ROLODEXXX
who declared you would be so expensive to buy in the store..
past the brink of obsolescence, you blindly sport a can’t-touch-me tag..
while your modern competition soars, you are weighted to the floor..
blame it on your disposition, says sontag..
you are but a glorified t-p holder; vex us no more.
NOW, what you’ve all been waiting for, the new and improved “SCHMOLODEX”!! Made from door trim, ring binders, and a dowel rod, it can EASILY accommodate contact information for hundreds of your most colorful friends. Place it on a desk, mount in on the wall, suspend it from the ceiling; ANY way you look at it, batteries aren’t included.. THAT’S RIGHT!! There’s not a single circuit to bend, no buttons to push, and nothing to rub… SOOOOO, sneak into a local construction site and build one TODAY!!
When your team is an array of residents all up and down the west coast, production meetings become a thing of beauty. A real testament to how cool the internet is.
Prior Location: The Vanilla Dome; Bellingham, Washington
Objective: Somewhere between life experience and logical conclusion, perhaps both.
Latest experiment in the research labs: Film shutter speeds and documentation of subject on skateboard.
Creatively most envious of: Charles Burnett
Enjoys terribly: Fauvism, and documenting projects that were built with his hands.
Conclusive Report: Forrest is intern 001 for one month in Los Angeles. A list of preferred women are Suzanne Sontag, Yayoi Kusama, Samira Makhmalbaf and Hannah Hoch. A list of preferred men are Carl Sagan, Charles Burnett, Dan Savage, Erik Satie, and John Baldessari. Favorite medium is currently collage. Lastly, given a $100 budget, he would create a film of himself consuming $100 worth of Twinkies or an 18-year-long choose-your-own-adventure film about a father who is a spy in the Appalachian mountains.
In this episode, Adi and Jimmy ask each other questions about making art, positive thinking, two dimensions, and ghosts.
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Sirocco has received our first ever media coverage — our first piece of evidence that this all isn’t a dream.
Check out our feature article in this month’s issue of the ever so awesome Chicago based art rag, Jettison Quarterly. Issue #6 is gushing with some Labs love.
Some amazingly charming photos we crafted by the Labs to add to the article. More on those soon.
Thanks, Jettison, for all the love. We plan on coming to Chicago soon to give you hugs and thanks in person.
I started with this one because a good elaborate idea was already in motion: with “red moon” colors and textures, the plan was to create a plaid using strips cut from the leftover costume materials by weaving them together, then applique them onto the lapel.. this was going well until the automobile carpet material was too thick and stiff to conform to the curves of a lapel on a human, and as a woven piece, it looked like a crafty grandmother’s dinner jacket from medieval times.. but since the materials were already in place, to get the same effect, an airbrush was used to paint black over it all, then all the stitches and strips were ripped off to reveal the white lattice; finally, red, gray, and white stripes were stitched to finish the plaid.
the future of sirocco was in mind: the “dream machine” color palatte of pastel colors was stitched on with thread of varying weight, fiber, and sheen creating a complete yet disorganized checkerboard..
the nautical theme was acheived with waterbased latex paint; masking and overlapping layers of paint was used to give the stripes a subtle illusion of depth; time and wear should slowly change them like waves on the hull..
the bold line curves from neck to hem: an extra 1/8”, so simple.
a jacket with room for decoration; selvage attracted me to creating patchwork: working as apprentice patternmaker at oxxford clothes, i was the after-hours scavenger, collecting all the selvage off the cutting room floor for their exotic locales colorfully woven along the edges of the otherwise exceedingly bland (but ridiculously expensive) bolts.. these strips of material have irregular vertical stitches to support the weight of whatever might be shoved in the slots..
One of my summer projects is a short series called A Lighthearted War. The movies document two revolutionaries in love who are fighting against their oppressive, bourgeois colonizers. The colonizers have, incidentally, banned whimsical romance. If you like non-sequiturs, contradicted on-the-spot realism, and two kids just trying their best, then stay tuned!
This prep list also might give you a decent feel for the movie’s look and aesthetic. Sort of, anyway:
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the great wide expanse of THEFUTURE. When all is said and done, I think everybody does a lot of thinking about the future. Wondering if they’ll be penniless forever, or whether they’ll really get to live the dream. I mean, the future is coming! It’s coming all the time! And people besides me think about it. For example, economists. Or palm-readers.
I also know that people besides me think about time and the future because I have been stuck for a few days sleeping very little because of a book called The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1919. I like reading it at night before bed, because it’s cool to read about total abstractions when it’s dark out, and because I keep dreaming about extreme interplanetary space missions and/or being in charge of a team of cool kids who are all wearing matching suits.
So there’s a whole CHAPTER of this book on the early 20th century’s ideas about the future. I went for it. There’s a lot of ground to cover when addressing the future, incidentally. The war. Philosophy, art, science, science fiction, technology, psychiatry, the Titanic. I lost myself in there for a while. In the end, though, I came out pretty encouraged by Futurism. Here is part of their manifesto, written in 1909:
We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness…Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.
Man, I wish I could have seen some guy just standing on top of a car letting the public have that speech. They were unafraid! They started trying new things! Just to see what would happen!!—and for the simple fact that it was new and not like the past! Some really cool art came out of it, too, like chromophony (the color of sounds!) and painting people that look like robots walking up the stairs and exposing film in weird ways.
As a movement, Futurism emphasized the celebration of change and originality. It spoke to the process of creation, of making as a remedy for temporality. This is what I like about it. It tried to get people to notice it, to be angered by it if necessary—but to notice! and to form their own opinions as a result. And yeah, also, its founders were completely misogynist, as many men in the early 20th century proudly, irrevocably were, counting feminism as an “opportunistic and utilitarian cowardice” they wished to demolish. (Whoa.) They also enjoyed exalting war and fascism. After WWI, Futurism became a vehicle for Fascist propaganda, and it morphed into a different animal from that of the original manifesto—one still addicted to destruction and conflict, but with little to no attention to collective creativity and the strength of youthful innovation and argument.
And no, I’m really not so keen on the war or the misogyny or the Futurists’ insistence on the categorical removal/destruction of the past and all its decorative trimmings (I mean, let’s be real, I love the decorative trimmings part. That could pretty much be my tagline. DECORATIVETRIMMINGS. Plus, three-quarters of my wardrobe is not from anywhere near this decade and probably has a hole in it), but I am inspired by the reminder that the future is a clean slate, a big stretch of what-ifs! and wouldn’t-it-be-rad-ifs! and lets-try-its! for us become better versions of ourselves in. I am excited by the inference that the process of thinking this way is just as revolutionary—if not more so!—than the final product.
There was this architect called Antonio Sant’Elia who was all for the idea that new construction should respond to the needs of the modern age, using steel and glass and cardboard (submarines…?) and concrete, making every building a dynamic, operational machine. In 1914, he said THIS:
From an architecture conceived in this way no formal or linear habit can grow, since the fundamental characteristics of Futurist architecture will be its impermanence and transience. Things will endure less than us. Every generation must build its own city.
Every generation must build its own city?! Geeze. Yes! I mean, it isn’t about the fact that this architect just told the world that he fundamentally believed that his buildings not only would, but should, fall apart. It isn’t about the buildings, or the art. It’s about the manifesto. The fact that someone (or groups of someones!) went on the record saying that each generation should build its own ideas. That rebuilding ourselves is the manifesto. That isn’t destructive! It’s the most creative! This guy saying that every generation build its own city shows that someone thinks it can.
So that’s what we’re doing now. Pretty encouraging, right?
I had a real bounce in my step as I did a (figurative) victory lap around my apartment. I felt so great, like I could make the funniest joke if anyone had been around to hear it. It was alright with me that no one was, because it was the potential that felt so good. To think how our ideas matter in that way! That our collective manifesto—all the mantras we write over and over in our notebooks and on our walls and at the tops of our blogs, that we might use as sign-offs if we had regular spots on live network television—those are makin’ us a city and we can live in it.
Man. So in my city (of the right here, right now) there is a lot of sewing and loud music for dancing in and really great pancakes, and everybody writes, and stretches their muscles in every skill they’ve got, and makes lists of things they want to learn, and learns them, one by one, and the world is at their fingertips just like the great wide expanse of the future.
