two of us grew up on a dead-end street. We know what dead-end means. Everyone knows what dead-end means. It means “Not a through street.” It does not mean all the old people will die here someday and we don’t want to offend them by calling their street dead anything. But I think we can all agree Dead End gets the point across way better than “Not a through street” or even No Outlet. Its language, and the words we choose to use to communicate information can be strikingly important.

The light goes out and I know I will see headlights, this is the cause and effect of my street now. I remember the cause and effect of growing up on a dead-end street, I remember the cause and effect of being a kid who walked to school out a dead-end street. I was proud to walk, proud to not be on a bus. I believe I felt a freedom in walking. I still do. We build our identities on thousands of little things and few very big ideas of self. Identity becomes all of those thoughts you have of yourself when you look in the mirror or into a menu. Who am I, and what do I present, and what do I absorb?

I drink Bushmills whiskey when given the choice. I have my reasons and I don’t know that anyone really counts that in the evaluation of me as a person. But many people know the whiskey I prefer and consider it when inviting me out or over. As in, will this bar have something he likes to drink? That’s maybe a standard more than a data point on an identity chart of Patrick Melroy, but still I add it to my perception of self because I like it, I like thinking I have a level of consistency. I admire consistency. I rightly or wrongly associate consistency with durability and success. Strange than that I prefer the dynamic flexibility of walking over the rigid consistent bus schedule. I am also devoutly lazy, which results in underachievement and rationalizing. When I was young people would identify my potential, use it like a big old birthday hat at the chain restaurant that you wear while the waiters all sing to you and you try to pretend like this is somehow endearing instead just frightfully painfully to your ego. That’s how I always felt when someone would say, “You have so much potential.” Now at thirty-six it seems sad when someone tells me about my potential. I probably don’t have to explain that. But it feels like the egg timer on using that potential is running low or maybe dinged while I was in the shower.

Potential always felt like a dirty word, like a most improved award, something I received when I was eighteen from the Society of American Magicians #59. No one ever offered to help me with turning potential into achievement, that would be an excellent recipe card to pass out by the way. Its not enough to look at someone who impresses you and tell them they have potential. Push past that, give them more than just the compliment which they will add to their identity. Encouragement is lovely but guidance is gold. But the truth seems to be most of the time people who tell you about your potential have no ideas on how to activate it, otherwise they would say, “You have a lot of potential, I could use a person like you.”

We are ourselves. The idea we hold onto about who we are is very different from the ideas everyone else has about us. We strive to align our self-beliefs with the beliefs of people we meet and interact with have of us. We of course always expect their perception of us to bend to align with our identity, rather than our perceptions to be bent by how others see us. This comes into conflict when they tell us how they see us. Language again. We are bound by how we interpret statements and non-statements and we apply all of our CSI slash Law & Order SVU powers of conclusion to squeeze out ah-hah moments of smarter than thou. We have very big brains and we add conclusions and determinations to everything, we treat every new experience like a clue which will unlock the puzzle of self. Who do you think you are? I’m a kid from a dead-end, and the great thing about a dead-end street is whenever you leave home you at least know which way to head first.

We are specific people, we determine our own identity. We are stuck with genetics on many topics, hair, eyes, disposition toward pie, but we are distinctly available to controlling what we think about our hair or our pie. Like it or love it, you got what you got. I chose a dead-end street as an adult because among other reasons, it felt like the place I live. I enjoy the streetlight’s winking, it could send me into a diatribe about the lazy city but instead it makes my street specific and I like it.

I’ve chosen to abandon my potential, I am happy to hand off the title to some other clever apprentice. Mastery of one thing would seem enough, but how do you pick that one thing to master? In a world of infinite choices… well not infinite, I’m not a very good musician, minor case of the tone def. It’s not really important, just pick something for now and we can change it later. Just don’t let the world do the picking.

We will wake up tomorrow, we will continue this thing we started. I remember being younger and I know I will remember being the person I am now. I hope no-one tells me when I am seventy that I have a lot of potential. I hope that when I am seventy I am still interesting. I hope that I am interesting right now, because I have met a lot of boring people. I used to think it was just me not being able to access the particular side of them that makes them interesting. I imagined that everyone plays the starring role in their own individual film, their own private narrative where they fight all the battles and the camera is always turned on them. The people coming and going from their lives are characters with roles they play and catch phrases. Each person is the star of the story of themselves.

However I think I might have been giving a little more to their individual self reflection than they were. I worry that many people might not know they have access to their script, to their novel, to their plot line, to their story arc, they do, you do even. You can turn your street into an epic location. Just under the street lamp, as it flickers out you have the briefest amount of darkness to get that shopping cart into the back of your truck so you can take it to your studio and use it for moving tools around… but that’s probably just me trying to write your narrative rather than mine or vice versa. It’s the lazy side of me wanting to live as you rather than the effort it would take to be me. It’s why people are always giving you advice, it’s easier to give advice than just enjoying being the star of your own life. Which brings me to the end of this batch of useless advice.

I picked artist, it’s working out fine thanks.

I hate new year’s eve.

2011-12-31T18:43:00.001-08:00

We as creatures occupy space. We take up a certain amount of space. How much space do we inhabit? We inhabit, we exist, what are we doing at any given moment as we occupy space? How can we distinguish the event of being in any one place or another?

I have a garage. In that garage is some stuff. What is that stuff, and more importantly what is that stuff to me? Ownership is a tricky contract. I created a lot of it, or if we are to be more specific I reorganized some objects I purchased into more specific composed combinations of objects. I made some art. My garage is full of boxes of trinkets I value and sculptures I built. Two friends are storing their stuff as well. Stuff they don’t need while they live on a boat. I have a half dozen bikes, I can call them mine as I maintain them and I believe maintenance grants a distinct amount of ownership. But it’s really all just stuff. Stuff I couldn’t really list in any accurate document. And as I write this, the boat people appeared and are going to look through their stuff for something they need for the new year.

I hate New Year’s Eve as an event. Which of course makes me old, but I do, I guess I always have. I have had my fair share of decent nights on December 31, any-year-here. Mostly spent at the Red Fox bar in Portland Oregon, but this year I couldn’t stand the idea of the cold. Though I will miss the fish toss for the first time in a while.
But all this damn stuff. I have a studio on campus, I have a studio off campus in Goleta near the airport. I have a garage and an apartment, they are all full of stuff. I moved here with a small trailer and a pick-up bed full of stuff. Not even a long bed, a six foot four inch blue box of stuff. In three years I have built up a stupid amount of stuff. Now I feel like I am wearing a psychic velcro suit and all this stuff is stuck to every angle of my imagination weighting it down. Now that said I have a very decent egg pan and a very decent coffee cup and a nice kettle and French press. So if I have those things and can tolerate their continued presence in my life than surely I can tolerate that box of useless trinkets from ten years ago in the garage.

Space is a funny strange and bizarre way to define and comprehend territory. As animals we have our territories, in our primal sense we have our sleeping places and our bathing places and our eating grounds and I guess we also identify hunting grounds. But to really feel an ownership over a space seems slightly or greatly absurd. We rent this five hundred square feet of building which we call out apartment. But its not ours, its not even theirs. It’s just a space I have a key to. But I watched a guy named Bobby from Santa Barbara Locksmith open my front door for me in a couple seconds. Despite the fact that I asked him to do it, the act set me on edge a bit as I had known it was easy to pick locks but really, seconds.

So here I have this space, that’s not mine, and a bunch of stuff that I can’t really remember or see in my head and all this stuff that feels… well it just feels like a lot of responsibility, like I keep imagining having to put it all in boxes. Strange to look in a closet for a band-aide and think how everything in the closet is just debris. All this stuff that I don’t use the way I use my coffee cup. We bought a bunch of food the other day and carried it all up our front stairs and Sam packed it into the cupboards and fridge, two more closets really. And as we did this I thought we will have to carry all of this back out of here. All the packaging, all the bulk of the food will have to leave the apartment in one form or another. So what is all this stuff cluttering up my mind? Every year I come to this night, which of course is just a random day in the revolution of the planet. Ask Samoa they skipped Friday this year in order to get into a new time zone. They just skipped a day, so I know this day is really just all of us agreeing to imagine it as something important, well my imagination is occupied right now and I can’t imagine this being a night I care about. But everyone else does so I have to go out with them or curmudge on my own, its up to me. The boat people have gone off to buy tickets for a dance party that they will try to force me to go to, and I probably will, because the one thing I know about dancing is; it generates exactly zero stuff and I can do it in any space regardless if I own the space or not.

Hey New Year’s Eve… pound sand!!!!

Cookies

2011-11-12T17:10:00.001-08:00

Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe

Ingredients:

2.25 cups flour

2 eggs

.75 cup sugar

.75 cup brown sugar

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda

2 sticks salted butter

1 bag chocolate chips

Vanilla Extract

Before you leave for work place two sticks of butter on a small plate in the kitchen. After work turn your oven to 375 degrees and place an empty cookie sheet on the center rack. Unwrap Butter and place in mixing bowl add 3/4 cup granulated sugar and 3/4 cup packed brown sugar. Mix sugar into butter with a power mixer, crack two eggs into a measuring cup, add two cap fulls of vanilla extract. Pour this into the sugar/butter mix. Add 1 tsp of table salt and 1 tsp of baking soda and mix some more. Add 2 cups of flour, then add a smidge more. Depending on how firm you like your cookies. Mix until the mix looks like dough instead. Add a bag of chocolate chips, mix with a wood spoon at this point, if some nut comes near your dough with an electric mixer after you pour the chips in, you break his arm, okay. At this point its a good idea to taste the dough with a tablespoon. Make sure you aren't afraid of raw egg sickness before you do this. Pull the heated cookie sheet from the oven (use a mitt) and place a sheet of baking parchment on it. Scoop the dough on to the sheet in small clumps using the scoop your brother got for you. Sample every sixth scoop for quality control. Bake cookies for 9 to 11 minutes depending on if your oven is a liar or not. Let cookies cool on tray for two minutes then move onto the rack then move to a gallon zip lock before your partner gets home and finds them, hide on top of fridge behind cereal boxes.

In Defense of Artists

2011-11-07T22:28:00.000-08:00

Smart people always thrill me, I cherish deeply the endless conversation. Endless conversations start when you aren't trying to start one, and they continue past any reasonable stopping point. I began one with Arnold Kemp a few years ago. I met Arnold when he was eating lunch in the middle of a gallery where his show was being installed, he is a very big deal. He had curated my collaborator Heather May Redetzke and I into a show. He was the type of pro who can make you feel a little anxious about your work just by asking what kind of art you make. As if the answer will wilt like a flower in the bright light of his observation. I think he was eating Chinese take out. Three years later he was standing next to my brother talking during my home town 4th of July parade. This juxtaposition of the artist Arnold Kemp is not unusual once you know him, this is exactly the kind of method he applies to other people's madness. Large gaps rest between each segment of our conversation, sometimes lasting a couple hours sometimes lasting a month. The other day I was driving through Berkley California, not a place either of us frequent, and I texted Arnold with a question, and moments later he was yelling at the open window of my rental car. You can rarely predict these moments, like waves rolling into the shore, you can just paddle into them and hope to stretch the ride as long as possible until the next set. This of course is the standard form of friendship, everyone has friends who exist like this, people you don't have to spend time getting caught up with, you just pick up where you left off. I have dozens of friends I haven't seen in years who I still assume are just stewing over the last question I asked them. Patrick Maxwell is one. He will show back up sometime soon and we will pick up on that conversation we were having about the future and handmade wooden boats.

Dick Hebdige sat on the other side of a table next to the biggest ocean on the planet and casually tossed an intellectual ax through my carefully stacked woodpile of logic. Dick is a professor at UCSB and a writer of the first order, and he really knows how to dance. What Dick said (and I am sure he will deny it later) was that "Art is not a part of culture, art does not have a purpose or a function, it does not serve, art is... art!" He learned to speak in Britain so he says it with a much better panache' than I can write it, but this broke me because I have spent years developing my reasons for art. I have always felt the need to refine and hone my vocabulary around why art is important. I provide clear and concise evaluations of the meaningfulness and need for art in our contemporary society. I challenge the myths of the broke bohemian artist living in a flop house cutting off lobes. I break down the obvious and silly evidence which exists in plain site. I describe how everything man-made, everything built, started as an imagination, as an abstract idea, a thought no more real than a cat's name. How if not for the artist, surely, culture would consist of gray everything and bland gravy for each meal. I proffered that the artist is the sole keeper of the best parts of life, and if the world restricts or bars the artist or the art, then society will cease and we may as well all start calling ourselves by numbers.

It hadn't occurred to me that art needs me as a defender about as much as a tree needs a beaver. I was just defining the undefinable, trying to put up a fence around a cloud. I thought I was being clever when I could bridge the gap and explain art to someone, anyone. I was really only explaining it to myself and trying to justify my choices.

The curse of growing up in a small town means rarely fitting in and often strays into awkward kid territory. I used to like to roll down the hill behind my house, cross the highway and run head long through tunnels in the blackberry bushes down the old gravel trail into the woods and off the embankment into that swimming hole at the elbow of Gee Creek at the east end of Abrams Park. Then I would follow it all the way back up. Walking, wading and plunging through the mud and clay I slogged a path against the flow of water. In winter it was deep, in the spring it was a bright run-off of cold and crisp and ball shrinking chill. Gee creek is a little river that I felt I could master, it pales compared to the Columbia that it eventually meets up with out near the Ridgefield Wildlife Refuge. I spent endless days dragging up and down that creek, pretending, imagining, growing and dreaming. I never had to explain to anyone why I liked playing in that creek. I find myself bored by the idea of trying to convince people about anything, I talk all day everyday, to classes of students, I talk to everyone, non-stop. Hours and hours of convincing, hours of transmitting my opinions, my expertise, my thoughts. I like listening but it always causes me to think of more to say. I promise I am practicing listening. But in all that time, it occurs to me that my convincing is wasted. You shouldn't have to convince people to go play in a creek, that's just common sense. If you have a creek that is. It is even more assinign to convince someone that I make art for a reason. I don't. I've never had a reason and that may be scary to some, but so are creeks.

If you would like to have a conversation about this or any topic on this blog please set up an appointment for a conversation with Patrick Melroy at the UPPUR BUNK

The Wedding of Cappy & Nikki

2011-10-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

Cappy & Nikki

October 15th 2011

Who gives this woman to be married? (Her father in full Marine dress blues did.)

Please be seated.

Welcome to the wedding of my friends Nikki & Cappy. Thank you all for traveling so far to get here. I am Patrick Melroy and these two people have asked me to stand with them on this amazing day. This is a beautiful setting and it is wonderful for Nikki and Cappy’s families to create such an amazing event. Especially the Strategic Wedding planning by Jim who may have a big future in the wedding war planning. It is every father's dream to provide the perfect wedding for his daughter, Sir, mission accomplished.

I agreed to be their officiant because I wanted the best seat in the house and I got it. They have asked all of you here today because like most things in their lives it feels better when they can share it with people who know them and love them. You are those people. This is the kind of moment you save up for, the kind of day that no matter how much you imagine it, no matter how many times you pictured it, the real thing is even sweeter and more magnificent.

This couple is honestly magnificent, they are beyond special and ridiculously good looking. This will not however be one of those fairytale romances. This is more of a epic novel slash reality show type romances. Think the Amazing Race meets Moby Dick. Nikki is convinced she knows where to find the great white whale and Cappy is listening patiently while cleaning Napoleons eye buggers away.

In a few short moments the two of you will be married. You will never again be the people you woke up as this morning. From this moment forward you will be new and different and wonderful. I envy the opportunity you will both have to grow together into your old age. You are going to make fantastic old people. You already know each other better and differently than everyone else. Being married will be the greatest adventure. My grandmother had good advice about becoming a successful married couple, she said “when you asked really old married couples who had succeeded at making a real meaningful life together, what the secret was, they always said, “”well its easy, find someone who you love a lot, (a lot a lot), and never let the other person love you harder than you love them, then you create a love surplus.

Spend everyday in love with this person. Give them everything you have, save nothing for yourself, hide nothing, if you are happy share it, if you are sad share it, if you are mad let them have that too, because if you go through everything good and bad holding it in, thinking you are protecting your lover from how you feel, you are really only protecting yourself from their love. Do not fear letting your lover in, they will not think you are a monster, they will cherish the trust. There will be no part of your feelings that the other person can reject you for, the only rejection is in not trusting them to love you unconditionally. Likewise when they give you their trust, know what to do with it. Be patient and listen and try not to exaggerate either of your fears. Fear has no place in your marriage, and the more you push it out, the more you will have room for trust, and love and admiration, and hope, and laughter. Because we do not have enough time in this world to squander it on being afraid.

The two of you have an unique opportunity, which comes along so rarely, you’ve been through the bad times, you survived. You saw the lows and here you both still stand. You lasted through every storm, you stood up against every test. I have witnessed some of these storms and what always kept them going was a deep love and respect. You took every nasty horrible thing the world could throw at you, you made decisions to save each other when each of you needed saving. That may have felt like it cost you a high price, but I assure you… and listen here… it was worth it!

Your marriage is worth it, you are worth it, I am standing here because you asked me to, I would do absolutely anything for the two of you, so would all of these people sitting behind you, so would each of these well dressed Bridesmaids and Groomsmen. None of us is here for the free food, or the dancing, we are here for you. You made this happen, not to fulfill some childhood desire to win a wedding contest, but because it is important to both of you to join forces and build a family. Thank you for letting all of us be here for the start of this part of one of the greatest stories of all time. The story of how the two of you stood at the edge, right here, where the land runs into the sea and joined hands and declared to each other that this is it, and there will never be anything more important than how you feel about each other.

This wedding is happening because these two people are stronger than most. This is not a one sided relationship, there is not one more lucky than the other. They are strong because they are together. Even when they decided to use the entire continental United States in the same way other couples might live across town from each other, they were together. There commitment to each other was like a law of physics, unbreakable and obvious. The challenges were never bigger than the two of them together. They have always been able to beat any struggle, it may have taken a loud voice or a quiet patience waiting out the frustration. It may have taken a big gesture to prove the strength of their relationship, but every time they made it work. You wouldn’t think picking out colors of napkins or paper envelopes could be so tough, but when one person is an artist and the other person is accustomed to performing precise oral surgery, well then these decisions start to feel like congress trying to agree on lunch. But each time, the problem got solved, each time they got the job done.

I have learned from these two people. I hope to keep learning from them for a long time. I hope to learn how not to give up, how to laugh when you take a hit and just step back into the fight and stay until the fighting stops and the loving begins.

These two people have come to this spot to make it official, they have invited you here to bare witness to their marriage, they will continue to provide happiness to all of us for years.

Relationships start in a variety of ways but Marriages begin in places like this. These two people began this process and have worked hard to make this day real. Not just in the planning and organizing and ordering, but in the real mental preparation to become a family. The investigation of another person on this level is a delicate matter. Building a life together, truly together, remains one of the great undertakings of contemporary life. Each of you succeeded in finding a partner who makes you happy. That should never be underestimated. Happiness can seem fleeting and fragile, but it is made infinetly more stable when your happiness resides in the person you wake up next to each morning.

(I skipped this part, because I felt it was too informal) In the hundreds of hours of pre-nuptial counseling I did with these two, AKA greasy breakfast and unhealthy tacos by the beach, I learned that they were truly meant for each other. I have watched them function as a team, and like a team they understand that not everyone has the same role. I have also seen them sacrifice for each other in ways which would make other lesser couples look silly. But on these two when they go out of their way to provide for one another, it just comes across as honest and reasonable. Cappy is a different person than Nikki. They are not two boring peas in a boring pod just hanging around, they have drive to accomplish specific individual goals. That drive will allow them to never stagnate.

In the world of improv and Jazz the number one rule is never stop playing and never say no. It is far better to respond, I don’t know how we can make a peeing buffalo but I am happy to help you try, than to live in a world where there are no giant bison scared of people yelling. (Edited this out on the spot, as it felt like I was losing the rhythm)

Trying to define either of these people with one word seems ludicris Nikki is not just a artist. She is one of the most gifted teachers I have ever seen. Cappy is not merely a Tooth Doctor. His thoughtfulness extends to ideas of business and physical exertion. I have struggled to drive up the same hills he has ridden a bike up. They both know how to observe every situation and distill the participants and strengths and weaknesses down into a useful set of pshhhsh……I could have made that!!

The only person I could imagine who could accept unconditionally the unsure life of the artist is Cappy and the person I could imagine who would take a dentist’s practice tools and create sculptures is Nikki.

SO I guess the completely unsurprising result is their marriage. Because it is obvious to everyone here, they are the perfect parents for a French BullDog with a snoring problem.

Unity forever
If anyone can show just cause why these two should not be wed, then you are crazy and should get your head examined, besides no-one is really asking you so there!
(this part got dropped at the last second)

Unity Tree: Explain
Relationships will only grow strong when rooted in a fertile supportive ground, much like trees, they can grow full and powerful, they can produce nourishing fruit, but only when they grow in good soil with deep roots. To illustrate this Nikki’s mother Remy and Cappy’s mother Ellen will each add a new batch of soil to this small tree. This is a Bessie Tree which produces tiny peaches, this tree was grown form a cutting which Ellen started from her Grandmother’s tree, Louise Overmund's tree will continue feeding generations of grandchildren. Nikki and Cappy’s job now is to find some grandchildren.

(Both mothers did an excellent job adding the soil and there were a few laughs as Nikki and Cappy dealt with patting the soil down. Later I sent the tree back on a flat bed trailer covered with hay. I think the tree made it home with them.)

The vows:
I would like everyone here to do more than just witness this wedding. I am placing a task upon you, it will remain your responsibility to watch over this marriage. You as their friends and family must stand behind them, give them strength when they need it. Give them everything they need, and take from them what they give to you. Show them kindness and protection. Guard them from evil and treat sacred what they have created in each other. Please answer this next question together in one voice with one loud “WE DO” Will you the people most important to this couple, watch over them, guide them, and keep them safe…..?

And now Napoleon's big moment. (He spent most of the ceremony staring at the bay showing his hind to the crowd. Remy had tied the rings onto Napoleon's collar so they wouldn't get lost, the knot was impossible for me to undo so I broke the string and held the rings over my head to show the crowd. Then I handed the opposite ring to each person.)

Nikki, look at this man and repeat after me. Cappy I promise it all, I will never quit, I will be your wife today and for every day after. I give you this ring as a symbol of my love. Place the ring on his finger.

Cappy face this woman, and repeat after me. Nikki I choose you to be my wife. I will never quit, I will be your husband today and for every day after. I give you this ring as a symbol of my love. Place the ring on her finger.

Turn and face me. Do you John Carter Sinclair take this woman to be your wife to have and to hold from this day forward? He Did.

Do you Kristin Nicole Leone take this man to be your husband to have and to hold from this day forward? She did.

I pronounce you Husband and Wife.

Cappy, for the first time ever, kiss your wife.

Ladies and gentlemen please rise with me and welcome a very new thing

It is my great honor to introduce to you Dr and Mrs. Sinclair

Presided over by The Reverend Patrick D Melroy

Two Hundred Things I am Waiting to Write

2011-08-28T22:18:00.000-07:00

So often I listen while I talk to the person I am speaking at say nothing. I realize so often, almost in horror, that they have just been looking at me and listening for beyond my turn. They are listening like what I am saying is working. I often then apologize and thank them for letting me practice a class lecture on them. Everything I say sounds like the early framework to some contemporary culture lecture that no one has asked me to give. My audience small and fierce and kind listens away giving me room on the dance floor of our conversation to make some really outlandish gestures or worse to back myself into the table holding the punchbowl, sending the moment cascading onto the gym floor like spiked punch. Meaning a wasted moment when I should have been dancing with my partner instead of trying to impress them with my 1985 Breakin' Electric Boogaloo moves.

Luckily I catch myself just before their eyes glaze over and they start thinking about the contents of their freezers at home while simultaneously crossing my name off their list of friends to invite to speak at their wedding. My people, how great it is that you listen to any of it, you are strong and good looking. Every day I lose a hundred ideas while reading other people's content.

Then in flashes of conversation I rattle off one I have been working on in my head for far too long and my listener looks at me with this kinda puzzled look, and asks, "where did you read that?" and I know in those moments my failure to write enough.
So here are some of the two hundred ideas I need to get out.

In the Future Apps will replace the music industry and rock concerts will hold the status of the Symphony.
Computers are going to be made of people not the other way round.
Art is already so ingrained in our lives we can't see it.
Painting pictures is still important because we still like it and it’s still hard to do, like walking on a tightrope.
There should be a town somewhere in America where people live like they are in a fantasy novel about elves and goblins and things, only they still have stoves and refrigerators.
I am still scared of the dark.
Education should be treated like the answer.
Teachers should have a philosophy and trust themselves.

Okay so that shouldn't take more than a weekend to get into book form. Thanks for not talking while I said all of that, a.k.a. listening.

Double Shot and Some Old

2011-07-14T17:34:00.001-07:00

I had a plan for this phase of my life but it seems the person who wrote that plan may not be the guy who made it through to this day. I am planning my classes for the fall. Dramatic only to me, exciting perhaps on a layer I hadn't anticipated. Photo and sculpture, two strategies diverse and specific and open.

In the fall of 2002 I started art college, the instructors with whom I felt carried the most clout, were the same age as I am today. I remember thinking they were the right age for teaching. I remember thinking how knowledgeable they were. I anticipate fronting that same confidence in my classroom. I will lecture to 90 photo students and 15 sculpture kids on different days and different topics.

Tonight they are forcing drinks into me, tomorrow they want to stand around and cook things and tell me congrats on my retirement from my early thirties and my graduation into the "Countdown to 40 Club" I am sure it will be lovely, I have a history of themed birthdays and full out pourings of thrill into July 14th. Today has been just the right amount of calm, it always feels like I am some undercover agent on a mission on my birthday. Like I have a fancy secret, and no-one knows they should treat me really nice because I just got older all of a suddener! I also keep expecting to be handed something soft and creamy and flaming, but so far I've only seen some eggs Florentine and two fish tacos, neither of them ablaze, sadly, but Sam made the day good.

When I was a child I would spend every birthday in the sun, brown and blackening my hide, bleaching and washing out my hair color until they had to drag me inside at night. Two more coffees and maybe I will be vibrating with the enthusiasm of the six year old who took his own training wheels off with the big crescent wrench and then mounted his steel machine and careened full speed and cackling like the bi-plane dare devil wing walking through a burning building down the driveway and through the front yard over the hill and into the backyard just feet from the edge of the ridge above the rushing traffic below. We almost lost a lawnmower over that hill, driver and all just a few days ago.

If you are looking across the room right now at that young son and thinking about his potential, double it, try to imagine him traveling the world and expanding his imagination into space, try to imagine him orbiting the planet, imagine him exploring the wreck of the Titanic in his homemade submarine. His dreams are limited only by his imagination but it starts with your ability to imagine he can, I was given that gift on each and every birthday. I was given the gift of faith in me, the gift of naivety, I didn't know how big to grow or how far away to wonder. But I always knew and still know the foundation that I built this man on, I am who I wanted to be, I am in the place that makes the most sense, I am still expanding and still taking off training wheels, cause there comes a time to risk the scrape on the knee and throw yourself into gravity, eyes open, screaming at the top of your lungs blazing a path straight into the sun.

Happy Birthday to me, and happy birthday to you, go ahead use mine it's big enough.

Acknowledgements

2011-05-26T22:07:00.000-07:00

As I release bits of my thesis here, I thought I would put up the acknowledgements page, and while this doesn't remotely cover everyone who made my run at an MFA possible I thought it would be good to put it up in a place people might actually read it.

Acknowledgements

I would like to deeply thank the University of California in Santa Barbara’s Department of Art, for selecting me as a candidate in their Master of Fine Arts program. I will treasure the time I have spent on the campus and in the studios for the rest of my life. I am grateful to the faculty and staff for their generosity and willingness to exchange knowledge and conversation. I am particularly grateful to the following: Diego, Michael, Ken, Trela, Carol, Yumi, Joel, Troy, and Fire Marshall Joe.

I would also like to make an effort to extend my never ending gratitude to my peers in the program, including but not limited to: Nikki, Katy, Daniela, Shane, Karen, Bessie, Tim, Raffi, Julian, and Napoleon.
During my time at UCSB I taught some very committed and talented students, they should know I learned more from them than they did from me. I can not communicate the joy I took in being your instructor.

My faculty are kind and forgiving and I aspire to their professionalism, particularly, Colin, Richard, Jane, Laurel, Harry, Dick, Graham, Gary, Kim, Bob, and Terrence.

I wish also to pay gratitude to the friends in and outside the department, Nick, Courtney, Bill, Jenny, and anyone else whom I forced to read this paper.
It should also be noted that my family made this possible and I am totally and completely in love with them for helping me be what I have always wanted to be, an artist. Mom, Kelly, Abby, and their families, I will never be able to give you what you have given me, but I will try for the rest of my life.

Samantha Fretwell is one of the finest artists I have ever had the privilege to work next to, she made me a better artist and I know in my core what I owe her.

Especially important was all of the people who I just don't have room to name, people who in minor moments kept me together and on track, people who reached out when I needed them most, if you are reading this now, you can count yourself among the loved ones. Know that if I missed you it would be in your interest to take me to lunch and make me feel guilty about it, I can't wait to see you and I am buying.

Lastly I risked all of this because one man taught me how to risk, how to work harder than the rest, how to show up and finish the job, even when you don’t want to, even when you don’t think you can, finishing the job and getting on to the next job. Merlin Hawkins was big for his age, and I hope this makes him proud, because despite this degree, my greatest honor has always been being the big man’s grandson. Thank you doesn’t cut it, but you get the idea

Practice Phyl.

2011-05-11T21:22:00.000-07:00

Patrick Melroy: Teaching Philosophy

Art education in America today is vital and threatened, creative problem solving and dynamic innovation will rule the future and my intention is to prepare the students I work with for the opportunities they will face outside of academia.

While at UCSB I have been lucky to assist in the teaching of such a wide variety of classes. I believe my skills in the practices of photo, sculpture, digital media, theory, and my long time love drawing and painting make me a valuable and flexible instructor, one who is comfortable under the most diverse of circumstances.

The classroom is a platform and venue for exploration and discovery. There is nothing like the confluence of twenty energetic and enthusiastic young minds working to develop their inner thoughts into physical manifestations. The instructors role is to guide them away from their own negative impulses and instead keep them tethered to the inevitable success of their most ambitious plans. The environment of the art classroom provides brilliant unique opportunities rarely present in much of contemporary life. The art students capacity for growth and expansion are limitless, the revelation possible for their identity and self-awareness is magnificent and truly a thing to behold.

Providing a positive safe peer environment for their growth is paramount. The creative mind is dynamic and endlessly elastic in its abilities to absorb and innovate. The teaching done inside of an art classroom is so often elemental and simply connects with the student’s most inner sense of intuition and logic. Their ideas are embraced and nurtured in a manner unlike anywhere else in contemporary life. The imagined can become real in brief quick succession. My experiences inside of academia have run the gauntlet from industrial community college in rural Washington to the urban campus of the private art college and then to the massiveness of the university campus. I have participated in classes of three hundred and of five. I am comfortable communicating instruction to very small groups and very large organizations. The university as a setting for making art is so rich in inspiration and resource. The opportunity to involve the larger university community in a student’s art practice seems obvious and inevitable. There is a difference in working at UCSB from other places and those differences should be turned into benefits for our students.

I have spent years developing my own skill sets from digital technology and innovations in contemporary image making, to the historical crafts of carpentry and metal-working. I am most comfortable when instructing a person new to a skill set or technical practice. I learned for years (which continues still) from masters, eighty-year-old magicians with arthritic hands, weathered cabinet builders and generous quilters, I learned to listen and practice and make mistakes and then ask for more help. I try to always pass on to my students the value in asking for help and the benefits in making mistakes. Too often we want to be good at a task we are trying for the first time, contemporary commercial culture desperately wants to sell new users on this premise of instant expertise, however my experience has taught me that the more practice anything takes the more gratification you can glean from the success of accomplishing that task.

Learning never ends, no single subject can be so mastered as to never develop further. I believe in research, both through text and practice. I believe completely that my skills are ripe for transmission to others, but those skills are ever evolving, and never are they advancing faster than when I am faced with communicating them to another person. From art theory to art appreciation to art execution, I am constantly thrilled when I can divine a new method of articulation for my own understanding. My own understandings are safe when they remain internal, but when they are challenged externally by a class of bright investigative minds, that is the moment of real codification, when I have to truly be able to support my thoughts or change them in light of new input.

The privilege of teaching art is possibly the best part of my day. I find no burden in the lively engagement between myself and students on the subject of art. My evaluations often note a significant amount of enthusiasm for the subject, this is never forced. I am completely sincere in my enthusiasm for my classes. I mucked out the horse stalls in my youth, I dug the ditch for the sewer line, I carried sheet after sheet of plywood up the ladder, I know what I have in the classroom and it is one of my most treasured experiences and I anticipate continuing the practice of setting fires in the minds of artists through teaching for the rest of my life.

Thesis Opening

2011-05-09T14:35:00.000-07:00

Leave Everything On the Floor

We start with a big room full of people. These people do not yet know each other. The hope exists for that to be changed by their experience with the art and artists throughout the course of the event. I will refer to these people as strangers, viewers, participants and even as the audience. In the room we also find art, or “the” art or “an” art. The audience has traveled to this place, making a conscious effort to be in this specific place at this predestine time, to see the residue of artists making gestures. The audience brings the formula of intention plus artist together into one new concoction. Their perception, their bias, brings the art to its natural confluence. The audience makes the moment, this allows the artist to achieve satisfaction in the piece. This moment when the art meets the audience is when the piece exists for the first time totally outside the mind of the creator. Before the show, before the display, the piece was captive inside doubt and unknowing. The reactions by the audience remains the satisfaction sought by the artist. The reaction by the audience gives the artist the impetus to return to the place of presentation. Thus inspiring the maintenance of an artistic practice.

This thesis will focus on the sources of my aesthetics, the themes behind my stories and the connections I seek to build with my audience through my creative practice. I will characterize the manner to which I am able to build those connections. I will also cover the actual mechanics and physical exercises which comprise the bulk of my art making. These two factions of theory and practice, are the two sides of my art coin, flipping back and forth, each side landing face up consistently fifty percent of the time. The work I make is art, which seems the only sensible thing to do. Which is to say, this is the time in which this seems like a good idea. My art making is a conversation, often I use metaphors, symbols, codes, hidden messages, overt gestures, and lies to communicate an outward statement. I make art to please the crowd, the trick is understanding the crowd and arriving in the right place at the right time.

Praxis: Imagination Work

Idea Engine

The control and authorship of each project is through aesthetic decisions of materials, location and timing. Art seems most exciting in the first stages of the development of the idea. The idea is pinnacle, the details that follow leading up to execution land on a scale from challenging to nerve racking. However the moments at the beginning, when the raw imagination begins to flow, those are the best moments of the entire art process. The potential lays split open like a universe waiting to be explored, discovered, and harnessed. Imagination functions in such a slippery ephemeral place in the frontal lobe of the brain that it seems impossible to control it and ring valuable useable ideas from its nefarious formless energy. The concept of controlling imagination and pushing it into the places it is needed can seem frightening. I believe ideas can be tuned and groomed, and that the origin of an idea can be intentionally seeded, cultivated, and grown, and harvested, sometimes in seconds. The brain is a challenging tool to wield, but when the imagination is pressured in the most constructive manner and allowed to work inside a prescribed framework, it becomes an Idea Engine.

Engines function as power supplies for larger systems. Building a practice of an Idea Engine is similar to building a physical engine. Each part inside of a mechanical engine functions with different hyper-specific roles. The spark plugs make the fire and the radiator cools the heating of the block, and while they rely on each other to perform (thus maintaining the system), each element can only function inside the specific parameters of its design, thus preventing a piston from doing the job of the fuel line. The Idea Engine functions as an intellectual simulation of the mechanical. It divides idea generation into compartments, which are charged with unique tasks. These compartments once filled can lay out the blueprint of an idea giving way to a fully formed project.

Intuitive inspiration is fantastically exciting but also dramatically unreliable for a contemporary art practice, one that involves deadlines and grant restrictions. Submerging oneself inside an atmosphere conducive to creation is also a strong strategy to use when developing art ideas, just the right hat at just the right table with just right totems spread about. However, relying on a place or mindset has often proved insufficient or chaotic and allows for too many tangential behaviors. My process needs to be an organized process, hence the output must fit into an organized request. Generating art for the contemporary experience requires certain parameters, which cannot usually be serviced by the concept of the artist generating ideas outside of a request for proposal. The contemporary artist functioning inside the institution, or at the service of an institution or granting body, must generate and execute their ideas at the pace and on the schedule of the institution. That involvement of such a schedule mandates that the artist respond with a system, which can match or beat the constraints applied.

The Idea Engine as a practice works by establishing clean rules and strategies for the generation of ideas. The process involves placing mechanisms into an ordered system which when activated can lead to innovation. The basic steps to running an Idea Engine are to isolate the needs of a project through simple questions and answers. The three first questions establish so much. Who is your audience? What do you want to convey to them? How are you going to do it? The answers to these three questions allow an artist to decide where to begin. The engine becomes more active as questions emerge based on the answers to the first three. Placing categories into the problem allows one to keep the development of the idea in a manageable form. Categories of the engine are often similar for most projects: budget, location, physical constraints and timeline. Inserting these segments into the traditionally known “brainstorming” portion of idea generation may seem odd, like placing the cart ahead of the horse. But with limited time and resources, it is very advantageous to have a starting framework, which allows the artist to populate fields in a template, thus placing the idea on a track, which can be run until the idea becomes feasible or void. The Idea Engine allows for creativity to be harnessed and kept on focus. Tangents can destroy a creative process and leave an artist blocked. It has been my practice to develop ideas through this system of grinding through the gears of the Idea Engine’s transmission, accelerating up to the execution of the project. It works even more aggressively when operated by a group of creatives, each tasked with a separate area of specialization, from message to aesthetics, or construction to audience reception. Each member functions to accommodate the engine as a whole and the project as outcome.

The output of the engine can be loaded into a searchable database. Several years ago I had a database constructed which could function to receive the output of this process. Such a database can break a project into segments which can allow the user to input raw ideas into several standard categories represented by fields. The database accommodates the storage of materials lists, resource vendors, research of topics and similar previous work as well as hundreds of other fields. The primary strength of this database is the ability to work on speculative projects that can be stored and retrieved when proposals become opportune. The ideas can remain in the database like an arsenal until a project or audience emerges which is in need of an idea, allowing the artist to pull the idea back out and reformat it to fit the current call for proposal.

The database relies on the answers to the original questions. In the original input of the idea into the database, the ideas are tagged with keywords that are generated from the answers of the questions asked during the Idea Engine process. The artist, for instance, can search all projects for ideas appropriate to a senior-aged audience. Obviously this allows the artist to search all projects in a certain genre or of a certain material or theme, allowing for rapid development of the idea during a tight deadline of a proposal process or in the event of a last minute change of direction brought on by institution restriction or the editorial oversight of a committee. The database was named The Book of A Thousand Ideas by its programmers and it serves as the archive of the activities the Idea Engine produce.

The human polish: Playground Equipment and The Nose of the Admiral

2011-04-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

This section got pretty carved up in the newest draft. So you can treat this like the director's cut of the tesis.

The human polish: Playground Equipment and The Nose of the Admiral

In the summer of 2003, I was traveling home down a back road, avoiding the freeways, seeking a slower windows down type of pace on a sunny summer afternoon. I drove up Hazel Dell Avenue headed north toward my home town some ten miles further on. I crested a hill and came up even to a stop sign next to the Hazel Dell Elementary School, which was in the process of being demolished. On that day the playground was being scraped away. The practice of the day was to build the new elementary school on the playgrounds of the old school while the older building continued to function. This practice allows students to stay in a functioning facility on the same grounds for as long as possible. The play area is sacrificed but avoids students being bused to a temporary facility. I pulled over and parked, as is my practice when faced with an unusual sight. What had drawn my attention was a massive pile of steel playground equipment heaped in one corner, leaning on the fence at the edge of the playground. I have a long and storied history of spending time at public schools after hours.

Growing up one of three children of a single schoolteacher/mom at the start of the latchkey kid movement of the Eighties meant spending thousands of hours lingering around my mothers various elementary schools, mostly at night. These cavernous closed public institutions provided endless adventures in their darkened halls and empty classrooms. I easily attended three extra years of public school in this way. Nightly I found myself being dropped off at my mother’s classrooms left to read and play while she attended meeting after meeting or worked through the night to complete lessons for her students the next day. I developed a keen eye for quality public schools.

A playground is not as much fun alone as one may imagine while surrounded by hundreds of screaming kids during a standard recess. The average playground user spends eternities waiting his/her turn on the swing set, and one believes if one were the only one at recess, one could do whatever one wanted all the time with impunity. But when the crowd of peers is gone, the place is impotent and lame. There is no point in swinging as high as the edge of the building kicking one’s feet high into the sky and then flinging one’s body wholly and wildly flying out of the seat like some stuntman from the action adventure serials, if there is no one there to see the brave soul do it. I know, for I have jumped off every swing set in the greater Vancouver School District #137. For the record Truman had really great swings, mistakenly the contractor installed extra tall supports making the chains at least twelve feet long, this allows a trebuchet effect which can propel a child up to twenty feet into the bark chips, far past the jungle jims. No worries though, as the terminal bone break distance is thirty-seven feet, tested and certified.

When I saw the crumpled debris at Hazel Dell Elementary you have to understand it was like seeing the body of close friend discarded in a ditch. The debris consisted of large two-inch pipes. When installed in 1948 at the brick school, these had been the most contemporary of play structures. The structure built with two-inch steel pipe bent and shaped into jungle gyms, crisscross bars and hanging uneven bars vaguely resembling their Olympic counter parts. Pipes of tremendous strength anchored by cement into the soft dirt. Surrounded for years by an annually refilling pit of bark chips. The post World War Two Vancouver had seen a very modern trend in the construction of playgrounds. Likely started in California, the trend spread north to my neck of the woods. The pipes were paired with large chunky timbers. Almost railroad tie quality, pressure treated to resist the rain and the hours of children stomping and jumping. These structures were built to be indestructible to the activities of a recess. It was rounded on most corners, welded and bolted like super industrial battle structures. Vancouver was a shipbuilding hub during the war and it seemed the mothers who had taken the jobs in those yards during the war assembled this structure. I imagine these talented moms designing and building the pipe playground with the knowledge from building Liberty ships by the dozen in the Columbia River, while simultaneously producing the largest generation in history: the Boomers.

The pile I found was a shadow of its play structure self, ladders visible crumpled together with bridges like an angry giant had discarded his erecter set in frustration. It’s more likely backhoe or bulldozer had organized the wad of twisted metal. The heavy tread marks were still fresh in the soil around the heap. The surface of the metal was the most interesting part. The metal was polished brown, but only on one side of each pipe. The polished side of the pipe was the one that when in use had faced up to receive the tiny hands of the school child. For ten minutes at a time for fifty-five years children had dragged and slid their hands over the metal, polishing, smoothing and adding patina. The oil of their hands and lunches combined with the rain and dew of the weather to cause constantly smoothing rust. This patina is a polish, which remains impossible to reproduce in any other way. This is the appearance a metal handrail or exterior doorknob attains after years of human polishing. Slow, haphazard and yet specific touching with hands. The human hand causes the metal to smooth while simultaneously adding and subtracting material.

Metal has a unique connection to people. It is a material that lasts a vast time, perhaps longer than a single generation, but only through maintenance. If left to the open weather, most metal will oxidize and dissolve into the ground from whence it was smelted. The metal fixtures we surround our public places with are so often susceptible to destruction.

These playground pipes were amazing to me as an artist, years and years of hands touching them at ten-minute recess intervals. It seems important to me to identify why that seemed so remarkable. It made an impression on me because so few objects in this world gain that much non-narrative history. The pipes tracked time, but not with any measurable markers. They were used, a lot and yet they were not transmitting a linear telling of their time serving a purpose. Unlike objects such as an odometer on a car, or the hash marks on the door jam showing a child’s growth. The investment was made without intention toward that investment. The children were marking the play structure as a by-product of their play. This marking did however mark the generational change. The generations of attention were visible in a distinctly honest manor.

Imagine the generations of school children handing down the playground from year to year. The students leaving and then the students arriving causing traditions to be born and/or forgotten. All present on the playground, the society of the playground ever changing, but the terrain static and unchanging. The new games incorporated the platforms, the king of the hill or the multi-level tag games. The children became masters at “The follow the leader through and over and under and around game. The reconstruction of the playground causes these games to draw to a sudden stop. The traditions of the playground I was looking at were going to radically reset themselves the following fall when the new structure would be installed, erasing the fifty years prior. The new structure with its own fifty-year time line would start with fresh new traditions to be implanted by its users. All of this is culture, in a micro atmosphere, at one specific small elementary school in rural America, however the atmosphere is replicated endlessly throughout the world. The brown rust patina on the playground equipment is the tangible residue to an intangible subject. Great culture is remembered through its residue, the masks, temples, and murals. This playground was leaving behind thousands of recesses on the topside of these pipes, and it was about to be recycled.

It would be expected that some of the games would carry on, but with new markers of success and achievement. The new structure would be of its time, the early 2000’s. Each structure is dated and specific to the materials of playgrounds of its era. The modern structures of the post war landscape, made of minimal framework have given way to plastic and poly fibers, materials familiar to the generation of users now in place. The reconstruction of the playground all at once activated a radical and complete interface shift. In the blink of a summer, the playground became recalibrated to the safety guidelines and moral trends of the mid 2000’s. The structure which had seemed safe or innocuous in the 1940’s now was treated as unsafe uneven or dangerous, and on a whole, completely unneeded. There was no plan to reuse this old weathered play structure despite its fifty plus years of service. Like a battleship no longer suited for modern warfare, the old play structure must be sent away and dismantled as a relic of our past.

2011-04-14T14:07:00.000-07:00

Contents: Thesis Draft, Committee Chair Review

Abstract: Leaving Everything on the Floor

Praxis: Imagination Work
I am a Magician at My Core
Idea Engine

Theory: Interface
The Right Hand Should Never See the Left Coming
Aesthetic Sources
The Human Polish
Paradigm Playground
Ax Handles
Audience: The only Game in Town
The Audience as Active ingredient
Firewood
Two Audiences
Community/Culture
Making Art in this Lost World Now
Your Contemporary Life Beat up My Contemporary Art
Snappy Conclusions
Hum a Few Bars

Works Cited
Acknowledgements

Leave Everything On the Floor

2011-04-12T21:38:00.001-07:00

Over the next month I will be publishing my MFA Thesis. I thought I would place portions here as I go. The first draft is thirty-two pages long. That equals just under ten thousand words. It is a big task and I am committed to making it readable, thus far it is a giant pile of thoughts. I hope you enjoy reading it as it goes. If you want to wait until the end and read it in its entirety check back in May.

MFA Thesis Opening

We start with a big room full of people. These people do not yet know each other. Their connections to one another extending no further than the acquaintances they arrived along side of. We will refer to these people as strangers. In the room we also find art. The strangers are our viewers they are the audience and they have traveled to this place, participants making a conscious effort to be in this place at this time, to see the gestures of artists and to witness these artists making gestures. In some cases the only visible thing on display will be the residue of the artists’ gesture, or the object that is the result of actions performed by the artist. The audience brings the formula together, their perception, biased or otherwise, brings the art to its natural confluence. The audience makes the moment so the artist can find satisfaction in the piece. This is the moment the piece exists for the first time totally outside the mind of the creator. Before the show, before the display, the piece was captive inside doubt and unknowing. The reactions by the audience are the real satisfaction the artist seeks. The endorphin released in the artist by the audience gives the artist the impetus to return to the place of presentation.

The audience causes the making and sharing. The motivation to create and make is argued deeply. My position on the argument rests firmly in the camp titled “Audience Affirmation.” I believe the artist creates to ultimately communicate with a community. However large or small, that communication, that interaction and that experience of back and forth, is the nut at the center of the shelled question of, “why the artist creates.” There can of course be a plethora of reasons and many motives, many complex needs being fulfilled by the action of making. By no means am I suggesting the community is the only reason we create, but I believe it to be the largest single motivator.

Patrick Melroy Artist Statement Light for Dr. Jennifer Vanderpool 4/7/2011

2011-04-08T14:59:00.001-07:00

I want to discover the thread, which is laced throughout the moments and objects of my life, which I consider classics. The aura of blue jeans, the impossible to replicate romance of the drive in movie theater. I want to uncover the elements of experiences and the specific nature of objects which allow me and my community to code them as timeless wonderful classics. I am less concerned with the individual nostalgia attached to events and objects as I am with the reasons people are compelled to attach that nostalgia in the first place. Why do we hold so strongly to certain subjects and let others drift away as debris of our culture?

I develop artistic gestures that highlight these qualities and traits of the classics. I enjoy participating with my audience as they move through the experience of creating meaningful markers attached to my projects. The tools I implement to execute this endeavor, run the gambit from textures to be touched, sounds attached to specific activities all the way to completely relocating the viewer physically. I build situations which invite or compel participation by the audience, which optimistically leads to them reaching a grand appreciation.

I believe art can exist intellectually inside of our core, I believe the human experience is filled with moments which we attach markers to which are distinctly and personally unique, these markers are what we build our definitions of time and life. I hope to provide curated experiences, which will become sticky and attach firmly to the psyche of my audience. I believe my work addresses the best parts of our culture encouraging continued discovery and progressive growth with in our society.

In Need of A Road Trip

2011-03-24T00:04:00.000-07:00

$4.50 a gallon. Did we ever not care about that. I think I thought I remembered not worrying about the cost of my fuel. Maybe when I was 16 and my mom gave me the keys to the Dodge Shadow for the weekend and let me drive north to meet up with summer camp friends in Bremerton, Washington. Pure freedom. Stop and start on my own initiative. Just unharnessed youth on an open road, that feeling is unmatchable.

I haven't set out on the road in a while, I was just checking my log books. My ship has been in port for quite sometime. No more desert adventures of late, though an Easter pilgrimage to the Palm Springs world is shaping up. Speaking of books, my books on tape account online shows I have several credits stored up. Waiting for that long juicy unabridged fiction story, preferably read by a British guy.

I know the road is calling because I have a paper due on Monday. I keep telling people different numbers, because I guess its a little like calling your shot on how far you plan to hit a baseball. "Oh, my thesis? Yeah I'm thinking like fifty pages... what my thesis, yeah they are asking for 25, which seems too few I mean I write more than twenty-five while giving directions to strangers on how to find the local In-n-Out Burger." For the record I have around 12,000 words on the subject, but only half of them go together, the rest are orphans looking for paragraphs.

Nervous? Not really, I like writing, the words, when made permanent outside of my head allow me to settle down my thoughts on a subject or object. But I never seem to be very happy with easy, so of course I had to pick a project with some risk. I know it will get made, the project that is, I'm just not sure what its going to cost me yet. I hope it costs me everything. Because the road trip never gets better than when you've spent down your entire road stake and you have to make a whole new plan. Busted and flat broke, bumming change for a pinball machine in the bowling alley, a long way from home, hoping like hell, that that collect call you placed to your people will get the right kind of rescue party mounted. Which is to say, even when the road trip is almost over and your ride home is coming to pick you up anytime, you should still be playing for High Score!

The Nose Knows.

2011-03-22T20:39:00.000-07:00

It started like this. My grandfather’s world smelled great. From the smoky, oily cab of his big old pick-up trucks to the musty work shop attached to the back of his garage. A potbelly stove burning in the back corner, pushing the cold back out the big double car garage door pulled half way down on the bed of pick-up truck part way propped up by floor ramps. Some cousin or brother crawling under it on a creeper dragging the shop light hooked to the spring-loaded retracting coil in the ceiling right smack in the middle of the garage. His tool boxes smelled good, the bench vice smelled good. The wood room next to the shop full of its pine and cedar and various other orphan chunks smelled better than good. The freshly opened Pepsi smelled good, his deep freezers smelled good. All those smells wrapped around his memory. Hundreds of bone cold nights standing around a garage while something was fixed. In the summer the warm light from the setting sun cracking through the windows on the west side, the sun always set directly at the end of his street, right over the stop sign that marked the meeting of the main pioneer from his little off shoot. On those summer nights his front yard would get mowed by some anxious grandson and the smell of cut grass and gasoline would drift and hold in the middle of the garage.

His patio smelled like split rock and hot cement, his backyard smelled like roses and pool chlorine. His roof smelled like cedar and walnut trees and moss. His drive way smelled like car soap and hot asphalt right when it gets wet from a garden hose stretched over to wash the pick-up. His life smelled like life, distinction and significances. His front yard smelled like fun and running full out being chased by the neighbor kid. That world exists in my mind now, none of it remains. My brother’s world is starting to smell like that for his kids. The smells of history, the tastes of adventure and growing. The last time I was there his garage was beginning to age just right. Just the right combination of oil change and tire rubber.

Smell is a trick really, it can come out of nowhere and blind side you. I cherish those moments and I always try to stop and really rerun the memory, never fight it. Those memories are so sweet, even the embarrassing ones. Like the night I was trying to pull my brake pads off the 86 Ford Ranger that my cousin still drives to work everyday. I had given up trying to get the C-Clamp to fit on the cylinder to compress it to release it from the front wheel hub. Papa was watching when Josh took over trying with the C-clamp, and he let us struggle just long enough before finally saying, “Why don’t you reach in there and turn the steering wheel to the right to give him enough room with that clamp.” Both Josh and I may have spent an entire minute staring at the man before I quietly reached through the window of the cab and turned the wheel. Which gave Josh a good foot to work in. The smell of grease or used motor oil still makes me think of that strange perfect aqua-marine green paint that covered the inside of his garage. It got painted white when I was an adult, but in my head its still green, especially when I smell hard work.

Practice till you get it right

2011-03-21T22:44:00.000-07:00

I recently hired Courtney Price to rebuild my internet identity. As you may remember she is a designer in Portland. Her aesthetic is clean, cool, and obscene. The ideas that come from her range from calm to Mt. St. Helens explosive. The site will go live soon. We are mostly waiting to get all the text in the right place and the pictures all the right size. I will thank her more properly when the site is finished, but for now you should know she is crazy good at everything she does, mostly.

http://www.cpricework.com/work/

Vid Bit

2011-01-31T23:57:00.001-08:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13pvqT-5hm0

Open Studios

2011-01-11T00:18:00.000-08:00

I almost forgot, not really but that is a good way to start a sentence, really grabs people's attention.

The Artists of the University of California Graduate Art Department will host an Open Studios at Harder Stadium on February 5th. 4pm till whenever.
We miss you already, come see our latest artwork.

Harder Stadium
Santa Barbara California

Nights of Goleta

2011-01-10T23:17:00.000-08:00

Which side should I sleep on? Each night I lay down in clean crisp sheets wondering which side I am suppose to sleep on. How does one decide to go to bed? At this age certainly there is no dictator in my home. I have all night to get enough sleep, why do I choose this time or that time? I lay awake in the dark each night worrying about nothing and everything. I think about late bills, and late phone calls I intended to make to resentful loved ones, who grow ever less loving of their absent friend Patrick. How long will a friend wait with out communique or promulgation?(look it up) I have stretched those limits with each and every member of my circle. The ones who used to know me best referred to it as "boating" as in, Q: "Have you heard from Patrick?" A: "No, he must be boating."

But this side of the bed thing really cause's me pain. When I lay on my back I feel as if I am waiting for the undertaker, and when I plant my face down into the pillow I feel I resemble a passed out drunk. So I reach for some dignity in my repose, some grace in my posture of slumber. But do I turn left or right, they are both frightfully empty. Either side leaves me staring into the dark, wide awake and worrying. On my right side I look down the open door to the hall and the bathroom beyond, with its open window above the shower which will of course let in the sounds of the construction crew sharply at 7am each morning.

When I role to my left and gather the pillow to my chest I am looking past the small gap I left between the bed and the wall which puts my bed too close to the wall heater on my right but allows me to get all the way round the bed to change the linens. That gap is nothing but I never hang my arms over it. I feel odd if I hang over the island of my bed. Not a foot or finger, no arm vulnerable, this impulse or compulse a residue of childhood I know, but can not shake. The fear of some nightmare jumping up from the carpet and biting off a finger haunts me. The wall to my left separates me from my neighbor. A music lover, and to be truthful I love that music too. Contemporary hip hop and pop from India or Persia. I don't understand the lyrics but I cherish the moment my faceless peer electrifies his or her speakers and fills my bedroom with good loud noise. It leaves me with no doubt about leaving sleep behind for the adventures of the day. At least more uplifting than the chop saw they are using on the building outside my window another unavoidable wake up call. My brother suggested I draw pay from the crew seeing as I start work everyday on their schedule.

Please don't take any of this as complaint. I truly love my bed, I retreat here often, but when safely secured with in its borders I am free to fret and worry and think. But also write and read, and imagine. But still I would like to know which side I am suppose to lay on. It's easier when she is here, because then I don't have to decide.

Write This Off

2010-12-25T21:28:00.000-08:00

Its Christmas Day and everyone has gone back home. I was hounded into a post.
I pulled this out of a paper so its a fragment, but its some text I wanted up here. I guess it will be sooner than later.
Cheers

Write This Off

The people to come will assign meaningfulness to something. The desire to find meaning continues to push the species along. It becomes self-defense to care about something. What that something will ultimately be for a population mediated away from choices and with out accountability will look much less substantial. Commerce and value are no longer linked.

Every major retail corporation finds themselves with inventory rendered unsellable by circumstance. Either the original shipment full of multiple sizes has dwindled to just one item or the fad has too quickly faded. If it ever existed in the first place. And the retail store moves these lone objects to their kill rack. A rack of items in the back usually set aside for the employees to shop from. The cost deeply discounted. Often the employees are required to wear examples of the companies merchandise while at work, but their minimum wage pay checks barely afford them the necessities of living and they find themselves relegated to their store discounts or the kill rack. A pair of socks which may have originally sold for twenty dollars now is marked to two dollars. This discount seems a gift from the corporation.

Two evaluations of this event can be divined. One: if the corporation can afford to sell them for two dollars, why then was the product originally marked at twenty? Is it because the original price accommodated an expectation that not all would be sold? So the original price included the elements of, product production, shipment to outlet, payroll, facility bills, rent, lighting insurance, the necessity to mark down a small portion of unsold inventory, and marketing along with a portion designated for profit to the shareholders. Because a corporations primary function is to generate revenue for its shareholders.

Or two: the product can be listed in that list of loss. Which means that each shipment of merchandise is laced with an algorithm accommodating several individual pieces as loss leaders. Merchandise, which can be sold for a loss. The corporation anticipates using these loss leaders as an option to write off the loss on their federal corporate taxes. Revenue that can then be recuperated from the moneys they would otherwise be paying to the federal government in taxes. Taxes, which would go to support the infrastructure, which allows them to stay in business. The street in front of their stores, the roads leading from the docks of delivery from foreign manufacture to the loading bays of the individual outlets. And the security of the police, fire, and rescue services who facilitate the community surrounding the store of commerce.

This loss in revenue from the corporation is then made up by the individuals of the community the business resides in. More specifically by the sales tax levied on the employee purchasing the merchandise required of them by the employer to keep their job. So the employee is purchasing the merchandise sending revenue to the corporation, the corporation is writing off this merchandise being sold at an arbitrary loss as they set the price high enough to accommodate this loss and still find profit in the sale and they are free of the burden of paying the taxes to support the very sale of their merchandise.

The corporation is free to function with no risk. Providing endless streams of profit to the shareholders who invest based on the strength of the brand which is artificially supported by its employees and local and Federal municipalities. How did this brand achieve such success and unabated practice, is it because the idea of their success is linked with the success of our society? If the business leaves town than the perception is a lack of culture and success of the very community it is benefiting from. The community benefits from the jobs and perception of success the business’s presence provides. With the business in place the community may assure themselves of achievement. Marking their success with the brands presence, absorbing the brands success as their own. They matter because of the attention laid on them by the corporation.

The corporation stamping its approval on the community instead of the other way around. But of course it is the other way around. If the community chooses to instead buy from their neighbors. The small mom and pop stores run by locals then the major corporation up and moves taking its prestige. Like a town skipped by the railroad stop they evaporate. A delicate dance between a community and their perception of identity. The town needs commerce in modern society to exist.

Many ideas and sentiments were codified while in conversation with Samantha Fretwell.

A terribly long thing

2010-12-09T23:25:00.000-08:00

The People to Come Have Accounts

Imagine the life of a child born in 2004 to a twenty-year-old user of the then freshly launched FaceBook, who met the other parent of the child via the same social network. The entire pregnancy and birth recorded in photo and written description. The moment when the child turns ten and opens their own account on the social network ostensibly responsible for his or her existence. That moment in 2014 when FaceBook passes the ten-year mark. The child will look at their parent’s entire social archive preserved there on the site for them to research. The child has an access to the parent that in previous generations has been significantly less exact. In pre social network life the child may have accessed their parents younger days through a diary or the back and forth letters or through oral history. But now the child possess a document of pictures and movie choices and blogs with comments, that lead to other entries modified to respond to comments left by loved ones and strangers. An extensive and overwhelming glut of information in the minutia. Every child’s parent at this point has a public following. Every child has a famous parent. What will fame at that point mean or even look like.

Anonymous will no longer exist for this child whose entire life has been broadcast and recorded. We are faced with a population whose daily experience is captured and transmitted from moment to moment. A pile of information unlike anything the libraries of Alexandria could have contained. The child becomes anthropologist to his or her own life. Privacy at this point will take on a new form. One the world is still grappling with daily. The self established archive will build transversals on a massive world level, connecting the reality the child perceives back through time and space to imagined and manufactured fictional narratives. Gifting to the child access to an identity produced for them by the technological advances. This child will perceive the world through the eyes of a new level of human evolution. The next phase is upon us, and the mysteries cherished by the past of individual privacy and self made identity are crumbling. The next great era of society is at a crossroads and the children in charge of its development are a people yet to be defined. A group without a clear motive. The decision will be made by these people as to weather the previous system of marketing driven life will remain meaningful enough to continue. I believe they will begin a pursuit of ideas and living which exceeds the simple consumer culture they are now being born into.

The revolution will be broadcast, then archived, and then available for rating on your Smartphone by the end of the workday.

There are over six billion people on the planet, souls as it were. One in twelve have a FaceBook account exceeding five hundred million individual accounts, all connected and networked through a designation of friendship. Friend is the Sign attached to the individuals a user interacts with on the site. This is how the people participating in the machine of FaceBook identify themselves. There is no other sign to represent the relationship between users. Friend is how they reference their fellow co inhabitants of the site, not community members, not peers, not associates, but as friends, even family members are indentified by the sign “friend”. This is the industry’s symbol chosen to be the connecting term.

Facebook places the limit of friends any one individual user may keep in their network at anyone time at five thousand. Distinctly drawing lines around the organizations its users may choose to build and create. This arbitrarily number lands above historical markers, but not outside the experience of a global user who builds quick relationships with users around the world on a daily basis. The idea of true friendship has shifted. Because FaceBook has no tier system to distinguish the relationships between users, no rating systems for how strong a friendship is on any given day. It requires every friend to be listed at the same closeness to the user. Friend as a sign loses its previous strength and meaning. The contacts one has on Facebook are exactly like the relationships people have always formed. Meeting a new person at a party and knowing their name but little else of their biography. But in the social network world the user may research the new contact to the tiniest detail. Searching back through there online lives to find other connections and parallels to their own lives. When the user leaves the party with the new contact’s name they then begin a much more permanent connection. They add the new contact to a permanent list of “friends” a permanent link easily established. This new level of interaction causes a user to build a network of contacts that they can instantly research and investigate, or follow and observe. The contacts feel more meaningful at this point because a stranger can become familiar so much more quickly and the walls of distance come crashing down. We have always been this connected in our communities, but now having a textual database providing visual codes for us to use to categorize and discern commonalities raises the feeling beyond previous norms. This feeling of knowing someone so quickly has lead to new value charts. The FaceBook user no longer needs a few close friends to rely on and instead acquires a vast network of perceived contacts to count as friends.

The Uniform

The vast majority of social networks, except MySpace, function on the same principle of formulaic profile. MySpace is the exception because of their willingness to allow users to upload html code, which modifies a users homepage. This has lead to countless breakdowns in their system and a loss of users due to a perceived unreliable nature of the site. The competition has adopted a home page that is a uniform. No modifications of the code on the basic homepage is allowed. Keeping everyone in the specific architecture of the official company programmers. The homepage resembling an early FBI profile page. Portrait of user in top left corner, name of user, alias’, statistics to the right of this, then a series of personal information about habits and preferences. Then somewhere on the sheet, information about current activities and where abouts. And lastly the known associates. A list of everyone the user has been known to interact with. The difference from the FBI sheet is, of course, that all the information on the user’s profile page has been provided by the user willingly. Privacy at this point is a myth. Any information uploaded is available to the institution at best and the world at large at worst.

The interactivity of the page is reduced to text editing and photo publishing. No other data can be submitted. The basic interface is between a users eyes and the mouse or track pad. The user is simply holding very still with their body and reading and viewing. Like 500 million research assistants spending hours just scanning over visual information occasionally making notes or comments. No physical interaction other than the fingers and rapid eye movement. What memories of experience can be constructed from static bodies? Can a user chart in their mind experiential life when they never physically interacted. More than just metaphysical knowledge acquisition that humans have been using for years with the printed text and film, this form of existence is entirely metaphysical. This mind at work but with no markers to hold onto. No theater seat, and no book to dog-ear or place on the shelf at completion. The exchange the social network users are participating in is more a kin to a cocktail party they hear about but never attended.

Identity Please

If the user goes by anything more than the American standard three names they are forced back into a predetermined average. In non-U.S. markets the format is inline with the individual culture, for instance the family names in many Asian markets reversed in order of appearance. But the option does not exist in the American market. This obviously presumes the American standard is universal and with out variation. The user may choose to have a screen identity, a handle, but in the background the user is expected to fill in accurate contact information stating an established real world identity. Jaques Steinberg writes about the FaceBook policy in his article for the New York Times

A Facebook spokesman, Simon Axten, said that the social network “prohibits the use of fake names and false identities.”

On Facebook the user is warned that they may only switch their screen identity once. Which seems odd, and arbitrary, what damage would be done with constant switching, it’s simply another information field, like the text box used for favorite movie. A text box which can go through infinite revision. Why would the line be drawn at the users name? This falls back into the cataloging that makes the site and sites like it so powerful an identity tool. The function of the system is to allow users to find each other easily and connect to one another through shared photographs and text posts. If the user is allowed to switch their screen identities too often their networks would breakdown and become unsearchable. This flaw was revealed on MySpace when it enjoyed market dominance, the fall arrived when networks became impossible to keep track of, the profile picture and screen names switching daily. This would be the equivalent of someone’s address book shifting the alphabet every morning, forcing a constant realignment of groups.

In the analog world we must stick day to day with the identities we have built both legally and personally over years. We may perform a name change via extensive paperwork with the government. But our nicknames can travel with us from group to group. School nicknames may be different from the family nickname and so on. Those remain flexible like the screen names and various account names we choose online.
In this digital age we are able to code our identities in so many more complex ways. No longer does the name we use on a social media site bare any specific association to the user, and if we too swiftly move from one identity to the next than we lose the ability to connect to each other. Much like we would be hampered in the analog world if we were to show up to work everyday calling ourselves by a new name. This however is not stopped by the restrictions of switching screen names as many people maintain multiple accounts on single sites. As if you could work at the same company but in two different departments under two different identities. The problem is multiplied by the infinite number of sites you must build an account to access. For instance, most sites now require a user account to be established with a valid email account to allow full access to the services of the site. RottenTomatoes for movies, Yelp for food, The New York Times Online for news and so on. We are forced to build new profiles and identities for each of these sites. The variations of passwords are exhausting. There is not one single login like in analog life as you use your Drivers license to validate your legitimacy to rent a car, or a hotel room, or purchase a money order? The Internet currently functions like a 1950s crime novel, in which the protagonist can hide in hotels by simply registering under a false name. But these personas have less connection and almost no romance attached to it. Giles Deleuze discusses this struggle between idea of identification and the nature of the thing being indentified in his book The Logic of Sense.

Is it necessary, then to invoke identity and contradiction? Would two events be incompatible because they were contradictory? Is this not a case, though, of applying rules to events, which apply only to concepts, predicates and classes? (195)
The contradiction of the online web account is an enlarged sense of authenticity of identity as it is produced by the individual user, but is contradicted by the nature of the identities creation. The identity has little connection to the reality of the user, the online persona simply a sign to refer to the user based almost totally in text and still image representation. Not an accurate or complete representation and a totally remote one as the online persona transfers off the site to function in the analog world not at all.

FaceBook attempts to build a universal web ID that you may present at various market places on the web and receive service. From YouTube to Amazon you are able to connect your commerce with your FaceBook persona. The social networks are attempting to be the online surrogates to the users analog identity. But the user has no use for this online identity when boarding a bus or ordering lunch at a diner. When the user presents themselves at the online front desk of a bookseller they are encouraged to cross identify themselves with their Twitter persona so that the network they associate with on the Twitter site will gain access to their actions on the bookseller’s site. Thus building more interconnected users. Online businesses currently rely heavily on this connection to propel their profitability. The business model of “word of mouth” has become, “word of click.”

Fame for All

Facebook, created by Mark Zuckerberg entered the Internet in 2004. A parallel platform for engagement in the newly established social network environment. It mimicked established brands like Friendster and MySpace. Both industry leaders at the time, built in response to what seemed a growing need or opportunity for connectivity. At the beginning of the first decade of the millennia the population of the planet had in its possession for the first time a device, a technology that allowed them to or rather demanded them to exhibit a public persona. Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame was now available to more persons than ever before. The media outlets exploded like a big bang of molecules drifting out away from each other still tethered by high-speed modems and public fiber optic cable installed and funded by Microsoft at the turn of the last century.
Jacques Ranciere writes about the true community aspired for at this time in his book Dissensus On Politics and Aesthetics,

A true community is a consensual community, not one in which everybody is in agreement, but one in which sense is in agreement with sense. The consensual community is a community in which the spiritual sense of being in common is embedded in the material sensorium of everyday experience. It is the community of an inseparate life in which there are no boundaries severing politics from economics, art, religion, or everyday life. According to the schema of the aesthetic revolution, the root of domination is separation. As a result, the full implementation of freedom and equality entails a re-unifying the various forms of collective intelligence into one and the same form of sensory experience. (81)

This description of true community accurately describes the efforts made by the social network to activate and entice its users into more and more information sharing. The internet was just flirting with connectivity of community when it exploded in access much like the early days of the telephone, in which every house rushed to join the network allowing vast distances to be ignored for the first time since the golden spike had been sunk in the transcontinental railroad in the 1850s.
The railroads allowed a crossing of the country in a matter of days compared to Lewis and Clarks three year adventure a mere fifty years prior. The telephones allowed instant response from another person living thousands of miles away. The fiber optic cables mixed with the communication satellites hanging in Geo Synchronies Orbit allowed not just connection of voice but also connection of full persona. We could maintain an archive of each other, which far out striped the file cabinets of the imagined big brother of George Orwell. Video, voice, written thoughts, and most importantly an identity cache unlike anything previously published by the public. More specifically Self Published, never before had so many people been so willing to talk about themselves. So willing to abandon solitude and launch clumsily into the town square every behavior and habit visible. This instinct cultivated by decades of movies and television, which equated happiness with fame. Fame in this case being lots of people aware of an individual and their idiosyncrasies. Once again the population had been convinced of their individual value through years of marketing which pumped up their egos and spoke to a faith that any of us could be loved if only enough people knew how special we really were. Just put someone in front of the public eye and they will become known and consequently valued.

The users of the Internet found they could build a profile on a social network site and instantly make their preferences for food, literature, music, and even love known by anyone or everyone. Early features of the social networks allowed users to post to a bulletin board that was broadcast instantly into everyone in their networks home. Hundreds of “friends” at every moment could suddenly know about a person’s movie choice for the night or a job interview that went badly. This of course had its repercussions but the largest was a new shared consciousness. The proletariat was on the move and they were forming up. Gallop polls becoming obsolete, trends and fads accelerating to light speed, literally as the fiber optics hummed with the information going forth from the crowd, building a new bar graph of likes and dislikes. The population was codifying in to a whole. Joining a network and becoming a member meant to establish ones role in the machine. Deleuze and Guattari describe such a machine when discussing Kafka in there book Kafka Toward a Minor Literature,

This is why we have been distinguishing in Kafkas’s work instances that are in fact enmeshed in each other – first, machinic indexes; then, abstract machines; and finally, the assemblages of the machine. The machinic indexes are the signs of an assemblage that has not yet been established or dismantled because one knows only the individual pieces that go into making it up, but not how they go together. Most frequently, these pieces are living beings, animals, but they are only valuable as moving pieces or configurations of an assemblage that goes beyond them and whose mystery remains because they are only the operators or executors of this assemblage.

The knowledge each user has of the social network is small and isolated. No user can manage anymore than their own corner or element of the large social network. The network functions only with the users input. Missing is any ability for the user to step into a new role in the machine. No hierarchy of usefulness exists in the social network. The engagement is on a single interface with the network. A user may view other users interface, but never more than one at a time and never simultaneous to viewing their own page. This creates a blindness of the individual in the machine. They cannot step back and see the machine as a whole. They can’t climb a hill and gain perspective on the entire network, they must only view it from their lowly place in the body. No one user can step into a room and find their true place in the machine.
But these are not simple appliances in the home set to give service in only one area. Decisions are being made based on ones network in a manner not seen prior. Before the shift, the population sought advice from the columns of the newspaper or the weekly musings of a 60 minutes anchor. They sought the expert, vetted and trusted to guide them to the right movie or vacation destination. The church guided the flock on giving to charities; the unions provided information on the candidates to vote for or against. Health and medicinal advice was proffered by the doctor in his holy office, his clients filtered by reception.

Waiting became a requisite of service, but the social network clobbers this. Pummels it into an early grave. Now the users could find a doctor by posting one simple notice to the online bulletin page, there for all two hundred networked experts to advise. Jose Antonio Vargas explains in his excellent New Yorker article Letter from Palo Alto,
“Zuckerberg imagines Facebook as, eventually, a layer underneath almost every electronic device. You’ll turn on your TV, and you’ll see that fourteen of your Facebook friends are watching “Entourage,” and that your parents taped “60 Minutes” for you. You’ll buy a brand-new phone, and you’ll just enter your credentials. All your friends—and perhaps directions to all the places you and they have visited recently—will be right there.”

He wants people to check in with their friends network from their handset devices before choosing a sandwich. Leading the user to only the best experiences, saving them the trouble of the wrong choice. The architects of these sites imagine a world with no wrong choices. Just less good ones. Where every decision is rated with a system of stars. Every professor, every route on the map, every hotel, every potential lover rated for the user, so that one may know upfront the risks one is taking in advance.
After the decision made and executed and broadcast back to the network, then the required feedbacks to either affirm the rating or dispose it. This to becomes a form of tuning the machine. Until the machine of the social network reaches the ambition of Utopian harmony. What greater life do the programmers for see for the people to come? The possibility of all chance removed. All decision making honed to such a fine blade that it would cut through life from cradle to grave with no adversity, no pain, nothing but a fictional perfection of the flawless life. What would an ideal life look like and would anyone recognize it should it form. Would everyone be as fabulously happy as the movie stars of our dreams? Would everyone then achieve the happiness perceived as the goal of all the fictional fairy tales? It is possible that the chances of failure are the only true meaningfulness anyone could hope to know? Which is to say, failure and the pain associated is what makes one feel alive. Ronald Bogue expands on Delueze and Guattari’s views on originality in his book Deleuz on Literature

…to invent something new is necessarily to invent something whose shape cannot be foreseen. The new emerges through a process of metamorphosis whose outcome is unpredictable. If writers find existing configurations of social relations unacceptable, their only option is to induce a metamorphosis of the established forms of the social field, with no guarantee that the result will be a more acceptable community. It is for this reason that in a minor literature expression precedes content: it is expression that outdistances or advances, it is expression that precedes contents either in order to prefigure the rigid forms into which they are going to flow or in order to make them take off along a line of flight or of transformation… (110)

The alternative, the life spent reliving decisions handed down by committee, the digital archive, would dull the human experience. The simulacra in full effect as the knowledge of who made the decision first, who picked Subway over Quiznos drifts into the erased source material. Would those choices start to ebb and flow as the trend pushes? The conservative parent who raises a liberal child, the grandchild returning to conservatism as a rebellion against the parent, not the ideals they portray.
Members of the social network lost the source or origins of their status as member of the network. There is no birth date for a user’s account. There is no seniority in the social network. No one user came first. And would it matter if we could find the dinosaurs of the industry. Long gone is the trend of the indie music scene, when seeing a band before they were “big” matters. Being on Twitter from the beginning buys a user exactly nothing in the market place. There is no credit attached to early adoption. In fact early adoption is a handicap as the variety of so many upstarts causes a user to rapidly sign up for new accounts on new sites hoping that it will hit the way Twitter did. Like a giant drunken belly flop into the pool of the social network. Splashing around and getting all over everyone with out really providing any enjoyment.

The first users are over shadowed by super networkers that have contacts numbering in the hundreds of thousands. People who have achieved network celebrity to such an extent that they can tweet a signal to their list and instantly reach more people than the national network news. The tweets arriving through no filter with no editor or organization attached to the content. The individual as loan media source, the institution of the social network providing the platform for broadcast but no accountability.

Menus.

Contemporary society has done away with innovation. Specifically in the US the drive continues toward containing choice down to a finite number of choices, which can be profitably manufactured. This confinement can be seen in the lives we are building full of repeats and simulacra like menus of a fast food restaurant. Everyone’s experiences mimicking those of the successful celebrity or the contact on the social network. Walter Benjamin writes in his essay Baudelaire, or the Streets of Paris

Newness is a quality independent of the use value of the commodity. It is the origin of the semblance that belongs inalienably to images produced by the collective unconscious. It is the quintessence of that false consciousness whose indefatigable agent is fashion. This semblance of the new is reflected, like one mirror in another, in the semblance of the ever recurrent. The product of this reflection is the phantasmagoria of “cultural history,” in which the bourgeoisie enjoys its false consciousness to the full. (105)

For years people have been drawn to the runways of Paris and New York attempting to tap the genius fountains of the clothing designers. Trying to impersonate that genius and replicate it through out their own life. The commoner mimicking the dress of the king in an attempt to gain favor or set ones self above those who don’t know. But in this century the practice has infiltrated like a virus leaving its carriers without the slightest original thought or recognition of the original sources. Not the inability to make an original thought just an amazing lack of desire to make an original thought. Original thought is not dead just more obscure than ever before. The examples are plentiful and laughable. Every experience has become the act of traveling an already traversed path. From film to narrative fictional literature to recorded music, there are fewer and fewer moments where a persons individual participation is encouraged and fewer in which many individuals are experiencing private moments of discovery and growth.

The music concert of the past is instantly packaged and rebroadcast by its viewers via their handheld devices to the Internet where it is rated. The gift of experience is waning. The memory of the first punk show one ever saw is becoming corrupted by the blog post moments after the event. Did the author see that or experience it or are they producing an account of the event manicured to meet the idea of the “First Punk Show?” The event becomes reason for the post, instead of a post leading one to an unexpected music event. We find ourselves in a large amusement park in which the entrance gate was our birth. Each event in our life a separate ride planned by an architect and operated by a disinterested minimum wage employee.

The individuals participating in our replicated experience place little effort into their task. Because there is no effort in uploading ones latest take on the corner ice cream shop through Twitter feed. Twitter is a fast moving creature all its own, drawing its users out of participation of daily life and into a constant wired-in experience. The user to attain maximum event from Twitter must stay in constant contact with the site via handset device or Smartphone. Updating and checking updates of the feeds they follow. Literally feeding… A constant processing of information at a speed, which only a few years before would seem overwhelming. But the speed becomes an addiction and a safety net. Matt Richtell describes an extreme version of this user in his very good article for the New York Times titled Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

“The technology amplifies whoever you are,” Mr. Reilly says. For some, the amplification is intense. Allison Miller, 14, sends and receives 27,000 texts in a month, her fingers clicking at a blistering pace as she carries on as many as seven text conversations at a time. She texts between classes, at the moment soccer practice ends, while being driven to and from school and, often, while studying.

Back at the ice cream parlor the participant stating “I will go with the pumpkin ice cream because it was recommended by 78% of the people who visited.” Where is the skepticism of the information? The Twitter feed and the user of that network are intertwined in a co-dependency of trust. But how did that trust grow strong enough to override personal investigation. The user now finds themselves reliant on the machine of the entire population of the patrons of the ice cream parlor. Personal investigation might lead the person into a decision based on logic. The store sells this flavor therefore it must be liked by many otherwise it would cease to be profitable and they would discontinue its sale. Likewise they might associate their previous experience with pumpkin ice cream and decide they enjoyed it in the past and chose it now. And how easy would it be to manipulate the Twitter feed, to hack the system and find ways in which to move the popularity of pumpkin ice cream up the list because they have a glut of it in stock. Twitter as a trusted source is a blind trust, because the recommendation cannot be challenged. The rules of fair play do not apply to the social network or the online world for that matter. Recently an online seller of designer eye wear discovered a method for beating the algorithm of recommendation employed by Google, as David Segal describes in his New York Times article

Mr. Borker maintained that scaring Ms. Rodriguez — and dozens of other customers in the last three years — enhanced the standing of DecorMyEyes in Internet searches on Google. That was because Google’s algorithm, he claimed, was unable to distinguish between praise and complaints. All of the negative postings translated into buzz, he said, which helped push DecorMyEyes higher in search results and increased his sales.
The Twitter feed which leads buyers to the best restaurants and best ice cream choices is just as susceptible to manipulation as is any social media. The network in order to function must be mechanized to such an extent as to remove individual directorship. The online polls only become powerful when a majority participates. That majority must be corralled by an algorithm or program designed and design allows for manipulation, intentional or unintentional the result is the same, the institution loses its credibility.

But of course even the menu is contrived. There are a limited number of options. The attempt by the ice cream parlor is to present a feeling of infinite choice to its customers. Someone may mix and match to such a degree that no one person could complete all the combinations, thus allowing originality. But originality would be in the individual spending time creating ice cream of his or her own. Even if one were to dedicate their life to making the perfect vanilla ice cream. They could make batch after batch and still discover millions of variations. This could be like the violinist practicing for years to achieve the desired tone and pitch from one song.

But the variations of the corner ice cream shop are finite. The manufacturers machines, inserted into the production process, are attempting to remove unanticipated variation from the product. The same McDonalds hamburger on six continents. The consumer comforted in the knowledge of the familiar. While familiarity is not wholly bad, transitioning every experience into the familiar cannot be the ultimate goal of human existence. What joy could we find in simply re-enacting everything? Re-incarnation to the extreme, not just the memories but the actions as well.
The Internet is generating this now. In a matter of years the world will crowd source politics, which for several generations it has attempted to do with opinion polling. One could argue that this is simply a digitization of voting, as we have known it. But that voting had a certain accountability, the current crowd sourcing lacks. Decisions based on a small number of users gaming the system to achieve outcomes more in line with their agendas. Like the eyeglass salesman, one user advancing his agenda outside the benefit of the group.

Politics has seemed to attempt to influence public opinion through actions. These actions executed based on the research from public opinion poll. But not in response to those opinion polls instead using those opinion polls to establish parameters for their special interest agendas. A generation weaned on the net as this current one being raised is and will be, likely will function more as a unit. A giant simulacra, a body with out organs guided by viruses of users functioning under the perception of the group. Moving from one redone trend to the next. These people living and re-acting the parts of history most famous or useful. Not doomed to repeat a forgotten history, simply stuck in a feedback loop of familiarity. The tyrants will not rise again just mediocre middle managers. When a crowd selects based on a larger number of options, the most loved does not rise to the top, just the least hated. That least hated is tolerable and after a time familiar and than trusted to such an extent that previous options seem unimaginable or grotesque.

The group’s choice will be near impossible to change. Why change the choice, if it has worked so many times in the past. Like the ice cream, I may not love this, but based on this advice I know I won’t hate it, and that’s at least a safe gamble. One in which I may love it but I for sure wont get hurt buy it. If everything in life could provide such a guarantee we would have no broken hearts or songs about broken hearts. Failure helps us mark the passage of time; risk gives us meaningfulness in our successes.
The complexities of contemporary life require not just a food producer and working class to harvest that food and bring it to market, but also an entertainment producer, a meaningfulness producer. Contemporary life relies on a perceived quality of life that has increasingly become reliant on the prescribed experiences we are having on the social network and through entertainment texts such as movies, video games, and television. I will hold back printed text, as this has become such a minor player.
This mass entertainment is now functioning as our town square where ideas are discussed vetted and decided upon and the central place of commerce. In a country of such diverse beliefs and values we find only two major political parties, and inside of those parties barely a hairs width between the opposing factions. We have decided what we are as Americans and what that means is very narrow. The American dream has been codified into a very simple set of outcomes with little surprise.
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We are not interested in striking out and pioneering, we are not interested in restoring the grand nostalgia of days gone by. And as conservative as conservative you can find they refuse to give up their TVs and Internets. Nor will they return to small business that would really be conservative, a return to pre cell phone use, which would be conservative, or the choice to allow drilling for fossil fuels in new territories, which would be progressive. Progress and conservation no longer hold a definable existence. The uniform shape of the social network dismantles the perception of sides.

Why Commit to a Place

In the past a worker could pick an employer an institution they wish to enter or become a part of and grow with that institution over thirty years becoming more important to it, growing into a manager or senior member. But the current generation does not view any institution with that much permanence. They can select the company that puts up with their idiosyncrasies, not the other way round. They do not need to bend for the institution they do not see the possibility to enter the group and change the group and thus be changed and grow, instead they function with the arrogance that they are already fully formed and must select an institution that meets their needs not the other way round and they are continually disappointed when the choices are finite.

For this generation growing now it has seemed for several years that the choices have were limitless. Which clothes to buy which computer to buy and customize, they do not perceive the institution as something that can be changed. Instead seeing the massive older generation a head of them in line, the old firmly in control of the institution via their seniority and the younger perceive no room or no desire to enter at the junior level, only to become a cog for an indefinite period of time until they can be the voice of direction.

This feeling comes from years of marketing telling them they are all individuals and individually valuable. That they are desired for their specificity. That they should never settle. That anyone of them can rise from obscurity to be a star. They have seen the world’s behavior toward, Sara Palin, dancing with the stars, or Justin Beiber discovered on a YouTube video. Beiber now selling out concerts around the globe. They have learned that fame and power comes from chance and the right timing. Fame and success can be yours if you just find the right person to discover you. You don’t have to work hard to rise up the ladder. The CEO will be handpicked and handed control of the entire company by a board of directors. You won’t be hired from with in. You will be brought in as a celebrity and you will have all the control you want and seniority has no place in this.

This is the story handed to them through countless media reports of success. The narrative has not been for several years that one person rode the ladder long enough to be in charge and bring years of learned wisdom to the decision making job. But George Bush was elected with no experience, the current narrative tells them not to move into a system and merge with it and change it, instead they are told, we were born with a deserving position, we deserve success and the students in today’s colleges are graduating and not getting jobs because they don’t perceive their role to be that of beginner. Their role is instead that of unknown celebrity on their way to being in charge. The individual celebrity born of building profiles on social networks and amassing thousands of friends and even followers. A fictional belief in their own self-importance, because that is a very marketable narrative to sell products. You are the most valuable consumer and you should want our product because that makes you savvy. And being savvy leads to being the head of a the largest automotive company in the country.

Onward to the Social Utopia

There will be no turning back of the tide. Fire has been invented. The social network is present and firmly planted. The only debate will now be the use and perception of it by its users. The people to come are here, and the moment we try to form a working definition of them they slip fast away from our definitions, hiding behind their invented personas. The question is have we built for them a life worth living? In the fine book Participation edited by Claire Bishop a passage retelling an epic moment is presented, I present it here again, as the representation of text has become the message of the day.

During a debate with Theodor Adorno in 1964, Ernst Bloch, pushed to the wall to defend his position on utopia, stood firm. Adorno had begun things by reminding everyone present that certain utopian dreams had actually been fulfilled, that there was now television, the possibility of travelling to other planets, and moving faster than sound. And yet these dreams had come shrouded, minds set in traction by a relentless positivism and then their own boredom. ‘One could perhaps say in general’, he noted, ‘that the fulfillment of utopia consists largely only in a repetition of the continually same “today”.’(184)
END

copyright 2010 Patrick Melroy

Writing Sample

2010-12-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

2 paragraphs

Lately I’ve been interested in making seemingly dangerous art. Specifically, I am making art that tests our perception of personal safety. By highlighting the viewer’s body and their location in this world at any distinct moment, I am attempting to tease the audience into excitement and curiosity. Whether the viewer is confronted with a nine-pound sledgehammer swinging inches from his or her face or a wooden ladder leading into an unsafe attic space, I am forcing them to question what can harm them, and to distinguish between real and imagined threats. There are dangerous things in this world. Art can seem a dangerous thing, and yet so can a rollercoaster. Both synthesize the thrill of the close encounter. Both carry the audience from one emotional place to the next, while keeping them physically close to their starting point throughout the entire experience. They are never really placed in harms way; they are in complete control of their participation. The authorship of their experience is handed over entirely to them. Some participants will be thrilled while others will be nervous. My work exists in the space between logic and instinct.

I find myself repeating the mantra “I liked it better when we were a community.” The world continues to fill up with people, fascinating, wonderful, giving people, yet the world struggles to stay connected in a physical manner. Technology has begun to develop our culture instead of the other way around. I relish the chance moments of discovery between people who can remove themselves from their self-imposed privacy. I believe we spend far too much time in our own heads, often isolated and only absorbing information by digital means. We are inactive participants in an ever-advancing techno-narrative. But there are moments when people talk to strangers. Those moments excite and inspire me to initiate opportunities that both enhance and spawn face-to-face engagements. People I don’t know inspire me. I want these people to tell me more. I distill various points of view and stories into gesture and narrative to address contemporary life.

Night build

2010-11-14T18:11:00.000-08:00

Oh Home Depot you naive child. The truck is loaded with straight wood and several pounds of screws and other fasteners. I have the rally socks on and the night is cold and inviting. I am in full build mold, I have until Tuesday Morning to make something magic happen for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and I don't intend to miss.
My powers are growing stronger.

Wedding

2010-11-08T13:51:00.001-08:00

Nick & Kristine Wedding

November 6th 2010

Who gives this woman to be married?

Please be seated.

Welcome to the wedding of two of the greatest people I know Max Nickolas Ulrich and Kristine Nicole Bowker. You each were invited here for very specific reasons, you are present because of the significant love these two people hold for you and an equal and growing love you hold for them.

Before today we loved them as individuals in a few short moments, this will all change. Everything is about to change. I know they are ready, maybe a little too ready.

You are all hear today to witness the long anticipated, long predicted, long hoped for marriage of Nick and Kristine. They will never be the same after today, the world just shifted, we are taking two individuals from this world and turning them into one family. This marriage will be unlike anything they have experienced before unlike any endeavor either of them has ever undertaken. The decisions, the choices, the trajectory of their life paths are irrevocably linked from today on. They will rely on each other in ways they never imagined possible.

The world is done giving them lemons, the world can keep its bad luck and skip the tough times we are headed straight for a marriage of legendary proportions. I anticipate these two will create a life together unlike any seen in recent memory, the kind of life that causes everyone around them to stop and take notice, I imagine women turning to men on the street asking, “why can’t you love me like that,” These two people are going to be very good at this, I know, I’ve watched it happen. I’ve seen as most of you have, the transformation these two have gone through to get them to this day.

It’s hard to find the right person these days. The world is pretty good at getting in the way and slowing down the process. But when you find that one right person, that one magical person who will forgive everything, who will look past your dents and rough edges, I ‘m mostly talking about nick here, when you find that person who will hold you at the end of the worst day ever invented. That person who smiles at you even when you aren’t looking at them. Then you hold on with both hands and lean into the storm. Nick and Kristine picked this day to declare their love for each other. They chose this moment in time to change everything, its rare when you get to do that. Its not like picking a dentist appointment or hair appointment. This is the big one, the day they have been planning toward, the moment they were scared of screwing up, but as you all know, after showing up on time, there is nothing they can do wrong, this is their day, their moment, and we all get to be here. There are very few moments in your life in which you have this much control. Look around you, look at the faces of the people who are here for you, look how happy they are to know you. I am very happy to know you, I feel very lucky to be standing here with you today. The two of you have been wonderful friends to me. I trust you very much, I love both of you, I know this is right, I know the world is just waiting to give you everything you desire. This will be the great adventure you imagined, this will be a union of strong opinions and though those opinions will not always be the same, they will always respect one another. I know you don’t always agree, but that is good, that means you both care, it would be far worse to have a partner who never questioned your decisions, who never sought to make you stronger by causing you to explain yourself. Often the greatest gift some one can give you is to challenge where you stand, and allow you to prove why you believe what you believe or to be swayed and learn something new.

The two of you have found each other and that was the hard part, this next part will be a walk in the park. Every day from this day forward you will be stronger, you will grow closer to each other than you ever thought possible.

The way you can tell these two are meant for each other is in their stories, like the one time this happened or the other time that happened, inside of each of there stories of folly and woe you will find a devout defense of the other person, never have I heard them find fault in their partners behavior or choices. At the end of the day Nick is on Kristine’s team 100 percent, and Kristine believes in her man. The proof is in the time they work to be with each other, the choice to share everything with each other. These two people already know what it means to have a partner. Now they will learn what it is like to have a better half, they will assume the role of one half of a single entity. They will be married. That is a very special and safe place to be. That is a place neither of them has ever been before. They are making a very specific choice to join together and take on this world together. That is a decision of need. He needs her, and she likewise needs him. That’s a pretty good deal, and I believe it’s going to work out great.

At this point I would ask that if anyone has cause for this union not to go forward they should take it up with the complaint department. The complaint department will be wearing white at the reception.

I know this has felt like an eternity and you will remember nothing I just said to you, but I made you copies so its okay. The total elapsed time of the most important day of your life has now been just over six minutes. Now it is your turn to speak to each other.

The vows:

Did somebody remember the rings?

Kristine, look at your man and repeat after me. Nick I choose you to be my husband. I know you, I need you, I want you, I love you today, I give you this ring to show you that that will never change.

Nick face this woman, and repeat after me. Kristine I choose you to be my wife. I know you, I need you, I want you, I love you today, I give you this ring to show you that that will never change.

Do you Max Nickolas Ulrich take this woman to be your wife to have and to hold from this day forward? He Did.

Do you Kristine Nicole Bowker take this man to be your husband to have and to hold from this day forward? She did.

I am charging each and everyone of you with a specific responsibility, protect this marriage with everything you have, when you see the world attacking them rise to their defense, when you witness doubt around them defy it, challenge anyone who dares to tear down what they are building together. These two people are a very big deal and I will not tolerate anything bad happening to them, and if each of you commit to doing the same, than we will see this marriage last forever. Please respond all together to this one question with “WE Do”. Do you the family friends and community of this couple agree to protect them always doing whatever is in your power to preserve their marriage?

On behalf of the State of California, your community, and God I pronounce you Husband and Wife.

Nick, for the first time ever, Kiss your wife.

Ladies and gentlemen please rise with me and welcome a very new thing

I present to you no longer a bride and groom but instead a husband and wife.

Presided over by The Reverend Patrick D Melroy

Held at Mayacana Country Club Santa Rosa CA

Muggy in here.

2010-09-27T21:30:00.000-07:00

All these websites are wasting my time. I can't bring myself to spend anytime on the facebook anymore, and if I catch even a minute of NPR than the New York times is painfully redundant.
I find myself back in school for another year, well nine months really and I find myself in almost the same state as this time last year. Well difference being all the people in this latitude who now care for me, thank you to them. And to those back in the home country for keeping me going and surviving. Serbia was weird. This year will be busy. I will be strong.

Wiseguys

2010-07-26T01:04:00.000-07:00

She once said, "If you're really so good, than do something already, what are you waiting for?"

It was wonderfully sunny today. Kinda felt like a kid, rode bikes out to the beach and looked at a stretch of land in constant dance with the water. Feels good to be on bikes, feels good to swim, feels good to have summer all over me. Feels good to laugh.

Tapping

2010-05-23T22:54:00.001-07:00

I stepped outside my studio tonight, about a pot and half deep into a coffee overdose, to find a steady drumming noise rattling around the stadium. At the top of the bleachers on the home side dances a lone man in the middle of the night. It's always odd to find people in Santa Barbara behaving outside the expected. We get a lot of runners up and down the stadium steps, but this guy was just tap dancing. In proper shoes atop the platform used by the occasional television crew when they cover soccer games here. There was a lone mercury flood hanging just over his shoulder and he was making the most beautiful rhythms. Pa-tat pa-tat, clickety clickety clickety, then he would jump from the platform and rattle around the metal bleachers and stairways kicking and tapping and making the whole stadium ring. Simply fantastic. I am about three weeks into a video project that should have taken me one, and I needed the break, I needed the moment of outside, I needed to be pulled from my own head and my own work. This guy was doing his own work and pushing himself. The winds tonight are blowing up the coast and through our stadium at a good 35 mph, but he just kept kicking and rattling. Smiles for miles.

Stretched

2010-05-12T11:15:00.001-07:00

Shane Tolbert oversees the rigging of the 40 foot hammock.

Pkg in 1217

2010-05-09T08:07:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I only receive a few minutes a day spent in my apartment. Last night when I dropped through to change from "work clothes" into "farewell party clothes", I was stopped at the front door by a note from someone working for Fedex, the shipping company. Well the note informed me that I had a "pkg in 1217." I took the stairs two at a time to find a very nice neighbor with a box for me. Four hundred square feet of net. From Arizona. For a forty foot hammock. Yes it will fit a lot of people. I have three weeks to do the rigging. Pictures soon.

Masterpiece

2010-05-03T01:22:00.000-07:00

My truck looks huge next to the other cars on the street. Palm trees stand guard all the way to the beach, making a Hollywood gauntlet. The Sun rises and sets funny here, as if the world's axis shifted this fall, or as if the Sun selected a new route through the sky. But tonight as I check my truck and pull the last needed items from the cab and the windows have already started to fog in that way that means it cooled down to fast tonight, I think how glad I am that it is my truck. The condensation heightens the sense of a lonely street. All is quiet in this beach town and I keep thinking about distraction. I spent the first half of the night re-reading my students written thoughts on Sherrie Levine. And the better half of the night watching Pulp Fiction.

I often question my faith, in my past I remember adamantly believing in many ideas and assumptions. It seems the more educated I get the less there is to believe in. I'm not sure I have believed in the "Masterpiece" in a very long time. But shouldn't I believe in a perfect piece of art or rather shouldn't I believe I have "one" waiting. I use to spend a lot of time trying to feel full. Food or fun or confidence or righteousness, but mostly just an overwhelming since of full. I think I forget to feel full even when I am these days. Even when the street is empty and I am headed to a warm bed and I know my world continues a steady course. I am full.

I believe in the Masterpiece. I believe one person can be responsible for a Masterpiece. A gesture or work or project so well conceived and so perfectly executed it leaves the audience in as much awe as the maker. We spend a lot of time in the art world arguing for the original or the authentic, but in that effort I see a missed shot, as if the marksman aimed slightly to the left and missed the balloon dangling from the lips of the perfectly dressed assistant, and the crowd is just confused.

Life needs Masterpieces, works so perfect they redefine expectation. This world of mechanism and remix causes a horrible sensation of de-ja-vu. Every action a reference either caddy or campy to some previous gesture made by some long dead master or musician. Why do we make so many covers to great moments in our memories. I feel it is too easy to be ironic and cynical, very clever boy, but stop being so emo and just say something in which you might actually risk a new thought. Don't pretend to dismiss your desire for the audiences approval. Any artist who rejects the audience is just playing "hard to get" which reveals itself more as an act than a meaningful gesture. We look back to our icons, our dead gods, in search of their mojo, how did he walk or talk or look just before he died? Being dead and brilliant has nothing to do with greatness. The only advantage is the dead never show up to hold the imitators accountable. But back to my empty street and my full belly. I am just getting comfortable here, I am just shaking off the last of my jet lag from the move, and that means a whole lot of good days to come. I am almost back to full speed.

My hand is becoming more steady, my thoughts quicker and cleaner, my ideas are returning to me bigger than before. My belief system is rebuilding. I watched a nine year old do a card trick the other night. He was great, took him three times to get it right, but he never gave up. Lately I argue, its not about whether something is or isn't art, it's that we have the debate, the discussion, the dialogue, that is important. When watching this young fella handle the cards, I remembered for the first time in several years, it's not about the trick working it's about the moment between two people when the trick is possible. When the world and its laws don't apply, when a nine year old can create and inspire.

2010-05-02T10:35:00.000-07:00

The first year of grad school draws near the finish. Spring quarter continues the busy hike toward summer. I currently find myself teaching two classes and registered for five. Yup thats a busy week. Several days I arrive on campus at eight and leave after ten. Studio time is becoming more and more precious and I treasure it when I find it. Today will be spent reading sixty midterm papers, each around eight pages long. I'm getting very fast, it helps that most of them are very well written. Something I didn't expect, based on my peers experience, but my students have proven very good at understanding the material. I am teaching a diverse group of undergrads, all the ins and outs of Visual Literacy (1a) Its art theory and I truly love digging into it. Makes me happy to codify my views on something by sharing it with thirty other people at once. Its one thing to think something its an entirely different thing to say your thoughts out loud in front of a group. It becomes a great moment to confirm what you really believe about a topic. Today will be a day of sitting in the sun and reading papers, not such a bad life at all.

Listing to Port

2010-02-10T10:34:00.000-08:00

Nineteen days separate the work I do today from my first year review show on March 2nd. The chalk board is filling, the pencils are grinding down through the sharpener on the wall and all the graph paper in the studio is deployed. The ideas are like wild horses racing around the stadium and the lasso flies from my hand sepperating one from the heard and pulling it in here and saddling the damn thing and riding it around a bit until it starts behaving itself. But with horses you never want all the fight to go out of it, so these ideas must remain a little jumpy. Springy and ready for adventure, hopefully I can bring them out full and bright and alive. The artist needs to reach out and thump the audience in the chest. Like a nine pound hammer of "Wow".

Nineteen short days to build the first big statement of my time here in the UCSB MFA, that causes a smirk, a smile that I hope reveals just a little to much confidence, like the first time I took a wrench to the training wheels on my tiny blue Schwin and grew up a little faster than expected. One of my nephews cackles a lot when you get him excited, the other one is too old and cool for cackling but I can still bust him up once in a while. But the little one yells with wild abandon when you get him going, and I like getting him going, full body laughing, full open smile whaling, shaking, wiggling, eyes squeezed shut cackling. It reminds me of that first ride down the driveway through the front yard on that little bike, screaming with joy the whole way. Then that precious moment when the ride ends and you realize two great things, one, you made it, and two, its time to do it again.
Its very wrong how much I like a deadline. Its very wrong how much I like it when someone says I can't do it. Its like calling Marty McFly a chicken, you might as well just plan on being proven wrong. Yes that's a "Back to the Future" reference, get over it. This first year has been a challenge, in ways I didn't anticipate, and I think it has taken this long to get the right perspective, to see it for what it is, a big damn bicycle that needs its training wheels ripped off and a Melroy pedaling like his shoes are on fire. This may look a little wobbly to the rest of you, but to me its just getting good.

The moment they think they got him on the ropes is the moment to duck, cause the left hook is coming, and there is no way they can do a damn thing to stop it, best to just get out of the way and watch.

Safe Harbor

2010-02-05T15:00:00.000-08:00

Would you like a conversation machine? I feel as if I am in one constantly. I believe my time sheet will reflect hundreds of hours of conversations. I spend most days leaping from one discussion to the next. Big beautiful dialogues with fantastic people, friends full of imagination and innovation, and then random clerks and passersby in my life, who drift quickly into my narrative and just as quickly wade off into the background.

Several people in my life kindly provide themselves to me for conversations that I anticipate will last the rest of my life. In many cases I can identify the exact starting moment, inversely I hate being able to identify the exact moment we wrapped it up. I prefer the never ending variety of friendship. My conversations just seem to go on and on, sometimes even after the other person has stopped coming around, but I just keep it warm for them in case they should stop bye unexpected.

I cut my finger open on a block of Tillamock cheddar. Well actually the knife I was using to make a slice of cheese for my sandwich. (my brother will tell me this is why he buys the pre-sliced Tillamock) But the thing about this cut is it keeps getting caught on everything, sweaters, doorknobs, bag zippers, loose lemon juice, you know the usual. So I feel lame putting a giant bandaid on this small cut, but it just keeps getting caught on every edge of my life. A truly terrible moment when a violent cuss word bursts from my lips every time I so much as reach into my bag for my phone. I must look like some possessed tourette's victim to all those around me. I come cussing into every room. But the bandaide comes off and like mom used to say you need to let the wound breath to heal. But if I let it breath than I hit the damn thing constantly, so it has been five long expletive filled days and the thing still bleeds.

The wood-shop has become a bit of a sanctuary for conversations, I find it super satisfying to place small foam earplugs in my ears and just work. I often wish I could pull off the same quiet gesture during many conversations I find myself in during the day. Conversations about nothing and nothing and nothing and yet I am still talking and listening. The wood-shop is so uncomplicated with useless talk. Its like the silence of a library, odd to find silence while using a table saw. I guess its because you have to pay all of your attention to the saw in fear of receiving the wrong kind of attention from the saw blade. The current wood-shop of choice maintains all blades at a premium edge, and were one to place finger to blade, the cut would be very clean indeed. But the best cut off currently remains the vacuum of exterior noise. I find the quietest moments of my day are the ones that belong to only me. Maybe the loudmouth in me is finally waning.

Sturdy Purchase

2010-01-29T11:01:00.000-08:00

The floor of showers are often the slickest place to stand. Today like many days I tried to stand perfectly still and static while in the shower. You do not need to move sometimes when the world is so rapidly cascading down about your shoulders. Its nice to not move and just let the water do the moving for you. But in that moment I can feel my toes, I can not always feel my toes but in that moment I can. Its as if the slick smooth surface of the tub is receding with some interior tide, like the sand pulling back around your ankles as you stand at low tide waiting for the next volley from the sea.
My toes begin to slip in the shower and scoot sideways. Very clearly I can feel the tub shifting under the whole of my mass, I am in motion despite myself. As if I am performing a very delicate sideways shuffle. Now here is the weird part I can feel myself drawing closer to the drain, and just for a second the instincts in my brain go against the logic and I am convinced momentarily, like most of America that I may in fact be sucked into the sewer. But than my toes flex, almost on their own, and the tiny muscles that keep me upright adjust and I regain my balance, my purchase as master of the shower. Its the smallest muscles on the bottom of my feet which take control and fix the problem, the solution from the bottom up, the head had nothing to do with it, and my big brain is just amazed that it ever thought it was headed down the drain.
That sideways shift, that slow glide on the cushion of soap across my tub can be a lovely sensation. But not always.
My muscles are working for me weather I tell them or not, my feet are doing the job with out being told, the old Melroy machine is coming back awake and pulling even with the front edge of the wave and getting ready to stand. Before you know it I might even start saying I am riding, as opposed to the current trend of treading.

Background

2009-12-20T02:41:00.000-08:00

I just heard the train, I had forgotten.

Small is a town

2009-11-21T17:47:00.000-08:00

Real towns, places with neighbors, places with histories, and old people who got old living there, those kinds of towns don’t ever let go of their sons. Regardless of distance traveled or struggles fought. Towns of families, towns of people, towns of agreement and towns of reasonable discourse and debate, maintain a spiritual tether. I don’t use that word lightly, but it can only be my spirit, which I feel, now tethered to that place I came from. When I was a child in a creek and the tree and the field, I absorbed that place. I ground the dirt into every cut and swallowed the water that ran down the tree trunks and into the rivers that ran through my land. What is native? I can’t say it really matters to me, be a native of yourself, be a native to your own life. Leave the titling to stuck-ups who need that kind of list to make decisions by. I will continue to measure my longing for a place by Carl Woodage’s tape measure. It’s in my bag now. It’s the kind of object that holds secrets, small memories, it’s really a trigger tool, that reminds me of my tenure as child of family/community. That tape measure is a time machine every time I see it or touch it. I measure the world around me with a tool coated in history. History has always been worn into objects, in fact I would say its pretty hard to wear the history off something like a penny or a pocket knife even harder to catalog all that that history can mean to anyone individual as they recall it.
Much of my life has been spent imagining, which is not to discount the time spent skipping flat rocks across that calm pool of water down the hill from my back yard. I imagined parts of life I couldn’t fully access. Soccer teams of kids and their parents driving them back and forth on cold mornings. The workers inside the bus barn in downtown Ridgefield, its dusty glass and milky light seductive to any twelve year old who passed and found themselves noses pressed to cold glass chin resting on rough brick. A place totally and completely boring to them seemed a magic workshop of fantastic potential to me. The back of the bread truck the milk truck the chip truck as the drivers slammed the gates down too quickly to view the surplus of merchandise being hauled into Zebruns Starliner.
Everyday my town wakes itself up, straightens its aching bones and goes about another day, but it never lets go entirely of its boys, its girls, who traverse the world in search of a variety of success and knowledge and adventure. Not that Ridgefield has a short supply of adventure, the traveling children of this town, because they will always be children of this town, are carefully threading their paths through a maze of strangers, who will likely at some point ask the best question ever. “Where are you from?”
Pride is a funny thing, its one of those emotions or feelings that has such a bad rap that it even merited a deadly sin listing. Now how the hell would I get anywhere without pride. How does anyone ever succeed at anything without the basic guttural knowledge of ones own self value and desire to be better than yesterday. If waking up ever causes me not to strive for a better day then the one that came before, than I recommend the closest geographical loved one should come and kick me in the ass, and quick. Likewise I will oblige. But pride for hometown does something else. It’s like miss remembering your nephews ability to fly or the quantity of rotations he executed during a back flip off a diving board. Because in the misremembering we make it true. We remember our hometowns as places of safety and sanctuary because that’s what they are, that’s the whole point of a hometown, a physical geographical reference point to what you consider good.
This is what I believe is good. My mom and her kitchen. The grass that grows in Ridgefield. (so green Ireland gets jealous) Trees so tall they put you in your place. Rivers that lead places. Friends who don’t miss you as much as wait for you to return. Hugs from people when you need them and vice versa. Curvy roads built by people who liked how much fun curvy roads are to drive. Knowing that you are almost home by every turn. Leaving my keys in the car overnight because I want to believe “they” aren’t out to get me.
My town still has me and I still have it, this week it will celebrate a holiday without me present, but it should know it won’t change a damn thing, cause we already put in the work and a town never lets go of its sons.

Master of Fine Arts MFA at UCSB

2009-11-16T16:07:00.000-08:00

The Master of Fine Arts program located at the University of California Santa Barbara.
I am a current participant in this interdisciplinary tightly organized program. This year applications are due into UCSB by Jan 4th, there will likely be 6 or 7 candidates selected, depending on their qualifications they will be granted Teacher Assistantship. UCSB Art Department, despite budget issues provides generous financial support for their grads. I looked at a lot of programs both private and state sponsored, UCSB excels at financial support. As many know I would very much have enjoyed the program being run by Arnold Kemp at PNCA in Portland, but it was important to me to diversify my degrees regionally speaking. If you know an artist who has questions about applying for their MFA or if you have questions yourself please email me at Patrickmelroy@gmail.com

Breakfast

2009-11-10T20:17:00.000-08:00

The refrigerator once again moaned at the sight of me coming through the door laden with four full bags of new eats. Strange to envision all of that weight going through my body. I hope at least it doesn’t all stay, I hope instead I am able to use it for fuel. Reading ingredients, selecting the smart one over the sexy one when it comes to breads. The packaging is the burden I regret the most. What sane adult would buy so much five color printing, in cardboard and foil only to throw it in the giant blue bin in a matter of days. Half the weight in my bags is likely the multiple layers of stale-proofing. Single-layer packaging, or better yet no layer packaging, maybe when we figure out how to get the cornmeal to form and hold itself into the necessary text to spell out, Cornbread Mix $1.99, now that is some genetic engineering I could get behind.

But I miss Merlin Hawkins and his talent for good shopping trips. I miss the consistency of breakfast with him. Sometimes its easy to forget the importance of breakfast, and the permission it should give you to eat what ever you want, because likely you will burn it off before noon. I miss his language and his hands and his dog. I miss him eating next to me, I miss the way he would distract his wife while I feed the dog under the table. I miss frying him two eggs instead of one because I knew Dee wouldn’t complain if I gave it to him. I miss his fresh shaved cheeks and his unshaved cheeks on the days I came too early and he anxiously made it to the table. I miss feeling bad that I couldn’t get there because I was out of town. I miss knowing he’s there watching Gunsmoke or Matlock or any other damn Andy Griffith show. I like that "spell check" leaves Andy Griffith alone, because that’s the kind of importance you swing when you have done that much.

I bought a camera the other day, it’s a little toy thing, called a Diana, used to make them in the sixties. Shoots square film, which means all the shots come out square and steeped in nostalgia. Something I rail against on a regular basis, but this time I think its just fine. I found a picture of Papa once in a box, it was square and from the sixties. Black and white, he’s young and trim in a perfect cut pencil suit, skinny tie and all, he’s got those great horned rimmed glasses and broad shoulders. He was at his peak, this was while he still had a piece of Neal Motors in Woodland, and I am sure there was something shiny and new in the parking lot. He was at a wedding, I can’t really prove that, but I would still lay money on it. He’s sitting in that way he could, one leg over the other like a real sophisticate and yet there is this real calm energy about him. Like not a worry in the world and probably there wasn’t. He just knows his place in the scheme of things. When I was making him breakfast for all those years, he would instill that same calm in me, as cool cats go, he was the coolest. I find it hard to reach that same level of calm these days. Here I am at the height of my powers, just here to make art and kick a little academic ass, in that order. And yet I find myself opening cupboards and checking behind bookcases looking for that sense of calm the old man could effortlessly hand out just by saying my name as I walked in and telling me how nice my truck looked in his driveway.

Tonight I slung sheetrock and mud. I coated an old beat up wall in the studios, wrapped it in one of those trades taught to me by the men in my family, years of watching manifested in my dusty hands. Tool-belt slung low, chalk-box dusting a precise line down the gray paper of the sheet, tiny sharpened pencil firmly locked behind the ear. My hands moving with the razor smoothly down my line, the snap and crack from the scored gouge and then like a dancer pull that knife in one long stroke up the back to free the flap from the larger panel resting on my tailgate. The panel up to the wall held firmly by Shane, the Makita from the belt screw already loaded on the magnetic tip finds the paper, plunges in, and digs tell it catches wood and pulls snug, dimpling the paper in that oh so satisfying way. And without even thinking to do it my left hand has already loaded the next screw from my pouch. Now where did I learn all that? I learned it one birthday cake at a time.

No one told me to rock the wall, but in my continuing search for calm, it seemed like a good way to stretch my back. Knock those kinks off the building side of my mind.

Raise your hammers to the old man tomorrow, without him we wouldn't know what hard work looked like.

Step three, eat something

2009-11-04T11:17:00.000-08:00

The world population of young people need a new vision of quality. They have lived so long without feeling anything authentic, that they wilt when they find themselves in the presence of greatness. My first high school English teacher Bob Hyatt asked my freshman class if any of us had ever heard an actual radio show. Not just music or news but actual radio shows. The kind he grew up on. Now strange exhibits in the radio museum of public radio. Shows like Portland's Livewire and the ever present Prairie Home Companion. When Hyatt asked us this with a distinct sense of sadness on his breath, he was hoping that we might see the error in our technological eighties decade. Realize plastic was not always better that metal and that it was not about returning to the past as much as holding onto quality. Quality can be innovative by the way, check out the small upstarts of self designers who populate the blogosphere. Dusting off the past and bringing the kickass out of its molecules.

One, yes one block exactly from my house is a giant village of college age drinkers and fornicators. Thousands of pre-adults on individual mass missions of gettin' The Gettin' movement is pretty easy to join and simple to explain. People gettin' drunk and people gettin' laid. In that order.

Shane, Nikki Leone, and I have conversed regularly on the lack of quality late night eating in town. We have struggled with understanding why there is no perfect dive to lurk in the back booth of, we are completely without a quality late night hangout. Do you know what that does to a gang. It is very hard to plan a grand adventure and heist if we have no headquarters to sit and draw on napkins while debating the jukebox agenda. I believe this lack of hang out is due in part to the complete lack of the Gettin' group to appreciate the time honored tradition of extending the hunt, don't jump in the sack immediately and don't get so blotto that you find yourself sleeping sitting straight up on a couch with four other dudes. How can you ever impress a someone enough to want to hold your hand if they only ever see you drunk and muted out by the house music. You can't sound witty, you can't seem cool for listening. You just have to stand around saying silly phrases like, what department you in? Come on young fellas, get some class, get some grace, get some god-damn aplomb.

Here is the bottom line, I got nowhere to take the Giddy-Up, I got nowhere to take the boys when they come down, I got nowhere to build my new crew. How can you have a crew without a hangout? Its downright criminal and its all the fault of these Gettin' guys. They need some charm school. Maybe that will be the way to do this. Maybe I need a charm school slash breakfast sandwich shop, perfect.

Patrick Melroy

Nikki Leone- smile like toothpaste add, hits like a hammer, girl got martial art skills. She makes no separation between the arts, they are all valuable. Nikki is new to my vocabulary but she has proved impossibly valuable as an ally. Often, when in a lecture and I think I must be the only one thinking this guy is crazy, afterwards Nikki tells me that guy was crazy and I feel I am not the only peasant who thinks the emperor is butt naked and struttin in the wind.
Oh and she makes asskickin art.

Cash in Hand

2009-10-23T01:12:00.000-07:00

We have a few new share holders, welcome. While in San Diego last weekend a few of the former colleagues from the road purchased shares in me. They and you should be happy to learn, there is free candy in the studio for any share holders that swing by. Snickers and Milky Ways hidden in the top hat next to the door. Never mind the tootsie roll junk.

The crit comes to me on Wednesday, I should be ready with a brief rundown of work to date and a few longshots I will be making the call on. I have many ideas, as is my norm, but reeling them in, is a lot like wrestling the remote from your older brother. You never quite get it all the way in your hands, but the channels keep changing, and someone is spitting in your eye a lot, slowly.

The world continues to play right into my hand, as the classes and art settle into a more constructive version of manic. The students are doing fine thanks for asking. They continue to impress me. The teachers are still playing catch up in the book of Melroy. I have faith though.

Played power forward in a basket ball game with the undergrads the other night, and was able to walk the next day, which is likely a testiment to their kindness. I am anxious to see their art as closely as I saw their jumpshots.

The family is missed, one nephew gave up his appendix this week, the other one dabbled with H1N1. I trust they are both feeling better. Happy birthday to the little one last week and the big one next month.

Studio #1309 continues the climb to comfort, see you round friend.

Cowboys do artsy stuff too, damn it

2009-10-07T13:47:00.000-07:00

My studio comes closer and closer to function. Several nights now of reviewing old documents and unpacking the packed. Listing, writing, reflecting, discarding. Piles of paper no longer needed are hitting the dumpster like a mad office recycling day. Late late nights spent standing around a coffee pot I rescued from a dusty grave, I feel many of the grads are finding their purchase on this rolling and pitching cruise of ours. The coffee pot is like the center of the ship that is Harder stadium, and a few brave souls keep watch on the creativity storm late at night. We wonder in and out of each others studio, more to catch our breath than to seek any more information to add to our already complicated internal conversations. But like every good conversation it must at some point become public, and I find myself blurting out, Picnic, or Potluck or do we need a twelve foot retractable movie screen in here because I got a lead on one?
The response always in Texan "Yes, of course we do."
Shane Tolbert http://www.shanetolbert.com was wearing very good old steel toed boots to the club last night. His efforts where enormous last night, sanding and prepping thirty canvas, alternating between my gut rot coffee and glasses of red wine pulled from a cheap bottle. When it got really late Nikki and Cappi got him to drag out some of his bigger older work. Which was problematic, because Nikki and Cappi have a kinda an itch to buy art and now they had good reason, and good reason leads to big purchases. But no final sales where sealed. We did however make it to the Pita Pit on Masha's request and all were fed, love the way they make a bread bed for the veggies. With a quick stop at the co-op, a very good late night snack shack. The best treat of Tuesday night being the Peanut Butter Malt balls. Yeah they are as good as you are imagining and yes they would be worth the trip down.
Shane goes before the entire troop tonight and receives our observations, I have spent several hours giving him more than my two bits about his work and ideas and I am sure I will come up with a bit more, but I hope it doesn't get messy. But with Shane I suspect that would only make it better. He's from Texas and he knows how to throw an "ass kickin," and you would be lucky to receive one, as it might teach you more in five minutes than you learned in all of that semester spent watching the sweat rings grow under that one professors arms, or was that just me and every one in my 2d class.
Keep the faith kids life is looking up in the deep south, and make no mistake this is south of most everything. My couch is only tolerable for two nights in a row keep that in mind.

Capital of my Land

2009-09-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the hard part. Try for me this link www.opbmusic.org possibly the greatest broadcast of contemporary music. Also read Michael Perry, his last book "Population 485" I finished on my last night in Washington and left in the hands of my mother. She can read hundreds of pages a night regardless of density.

The Hogan family has invited me in for the weekend. Patrick, Krista, Jake, Zoe, and Laura, their version of a wacky neighbor. I have known these funny people for 13 years. I often show up with no warning, as many of you know my favorite trick, and they always let me in and they often feed me. They are just being polite but it always feels like a solid layer of wagons gets circled around me and I can relax. At some point you will get the run down on each member of the crew. They are a cast of characters of mythic proportions. They live in the valley and they have a perfect curb out front for my little Gypsy Jalopy (like that Giddy-Up?). Some people just have the right kind of house, these are those people and this is that house. The back porch functions like the holy benches in 19th century, known most for the rapturous intellectual debates intiated by the loudest creatives of the day. To sit on that porch and keep up is to step into the ring of a rusty toned boxing gym in the gut of an old neighborhood. The jabs come fast but they are intended to make you stronger and build up your own reflexes for conversation, not to knock you down. The result leaves you with a codified thought, tested and treated now with a new kind of toughener. After a session on the porch you feel full and yet a little lighter on your feet. Kinda raring for the next conversation. Oh and Zoe has amazing butt and poo jokes.

School is breaking over my head and I am tucked and ready to pull out and come up for air the wave breaking on the shore behind me, if you have ever swam in the in the ocean and come out from under a wave you can count on two wonderful certainties. One, the air is going to taste like angels and two, shut your mouth stupid, here comes the next wave. I believe everything is going to be okay. Not like, its okay I think the bad guys are gone we can go outside now... but more of an actual sense of fortitude. This here grad experience is taking shape and I like the shape its forming. Kinda a fractal. Ask Jake about fractals, he is nine and explained it better than any professor in tenure. Eat that tenure committee.

The trailer is fine, though I met some neighbors the other morning who wanted to make sure their tax funded public roads were not used as campgrounds. They should know, I think they are dumb and have been watching too much T.V. and I will not be sending them a Christmas Card, so there.

Okay to sum up, I have the greatest friends in the world, listen to OPB Music, read Michael Perry www.sneezingcow.com and I am still a Cowboy.

This here is South of the beach... You want over there.

2009-09-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

I moved to Santa Barbara. Did you know that? I am in a strange world and no-one knows me here. Its kinda like the FBI artist protection service. They pick up an artist with an established network and drop him in some crazy town in America where he has to put it all back together starting from scratch, well cousin this here's "scratch."

I have met some very kind and generous people thus far. And by kind I mean they have kept fairly sober and away from the cliffs. I will fill you in later on their profiles. I don't know if I have properly thanked everyone who helped me in those last few days before lift off.
Max Melroy and his parents are the greatest people ever. I literally would not have made it here without them and by literally I mean in the gravity sense not the "O.M.G. Donna the food court is literally out of anything edible!"
Abby and the other Burks are far to kind to this brother when it concerns letting him drop junk on her porch.
Oh and the Douglass's are my damn super hero's, never have I had that amount of kindness poured on my shoulders.

You will find me currently just up from the beach in the Land Commander in Goleta, the weather is perfect and camping is a great life. But I feel the move into a less mobile lifestyle will be coming sooner than later.

I have moved into my studio under the soccer stadium, they had a game last night I didn't hang around but I assume we won, we have a very good looking team this year and by good looking I mean, legs like steel corded barbarians. But after everything out of the truck I realized I have lots of stuff but no shelves. So I went and met the woodshop tech, a twenty year veteran of the shop. He gave the me the once over and then the once around and after a quick quiz in which he counted and inventoried all my fingers, I was cleared to use the facilities. Wooden shelves should be in my future very soon.

If you want to start planing your vacations now you should know I have classes Monday through Thursday. The Santa Barbara airport is very near the school and I miss you all a great deal, some more than others. You know who you are.

Meet you on the other side.

2009-09-18T16:38:00.000-07:00

I am off in the early hours of the morning, heading south to an old and new adventure.
I will miss all of you and likely find sometime next week to update all of the adventures of the last month. Please forgive the missing time, when I have a computer I will know you all again.

On the Run in Stumptown

2009-09-05T14:23:00.000-07:00

I am back and running, catch me on the fly and we can coffee together. So many things moving at once I am just trying not to loose a finger and still get everything done.

Be sure to save a dance for me.

My Stomach yields the floor to the Senior Senator of Mensano

2009-08-27T23:08:00.000-07:00

Don Riegle and family put a true hurt on my stomach the other night at one of their favorite restaurants in Mensano. I couldn't tell you the name I just know I ordered too much and had a bottle of wine that would make you cry for your mother. The owner operator of this little food nirvana wouldn't let me order my pasta with the butter and sage as listed on the menu, he said this is the moment of the tomato, take that moment. And holy butter your bread on both sides, was it awesome! The pillows of ravioli were as large as my head and filled with what can only be described as soft-perfect-candy-like-favorite movie-best date ever-kind of cheese. It was like making out with that hot foreign exchange student from high school. Food remains a huge priority in my life and I truly love people who bring me closer to the best meal ever. I will think about that meal for years.

Don and much of his family, wife Laurie, daughters Ashley, and the always light on her feet Alison have been extraordinary hosts. They have opened their house and there knowledge to me and the Giddy-Up and it has been a delight on all fronts. Sadly Don left early this morning for a funeral you may be reading about soon. His dear friend from the senate died this week. It has been inspiring watching him manage his sadness. The day we heard we drove to the ocean and spent our time back and forth between the warm water and the shade of the umbrellas. I feel it must be terribly difficult to morn the loss of your longtime friend and the godfather of your child at the same time as the rest of the country. I guess at some level even grief becomes public domain. He smiled and shook my hand before leaving, it was very nice meeting him, I trust it will happen again.

Oh and there was a Biennale in Venice yesterday. Six am we departed, onboard, Dee, Alessandra, and myself on a long mission of art. We headed to Florence and took the train out to Venice. Four hour trip, and landed in the middle of what should be a fictional place but is real. Venice is in fact exactly like the movies, everywhere you turn. We boarded a water taxi and tooled up the Grand Canal and over to the Armory, or Arsonel to see the 2009 Biennale, a collection of contemporary artists from around the world. Some hits, but a lot of "This curator is obviously visually impaired." The weather was perfect and I enjoyed the conversations back and forth. We traveled eight hours for eight hours on the island. Kinda a "Smokey and the Bandit" style trip. The good news is I am getting very good at hairpin turns in the middle of the night in a stick shift up hill both ways. More on the Biennale later.

Today we return to Florence and the hunt for proper stationary.

Under the Tuscan Sun

2009-08-24T08:56:00.000-07:00

The house is just east of Mensano,(sp) They have made me the get-away driver and I am enjoying the six speed Fiat rented for the purpose. It corners nicely and man do they have the right kind of corners here. Perfect angled and banked back & fourths. With not too many in the same direction to cause dizzy. But the G-Forces you can pull in a small diesel are still impressive (at least to my passengers.) First off this morning, I was faced with a difficult parallel parking situation, well not really a situation as much as a "Grade Triple A" clinic, facilitated by me, at speed no less. And on the opposite side of the road. Not that the cars are left hand drive, they are the same as the American version, it was just a small town in which we needed to get to the market like George Clooney needs a new girlfriend. Oh and it was on a hill. But if I thought that was a feet, in the next village I put the bumper two inches off the trunk of a very large olive tree, on purpose. Great parking spot really. I don't know what all the fuss about parking over here is, I intend to do the next one with my eyes closed.

The family I am staying with have been so unreasonably generous I don't really know what to do. They have provided so much and good conversation, which is odd, I think the reader will agree. We are off to pizza now, which I have informed them I am totally allergic to. They have assured me this is the kind of food you are totally not allowed to be allergic to. So I will be putting aside any pickiness in the interest of having one of those "Remember how damn good that was, why can't everything be that good?" moments.

I am safe, but I am not sure how sound.

I load sixteen tons and what do I get.

2009-08-22T12:17:00.001-07:00

I am in New York. Way layed on the trip to Italy. The big blue truck will be fixed by Tuesday, shareholders should know they had a direct hand in the repair. As I would not have been able to pay for it without you. Michael Perry has written a book in the language of my generation. Titled Truck, halfway through it and he has me bookmarking and underlining passages to pass along to all of you. It kept me sane on my 16 hours of flying and waiting yesterday. I will save you the boredom I practiced yesterday while sitting on the tarmac at multiple airports. I had no idea there was so much tarmac available for parking. It would have been nice to have a pretty girl with me, I could have at leasted practiced necking.

The wooden suitcase built for the trip is in lockdown. In a holding cell at JFK waiting for my next flight. I know I cursed myself by bringing a fresh shirt in my carry on, the universe hates a fresh shirt going to waste. Like when you spill lunch on your pants right after picking up your dry cleaning. Yesterday in Minneapolis I caught sight of the crew loading suitcases. Throwing them like practice for a yet established Olympic exhibition sport. But when they got to mine the man literally carried it the ten feet and set it down gently on the conveyor and when it arrived at plane side the belly loader held it up and a different ground crewmen snapped a photo on his phone. Warmed my little heart.

Hopefully the appreciation of the case continues through a day of waiting at the busiest airport in the country. We have been swinging around Manhatton waiting all day, forgot how much I like this place. No jet lag and mysteriously good mood. Maybe its the unemployment and portability of the situation. All other worries put aside. Many people missed right now, you know who you are, if only I had a plane of my own or hang gliders for everyone, that would be the way to travel. Next stop... New.

Patrick Melroy

Jenny asked for the funnier version

2009-08-07T16:26:00.001-07:00

My Lawyer has advised me to inform any potential viewers of my art,(you) that the experience, while potentially startling at first, will eventually warm, and gel into a cool humming like feeling, not un-similar from that sensation you experience just after riding a roller-coaster, and you step out the exit gate to have your favorite aunt give you an ice cream, just as you sit down and the awareness of flight and drop and rise and speed are still in your hair. But don’t worry this new yet familiar feeling should only last as long as you live, if it persists past that time, it should be clear that the artist and or his graduate school should in no way be held pliable by any persons living or otherwise. Thank you and please drop by my studio for cocoa.

A Statement for UCSB

2009-08-07T14:46:00.001-07:00

I make medium-large to small projects, which often find themselves on the public stage. I am most excited when the audience is engaged in a since of enjoyment and play and physical interaction. My commentary leans toward the hope of a more fun life. It is very important my work feel accessible by large and small audiences, who often if not always have little to no previous explanation of the work. I create objects and events of straightforward engagement, in the hands or in the way, fine art in the everyday world, each gesture feeling native and yet supernatural. A small creative addition to someone’s regular routine. The idea of what is possible should be an ever expanding and progressing notion, it falls to people like the artists to push for these moments to be unearthed, re-framed, and placed in line for public attention.

The waiting room is Full, Please use the Roof

2009-08-06T12:47:00.000-07:00

On your mark.
Get set.
That heartbeat before the GO. How long can I stretch that out? How long can I hover like the coyote over the edge of the cliff waiting for gravity to take its full role in my life. I am that cartoon in mid air holding a wooden stick with a poster board tacked to it, sloppy letters spelling out my thoughts. COME ON ALREADY.

Just bring me to a grand fall.

Nickname Fame

2009-08-04T14:30:00.000-07:00

Lets talk about nicknames, huh? The rules are pretty clear. 1) You can never give yourself a nickname 2) Rarely do people like their nickname at first but they grow to embrace it. 3) A good nickname must be easy to yell in a crowd or while hanging out the window of an accelerating car or train. 4) A nickname should fit between the first and last name your parents gave you. 5) If the nickname makes reference to your appearance then it must be in an ironic way, with the exception of "Red" which has been grandfathered in.

Someone is always allowed to build a nickname for you off of something you have said, this is not a rule as much as a method. You should always keep track of what you say and "own it" when you put two words together that don't belong or rename a city or street accidentally, as these are the most common origins. Anyone over the age of seventy is automatically allowed to nickname you, they are also not required to remember the name they give you, often those nicknames are single use, so don't run out and put it on your jersey if its a good one.

Never put your nickname on a license plate on your car. You are however allowed to use it in the name of a boat. Red's Doll or Buzz'z Deep Diver. Nicknames shouldn't be slung around like some full sack of corn. People hate name droppers especially when some Jocko keeps dropping his own name like it means you understand how he did those twelve keg stands at the last home game to earn an upgrade from his previous nickname Skippy.

If you end up with a nickname that may lead to fights, then you best get good at fights or stare downs or you need to hook up with a wingman or sidecar that has a worse nickname than you. I recommend you find a guy named Rosie or a woman named Carl. Don't pick a fight with anyone named Rosie or Carl. Either of them will likely know how to fight and will take the heat off anyone noticing how your nickname refers to your incredibly high ears. I am just saying nicknames come from weird places, I think your ears look fine.

Never ever get your nickname tattooed on yourself and probably you should prevent other people from branding themselves with your name, a pictorial reference is allowed. Never name your child a nickname when they are born, its rude to do other peoples work for them and it cuts out the fun, its also fascist. Don't be a fascist. There are very few nicknames for fascists and you don't want either of them. Babies are always good receivers of nicknames, but you shouldn't hold them to those names, allow the name to grow with the child. Often this is where the uber crafty deep identity names come from.

A nickname that is built over twenty or thirty years, layers of nicknames that tell an entire story in one word is something to strive for. Don't question the authenticity of a name built in this manner. Statements like "But you don't look like a Cardinal?" or "D-Top, but what does that have to do with Jennifer?" are stupid questions and if you ask them, you should realize there is only one source for stupid questions. And not coincidently going after one of those super deep identity nicks will usually land you a new one of your own, one you may not like very much, Captain Boris Unoriginal Von Critical. Because if there is one thing people with twenty year nicknames know its how to swing that particular axe.

Last but not least never out some ones nickname if they introduce themselves by a name you previously never heard, not in the twelve years you have known them did you know Denver's real name was George. It’s rude of you to say something totally bro-onic like "but we all call him Denver, aint that right Denver?" If he didn't give them his nickname its because he doesn't like them as much as he liked you, right before you dropped that sack of awkward on the floor.

So in closing, don't rush it the nickname will show up. Just be patient and keep mixing your metaphors and it will be on a nametag waiting for you at the front desk before you know it.

Most Sincerely
U-Betcha

The Basis of this is Albright

2009-08-03T09:52:00.000-07:00

The return of the great and powerful Joshua T Albright. Cast aside your worries, the man roles back into town soon, very soon. Albright will resume his command of the lower southwest state of Washington. If you want to pull any job in the southwest you best clear it with big Papa Albright. His reach extends fair and his profile casts a shadow that both Paul Bunyan and his Ox envy. Suddenly the balance feels a little more even, the scales a little less tipped in the favor of the stupid and careless and instead we lean dramatically on the side of bold intellectualism and stable clever resolve. Down with the tyrants who take our loved ones and place them in harms way! That said Albright roles heavy and jacked and I had little doubt the man would fear not the arrow that takes flight, but embrace the wind that protects the fearless. Now that same wind is at his back blowing him steadily back to us. He arrives a hero and a well missed brother/father.

My, my, what a week can do to a soul. Santa Barbara unfolds to me, its mysteries becoming less daunting and its options more varied with each visit. Three plus one came to greet me at the Chinese restaurant. Two Lauras, a Ray, and Shane kept me talking into the night, giving good advice and clear discussion of the future. They all did a fine job at two things, 1) keeping me dancing and jumping to keep up with their strong wit and clever thoughts, and 2) demonstrating what the success of the MFA can produce. They are shiny and bright and I can't wait to work with them further.

In the last moments of dark in the morning, the window sprung wide, its gap filled with a diligent box fan, I find myself unable to fully grasp my situation. I am broken and yet my horizon is full of the Promised Land. Nothing is free, not happiness, not love, not even pain, every part of life comes with a barcode these days. Mobility cuts deep into the wallet organ, and a day off requires a check written on the guilt account. Every moment awake is another moment of evaluation and decisions. I must place all of it in perspective and evaluate each component of my life from the balcony of calm. The morning brings with it the chance of a new day full of laughs and cheers, a day built on triumph and caddy confidence secured deep in previous plans set to motion. This is my story, it will be a success story, god-damn-to-it.

What I may want more than anything is the release from my friends questions. What will you do about your truck, when are you moving, how will you accomplish this next step, it seems like the odds are stacked against you, it seems like you don't have the right pieces in play to make this happen. But what I know inside me and have no way to articulate outwardly is my constant resolve. The only game piece I need to win, is already working. I have secret weapons stacked all over the board. My plan may seem problematic to all around me, but luckily its me who will be going through my life, others will have to settle for their own lives. I don't mind the concern, I know it is an act of love. I know that the people closest to me have the most vested in this next venture of mine. I will try to take each of their questions as a compliment that they would spend any of their valuable time worried for me. I struggle to find the polite way to let them know I cherish their involvement, but what I need most right now is cheerleaders not brainstorm/problem solvers. Trust this Melroy he's got his shit on lockdown.

Cadigan (The One and Only) reminds me I only have ten days left at this desk. I am not sure where to put this sensation. I want to feel I am standing on the tippy-toe edge of the diving board at my grandfather’s pool. Ready to spring up, and then down, launching up into the air flying, arms cast out, grinning, anticipating that next beautiful embrace of the cool water. I love that moment just on the edge of the board, how will I enter the water? Every time is different, from gross gangly splashing to perfect torpedo like velocity, every way is the right way. My spring board is ready, I stand hand held high, some people out of the pool watching, waiting to see which landing will happen, others already in the pool waiting on the splash and displacement of water, wondering what I will add to their party. Swimming, that’s really what I should be doing more of, Kermit (explained later) took me into the ocean and together we challenged that big ol’ bastard of a body of water to best us. That is a different kind of swimming, I think I liked how that water shoved back. The swimming pool is trustworthy, the ocean is a dance partner yet proven. Both have their place in my future. The trick is to know which is which and behave accordingly.

Josh Albright 6’4’ and full of muscles. He came from way back and still plays front and center in my life. Josh is, among other things, consistent. Which is no small feat. He has a courage and discipline that I have always respected. He is wrapping up his second tour of duty for this United States. Three children and a loyal loving stubborn tough wife named Sunja got him through. He and his family are some of my most favorite people, I can’t count the number of times I have arrived on their doorstep broken and battered, beat down by a girl or a job or a bank, and these angels fed me and listened to me and put band-aides on all my wounds. Not to mention some very decent booze in my gut. Josh is my best-friend every time, no doubt about it. I could only hope for ten dozen more years knowing him, that would almost be enough.

Anxiety? Hum a few Bars wouldya?

2009-07-28T13:25:00.000-07:00

I know about the chemical and biological reasons my chest gets tight when I think about that silly Collections Agent who keeps calling from Florida about some random 240 dollars he keeps telling me I owe him. I know why my body has a physical response to this thought, I just don't know why I choose to embrace that sensation of stress. Why do I associate this completely abstract relationship, a computer file titled PATRICK MELROY, with the very real dread of being hit by a car? They just are not the same thing, but my body keeps putting itself through it.

It’s funny to spend so much of my time feeling bad about something that just isn't anything. Not the bill in Florida, forget about that, I will pay that on payday and be done with it. It will cost me over twenty percent of my pay check for something that essentially comes down to me not communicating with another human, even though it was their mistake. There just isn't anyway for me to change that now. Sometimes even when you are right you pay the price of being wrong because the world doesn't have a large thresh hold for the individual. No the real stress seems to be coming from a complete lack of jokes.

I need humor, it’s the greatest moment in any day, the moment someone cracks me up with the simplest and smartest of well placed phrases. I just need to get my belly laughing and giggling and cheering for the joy of a sunny day. No one wants me to be unhappy, even that guy in Florida doesn't want me to be unhappy. He doesn't even know me. But everyone around me is lifting their heavy boots and dragging them from one boring moment to the next. Where are the banana peals when you need them? We need them. Cue the 1970's monkey buddy comedy.

Speaking of the 1970's, start it from nothing. Zappos.com did not exist two years ago and it just sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. Please if you do nothing else, join a group of people who are trying to do something that hasn't been done yet. We already know how to feel sad and broke lets try feeling funny and sexy. Its free, even if you are still sad and broke, laugh at it, because once you fall down, its a lot better to stand back up than keep laying there on the ground re-evaluating how you got there.

I know this sounds sad, but lets just reflect on fish tacos for a moment. I was just in the office of Robin (see below) she brought up a very good point. Any day you end at 5:30 with two fish tacos covered in pineapple riding shotgun to a salt-rimmed margarita, is a day worth repeating. Almost any bad situation can be made better with the mixture, fish tacos and margaritas. The right thing to do is go up and down the coast every day ordering fish tacos and margaritas until you find the best combo. When you do text Robin and she will be there lickety split.
Don Winslow, a very good writer, argues in his book "Dawn Patrol" that "...everything is better with a tortilla wrapped around it..." I challenge anyone to prove Don or myself, who agrees completely with this, in any way wrong. You won't, but we will end up eating a lot of fish tacos, clever challenge huh?

I have struggled for years balancing my anxiety with my daily decision making, the problem is, both those activities occur in the same place in my brain. I need to appreciate "this" and stop letting "that" get all over me and my day. I got to pitch for my softball team on Saturday. There was a beautiful moment when I was standing in front of my eight other teammates, staring down the batter from the Lutz tavern, and they were all waiting to see what I would pitch. And they all wanted me to succeed, and I wanted to succeed for them. But it was living, no way around it. I had placed myself in the right place and it worked, the only worry I had was getting the ball over the plate, no anxiety for life, just the joy of the moment. Like falling down, it’s not why you fall, it’s the act of falling that makes getting up so magnificent. Get up, it’s worth it.
Patrick Melroy

Robin Gerstenfeld: artist and friend. I like knowing Robin, she has the ability to speak clearly with a great deal of care, and never speak badly of anyone or any situation. It inspires me to clean up what I am saying and how I am saying it. Both of us will see less of each other in the near future which is sad, but for the right reasons. She too will be leaving her job at PNCA for new adventures, which I can't wait to hear about. Knowing Robin is a lot like knowing the town sheriff. Robin is the Sheriff of PNCA, she is fair, it’s the best way I can say it, but she sees everything that happens in her town and she keeps the peace best she can. But just like the Sheriff in your hometown she has a bigger identity, one that extends far beyond her daily duties. PNCA is losing a great pillar of its staff community and the world is gaining a free agent with possibly more unharnessed potential than any single human should be allowed to possess. I know few people who I trust as much as Robin I doubt that would change at all even if I lived a thousand years, which is my estimation of how long it will take PNCA to find someone as good.

Too much coffee or an actual Shakespearian tragedy?

2009-07-24T13:34:00.001-07:00

How many lances does it take to bring the charging bull down. It could be me or it could be the world but one of us is gonna have to bend on this one, because neither of us can keep up this pace.

I have no truck, little money, the job is going away, the girlfriend is back east, I'm moving to a new state, and I am more than positive I have a new cracked tooth deep in the back of my head. In other words, my horse just died somewhere past El Paso, the herd ran off so I got no cattle, I'm running from some trouble in Tulsa, and I broke a spur, and the campfire just went out, my life has become a country western song.

I have been saying for years that my Grandma Vonda had a saying, "When you are on your way home and it starts raining, there comes a moment when you can't get any wetter, so that's the moment when you should start jumping in puddles and splashing around, even better is when you except that this moment will get here sooner or later, so you might as well lean into that puddle at the first sight of drops on your face." She knew as I do now, that rain can't hurt you if you don't let it, all it can do is make your shoes feel a little heavier.

What you do with what you have defines you, if you are at all concerned about definitions, and just as you pull through at that very ruff moment and you look around to take the bow, you realize you were so busy solving your dilemma by yourself, and feeling sorry for yourself that your audience up and left your theater at the intermission.

Fixing problems gets old, so sometimes its more important to fix myself. My problems often feel so overwelming they require extra breathing and extra flexing of gut, but over and over I find that just causes hyperventalation and cramps.

I can't fix the truck, its one of those impossible riddles created by some obscure philosophy proffessor. Where all of the elements in the problem feed back in on each other and make any solution more problematic than the next. Which leaves you with some weird calculation of just not solving anything, maybe there is a time to pull your chips back from the table and realize this is just the wrong time to play this game. Which means its time for a new game.

Shall we establish the rules up front, lets.

One- keep your gun hand free and ready.
Two- kiss whenever possibble because not getting a kiss is unacceptable.
Three- Give up on getting it right, just get it good, that will be enough.
Four- This aint a tightrope asshole, walk around a little and get some perspective.
Five- Eat too much, laugh too long, drink it while you still can, the buzz is always worth the hang.
Six- Cross your eyes or fingers but never your friends.
Seven- If I am not having a good time then I am wasting time.
Eight- Objects are less important than objectives.
Nine- Own it.
Ten- Let it out.

That said, lets put this entire stack of records on and let the sound spin out over us. Its probably a good idea to follow the river even if we can't see the end, worst case scenario we end up at the beach and I have always liked the beach.

Regarding Vonda May Hawkins, redhead, she gave good advice and laughed a lot, she was the kind of person you made friends with, and then cherish even more when she makes a friend of you. She had cancer and a family, guess which one she spent more time thinking about. Lets just say as bad as anything ever gets, well at least it aint cancer.

Daunted: the act of looking forward wrongly

2009-07-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

The truck broke, which seemed like the perfect harbinger of the exodus of my lady. Giddy-Up galloped off to points East. Depressing to watch her go, my house seems so much smaller without her in it. That should be the other way around, but its not.

I'm desperately clearing house, email in-boxes long neglected, back of drawers backstopping front of drawers, and of course the clearing of my mind. Money is not the only struggle, funny how I focus so completely on it. I imagine I should be more concerned with the level of work I will find myself making in grad school, or struggling to understand the delicate network of this here "Art World" which I purport membership. How tangled it all seems, how filled with missed connections and small slights, as if the art world requires you to be friends with everyone and yet rivals to the bitter close of the show.

I can not really vision myself as an artist referenced by my current colleagues during one of their high school port reviews. Which is a lie, that specific thought occurred to me while crossing the railroad tracks on the way to work. I was driving down 15th ave, which has an old iron track down the middle, and as my car tire hopped up and straddled the iron and the whole car began a slow-dance-like sway down the road, I thought about Trevor Amery (new to the blog). I wondered if my friend Trevor while deep in a portfolio review would find himself recommending to the student the review of my work as a guide to their own interests. Sometimes I see these outcomes as my true goals.

Its hard to imagine where you might land once you let go of the rope swing into the river, the water is moving, you are moving, and its hard to judge how high this cliff is, I do know how hard it was to climb from the river up the slippery rocks to the top of the cliff. There it was no small feat to retrieve the rope from its dangle, and gage it for sturdiness. Will the branch hold, will the rope hold, will these ten hillbillies in bikinis and cut offs be impressed or will they cringe as I slam into the one water hazard they know to avoid because of location of birth. The best I can do is try to enjoy it, and realize at the end of the day I did it for me, not for the cliff or the tree or the giggling gaggle. I did it to feel it. So now I have the rope in hand and it is a grad program and right now is the hardest part so far, because that is the way it always is, the hardest part is the anticipation.

What if I can't get the rope, what if I can't make it up the rocks, what if I can't pull myself from the water, what if I can't find my bathing suit or my keys or the gas to get to the river? What if I never knew the river or the rope swing was there, what if I stayed home and just imagined the adventure, I bet I would be completely wrong as to how it felt and what the actual scariest part was, and I would also be wrong as to what the best part would be, and I would be completely unable to tell you where I would hit the water after letting go. I would very totally and completely not be able to tell you what it feels like to hit the bottom of that cool river and push off with my toes in the silt and rise lungs popping to break the surface and find the air to scream the mad joy of childhood, the shear pleasure of coming that close to "not doing" and still leaping. Yeah my life is mostly a rope swing on a river and it seems the cliffs keep getting higher the current faster and the hillbillies cuter.

Trevor Amery explained: I met Trevor on the worst weekend of his life to that point. He and I were recruiting for separate art colleges, he MICA and me PNCA. Trevor and I found ourselves locked in a snow storm in Albuquerque NM after a portfolio day. We had lame hotel rooms and no chance of anything interesting, we just had to gut it out until our flights the next day. Trevor was raw and exposed from a very recent break up. He was frustrated and hurt and mad, and I mostly let him. We talked for hours and drank at random bars all night, we tried so hard to find a decent place to eat but every restaurant was booked for Holiday Parties. We ended up at a Texas land and Cattle, read Applebeas its Friday Chilly!
Trevor kept his mind up, his attitude forward and never expressed any doubt about his future success. I had met him a brief few hours prior and it would be fair to say, I trusted him right off, if this was Trevor on his worst day, than I very much intended to be on his side come his best day.

Patrick Melroy

2009-07-16T15:05:00.000-07:00

I have issued stock in myself, I encourage you all to buy shares.

Each certificate is listed with 14 shares, they have sold for as high as $500 a certificate and as low as $8.

I wanted a method for friends and family to support me economically in this transition to Grad School. The stock seems like the perfect method for people to give money to the cause while retaining a voice in my future.

The Recapture

2009-07-15T09:12:00.001-07:00

Saturday turned into a brilliant night full of fun people and great food. For those in attendance, I am humbled by your friendships, thank you. For those who missed it, I will be having another one next year about the same time, mark your calendars. Site to be announced at later date.

The actual anniversary of me dropping into this life went beautifully. Giddy-Up and I completely wrecked any idea of diet. Well done Jenny, Bill, and Gus (new cast member, defined later)
Here is the basic run-down of the day.
Bunk's sandwiches for the best breakfast sandwich on the planet. Your cousin made the yolk perfectly and they gave me a raspberry cupcake from the SugarPimp. Off to Washington park and the Portland Rose Garden, great views. Wild goose chase in Vancouver for a U-Pick berry place, then Hazel Dell Brewpub, for the best Club Sandwich in the world. I have tried hundreds and the Brewpub Club is still the best. Duane and my mom showed up, surprising Alessandra but not me, I just assume them to show up everywhere, some kind of mom child connection.

Leaving the newlyweds behind we headed to Sauvie Island via St. Johns and the very tall St. Johns bridge. We hit the U-Pick feilds like hobos just off a northbound crawler. Two pounds of Blueberries then off to the barn to coo at the animals and buy soda pops at the farm store. Root Beer and Vanillia Cream, slow driving around the back of the island headed to the beach and the mighty Columbia river.
"How mighty" she asked? "So mighty when the ocean sees it coming it runs the other way." I says.

After the appropriate amount of walking and making out on the beach we headed back into the thick of it, landing on the porch of the New Old Lompoc with the aforementioned trio. After two plates of nachos we hot footed it over to Apizza Shollz. We got two of the last pies of the night and were glad for it. Finishing up watching the Toure De France at Gus and Bill's with icy blended rum drink in hand. Crash bang bam into bed and call that exactly the right way to celebrate the end of one year and set up expectations for the next year.

Brief description of Gus Baum: He has a trumpet that would rival any treasure in the Indianna Jones movies, and he knows how to play it, a passion and skill which can only lead the observer to believe in a truly deep and meaningful soul, regardless of how Fratty he drinks, he has funk down in there and we would all be better off if he let it out more regularly.

Bail Out of this Work Sled

2009-07-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

I'm taking my Gyddie-Up and heading to the sand.

I would like to apologize to the following people.
Bill Watt
Sarah Kamsler
Jenny Cadigan
Chris Sweet
Becky Haase
And Grandma, sorry about the mohawk, but you do look cute.

One less day to wait

2009-07-07T14:36:00.000-07:00

My Gyddie-Up will get here tomorrow. It makes me shake with excitement and I have become impossible to deal with at work. The world is coming to a head around me and I can only wait, hours slip by with the silky expectation of a grace that really should only be granted by an organization on a par with the Vatican rather then Continental Airlines, who is bringing me my relief in less than a day.

The 4th of July was nice, Arnold Kemp attended the Ridgefield Parade with me and then invited me along to friends of his for a brief but great bar-b-que. Oh and before I forget, Johnny Depp should never have made Public Enemy. It was terrible, Bale is made of sawdust and should not be allowed to act. Michael Mann is not invited to Christmas and I want my money back.

Colson Whitehead has a new book out “Sag Harbor” twenty three pages in, it may be my new favorite. The book chronicles Summer, which is parallel to my life, which also chronicles Summer, even in the winter. By fact I am moving to Summer, in the form of Santa Barbara where I have been assured it remains Summer even when the calendar disagrees. And yes that is a capitol ess on the front of my season. It deserves nothing less, and neither do you, so lets keep those capitols coming.

God Save the ones in bathing suits, and the corn on the cob, and long long moments underwater when you aren’t sure if you are going to make it back, and God Save the person who invented making out, cause we would have a whole lot less unemployment if we all remembered that the point is, and always has been, to get her to touch you.

Hot on the Trail

2009-07-02T12:45:00.000-07:00

Gyddie-Up gets here in five days. She is hot on the trail of a perfect NYC 4th of July. On Saturday if you are in New York, go look for the bombs bursting in air and she will be dancing directly underneath them. Then she's on a fast track to my coast.

The nights are long, I am sure this weekend will be full of warm dark pools of night. Evenings that can't be fixed by twirling fans or stripping all your clothes off. Nights that can only be fixed by skinny dipping and cool blended drinks and secrets whispered across the water with only the stars and summer moon providing judgment. Nights that were meant to start legends during. Nights where new scars are formed and new loves grow. The mighty summer has magic about it, and anyone trying to tout the beauty of some other season, needs to remember the joy of watching someone new peel off a swimsuit and lead you by the hand into the cool water of adventure. Summer is for the brave and the lovely, summer is for the bold and the swift, summer is for "all the right reasons" and for, forgetting all the reasons why not, and only believing the moments of "Hell Yeah!"

Bring on my summer, I was born to this.

Lunchman cometh

2009-07-02T11:52:00.001-07:00

All should be right when there is even a little food in my stomach.

Arnold Kemp is Smart

2009-06-30T09:58:00.000-07:00

Brash, lively, honest, and specific, Arnold Kemp went to dinner and gave a concise evaluation of Portland thus far. According the Chairman it is in fact good and right. If this town is lucky he will make it his own. I appreciate his guidance and humor regarding my near future, he is certainly one to watch.

This week will close with the annual 4th of July parade in Ridgefield Washington, where I am sure I will receive my annual disappointment at the lack of floats and creativity in the event. Every year I brave the crowds and hope for some amount of innovation in my community, and each year they let me down. I want a float building contest to pop and really make Ridgefield "float town USA." Home of the greatest float builders on earth. It could happen.

The best part of the 4th will be and is always the breakfast at Starliner, Tony Zebrun runs the amazing breakfast and it usually is more of a parade than the one in the street. There is a good chance we will have Arnold Kemp at the event this year for the first time. Everyone is very excited at his celebrity status.

The Entirety of a Weekend Spent.

2009-06-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

My shoulder still lacks the flexibility I am used to. Likely the overload of fall planning in the middle of a summer which should be spent swimming and frolicking.
Its quiet in the steel desk aquarium this morning, most of the usuals are still on weekends far away. Just me and Sanford (described later than this) the phones humming with questions. Every voice urgent with worry about choosing the right loan or house or job. We provide the counsel we can and send down the line the real complicated ones.

They gave me left field on my softball team. Its in the bar league here in Portland and they have deemed me entirely too sober to play the entire game, so I will likely switch out or do some shots around the fifth inning. Apparently we are Team Evil sponsored by The Red Fox and the Florida Room.

The move is coming on fast and the equipment is slow to assemble. But soon enough I will have everything needed for Santa Barbara.

My Uncle uses an 80/20 mix on his sausage

2009-06-23T09:09:00.000-07:00

Bunks, 8:12am. I had ham on my breakfast sandwich, Watt went with the sausage. For those who have yet to have me drag them out of bed to go get one, Bunks makes the best breakfast sandwich on the planet, don't take my word for it, read the same thing in the NY Times. The eight o'clock hour is the time to get in, no traffic in the street or on the sidewalk.

The shocking part came while our cousin was making our sandwiches and the Uncle was busy stirring a giant bowl of meat. I say,"that the meatballs?"
He says, "Nah this is the sausage, thats the meatballs over there." elbow juts out at a larger bowl of meat.

It hits me of course they make their own sausage, you don't get to be on top with frozen Jimmy Dean. Watt gives me a taste of the sausage, and G to the Damnit, I thought I was gonna start dancing. Holy Cow Shit, it was amazing. Problem being, I can only have one Bunks sandwich a week, so I have to wait until at least Sunday to put the sausage in the sandwich.
Tragically, my cousin making the sandwich this morning over did the yolk, but sometimes thats why you appreciate your uncle more, he's got the skills, every time.

It is no exaggeration to say Bunk's makes Patrick Melroy fly.

Cadigan to Melroy, Melroy to Watt, Double Play

2009-06-22T13:24:00.000-07:00

Lunch... the carts on 10th and Alder, I dig the little greek guy on 10th, hes got dangerous good food. Then off to the park on 9th and Washington for a quick eating fest. Jenny Cadigan's Thai curry was spicy and filling so she passed it to me, I cleared the chicken then Bill went after the bamboo shoots. Then we rolled heavy through the park blocks and made our stand at Cupcake Jones on 10th and Everett. Special of the day Peanut buttter chocolate, Watt went with the taramisu. Awesome on both counts, Cadigan passed but fell for it a couple blocks later when she tried the taramisu, which she deemed to big to eat. It is possible that every bad mood can be fixed with frosting and cake, ask Giddy-Up.

Kay Melroy Marries Duane Douglass

2009-06-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I was tasked with the great honor of Officiating over the wedding of my mother to Daune. This is the portion of the service which got rained out.

Thank you all for coming to this wedding.
Ask them to take their seats
Bret plays music for intro
Jeep pulls up
Bride and groom enter
Mike says a prayer for the couple.
Abby reads description of River of Choices.

This may be the moment when we all get back to normal.
To truly appreciate normal you have to be without it for a very long time.
“I wish things would get back to normal.”
Does anyone really remember what normal looks like?
I personally believe Normal started to fade near the beginning of Reaganomics and continued to drift away right through the nineties.
It seems like normal may have taken some extended vacation and not told anyone.
We have been looking for normal everywhere, from our jobs to our friendships.
And it just seems that normal gets further and further into the past all the time.
Like remembering when TV was normal
or when the kids were normal… or when gas was a normal price.
This is what I believe normal looks like.
When someone says… you “guys” should come to our party.
You know exactly who “GUYS” is… and you know they will be with you regardless if they or you want to go.
You stop worrying about getting rides to the airport; because there will of course be someone to take you. That someone is usually a member of the “GUYS team.”
Normal is having someone with a good opinion and they have been willing to share it with you for a very long time, in fact you can’t remember a time you didn’t rely on that opinion.
Normal is having someone who brings you a sandwich and its made exactly how you would have made it… only it tastes better.
Normal is when the future seems sane and safe and full.
Normal is that moment when you realize you have been smiling for over a month at absolutely nothing.

Normal is where we find ourselves now. This is not making do. This is not rushed, this is not unusual this is normal; these two people are what normal looks like.

I often feel when you meet new people it’s as if you have spent your entire life getting ready to know that new person. It seems like all of a sudden your decisions lead you right to this place and this person. And you get very proud of yourself for being ready and then you get a little more excited thinking that other person has been spending their time getting ready for you.
My mother has achieved so much; she is a complete nut and its what I like best about her. She has always put everyone else ahead of her,
Duane showed up just in time. I have never met anyone quite like him. The most interesting thing about Duane to me is, he is still growing.
He is still learning. Somebody forgot to tell him to get old, he just keeps moving forward, and he is not stuck.
He is exactly the kind of person I expected to show up.

These two individuals have decided to marry. Which means they are getting down to business and they are making an entirely new plan. This will not be as it was before this will never be the same again.
This will be normal, because it already is. It has felt normal to these two for several months now.
As the community that surrounds these two I am glad you are here.
I am tasking you all with looking after this couple. I am asking you all to involve
yourselves in this marriage.
I will now ask all of you to speak in one loud voice answering WE DO to my question. Will you as a community agree to support and watch over this marriage protecting it always? WE DO
(Get rings from Max)

Kay face Duane and place this ring on his finger.
Duane do you take this woman Kay to be your wife? I DO
Duane please face Kay.
Duane place this ring on Kay’s finger.
Kay do you take this man Duane to be your husband? I DO
Duane…You may kiss my mother.
We will now sign the Wedding certificate
Play music
Roger and Pat please join us.

By the power vested in me by the State of Washington, by the County of Clark, by Safeway, and by the members of this community, I now pronounce this a lawful and sound and normal marriage. Ladies and Gentleman Mr and Mrs Kay and Duane Douglass.

Please now join them in the Library for doughnuts and beverages.

Bread and Cheese

2009-06-19T15:21:00.000-07:00

Lunch... Cadigan and I ran to the market and built a brief but worthwhile lunch and the rest of the afternoon was spent in the usual manner. The sky opened and dropped all its water on just our little part of the city, and yet its still just a little too warm. People from every building came out on their loading docks and patios to watch it pour in that very specific summer way that only rain in the northwest can accomplish.
I'm planning and planning and writing the wedding service I have to give tomorrow for my mom and her new husband Duane. Well at least that's what he will be when I get done tomorrow. Its an odd sensation being briefly in charge of performing a wedding, kinda just a very small intense moment where before I start talking they will be separate, and when I stop talking they will be very completely and totally bonded, legally and soundly. Kinda like when that rain woke up the afternoon and everyone could sense we would all be a little different when it stopped and some of us would be drenched. I know tomorrow will be fine, there really isn't any way for it to go wrong, I wouldn't really tolerate that.

Patrick Melroy

Bill Watt aka William Hall Watt the IV (fourth)

2009-06-18T08:43:00.000-07:00

Bill is the strongest person who has ever hit me. He wasn’t really trying so I survived. He wasn’t even mad which I believe is why I was not injured, he did however displace my entire mass with no more than a flick of his elbow. A very sobering moment, one I never again intend to provoke.

Bill has the size and strength of two Irish bouncers. But what makes him especially dangerous, besides his cold hit-man like view of people smaller than himself, is his “m to the eff to the ucking Speed.” Dude moves fast, he is not a 59’ Lincoln Continental which has to get up to speed on the straights before it can sit you back in your seat, he is more like the “Genral Lee,” you can technically see the Dukes of Hazzard in the air, but their aint a damn thing you can do about it until they land on you and foil your plans to kidnap Daisy. The point is Bill has options and he keeps them open like a 7/11.

I work with Bill and he is a very good photographer, which I have used to my benefit several times. He also is willing to try new things, any new things, really, because his physique protects him from most experiences including Vegan Thai places. I have a great deal of respect for Bill on many levels, he is very comfortable in almost every situation and excels the first chance he gets. Lucky for all of us he finds plenty of chances. Like the time the bus load of Canadian Tourists showed up and he convinced them PNCA was the leading Proctology College in the Northwest and they should all come in for a free exam. Which of course allowed us to go to lunch early that day.
The man has skills.

Brianna McGrew turns the Corner

2009-06-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday itchy. Wrong shirt likely. After work colleagues Bill Watt (explained later) and Jenny Cadigan (previously mentioned) met for drinks in the famed Yurs. They know how to pour a shot of whiskey at Yurs and while there I know how to drink it. Later Cadigan, Watt, and I parted ways, they both headed to other obligations, and me off to the 21st birthday of a good friend Brianna McGrew, which she was holding at a deep Northwest Industrial gallery called SpringBox. The food was great and found myself in several verbal fencing matches. Meredith Andrews had me trying to keep up for over an hour, while Jax Gise and Vegan Mel were kind to an old man and let him rant and rave about what very small things I think I have learned. Brianna is awesome and I wish I had spent more time talking to her and Kyle, but its nice that we can now do that at a bar.
Congrats McGrew, enjoy the blackouts. Cheers.

Morning Cereal and Ramblin Rod off the Air

2009-06-15T09:51:00.000-07:00

I know we have turned off the analog signal, I know television is broadcasting in all digital.
I chose not to get a digital converter box for my old television. Every news organization made a very big deal about the conversion. They were of course required to, by the Feds, and the panic was infused early with a gleaming white smile, and a never ending continual patronizing patter of goo that always made it feel like they were talking to some strange population of mental deficients who apparently were left by their handlers to make the digital switch alone. And from the broadcasters slow small worded speech you would believe these people just as likely to plug their new converter boxes directly into their own ears as the back of their TVs in exactly the same manner in which you have plugged antennas into the back of TVs for the last 50 years, oh wait, I mean since TVs were invented.
Regardless I chose to go through the switch flip in the dark. This morning I rose and made my bowl of ceral as I have done for years, only now I have Almond Breeze instead of milk. I took my bowl to sit on the couch and check the status of my local analog signal. All but channel 6 was gone to the world of static. Its been like this since Friday. Channel six keeps playing a loop of prerecorded programing describing both in Spanish and English and Closed captioning how to perform the transition. The language continues to be slow and small. I happily crunch along hoping that someone with imagination might finally be put in charge of something, but I am dissappointed once again. They don't make it fun, they don't use this moment to bring people along with a feeling of excitement and joy for the switch instead they use the same scare tactics employed by Orson Welles on his War of the Worlds broadcast.
Oh if you don't switch you will be left in the dark, but really the snow, the static.
Well I am kinda glad to be there, it doesn't really feel bad to be missing CSI-Lameville.
None of this would have happened under Ramblin Rod's watch. He would have insisted that after the stations stopped broadcasting, that a loop of cartoons play continuously, with a few smile contests thrown in for good measure. So say we all!

Portland Naked Bike Ride

2009-06-14T09:46:00.000-07:00

On the way home last night at the intersection of 7th and Belmont I was held up by over 1000 naked bicyclists on their annual naked bike ride through downtown. It was brilliant, I enjoyed all 23 minutes of it. So many people, it seemed like it was never going to end which was of course fine since when do you ever get to see 1000 screaming naked people for free. Several of my fellow drivers seemed upset which I feel might have been their intoxication level or their douche-bag quotient. Regardless, I was thrilled to see my fellow bike riders spreading the love and everything else. I just wish I hadn't forgot it was last night June 13th at Midnight.

Patrick

That Damn Zeartman

2009-06-13T11:54:00.001-07:00

Hero Zeartman seems to have resurfaced. I trust it will be a lot like last time. Oh the lawsuits, anyway, make the best of it people. The language should be the least of our worries. My guess is it has something to do with Televisions switch to digital.
god Help us.

Patrick Melroy

Jenny Cadigan the One and Only

2009-06-12T15:18:00.000-07:00

I work with Jenny Cadigan every day. I find a great deal of comfort in Ms. Cadigan's professionalism. I am sure she has no similar problem, as my behavior on a regular basis slides deeper and deeper into the likely liable.
Ms. Cadigan has a very large since of humor, though she parks it in a very closed garage at the rear of her Persona Casa. Never fear she is willing and able to keep up with any war of wits, if it so suits her. It does not always suit her. She saves her best moments of comedy for particular times of the day. Usually when ones backside has reached the thresh-hold of our interior office.
Ms. Cadigan grew up the right way and it seems to be paying off for her, she is poised and atractive and provides a certain air of former beauty pagent participant, though I believe she likely refused to pander to the judges in any superficial manner. She can handle most anything and the closest I have ever seen her to actually loosing her cool was a day I made the regrettable mistake of not stocking chocolate in my desk when the charasmatic Cadigan found herself in a moment of need.
No... friends it has been my great pleasure to befriend Jenny Cadigan and an even greater pleasure that she has befriended this salty old bore. Me of course.

Respectfully
Patrick Von Melroy Esq

Dust off the Boots

2009-06-11T14:59:00.000-07:00

Having a cowboy name can be essential to getting out of a bar fight.
Rarely would I continue a verbal altercation with a man who affectionately refers to himself
as Jeff "Cow Thumper" Ferguson, obvious right?
But cowboy names are also for lovin too. Like Benny "CuddleFish" Flanders.
I recommend when picking a cowboy slash cowgirl name you should go with the gut and aim for
something that fits on a nametag should you ever take a job which includes a matching polo shirt slash tennis visor. Two to three syllables is best.

Sincerely
U-Betcha

The Desk Of Patrick Melroy

2009-06-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

I can't seem to ever clear everything off this desk of mine. Piles of papers, I really just want my typewriter and maybe a coffee cup. Could we all just agree that files, as exciting as they may be, should never be manila colored. In fact could we all call crayola today and demand the recall from our vision the color known as "manila." Email them here:

Susan Tucker
Public Relations Specialist
(610) 253-6272 x4293
stucker@crayola.com

The Crayola FACTORY

Parade Floats

2009-06-09T09:00:00.000-07:00

I can't stop building a parade float in my head. I think it would be a very good weekend spent building a shell over my brothers back-up truck, a Ford Ranger. I think I could get Starliner to sponsor it, as long as it had a rocket theme. Maybe a moving launch platform for Skylar to be catapulted into space. Or some kind of candy flinging space gun. Either way I know my brother won't go for it. But its a nice dream.

A Reprinting of Merlin Hawkins Eulogy

2009-06-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

I will now attempt to cover 85 years of life, and cram all of the love papa's family and friends had for him into a brief few minutes. I will fail completely at this. You can not sum Papa up in one word or one sentence or even one perfect clever story that is an analogy for his entire being. I am available for a more extended version of Papa's story after the service and for the rest of my life. You are always welcome to ask me about him, because as every one knows I use every chance I get to talk about the big man.

Merlin worked his entire life. And that's the way he liked it. From the day he was born he began earning a suit. Nellie Sutton struck a deal. If papa was named Merlin Orville Hawkins, then she would buy him a suit. He told me he has yet to see the suit, but that until recently he had hopes of the deal going through. As many of you know he worked in the steelyards, built ships during the war, owned a grocery store or two, a gas station for around a decade, bought into a Ford dealership, and worked for Koch tractors for just over 20 years.

Then he opened my favorite business venture to date, Papa Incorporated, providing a long list of services to the public, including but not limited to:

Oil changes /advice column, rock quarrying, wood splitting lessons, shake and shingle manufacture, swimming lessons, fishing and hunting excursions, there's a really good box of oranges on the porch take some with you service, baby holding and judging, expert story telling, mole deterrent, neighborhood watch, proper beard grooming instruction, treeing and logging service, how to watch a sunset right classes, and of course, help my car is broken on the highway and you're the only phone number I have memorized shuttle service.

This business has recently been opened under new management but I anticipate a smooth transition.

He was big for his age, every age he ever was, as a matter of fact. When children are big for their age and it's the twenties and leading into a depression, you put them to work, apparently with dynamite. One of Papa's first paid jobs was blowing stumps out of a neighbor's back yard with copious amounts of the explosive. This of course after he was already an experienced picker, from cotton to corn. He remembered how big the sacks of cotton seemed to him when he was moving them around at the age of seven. Many will remember his Grapes of Wrath stories of the trips back and forth across the country.

He said "we" always had enough, at least as much as everyone else, sometimes a little more. By "we" I believe he meant his family, his friends, his community, his town. The "we" that Merlin believed in was all of us. He did not separate his success from those around him. He incorporated everyone he could into a better life. How do you do something like that, how do you give that much of yourself? Well, first you have to be born without any selfish bones. They usually become apparent around the time you are 13. But Papa didn't understand what that meant. If you were hurting, he was hurting, if you succeeded, he succeeded. That's what made going to him with your successes so fulfilling. He lived them with you and in you telling him how everything went right, he got to relive the excitement and joy of it.

Papa was the place until the day that he died that we all took our successes, our pride, our sorrows.

My grandfather has died, and it has ripped my family apart.
How important does that make him?

The Story of the Shingle Weaver's Glove
Remembered by the 5th grandchild

When he was seventeen he was hot mopping the roof of the Hawkins store, now Laura-mae's. You know it as Tony's.

Anyway, they were cutting chunks of tar off of longer pieces down to firewood size lengths. Papa got distracted as he tossed one of the logs into the boiler, and it back-splashed boiling tar onto his left forearm, coating his arm from his knuckles to above his elbow. I never exactly confirmed what was in the street that distracted him. However his first wife did work at the store he was roofing.

His pals took him to the local doc, who confirmed he had boiling tar all over his arm. The doc said he maybe could try to take it off with gasoline, but likely Papa had the worst burn of his life under the tar and the tar would make a reasonable, if not good, bandage. The doc proposed Merlin leave the tar on and don't use the arm much for six weeks or so.

Now this caused a bit of an upheaval of religion. (that religion being football). Papa told the doc there was going be a problem in not using the arm. You see, Papa was the starting guard for the three year undefeated Ridgefield high school Spudder football team and they had a game that night.

At this point in Papa's story, it is safe to say he has your attention. "What did you do," asks the 5th grandkid.

"Well," says the big man, "I shoved my tarred hand into a shingle weaver's glove and wrapped leather up the rest of my arm up to the elbow, but you could still see the a little tar sticking out."

"Then what?" Says the grandson.

Papa says, leaning forward and smiling, like it was a dumb question, "We won!" And then kicks his head back and laughs.

I do not know what a shingle weaver's glove is and the man, as far as I can remember, never hit me in anger. But I guarantee you, you do not want to be hit by a 17 year old Mert Hawkins wearing a shingle weaver's glove only a couple of hours after covering his arm in boiling tar, while on a three year winning streak. You let that guy go through your line all night.

I was raised right, I was taught right. Most of that came from the top down, and Papa was the top. His great grandchildren will be taught right and he was very proud of that idea. He put in the time, he stuck it out, and we are lucky to have known him. That is the best case scenario. Come see me if you want to hear the really good stories.

Patrick Melroy
February 17, 2008

Note: Papa Inc.

I saw David Carradine Play Piano

2009-06-05T09:08:00.000-07:00

I was lucky enough to be invited to Ever Carradine's wedding a couple years back, in Nantucket. David Carradine her uncle was of course in attendance. Amazing tuxedo.
So I am standing next to Barry Sanders, the one I know not the hall of fame guy, though my Barry is much better in a conversation and should likely find his way into some hall of fame sometime. Anyway, Barry and Mr Carradine are chit chatting when Mr Carradine produces a silver cigarette case with unfiltered Pall Malls. He selects one and taps on the case like only movie stars can. He then snaps the case shut economically and produces a lighter from his pocket while resecuring his cigarettes in his breast pocket. After igniting the end of his cigarette Barry inquires non chalantly "Did Tarintino give you that lighter?"
Mr Carradine exhales and says "He gave me an entire case of them, here take it." and then hands his lighter to Barry, who says "Oh my god!" and hands it to me.
I stand there with my palm open and I have just a moment to glance down and see the lighter is marked on its front in slightly worn gold leters "KILL BILL" at which point David Carradine without looking swipes it out of my hand in a clean movement and hands it back to Barry saying, "I didn't give it to him I gave it to you." His hands moved so fast I didn't even blink, one second the lighter was on my palm the next it was gone. For one second I had Kill Bill's actual lighter in my hand the lighter he used daily, for one second before the Kung Fu Master showed at 69 he was still a bad ass.
Later during the reception he scooted the piano player off the bench and took over for several songs, playing and singing with the band. Old school Hollywood all the damn way.
David Carradine was found dead yesterday in Bangkok, which sucks.

Stripey Sox Stripey Sox

2009-06-03T16:21:00.000-07:00

Striped socks are always useful. Carl Klimt was just in my office, new artist in Stumptown and he was talking all about Morse Code and how most people just used it to play chess over long distances at first until they found they could catch bank robbers who had hopped trains to get away from the long arm of the law, and I said how about my socks you think these could rob a bank or what, and he just said "Word" and left to climb Mt. Rainier. I know same old same old here at the office.

Patrick Melroy

Merlin Orville Hawkins

2009-06-02T15:54:00.000-07:00

My grandfather would have turned 87 today. Looks like dinner with the family. Papa was always big for his age, and he is still big today. Send me a letter about your grandpa and I will send you one about mine. 1241 NW Johnson St Portland OR 97209

Make the letters to Patrick Melroy

The Whole Week Long

2009-06-01T10:00:00.001-07:00

This week will be a long one for work and a short one for free time.
I have a pile to get through at PNCA, and more sorting of my stuff at home. Trying to decide what to keep and what to discard. I am quickly working down to a slim pile of must take and tossing everything else. Which is hard because I have so many small objects linked to nostalgia. The question every time I open a new box is "Do I own this because of a memory or because of need?" Its a real 50/50 process, which my brother is good at, but I am less successful. I'm hoping to get down to one pick up load.

Patrick Melroy

Long Weekends

2009-05-31T19:12:00.000-07:00

This weekend seems to be longer than most. I am saying goodbye to the Gyddie-Up as she packs for her trip back to Baltimore. I have a little meat on the grill and a salad waiting in the fridge. A new week breaks in the morning and I will meet you all there.
Patrick Melroy

Yellow Shirts

2009-05-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

Can we all just agree that Fridays should always be yellow shirt days. Send a letter today, I promise it will make you feel awesome.

Friday Website

2009-05-28T11:30:00.000-07:00

So, turns out, I am not the web wizard I had hoped. The full Patrick Melroy dot Com will be up on Friday, not sure which Friday, but it will be on a Friday.

one to kick

2009-05-28T09:44:00.000-07:00

In the beginning there was a beginning.