it's friday ... KaBLOW!

i tend to think of collaborations quite often. in fact, my re-entry into writing and the visual arts stems from a collaboration with my friend john jenkins, a painter with whom i have lost touch. i was a biology student at the time, having recently moved to houston after failing to receive financial aid for med school in strasbourg (i hear that the universite louis pasteur has the second best science program in france overall).

i had not written anything in four years at the time, except for a few comicbook scripts, which were, quite frankly, awful and derivative. and when i say awful and derivative, i mean marvel/dc-awful. remember, this was the late 90s, when mainstream comics were awful. (hey, cool. i can move this image around)

enter john, who was influenced by pop art and andy warhol and the velvet underground. he worked at the starbucks across the street from work and gave me coffee for free. we spent time chatting derrida, duchamp and related things. he knew of my doodles, made in anatomy lab with actual body parts probably collected from concentration camps in world war ii (the struthof camp was only forty-five minutes away from strasbourg). and he knew i like japanese visual kei bands (see john sakkis's blog for more details).

so the idea was to start this fake glamrock band named jus derange, with me as fake frontman and lyricist. john j. would create the visuals (too bad i lost the address to his website) and i would write the lyrics. the music would be made by the two of us (i don't remember what instrument john knew how to play, while i had been classically trained to play the piano and the trumpet, but sucked tremendously). a website would have been created, and john and i would laugh at the potential emails received.

so the lyrics were written quite frenetically with whatever i was thinking at the time. the results were a mix of surrealism, oulipo-esque wordplay and second-generation new york school, although i didn't know that at the time. mike perez told me, shortly after i met him when i changed majors from biology to english/philosophy. i had shown him something titled "house of the seventh dead monkey." yeah, i was young.

i've trying to start collaboration for a while now, since i don't see john j. that often anymore (well, at all). there was the painted comicbook poem with cole michael, and travis rice and i have been trying to do something together for a while, in the manner of kenneth koch and larry rivers. todd dillard has wanted to work on a comic book project with me as illustrator, but his taste veers to much toward the conventional (read a sentimental exploration of superheroism; now that i've typed a derivative of 'superhero,' i expect a cease-and-desist order from marvel comics and dc). which is funny considering that todd did his thesis with claudia rankine while i did mine with tony h. i think todd and i were switched at birth or something.

so yeah. collaboration. KaBLOW! we are all writers, but there's more. john s. obviously knows silkscreening, among other things. jessica knows photoshop, collage and more. claire knows how to do too many things for me not to be jealous. i want someone to write me a comicbook script. nothing too long. six pages maybe. i'm slow when it comes to drawing. actually, you could all send me scripts, i'll probably try to illustrate them all. just give me something to do!

i am now on my sixth cup of coffee since i got to work.

word.