Anarchrism

Southeast Asia Trip - Part Three

2010-03-11T12:21:00.000-08:00

It's taken me this long to get this far, and it looks like I am never going to get around to finishing the narration of Vietnam. I will just conclude with a picture show. More awesome stuff coming soon - including playing a hardcore show at a Mormon church.

Part 3 of the Southeast Asia trip - Hoi An. Hoi An is located in the skinny part of Vietnam on the coast.

If you have a chance to go to Southeast Asia - make sure you visit Vietnam - it is awesome!

Southeast Asia Trip - Part Two

2010-02-22T19:03:00.000-08:00

Here is the second part of my redux of the Southeast Asia trip - this part, Southern Vietnam! We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City (also known as Saigon.) The first thing that got me was the craziness of the traffic - there are no traffic laws, very few traffic lights/crosswalks/etc., and TONS of people zipping around on motorbikes. The Communist Party declared that it was seen as unpatriotic and bourgeois to own a car, so everyone bought motorbikes. This is light traffic on a fairly backwoods road. Everytime I had to cross a street I feared for my life. Lauryn and I learned real quick all the unspoken rules of traffic in Vietnam. Which are - motorbikes will swerve to avoid you - cars will not.

Light traffic in Saigon.

Our first night in Saigon was New Years Eve, but we were so exhausted that we bummed around the city, danced to horrible techno in the town square, then went to bed. The next morning we went on a bus tour to the Cao Dai compound and the Cu Chi tunnels.

Cao Daism is a wierd amalgamate religion comprising Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist beliefs, with some random saints and craziness thrown in there for good measure. This is the inside of their main temple, very psychedelic. The tiers of the floor represent levels of englightenment, and during the service everyone sits on their respective tier and mumbles.

This is me outside the temple, you could walk around the compound - which had some cool gardens and buildings.

Next we went to the Cu Chi guerilla tunnels, which are a series of tunnels in Southern Vietnam north of Saigon which the Viet Cong forces used to connect North (communist run) Vietnam with their Southern Communist sympathizers - as well as mount attacks on nearby Saigon. Most of the tunnels (which spanned hundreds of miles and were hand dug!) had collapsed due to bombing or disuse. There were a couple miles of preserved tunnels, one of the entrances seen here. for scale, the tunnel entrance is a little bit smaller than a sleeping pillow. The Cu Chi guerilla forces had huge bunkers, kitchens, armories, and schools connected by these tunnels, and often would live in them for months at a time.

Me in one of the bunkers

We got to crawl around in a widened tunnel (for fat Westerners) and Lauryn and I, being pretty tall, had a difficult time in them! Some of the fatter people got stuck, which was hilarious. Afterwards we had a refreshing snack of hot green tea and tapioca root (like a potato) rolled in peanuts.

Some Chinese tourists wanted a picture of white people, so we made them take our picture as well.

Me by an exploded tank. I tried to ride it Cowboy style but wound up making an ass of myself.

Our guide for the day, Slim Jim, was pretty awesome. He was a teacher from the Mekong Delta (south most part of Vietnam) who became a tour guide to perfect his conversational English, with plans to return to Southern Vietnam to teach English again. He had fought in the Vietnam war against the Viet Cong, and had some hilarious anecdotes. He confirmed Lauryn and I's assumption that all white people look the same to asians.

After the Cu Chi tunnels we arrived back in Saigon at around 6PM and seeing as it was still New Years Day, there was a huge carnival in a park adjacent to our hotel. We enjoyed some delicious beers from a local microbrewery - as a side note, Vietnam has recently seen a large explosion of microbreweries, taking traditional European styles such as pilsners, stouts, and even Belgian beers and incorporating Asian and tropical ingredients. A lot of the microbrews were much sweeter and more floral due to these ingredients.

I wasn't taking a lot of pictures in the city because I was having enough trouble getting around and attracting a lot of attention with my tattoos and piercings. While waiting for the tour bus, I learned from a guy that 'Tiga Numba 1!' which is to say that getting a tiger tattooed on your chest is the most common tattoo in Saigon. Also people would stare at our piercings and try to touch my tattoos. It was kind of creepy but also pretty nifty. In the US, I catch people staring at me, but when I look at them they quickly look away ashamed. In Southeast Asia, people would just stare for minutes at Lauryn and I - initially I ignored it, but after a while I kind of liked the attention. Then, I got really tired of being an attraction and stared back. It was pretty fun!

The next day our plans included bumming around Saigon before we left for Hoi An. We went to the War Surplus Market, which was mostly filled with cheap war kitsch. I did however pick up a Vietnamese Army outfit, which is pretty cool.

We went to the War Remnants Museum - previously known as the War Crimes Museum - which details the US involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975. It was pretty brutal, not due to any sensationalism (which surprisingly there wasn't much of) but because of the stark contrast between cultural narratives of events. In the US, I never learned the reasons behind our involvement in Vietnam, or even that it started during World War II. Because of the media coverage of the war, there were lots of photos detailing the US atrocities against the Vietnamese people. One of the craziest was an exhibit about Agent Orange and the effect of dioxins on the environment and population - effects that still effect Vietnam in big ways. For instance, the birth mutation rate in areas that were exposed to Agent Orange skyrocketed, and all over Vietnam we saw people that looked like they walked out of Total Recall. We also saw the old guillotine that the US and South Vietnamese forces used to execute suspected communists. Next to it is one of the 2' by 4.5' "cells" made of barbed wire and splintered wood where suspected communists were held for years at a time.

I think in 10-20 years there will be a similar museum in the Middle East detailing US atrocities. After being really bummed out about how fucked up our government is and the ties to the military industrial complex, I needed a fresh coconut.

After that we went to one of the best 'hidden' temples of Saigon. Getting there was half the journey, as our taxi driver did not know how to get to the temple, let alone the region of town we wanted to be in. We wandered around for an hour looking and finally found it in a little courtyard over 600 years old! Everything was coated in a thick mat of incense dust. There was a pond with TONS of turtles. There were turtles riding on the backs of turtles riding on the backs of turtles. It blew my mind, man.

Our next stop, the Presidential Palace, was also a journey due to language barriers and racism (some Vietnamese will not pick up Westerners) which I can understand. We did invade and fuck up their country.

Outside the palace

Lauryn with a solid gold Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh's Office

The Famous 'Fall of Saigon' helicopter. Sometimes they let tourists get a photo with it, but not when we were there. The basement of the palace had a War Room with old hand drawn maps of Vietnam and troop movements, along with old Cold War Era communications equiptment.

Afterwards, we headed to the airport and flew on JetStar (budget Asian airlines) to Hoi An. And that will be covered in the next post!

Southeast Asia Trip - Part 1

2010-02-05T12:33:00.001-08:00

It's taken me a while to update due to the start of the Spring semester and Disowned recording a demo - but here is the redux of my trip to Southeast Asia over Winter Break 09-10. My plane flew out from LAX to Beijing, where I had a 12 hour layover until I hopped on a plane to Singapore, where Lauryn is doing research. My plane arrived at 5 in the morning Beijing time.

The Beijing International Airport is REALLY nice - probably just fixed up due to the 2008 Olympic Games. It was pretty odd, however, as the moment you get out of the terminal, you see a picture of Chairman Mao right next to an advertisement for Chanel. This weird juxtaposition of uber high end capitalist stores and communist leaders was a prevalent theme in Asia - as I'll discuss in the Vietnam section.

The many tiered Beijing International Airport - the whole roof is one big lighted dome, the top floor is arrivals and immigration, the bottom two levels are departures and high end shopping stores like Gucci, Armani, Chanel, Lacoste, etc.

One of the departure terminals.

I had seen enough of the airport, and was eager to get to Singapore. After meeting up with Lauryn I was given the whole country tour on the ride from the airport (which was on one side of the country) to Lauryn's apartment (which is on the other side!) It is super futuristic, with a really nice metro and airport and EVERYONE has a really nice phone. After catching up on sleep we went to the Haw Par Villa, which is an open air garden/theme park made by the two brothers who invented and sold Tiger Balm - which is a popular ointment in Southeast Asia.

The entrance, notice the tiger motif.

There were tons of weird stucco sculptures, mostly depicting old Chinese legends with sparse placards in poorly translated English, which is odd considering English is one of the primary languages in Singapore. One of my favorite sculptures was the Rat vs. Rabbit war. There was even a rat with a knife!

One rat you don't want to mess with!

FREEDOM! YEEHAW!

Then there was the 'Tiger Car' which the two brothers would drive around when they were advertising for Tiger Balm. When you honked the horn it roared like a tiger! I bet they picked up maaaad ladies with this clean ride.

The next exhibit was...odd. It was the 'Ten Courts of Hell' of Chinese mythology. Each Court was presided over by a judge, and he would sentence you to the crimes of that particular court if you were guilty of them in life. Here is Lauryn standing outside the entrance of Hell, guarded by Horse-Face and Ox-Head.

The Judge and his Court.

Each Court has its own punishment or set of punishments prescribed for a sin you committed in life. The above punishment was being thrown on a tree made out of knives, I think for neglecting your filial duties.

You could also be chopped in half, ground into a paste, disemboweled, etc. for being a rapist or a litterer. The Chinese ethics system seemed a little skewed in my mind.

But prostitutes went in the Filthy Blood Pond...where they were drowned I guess?

Anyhow, at the end of all your punishments a nice old lady gives you the tea of reincarnation, and you enter the cycle of Samsara (continuous reincarnation until enlightenment) again. The rest of Haw Par Villa had more crazy statues, like frogs and turtles riding on ostriches and a crab lady?

Like I mentioned before, the Metro system in Sinapore is really nice, one of their national prides next to their airport. If you want to know more about the oddities and nuances of the Sinaporean culture feel free to read Lauryn's blog at Lauryn in Singapore. This is me standing next to Singa the Friendly Lion, who advises people in the metro to be kind to one another and to obey the rules lest you get fined! Next to me is a sign about the fines, also letting everyone know not to bring durian fruit on board because it smells like bananas, pineapples, and oranges stuffed in a corpse's rectal cavity that was thrown in a garbage bin in the hot sun for a week. Anyhow, Singa is touching my butt in this picture.

Lauryn and I then had lunch on the quays (pronounced like key) and went to the Southeast Asian culture museum which had cool architecture and artwork from all the cultures residing in Singapore. Then we went to the Buddha's Tooth Temple of Buddha Maitreya or the Future Buddha, which we envisioned being a hovering robot Buddha who shot lasers out of his eyes. I drew a good picture of it, but can't find it at the moment.

That Buddha is about 20 feet tall, and the background is a single piece of embroidered silk. The entire temple was very opulent - the top of the temple had a room made entirely of gold. It was a about twenty square feet and had a gilded golden altar in the middle weighing over 500 kilograms which supposedly enshrined one of the original Buddha's teeth.

We had dinner at a really delicious vegetarian Indian restaurant which was staffed by people enrolled in an adjacent school, and ran entirely on donations! We then bummed around Chinatown (as every city has one...) and retired for the night. Our next stop was Vietnam!

12/20 Show at Owen's House

2009-12-28T01:00:00.000-08:00

On 12/20 Disowned was slated to play a show with Active Aggressive, Digne Y Rebelde, and Drugshit (all local hardcore/punk bands) and Malady from Tiajuana, Mexico - but they cancelled. I designed the flyer below, I will scan in a better copy when I get to a good scanner at work.

We had extended our set from a scant five to a meaty eight, plus a holiday favorite - 'Fuck Christmas' by FEAR. The acoustics were pretty off but people enjoyed our new material and extended set.

Fun fact: Owen and Jorge (the lead singer for All Systems Fail/
guy in the background) are wearing the same shirt from this LA
noise punk band Dead Noise we met a couple days earlier at a show.

Michael is hilarious to watch drum - besides being an amazing
drummer he gets really into it and makes faces.

The obligatory shot of me looking goofy and focused.

This picture will make more sense in a paragraph.

Next up was Active Aggressor - a local favorite who play fast, female fronted old school hardcore. Everyone loves them and since they have been around for a while, sing along and get really really riled up.

Which is why while moshing, someone busted through the window that Owen is standing on in the above picture. I fortuitously captured the exact moment of Owen seeing someone go through his ground floor window. Also in the picture - just to the right of Owen - is my good friend Marek, who came up from Austin, TX for the holidays.

Thanks to my quick thinking and Boy Scout training, I was able to make this awesome cardboard sheet by cutting up liquor boxes and interlocking them. Owen is stressed out as hell because it was about -15 C outside and there is a broken window. Marek is also in the picture, looking like a jolly Polack.

Awesomely enough, Active Aggressive kept playing the entire time with people moshing. After the set, and after we had patched up the window, without even asking people got a donation bowl together and in a couple of minutes everyone had pitched in enough to cover the new window and then some. It was pretty cool. It got me thinking about how Salt Lake has a tight knit enough group of people who will:

a) allow a show in their houses for extremely loud, gross, scary looking kids
b) play free shows - I have never been to a hardcore/punk show with a ticket or cover price
c) the moment something goes down - be it someone falling down in the pit, being out of gas/needing a ride, or crashing through a window - there are immediately twenty pairs of hands willing to give everything they have to help out.

I constantly scrutinize people, and can't help but wonder "What is their life worth? What are they doing that is worthwhile to justify their continued breathing?" I am usually pressed to come up with anything. Now, whenever I do that at a show, I can tell myself "These people will be good to each other and help to their fullest extent." It's more than I can say for most of humanity.

Shoe Sniffing Gnomes, Belschnickel, und Der Krampus!

2009-12-17T12:29:00.000-08:00

Every family has their holiday traditions, and mine is no different. Every year all the kids get their picture taken with 'Father Christmas' - this awesome old pagan style Santa character. He is super friendly and always remembers our names and what we wanted last year, which for doing this for over 20 years and tons of families is quite some feat. We have pictures of all the children throughout the ages and it is really fun at Christmas to see them all sequentially.

My family also spends time with my maternal grandparents, who are old school Germans. They celebrate a little mini Christmas on the 6th of December, where you leave your shoes out and a little gnome visits your house while you sleep. If your shoes stink, it means you have been committing mischief so the gnome fills your shoes with twigs and pine needles. If you have been good, however, the gnome fills your shoes with chocolates and cookies.

When I was really young - maybe 5 or so - my grandparents filled my shoes with pine needles. When I went to put my boots on, all the pine needles (which were dry and sharp) pierced my feet and I started bawling hysterically. I didn't want to take my boots off because I thought there were snakes in my boots and if I took them off I would let the snakes out, so I just sat there crying with my parents trying to figure out what is wrong and me not wanting to walk. My grandparents came up and started teasing me about the gnome thinking I was naughty and that I should start being good lest 'Der Krampus' came to get me.

About ten years later my grandparents filled my shoes with pine needles and warned me about 'Der Krampus', albiet somewhat jokingly. Looking bewildered at them, they sat me down and explained the ancient Germanic traditions of Belschnickel and Der Krampus.

My grandparents are from Northeastern Germany, a wierd place that ties German, Scandinavian, and Eastern European cultural influences together. Even centuries after the Christianization of Europe, people still carried on Germanic Pagan traditions. One of the most awesome things is their depiction of Santa Klaus - or Belschnickel. He is a master hunter who sneaks into poor people's houses to make Christmas awesome - sometimes he leaves a big goose/Christmas feast or firewood. The best story involves an old miller who had three daughters, but couldn't afford a dowry for them - so Belschnickel snuck in and stuffed their socks with gold.

Now, when Saint Nicholaus/Belschnickel comes around to give presents/firewood to all the good deserving children and families, he wakes Der Krampus. Der Krampus is a demonic satyr who carries rusty chains with bells on them to frighten children, a fist full of birch branches to flog naughty children, and a sack for holding really naughty children to dump them in Hell later. There is a tradition on the 6th of December, when the shoe sniffing gnome comes, that the young men dress up in horns and furs and run around with chains chasing children. Supposedly this reminds children to shape up in the interval until Christmas.

Also, my Norwegian cousin Matthias sent me some pictures of a little hedgehog - or bolla piggsvin - that came to live with him and made it's nest in his recording studio/distro.

HeLa Cells are Awesome

2009-12-08T13:35:00.000-08:00

Lately I have been reading about the history of divergent cells lineages within research over the past 75 years. I came upon the HeLa cells (which I had worked with in tissue culture research.) Turns out they initially came from the cervical cancer cells of Henrietta Lacks during the early stages of molecular biology research in the early 50's.

They are particularly awesome because they are biologically immortal - a product an an enzyme called telomerase which keeps the telomeres (repeating segments of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes) from shortening during replication. Repeated telomere wear and tear is one of the leading causes of cell age and death. Beause HeLa cells don't have to worry about it, they can reproduce endlessly given sufficient conditions to do so.

Because they are prolific and adaptive, they have become a major contaminant in most cell strains today - and as large as 10% of any known cell line might have arisen from/has some HeLa cells inside of it. This actually caused a big Cold War hullaballoo after the restrictions on Soviet/US cancer research was relaxed in the 70's. Not having seen HeLa cells before, the Soviets thought the US researchers were trying to conduct biological warfare by sending them infected samples. When they isolated the HeLa cells and saw their unique capabilities they thought the US had engineered some super cell.

So as awesome as all that information is, here's what really blows my mind - that Henrietta Lacks is still living all over the world in different laboratories, and seeing how her contribution to research science has effectively made her immortal.

Awesome.

Nine Awesome Bands You Should Be Familiar With If You Want to Talk Music With Me

2009-11-24T22:15:00.000-08:00

Every time I meet new people I inevitably am questioned about my musical tastes, what music I play, who the bands on my jacket are, etc. By no small margin do the people I meet have no fucking clue what I am talking about when I respond. 'Oh punk, you mean like Blink 182?' or 'Oh metal, like Metallica?' at which point I die a little inside and narrow my vision at them, quietly finish my drink and hate humanity a little more.

I mean, I am sorry I don't listen to more mainstream or popular music. I really am. I would like to be able to play beer pong with some brahs and listen to Nickelback without feeling the need to kick the speakers in. I would love to be able to talk about how the latest Fleet Foxes album is so overrated, I can't believe Pitchfork gave it that score with hipsters while drinking Pabst tallboys. Hell, I would even settle for being able to listen to the radio in the car with someone without changing it to NPR.

And here's the thing, I'll be the first person to admit that the music I listen to is horrible. It's dissonant, complicated, violent, and inaccessible. Subjects include death, the fall of humanity, existential angst, nuclear war, corruption, poverty, drug use, Satanism, and drowning kittens. All that nonsense aside though, I love it. Call it an acquired taste or just trying to be different, but I'll be listening to blackened crusty metal until I die.

So if you want to talk music with me, or see patches on my jacket or hear a gawdawful racket coming out of my speakers, here's a crash course.

Carcass - first off, Carcass is hands down the reason I grew to love extreme metal. Swansong, while a huge deviation from the typical Carcass sounds, got me hooked. That album is one of the most solid metal albums ever produced, a true 'something for everyone' piece. Catchy riffs, rock and roll structure, bluesy guitar, all while keeping it heavy and fast. Heartwork is Carcass' agreed magnum opus, combining grind and punk with melodic death metal (which Carcass pioneered). It set the tone for the next 10 years of death metal, giving rise to the Swedish Death Metal movement, which birthed Opeth, At the Gates, and Entombed.

Necrotism: Decanting the Insalubrious, however, is my favorite Carcass work to date. It took the heaviness and aesthetic of goregrind (which Carcass also pioneered), the speed and ferociousness of anarcho-punk, and the technicality and precision of death metal - blended it all together in a maelstorm of awesomeness. Spliced intros of autopsy audio set the tone for the visceral splattering of neck snapping riffs, dizzying tempo changes, dripping vocals, and neo-classical guitar work.

Pick this up or you could wind up in the morgue.

Electric Wizard - From the first self titled album, there was no doubt Electric Wizard would be taking Sabbath style doom, loading it up in their pipe, and hitting that shit until the walls started to bleed. The hits just kept on coming, with Come My Fanatics... - heavier, darker, and more drugged up. Dopethrone, with it's cover of the Devil hitting a bong, visually encapsulates the sound they bring on this album. Considered the high point of their career, the beginning is strong with heavy, groove based riffs and memorable desolate lyrics. The middle is a return to the droning, repetition, and heaviness of earlier albums. The end of Dopethrone, with the title track and Mind Transferal, bring heavy distortion and the sludgy haze that make the Wizards the masters of stoner doom.

We Live, while a solid album, trades catchy riffs and memorable structures for droning guitars, feedback, and almost below perceptibility bass, slowing things down for all the burnouts. Let Us Prey departs from the bass heavy distortion of previous albums, but there is still plenty of each going on. The use of more psychedelic guitars and a return to groove, along with some a healthy dose of high frequency experimentation paves the way for the best Electric Wizard album to date - Witchcult Today. Acid guitar solos and warmer sounds mingle with the uncompromising drone and heaviness that is trademark Electric Wizard.

Turn on, turn up, tune out.

Discharge - coming out of the UK 82' movement (giving punk some balls with faster and angrier sounds) they pioneered and mastered the d-beat. Using simple song structures and shouted lyrics typical of punk, they added metal guitar solos and heavy distortion for darker sounds. They were too metal for the punks, too punk for the metal-heads. Fast, aggressive, and simple, they influenced thrash metal, hardcore, crust punk, and every genre spin off from the above. Best album - Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing.

Amebix - early crust band, combined the fast pace of Motorhead with gloomier noise from Killing Joke and Swans. A short lived band, but highly influential on the development of black metal and crust punk. Unlike most punk bands at the time they wrote about brotherhood, riding motorcycles, the consequences of nuclear war, and humanity's fear of death. One of my favorite songs of all time is by them - check it out. True fact - after Amebix, the lead singer Rob 'The Baron' Miller became a self taught swordsmith. He lives on a tiny island up in Scotland making custom swords. Badass.

Taake - black metal at it's finest. Coming from Bergen, Norway (home of black metal) they write about fog and what archetypes it takes in our collective literature and mythos. While black metal is kind of hokey and suffers from taking itself too seriously, Hoest (the head honcho of Taake) has always brought seriousness and solemnity to his albums. I had the privilege of seeing Taake and Behexen (another black metal favourite) play when I visited Bergen a couple years ago - one of the best shows I have seen hands down. I got the feeling watching Taake perform that they would be playing black metal even if they didn't come from the home of it, that the black metal sound is just who they are. Taake takes the ambient noise and doom fields of black metal and blends them perfectly with the fast, aggressive early black metal sound, never skimping on production and meticulous writing.

Hoest, rockin' with the cock out.

Origin - masters of technical death metal. Listening to them is an aural onslaught of technical brutality. When I first heard these guys back in high school, I thought, "There is no way that is a guy drumming that fast, it has to be a drum machine." I saw them a couple months later and the drummer was the fastest, most precise, and honed human being ever to sit behind a kit. He probably is a robot. The bass shreds, the guitars are doing non stop sweep arpeggios that would make Yngwie Malmsteen cry, and the vocals are inhuman. Check it out for yourself - though the band looks more at home playing WoW than being in the best death metal band ever. Orgin - Finite

Origin is what I think the beginning of the Universe sounded like.

Portishead - easily the most depressing music I own. Trip-hop before it was called such, Portishead combined fusion jazz samples, noise samplings, and hip hop beats together with haunting vocals about loneliness, isolation, and self hatred. Surprisingly, Portishead is my feel good music - it's been the soundtrack for countless breakups and depressive periods, due in part to the solidarity I have with the lyrics and how fucking chill it is. Life may suck and relationships may be pitfalls, but don't get angry and upset. I don't have a favorite album, everything they have put out is solid.

Skitsystem - Swedish d-beat/crust/hardcore, the epitome of what I love in music. Fast, brutal, heavy, and aggressive as fuck. Members from Swedish death metal legends At the Gates got together and started a kang (the Swedish term for Discharge influenced hardcore) band. I think their logo sums it up, combining the sheer awesomeness of wolves, skulls, and swords. Also they get points for singing in Swedish, which has the highest umlaut density of any language - and as everyone knows, umlauts are fucking metal.

One chain mail clad babe/greasy barbarian short of a Manowar album.

Orange Goblin - I was first acquainted with Orange Goblin in high school, but only with their later more punk/thrash influenced stuff - which is good, but pales in comparison with their first three albums: The Big Black, Frequencies from Planet 10, and Time Travelling Blues. I've listened these Orange Goblin album for hours both sober, stoned, and tripping - I still can't decide which one is the best as they are all cosmically good. The overall Orange Goblin sound has a distinct Motorhead-esque 'living fast/riding hard' mentality and sound, but brings a lot of funk breakdowns and psychedelic rock into the mix. Tracks like 'Diesel' showcase the hard hammering biker riffs a la Motorhead, while 'Shine' lures the listener through a groovy psychedelic lullaby into a black hole of astral heaviness. If it sounds like I am stoned when I describe their music, it's because it's the most apt vocabulary for its description.

Orange Goblin is the soundtrack for psychedelic drugs.

Hipsters...Dirty Hipsters...

2009-11-04T00:03:00.000-08:00

Until recently, a good majority of people I hung out with would be classified as 'hipsters' in the modern usage of the word. Compared to most people in Salt Lake, they seemed well read and fairly intelligent on a variety of subjects, and were a welcome distraction with free Pabst Blue Ribbon. For a period of time I even dated a hipster and bought some deep v neck shirts (which are still super comfy and cool in the summer.) However, something always bothered me about the whole hipster scene/lifestyle/aesthetic. I felt dirty walking into Urban Outfitters, listening to electro-hiphop nonsense, and drinking cheap beer. It dawned on me that whole culture revolves around the sense of irony - hipsterism's refuge from society and detachment from art and culture.

Now irony and kitsch are two very different things. As Clement Greenberg points out in The Avante Garde and Kitsch, kitsch is the appreciation of the sublimely bad in art, transcending its place as a cultural artifact and by virtue of it's lack of taste, becomes a sort of high art. However, hipsters are unable to even appreciate the beauty in the tastelessness. Rather, they abstain from deep emotional and intellectual connections and have built a subculture specifically revolving around not the rejection of decadent art and culture, as many counter cultures have, but a celebration of it in its worst forms.

Perhaps the thing that bothers me the most is that rather than creating something innovative and new, making a culture of their own, hipsterism shamelessly revels in stealing from the past. The music and culture which hipsters 'take seriously' - assuming that they are even capable of such aesthetic connection and analysis - comes from their parents or older generations. Musical genres like garage punk, indie rock, electro-pop, or hip-hop - 80's clothing, tight and flared pants, old cameras, vinyl - most if not all of hipster cultural consumption is from a bygone age. Ironically enjoying these things as if they were a lampoon of culture, the oft given explanation for the love of anti-culture seems to be, "OMIGAWD it’s so awful!" followed by a loud "I LOVE it!" This attitude perpetuates the banal and ridiculous cultural institutions that so desperately need to go the way of jelly sandals and Beanie Babies. Instead of finding or creating an alternative, hipsters instead opt for ironic detachment.

Another thing that bothered me was their appropriation of working class and blue collar culture like trucker hats, western shirts, and Charles Bukowski. In trendy SLC coffee shops hipsters sling Marxist slogans*, misunderstood Chomsky and Foucault snippits, and how they know 'the plight of the working class' on their 7.50/hour barrista jobs that make them choose between buying cocaine or a fixed gear bike (in Salt Lake? Seriously?) The truth is that most hipsters couldn't make themselves a cup of coffee (which is why they go to coffee shops.) The divorce of their labour seems to leave them with that empty feeling characteristic of the post-industrial existential crisis. Rather than confronting that void and re-asserting their labour power, hipsters turn the culture of legitimately hard working people into a joke, an ironic statement meaning absolutely nothing.

What it all boils down to is that hipsters lack meaningful connection to culture and society, and what they are left with is absurdity. By mislabeling this absurdity as 'hip' and creating a gradient for immediate downwards social comparison to anyone who doesn't buy into this bullshit, they forge an identity, culture, and society of their own. But the very ideas of 'culture' and 'society' mean nothing to them - and they try to apply a simplistic misunderstanding of critical theory, postmodernism and deconstructionism. My summation on hipsters therefore is that they exist in a world without value and meaning. They lack soul, authenticity, and purpose. Fuck the hipsters.

*I will be the first to admit that I have thrown around Marxist rhetoric and French names to sound smart and important - in my defense, I do know what I am talking about when it comes to Marx. I spent most of high school devouring Marx's collected works, including doing a comparison study of Marx's most well known works (Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital Vol 1-3) in German and English as my IB Extended Essay.

Halloween Hardcore Show!

2009-10-31T23:59:00.000-07:00

This Halloween Evening my band Disowned played at the Boing! Collective, which is a local anarchist squat and community center focusing on impact free living. We played with a bunch of other local hardcore bands - Active Agressor, Ritual Fuck, Olivia Neutron Bomb, and Drugshit - along with two touring bands from the East Coast - Product of Waste and Bear Trap. I think out of all of the bands we were the only one not classified as 'Straightedge Hardcore' - which is most likely because I am the only one in the band not a vegan, straightedger, or combination of the two. Go drug use and drinking! (That's why I have a shit eating grin on my face.)

Our band from left to right - Choi, Chris, Michael, and Owen. Not pictured, Chuck.

Pictured, Chuck.

This is me shredding on the bass, looking professional and serious. I went as a crust punk for Halloween, which consisted of not showering or brushing my teeth for a couple of days, not washing my clothes, having badly done facial tattoos, and the obligatory Nausea patch on a hat - because all crusties love Nausea - with a bullet and rope belts. All of this was strictly a DIY found item and poorly done affair, making it extra crusty.

From left to right, Maia, Owen, and Choi - who went as a woman for Halloween. The entire show people were like, "Who is that cute asian girl? It's good to see more women coming to hardcore shows." People kept trying to talk him up only to realize it was Choi.

This is Active Agressor, fronted by the only female in the room. They kicked a lot of ass and had a really good set. Michael (our drummer) played bass for them in total drag, and to his credit, did a floor slide in heels and fishnets.

Cross-dressing was a popular costume, and people kept trying to talk up Michael only to realize it was a 6'3" white guy and not some random tranny who came to the show.

Product of Waste was somewhere between Rage Against the Machine style vocals with lots of rapping and break downs, with Napalm Death speed and dissonance. The vocalist and I had an interesting talk about Eastcoast vs. Westcoast lifestyles after the set, and as intelligent as he was, he had a hilarious Rhode Island accent that I couldn't get past.

Bear Trap's set was quite an experience - lots of nudity, vulgarity, and violence. The lead singer was nude most of the show and was dry humping everything.

The room was crammed full of sweaty people who hadn't showered in weeks, and it smelled like a dumpster crammed full of butts left out in the sun.

A lot of people got socked in the face, their toes busted, and kicked in the testicles. I had sequestered myself on a sturdy shelf high above the chaos, but it was quite intense and a lot of fun to watch.

How Research Relates to My Drawing

2009-10-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

With a little bit more time on my hands I have had the opportunity to both draw more and focus in on my research. First - a redux of what I do research wise.

I work with Alberto Bosque, a post-doctorate fellow from Spain who is over here on commission of the Spanish Departmente of Health, who Vicente Planelles (the PI of the lab and also Spanish) personally wanted to work with because he is a brilliant and laid back dude.

One cool cat.

Alberto is researching the latency pathways in the HIV life cycle. To explain what we are doing requires a little background. The HIV virus (shown below) binds to the T cells (and more specifically the CD4+ memory cells) in your immune system. Because the outer layer glycoproteins so closely resemble those of your own cells, they are not destroyed and will bind to the membrane of the host cell. They then inject the viral capsid into the cell, which degrades. There is now some free RNA floating in the cell with a reverse transcriptase attached (more on that guy in a second.) Since cells have all kinds of RNA floating around it doesn't concern itself with where the RNA came from, because free RNA is free RNA.

So the reverse transcriptase tells the cell "Hey you know where I go? In the nucleus! And while I'm there you should integrate me into your genome!" The cell, being stupid (or blissfully ignorant depending on how you look at it) says "Dur yeah let's do that." and you now have the coding regions for HIV in this cell.

HIV has a small genome, only encoding for 19 different proteins (any cell in your body codes for about 40-400 different proteins depending on the cell). Like most viruses it hijacks the host cell machinery to make copies of itself. On a related note, the other half of the lab is doing research on the Vpr coding region and it's function on expression and regulation of viral production - which is hotly debated.

So, say you have some HIV in your cells and don't want it going into full blown AIDS - currently your two options are 1) seek out the Ancient Chalice of Zhara'Gruum or 2) go on a system of Highly Active Anti-Retoviral Treatments (HAART) which are extremely time consuming and costly. What these treatments do is block the expression of the integrated HIV genes, preventing them from reproducing and infecting more cells. This is called the 'latent' phase of HIV - meaning that it is present and has the capability for reproducing but NOT expressing any of the genes for coding of the proteins.

The catch however, is that once you stop taking the HAART medications, the virus reactivates and starts coding again. Even if you took the drugs for years and years and waited for the turnover of infected cells to be replaced by non-infected cells there is still a chance that one of the billions of cells in your body has the HIV genome inside of it, and as any zombie aficionado knows, it only takes one to start a new infection.

We know exactly how to drive the viral genes into latency, but how it comes out of latency is a whole different matter entirely - they use different signaling pathways. That's where my work with Alberto comes in - I am currently designing lines of cells with a particular genomic makeup to uptake parts of the HIV genome, then mess with the signaling pathways to single out different molecules that are both necessary AND sufficient (this phrase is branded into every cellular biologist's flesh) for coming out of latency.

Basically what I have been doing for the last 3 months is doing a series of mutations in a plasmid (circular ring of DNA) called pMACS-Kk which is in an E. Coli organism. So far I have introduced 3 different restriction sites into the plasmid, effectively making it pMACS-Kk-NcoI-XhoI-NotI. This is important because the spacing of these restriction sites along the plasmid will determine how the HIV genome is integrated and how I can target my signaling proteins. I am on the last step of confirming I have the mutations I want, at which point I can begin to introduce the HIV coding regions I want.

Aww they're so cute and fuzzy!

What the hell does this have to do with art and life?

Everything I do in the lab is focused on my two favorite buzz words: process and magnitude. The research I am doing is very focused on process - perfecting the processes I carry out in the lab and a search to understand the processes happening at a cellular/molecular level. The magnitudes involved are on the order of 10^-8 (messing around with different base pairs) to 10^6 (the amount of cells I can fit in a single millilitre of media). Research shows me how process occurs in different magnitudes and the interrelations involved.

My art is likewise affected - I see processes in the microscope that make me pause and think 'that is beautiful' and as I draw what I saw begins to appear - bubbling out of the primordial doodles. The rough wrinkles of the lipid membrane budding with HIV virons - a tentacled lymphocyte attached - could be an octopus clinging onto a coral reef or nebulae rich with stars obscured by interstellar dust clouds. The forms I see under the microscope mirror as the ones I see through a telescope. It's all a question of magnitude.

With that in mind here's what I have been drawing that is influenced by my research.

I drew this after a week of learning how to split and culture two very difficult but important types of cells - HeLa (pronounced like Gila) and 293 FTR. I was using a very high precision light microscope and could see huge clusters of cells (the cells get attached to a foci and like to clump together - it's a real pain in the ass.)

My side notes said I was really frustrated (with research or art?) but looking back i really enjoyed this. The big sphere in the middle looks similar to binary star systems or the nucleus surrounded by the endoplasmic reticulum.

I spend a lot of time looking at diagrams of cell surface proteins, and they always look very boring and static. You can see one above in the HIV viron, little green balls on sticks protruding from a purple circle. Boring. I always think of the cellular envelope as this ocean of flowing protein, with receptors and surface proteins as buoys bobbing around.

I look at this and see a cocoon. Cocoons have nothing to do with my research.

And this is a drawing of one of my rats, Bjorngaard, and DNA Helicase 'unzipping' some DNA. Then I just doodled.

Evolution Pictures

2009-10-11T11:45:00.001-07:00

Between school and lab work I have been quite busy, but I have also been working on a project for my good friend Eric Ulbrich. He has just started a company called Evolution Pictures and wanted me to design the logo - his basic parameters were 'similar to the Evolution of Man but with every step they should have a different camera. Kind of like the anatomical drawings you used to do in high school.' I had a pretty free range to work with. Unfortunately I haven't done figure drawing and worked with the classical form since my senior year of high school, and technical drawing has always been difficult for me.

I was given a series of camera models throughout the ages by Eric. I had no idea where to start with the techincal drawing of the cameras, so I just started playing around with them. Lots of re-learning to draw straight freehand lines, but it devolved into play time as usual. This guy was my favorite - the psychedelic aspect behind him has a space whale. Little known fact: space whales release nebulae out of their blowholes.

Finished Product 1

Finished Product 2

Closeup of Last 3 Evolutionary Steps

Homo sapiens before he got shading and finishing touches. I really liked how he came out.

I had a lot of difficulty with drawing the earlier evolutionary steps, most of the reference art I had available was rough at best, so I took a few liberties. As the progression neared modern humans, I had an easier time drawing, and all those years of figure drawing paid off in drawing Homo Sapiens. I had a lot of fun drawing this for Eric, and learned a lot about evolutionary anthropology, which while really interesting, is probably very very boring to research in real life. Unless you like digging around meticulously in the hot sun for long periods of time. I think it is cool how more and more mitochondrial genetics is being used to trace special lineages - maybe becuase I am just a big genetics nerd.

Anyhow, with midterms done with and Fall Break this week I will have more time to draw and write.

One False Step

2009-09-20T11:24:00.001-07:00

My friend Michael Iverson's blog - his latest article is extremely well written and struck a chord with me. Agree with it or don't, it is well written and interesting to consider.

One False Step

Sky Jelly Fish

2009-09-12T19:47:00.000-07:00

I haven't been drawing a lot lately since I have been so busy with lab work and school. Today was a nice change to that by taking some acid with Jordan and drawing. We began by playing D&D, in which the characters were exploring a series of Dwarven tombs laid out according to genealogy of the Dwarven Thanes. After the acid started kicking in it was nigh impossible to keep focus and tell a story and I became entranced by my sketchpad.

The strangest sensation was feeling completely detached from my hands, not being cognizant of their working as I was drawing. It became as though my mind would visualize it and it would start magically flowing and appear on the paper. It was a lot of fun, and I got pretty lost in my own little world, as I tend to do when I draw.

There are lots of small vignettes, starting with the map of the Dwarven Thanes up in the right hand corner. In the middle, there is the Sky Jellyfish, who is sweeping across a plateau towards a city and melding into the clouds. Coming out of the clouds is a monster with a steam leak, which culminates in a shai-hulud (the worms from Dune.) To the bottom is a drippy cave of stalactites and an unholy toothed altar. Up at the top there is a mushroom cloud with a psychedelic skull which also kind of looks like a large tree rising up.

Though nowhere near as epic as 'Skycat and the World of Tomorrow' this is some solid art on my part, and I had a lot of fun drawing it.

Porch Times

2009-09-11T12:30:00.000-07:00

I get home from work and school. Damn it's exhausting. Mentally I am exhausted, my body tense and uneasy from sitting at my bench or in lecture halls for 12 hours a day. My head is full of plasmid maps, organic molecule diagrams, and trying to remember what I have to do tomorrow. Change the media. Start a transformation. Will colonies be on my plates tomorrow? Are the incubators sterile enough? How much ethanol could I put in my coffee before I went blind? A whirlwind of molecular biology, technical manuals, and Post-it note messages buzz in my brain.

Time to leave that all behind.

I grab a cold beverage out of the fridge. Today it is a glass of water with lemon flavoured ice cubes. I take my sketchbook and sit outside on my balcony overlooking the lawn and L Street. My chair has a soft worn groove for my bony ass to sink into. Feet on the makeshift coffee table I begin to let my mind wander on the page. Max comes out, we start to talk about our days, get the vaporizer warm, and plan out our evening.

That's the essence of Porch Times. Outside, with a good place to sit, a drink or snack, good company and good conversations.

The old people of a bygone era founded Porch Times. Get some iced tea/lemonade or mint julep, watch the world go by. Talk about war, recession, the youth of today, gardening, or gossip about the neighbors. A time for relaxing with friends, catching up, and strengthening community. People wander by and join in, others leave - ebb and flow. Too many people and it becomes a gathering. No, the moment has to be intimate.

It seems our generation has forgotten Porch Times. Caught up in the digital gestalt of Facebook and Twittering, texting people incessantly on the newest iPhone, these are the communities we create - a false network of face value friendships and threadbare conversations. Fast life, fast drugs, fast failings at good living. In the end what will our generation have? Bad health, large debt, obsolete gadgets, and the existential despair that comes with disconnect from others.

I repeatedly find that The Greatest Generation had it right, that for all the war, depression, and hardships they endured, they knew how to make the most out of nothing and not let life get them down. They had just as much free time as we did, and in talking to my Grandparents and various elderly friends I have, were much happier that we are now. It is interesting to note that whenever I visit with them it becomes a Porch Time. In my own weird way, I feel like Porch Times is a tribute to The Greatest Generation, both in it's simplicity, social function, and appreciating free time.

Porch Times is more of an attitude than an activity, a mindset that sets the pace of living. Keep it simple, keep good company, and relax.

The Dopesmoked Wizard

2009-08-21T10:29:00.000-07:00

This drawing was produced after a sleepless night coming down off of mushrooms. I spent a lot of time thinking about my future and the coming indeterminacies such as grad school and the GRE, applying for lab jobs, leaving my work at the morgue, and coming out of a very intense relationship. A lot of things came together in this drawing, especially the wizard, sleepy from smoking 'wizard weed' and weary of the psychedelic visions. There were a lot of simple fractals in this drawing as well, which have strong correlations with my experiences on psychedelics. It is pretty evident I was listening to Electric Wizard's Dopethrone.

Detail of the wizard himself. His robes have the cosmos in them, his hat patch supports legalization. Wizards are among the top demographic for developing glaucoma, studying dusty tomes by candlelight and being around alchemical equipment.

This is the Bong Necromancer, who also lights up an unholy joint, rolled with the ashes of ancient lich kings. Based on the same pose as the Wizard, I tried to make him more menacing without overdoing it. My note in the corner is 'Bong Necromancer - enemy or ally to the Dopesmoked Wizard?' I still haven't decided.

Late Summer 2008 Drawings

2009-08-20T21:46:00.000-07:00

These are some drawings from the later half of the summer of 2008, after I returned from California.

Early ideas of space whales, playing mostly with blue and sperm whales since they are both archetypical and huge!

This is a drawing Max and I did during that summer. I think the picture pretty much explains it all. Hippy in a space suit (with a patch because he reduces, reuses, and recyles, man) tethered to an interstellar VW Bus with a zero-g vacuum bong, spreading good will and good times to a grandfatherly ringed planet. Peace on groovy space brother!

I spent a lot of my down time (recovering from work or tripping) by watching Wonder Showzen and smoking my neighbor's 'Killer Bud'. This is one of the heavier night's products.

Max and I had a conversation at Jopi's protocol palace of what the song 'Diesel' by Orange Goblin conjured in our minds. Mine was the devil (looking like a Hell's Angel), riding a motorcycle made of Christ's cross and fueled by the souls of the damned. We also decided that old school heavy metal should be about 3 things: Riding Fast, Living Hard, and Satan.

That's it for now, I am gradually getting more art scanned in along with the stories behind them!

Process and Magnitude

2009-08-18T12:46:00.000-07:00

This spring I took a Cognitive Psychology class entitled 'Cognition in the Wild', which dealt with human attitudes of the wilderness and how perception changes when placed in the wild. A large focus of the class was on Southern Utah and the Anasazi peoples. It encompassed a wide variety of topics like anthropology, ecology, evolutionary biology, geology, politics, and art. But no psychology, which initially bothered me. Whether by coincidence or purpose, the cognitive processes elicited by the class were as informative and influential as any discussion could have been - and it was one of the better classes I have taken during my University career.

Earlier in the year I had taken a class on Systems Theory entitled 'Chaos and Change', which primed my mind for the experiences and changes I have encountered in the past 6 months. I've always felt that everything is interconnected if one looks hard enough, but a rigorous scientific viewpoint has always forced me to view the causal schemata of life without teasing out the relationships. The two operative words I gained from this class are, as the title suggests, Process and Magnitude.

Life rarely is in stasis, and if it is, it usually is dead or inert. It is not dynamic. Science for the most part takes slices of living, such as the model cell or the Bohr model of the atom, and presents them as life itself. Certainly these models provide a framework for how life operates in simple, generalized terms. But no cell has perfectly shaped mitochondria with evenly spaced cristae, no atom has little red electrons with minus signs whizzing around the nucleus in perfect orbits. These are symbols of structure, static images of ideal existence. The reality however, is that all structures in life, from the quark to the galaxy filament, are interconnected through a web of relationships, a multitude of dynamic systems.

Southern Utah demonstrates the ideas of process and magnitude in a beautiful and elegant way that no other place or subject can. This past weekend, I had the opportunity to share a couple of my favourite places in the San Rafael Swell with Lauryn.

We went to Horseshoe Canyon, which houses the Great Gallery, a collection of Anasazi and Fremont rock art (both petroglyphs and petrographs) adorning the canyon walls. The tall, oblong figures are the product of a lost and unknown people who managed to create a grand civilization in the middle of a harsh and unforgiving land. Horseshoe Canyon itself is beautiful, with the tangible feeling that you are in the midst of watching geological processes unfold. The multihued banded rocks give me the feeling of looking at the swirling gasses of distant planets, the organic shapes carved into rock by the ebb of water and wind over eons playfully tantalize my imagination. Everywhere around is manifest of organic process.

This greeted us as we descended into the canyon.

There was this old pipe in the ground in the middle of the desert. Where did it lead to and why was it there?

One of my favourite places in Horseshoe Canyon, an enormous cavernous opening with a red rock beach, made better by one of my favourite people, Lauryn. We enjoyed the mesmerizing dance of a dust devil as we ate our lunch, then lay on our backs looking at the fractal tendrils of the clouds creep over the lip of the canyon.

A section of the Great Gallery panel. The guy at the left leaning over seems like he would be fun at a party.

One of the most well known sections of the Great Gallery, the middle figure maybe has a big beard or has a skull for a head?

At the end of the hike. Triumph!

The next day we hiked Little Wild Horse Canyon, a slot canyon with really narrow walls.

The most wonderful thing about science, in my opinion, is it allows us to expand our experience of magnitude. Imagine, for a second, the biggest thing that you can concretely picture in your mind. On good days, I can realistically imagine the space of the solar system, maybe just past the Oort Cloud. That's fucking huge - 1 light year. Almost 10^16 metres. Now imagine the smallest thing you can think of. For me it's a nucleotide, maybe I can imagine some of the electron clouds of the atoms in the nucleotide interacting. But that's on the scale of 10^-8 metres. Daily human experience, on the other hand, is about on the range of 10^-3 meters (a millimetre) to 10^3 metres (a kilometer). Huge range of magnitudes.

The problem that science currently faces, in my opinion, is helping to establish and understand the relationships between levels of magnitude, giving it meaning and connection, showing the process. Personally, I hate the way molecular and cellular biology shows only diagrams, little loops of molecules in a neat cycle, dead organelles and macromolecules locked in a deathly stasis for our perverse voyeuristic pursuits. The higher up I get into biology, the more it starts to make sense in a dynamic way, I can see the parts interacting, and maybe that is the well kept secret that is bequeathed to you in grad school.

Side Note: I also got to ride on a giant gila monster - giddyup!

Fear and Loathing at UCSD

2009-08-17T14:25:00.000-07:00

This is the story of later in the summer of 2008, the last week of July I believe. I had come down to Southern California for the ComiCon with Max, and Lauryn gave us a ride down to San Diego. We all decided to start our morning with some LSD and wanderings around UCSD (University of San Diego) because of the cool architecture and lots of eucalyptus trees. Max likes to chip eucalyptus bark in his hands when he is tripping.

Max and Lauryn, at the beginning of our journey.

I can't believe my hair was that long. It really blows my mind. I had gotten a horrible sunburn on my face thanks to the Day Star - my nose was leaking gross goop. I also lost a lot of weight doing a lot of psychedelics and as such my pants didn't fit too well, so I constantly had to hike them back up, completing the whole ponce look I have going on here.

This is the Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss!) Library, which looks like a crazy spaceship from a bad sci-fi movie. We spent a good amount of time in there, being noisy and looking at old books. We found an archived collection of Popular Mechanics magazines from the 80's that cracked us up.

We left the library and came across a map of UCSD which was water damaged and really hard to read. I told Lauryn and Max that I couldn't read the map, to which Lauryn replied 'Why? Are you so stupid you can't read?' On acid, you lose track of the magnitude of things, especially with sounds, so I yelled at Lauryn 'YOU KNOW, READING IS REALLY HARD FOR ME RIGHT NOW OK YOU DUMB BITCH!' Which caused a group tour nearby to immediately go silent and watch Lauryn and I glare at each other for what seemed like ages until we realized what we had just done.

There was this crazy looking tree that was dripping a deep red sap, we thought the tree was bleeding profusely.

Making our way back to the exterior of the library Max saw the moon, which he called. It's his so no one else can have it. Looking around for something equally awesome, I saw the Cognitive Sciences building and called that. It's mine. Lauryn didn't want to call anything so we gave her the West Coast, which is full of brazen hussies. This turned into the adventures of the Moon Ambassador, the Cognitive Sciences Robot, and Western Hussydom playing around on the exterior of the library to escape the Day Star, which we were all allied against due to it's face wrecking capabilities.

The ground outside the library looked like the surface of the moon, which I excitedly told Max about. Glaring at me, and in the sternest tone I have ever heard him talk to me in, he said, "You wouldn't know The Moon's maiden beauty." and smacked the camera out of my hands.

There was some general wandering around, watching the gentle coastal winds ripple through the trees, appreciating the architecture of UCSD, and idle conversation. We went to the cafeteria shortly thereafter to get something to eat.

Eating while tripping is always really hard. First, you lose perception of time, which messes up the internal dietary clock immensely. Secondly, you lose your appetite. Third, nothing looks appealing. Case in point, we went to the Subway in the cafeteria for lunch. Standing in line, we had another magnitude problem. There was a guy eating a sandwich at a table, but his sandwich looked huge compared to him. We couldn't decide whether the sandwich was enormous or the man was really small, so Lauryn went and stood next to him for comparison. Unfortunately that didn't help. To this day it still really bothers us that a midget might have been eating a giant sandwich.

I looked at the sandwich fixings through the glass, and everything looked like insects or organs to me - I couldn't take it; the bright lights, the noise of people eating, the prospect of eating a sandwich full of tapeworms and grubs. I stuffed a wad of bills (it turned out to be like $60) in Max's hand and ran to what I thought was outside. Turned out to be a breezeway, which I stood in the middle of trying to clear my mind as people navigated around me.

Max and Lauryn somehow made it through the ordeal of ordering food and came out bearing sandwiches, proceeding to tell me the horror stories of dealing with the Subway employees. I couldn't handle hearing it, their descriptions filled me with anxiety and fear. The fear of people, noise, and connection started to bother me, and as I looked at Lauryn and Max, two of my best friends, I began to feel extremely distanced from them.

After lunch we all needed to cool down and the acid had switched into the cerebral phase. We sat on the grass and contemplated silently in our own heads. I remember thinking that I had no future compared to Max and Lauryn, seeing the life and environment of UCSD only amplified that feeling. I had earlier that month had an experience which helped me decide I wanted to pursue science over art, but what would I do? I was just a long haired drugged out depressed cosmonaut, drifting through the empty space of my life.

A lack of connectedness and purpose. That's what gives me the Fear. No matter how much I try I still come up short. That's what causes my Loathing.

The Beginning of Something Wonderful

2009-08-13T11:58:00.001-07:00

During the summer of 2008, I spent most of my free time either taking psychedelics or studying astrophysics - sometimes both at the same time. The next couple of posts will be a recap of last summer, the stories, the journeys, and the experiences that shaped my path for the last year.

The summer started out with me finishing a very intensive semester of cellular and microbiology courses. The day after finals, I was in Claremont, CA with Max tripping on the best acid either of us have ever had. I attribute the wonderment and awesomeness of the experience to our lack of expectations - we had no idea how strong the acid was or had any real experience with heavy trips.

We started out watching Good Burger, a really stupid Nickelodeon movie from our childhoods. It was actually pretty entertaining, and as the acid began to kick in the movie became frighteningly hilarious. At one point, the antagonists (the rival burger restaurant) is poisoning the 'secret sauce' used by the protagonists. The poison they use is labeled 'Shark Poison'. Now, this really bothered us because why would you poison a shark? If you needed to kill a shark I would think poison is probably the least effective method. So surely there isn't a company manufacturing poison to specifically target sharks. Maybe the poison is developed by sharks, like in a poison gland? I am no expert on marine biology, but I don't think any shark excretes poison. Though that would suck, a shit wrecking shark...WITH A POISONOUS STINGER! We then imagined that it must be like rat poison, a poison developed for little cockroach sized sharks, scurrying about the woodwork. We imagined an Italian immigrant family trying to squish little sharks yelling "Get 'im with the boot Guiseppe!"

At that point we realized we were really, really out of it. The tree outside Max's dorm had begun to swing towards me, trying to grab me through the window, and Max's Union Jack flag had begun to bleed and drip off the wall. Time to go outside and get some air. Unfortunately there were fractals everywhere, and we were having a hard time maneuvering around them until Lauryn helped us to a grassy spot. I looked at Max, and the grass had taken root in his manly arm hair, making him look like a treant. Lauryn had a decidedly reptilian look about her.

The next thing I remember was going up to this girl Elaine's room to see a small kitten she had smuggled into the dorms from Mexico. She had a tie dyed wall hanging which was so brilliant and beautiful to look at. The only way Max and I could describe it was as if a man wreathed in multi-coloured fire was doing capoeta. We began joking that The Kitten Immigration Services would come to get it. 'La Migra de los Gatos Illegales' were a group of flak jacket clad kittens with rifles marching little kittens with sombreros and mustaches - who only wanted to taste American freedom - back across the border. It was so sad I began to cry, but that could have been my cat allergies acting up. I ran outside to get some fresh air, at which point Max and Lauryn came out laughing about La Migra. They asked my why I was crying and I yelled 'DON'T YOU FUCKING TALK ABOUT THE KITTEN MIGRA - IT'S TOO DAMN SAD!" And threw this metal pole Max had picked up over the balcony. I can't stand it when he has nice things that I don't have.

After the debacle of the Kitten Migra, we went back downstairs to sit on the couches and collect ourselves. Whatever crazy conversations we had are lost to time, but Lauryn left soon after for a recital. We were still really bothered about shark poison. More people came by to see what we were up to, all amazed that we were still functioning after taking acid.

Lunch came around, which was pitas and spreadables. The pitas looked like Pfaddenstohl hats (Germanic fairies that are little anthropomorphic toadstools.) It was sad that they gave their lives so that we could eat. I think that was the first time I started to think about where my food came from and the dynamic web of consumption. In addition to my experiences working at the morgue, it would later prompt me to switch to a vegetarian diet.

Honestly I can't remember too much more of what happened, only that Max and I talked a lot about people we knew, our childhoods, tautology, causailty, and plans for the future. As the visuals subsided we began to get more lucid and have deeper conversations, which we termed the cerebral phase of LSD. Lots of introspection, but your thoughts continuously spiral inwards, leaving you tangentally scatterbrained.

At some point during this phase, I looked at Max, who I had known since I was 9 or so. The last couple of years of our friendship had been turbulent, and I had doubted whether we would continue to remain friends after college, with us going to grad schools across the country or life taking us in some other far off direction. Sitting with him on a grassy hill, I realized that I would know this man until the day I died, that he was a friend for life. No matter how bad things got, I knew that Max and I would be friends - he is one of the most unique and dear persons I have ever known.

The world works in mysterious ways, and a year later I travelled with Max for a month in Europe. He came back to Salt Lake for grad school and we have an apartment together. Things are still rocky, but I truly love the man and couldn't be happier with the situation.

Grandma's Good Living Protocols

2009-08-12T13:48:00.000-07:00

I have gotten a lot of requests about the term protocol and 'Grandma's Good Living Protocols'. Protocol comes from when Max was living in Compton, CA during the summer of 2008 while working for Mattel. He lived with a Finnish room mate, Jaako, who worked for the military defense company Raytheon. Jaako had some strange quirks and sayings, such as egging SUVs while laconically repeating "good...good..." He also watched romance movies as porn because "you get so into the characters and then when they finally bone it's AWESOME!" Nice enough guy, just had some wierd perks.

While I was visiting the two on my trip to the San Diego ComiCon 2008, we got into a conversation of wierd work jargon. (I worked in the morgue at the time, and there were all sorts of wierd terms we used.) Jaako would constantly be asked if projects he was working on were 'up to protocol' - or 'protocol' for short - always said in a really stern and authoritative voice. Max and I thought this was hilarious, so we began asking if everything was 'protocol'. When we made dinner, had to be sure it was up to protocol. Drinking a beer? Make sure it's protocol. Slaying a brown snake? No better time to review bathroom protocols. The word was inemic.

So after a long day of tripping and settling into the cerebral phase of good LSD at Grandma's Pleasure Palace in La Jolla we started talking about what it meant for something to be 'protocol.' We had been using it to describe pretty much everything, but being surrounded by the simple luxury of Jopi's house we realized that something can be good, something can be awesome, something can be essential for daily life - all without being protocol. For something to be protocol it has to be essential for good times and good living. The way Max's grandma Jopi lives is protocol to a T.

It's a slippery slope and a lot of gray area is involved in determining how protocol something is, and whether it deserves the title of protocality. Max and I have had countless debates discussing whether something deserves to go on this list, and it continually is added to. As Max and I have begun living together we strive to make our apartment as protocol as possible. Protocality hasn't become just an idea for us, but a lifestyle we strive to cultivate around us.

GRANDMA'S GOOD LIVING PROTOCOLS

Good, healthy, organic food. Preferably grown in your own garden. Cook and prepare as much as you can yourself. Along with this is learning how to cook good food, whether for one person or ten.
Rugs. Oriental is better than plain - must be soft for laying on and beautiful to look at.
Good sound system. Music has the ability to transform mood and seeing how much I listen to, a good sound system is a sound (no pun intended) investment.
A full/queen sized bed with clean sheets and soft blankets. Humans spend at least a third of their lives in bed, and having ample room is important. Must be big enough for two people, but not so big that when one person is in it that they feel lonely. Soft blankets are important for the winter (especially in Utah) and cuddling up.
Good beer/liquor. Beer is delicious, and liquor can be as well. Never skimp on either. Buy local microbrews opposed to shitty Domestics. Brewing your own beer is also super protocol.
A porch/balcony/outside space. This goes hand in hand with that most sacred of rites, Porch Times (another topic for another post.) South or west facing is optimal for sun.
Things made out of natural materials like wood, metal, or glass and fabrics like linen, cotton, and wool. Plastic is a horrible material due to it's feel, cheapness, and artificiality - not to mention the environmental impacts.
Books. It doesn't matter if you have The Lorax or A Kierkegaard Anthology on your bookshelf, but having books is important. It's tangible collective knowledge, reference material, and a comforting friend all in one. Having a good collection of books that have meaning and signifigance to you is essential for good living.
Animals. Cats are preferrable since they are good companions, but unfortunately some people such as myself can't have cats due to allergies or housing restrictions. Max and I currently have a pair of hooded rex rats I rescued from a laboratory and they have been the most protocol pets I have ever owned. They are extremely intelligent, loving, and very low maintenance.
A big desk/table. Max and I both like to have numerous projects going on our workspaces, and clutter is the enemy of productivity. A big desk with a few drawers for supplies or a big, old wood coffee table is preferrable.
Learning to play a musical instrument. If you love music, at some point you must be a participant and not an observer.
Good chairs/seats. Max and I both agree that the most protocol chair is an old 70's bucket/papasan chair. Unfortunately it is hard to get work done in these chairs as they are so conducive for relaxing and enjoying life. But good chairs are important for work, relaxing, and Porch Times.
Good tea for the winter time. (Thanks Lauryn!)
Learning a proper DIY attitude - learning to make your own food from scratch, learning how to repair and build furniture, and learning how to make and mend your clothing. (Thanks Lauryn!)
Delicious ice cream and/or gelato for the summer time. (Thanks Lauryn!)

I'll update this list as I remember/new items come. E-mail me with any recommendations you have on things that are essential for good living.

Space Whale vs. Void Kraken

2009-08-07T13:45:00.000-07:00

This is the only picture I have scanned in on this computer at the moment, but it's a good one. Never got around to finishing it, the blue blob in the corner was going to be a nebula with stars inked in, but moved on and never came back. If one day I finish it, I will post it here for comparison.

This particular piece is a translation of the old 19th century maritime woodcuts of giant sperm whales wrestling against giant squids. But in space.

The background -
During the summer of 2008, I was doing a lot of pyschedelic drugs. At this juncture of the story, I was out in Southern California visiting my best friend Max and his friend Lauryn. Max and I were heading to Comic-Con, and caught a ride with Lauryn down to San Diego. We began the day with a couple hits of acid and adventured around UCSD - a story for another time.

After a good trip around the balmy and beautiful modern architecture of UCSD we went to stay with Max's step-father's mother, Jopi - one of the most down to earth and relaxed individuals I have ever met. Unfortunately, due to the strength of the acid and a long day in the sun combined with Jopi's thick Dutch accent, I was far from social functionality. I wound up making an ass of myself, which bothered me to no end until I realized that Jopi didn't care, she was just happy to have me there.

We conversed with Jopi for a few hours, but she was off to the Pops! (classical musical concert.) Max and I decided that we would take another couple of hits of acid and trip around Jopi's extremely protocol (def: conducive to good living) house. Cranking the Orange Goblin we talked about psychedelic seers traversing the desert, the nature of distortion and perception regarding psychedelic insights, and hammered out what it took for good living. This list later became 'Grandma's Good Living Protocols' - which is another story for another time.

As the night wore on we sat out on the upstairs balcony, which overlooks La Jolla Bay and the tranquil ocean. We slept under the stars that night, which looked like stick and ball models of complex organic molecules. We debated and discussed the important issue of vampires vs. werewolfs - deciding that while vampires were classy and multifaceted with many cool archetypes, werewolves were just plain shit-wreckers.

Towards the end of the night, as the clouds rolled in over the bay, I expressed to Max my deep fear of the ocean combined with my fascination of marine biology. We compared the deep blackness of the ocean to that of the cosmos - and in that comparison we imagined pods of whales on the same scale singing a haunting song throughout the universe. Behind them trailed dust, planetesimals, perhaps even worlds inhabited by life. But perhaps civilizations lived upon the space whale like the ancient legend of the zaratan turtles.

Max revealed to me that he wasn't satisfied with engineering - that he wanted to be an illustrator. We both committed to each other not to let our scientific careers get in the way of our art - and my first drawings of the space whales came soon after.

What I do and Why I do it...

2009-08-07T12:58:00.000-07:00

The beginning. A good place to start if I could find it.

It seems as I get older that more and more of where I was and what I did eludes me - from time to time I have these moments, feeling like when you wake up in the middle of the night and forget where you are. Those 5 seconds of unfamiliarity and displacement until you remember "Yes I am in my bed, these are my sheets, this is my room. Ok, back to sleep." Except for me it is a lucid awareness of my presence and existence. Climbing a staircase, sitting outside, driving - I might have this experience. I realize I exist and that all that is Chris has come to this one moment of being.

But what brought me here? It's as though the last twenty two years have been culminating to this point, and now that it has come I am at a lack for understanding. Causality blurs and have a tranquil moment of awareness, unification, zen being. In this state I merely exist within my own head - the last 22 years and 13.6 billion before all seem arbitrary points. Such solipsistic escapes inevitably lead to a loss of my sense of self - a dissolution of connectedness with spatial and temporal events.

It comes with no small amount of anxiety and cosmic angst that everything I do here is all trivial, that the cultivation of my mind and collective experiences that manifest as personality might have no context or framework for my understanding. I might wake up and not know where I am.

So I keep notes. I draw and write to help me remember where I was, what I felt, how I saw the world. I look back at the sketch books, loose leaflets, Moleskin journals, Post-It notes, and receipts - each a fragment of expression tying me back to a time, place, and state of presence. I want to share the fragments of my conscious processes with others, so here we are.

At the beginning.