Thought – Page 5 – Pol Rosenthal

Terrible Thieving Thieves, the update

it’s really hard to write any more about this. the theft has been traumatic. i actually started crying the other night. and i get panicked if i’m in the art space for too long, convinced that the thieves are back, running amuck, while i’m there. it’s absolutely horrible at times.

i’ve been talking to everyone about it. and all my friends, you, have been so very supportive. and i couldn’t ask for better friends. thank you.

the only advice i’ve been getting is to move on and how to do so. and i am taking that advice. i’ve made the move to do something i’ve been wanting to do for a long time and that is making my first film. i mentioned that before, i know, but i’ve actually set a date for shooting. july 27th. it’s the most exciting and frightening thing i’ve done in a long time. even more than chasing down that lovely woman in korea last year for a two month date to europe and africa. well, maybe not that scary…

last year i decided that i wanted to make the move to photography. and secretly i had decided i also wanted to get into film making. photography was no problem, but stepping into motion pictures? that was tough. no equipment. no training. no connections. how to start?

luckily it just fell into my lap. like so many other wonderful things and opportunities. dk pan just looked at me one day and said, “why don’t you make a movie? you can use my camera.” jesus, dk, are you ever going to stop accidentally upgrading my life? thank you!

so i’m working on it. and it’ll debut in august. i’ll let everyone know the details of the showing and you can all watch me whimper and freak out in public. and if you have any comments i will be open to them. scared, but open.

turn it on.

since i’ve been through so much in the last week i have barely been taking pictures. it’s just too depressing. my biggest decision has been whether to get a new laptop or buy a smart, new camera. at this time i’m thinking of a camera; the canon rebel series comes highly recommended. and now that i doing a worktrade with the photo center northwest it seems like a great idea.

maybe the transition into a new field of operation for me, from dancer/musician/performer, will actually occur. i hope so. i’d like to think that all this work in other fields will translate. that my work in the other genres will be beneficial to my new eye. and i have ideas. just wait. you’ll see. and hopefully i’ll continue to keep you amused so you’ll keep inviting me to dinner and drinks. thanks for the dinner and drinks!

some old shots to keep you entertained. enjoy:

a crumbling building in cheunchon, south korea — a mobile sound device in japan

working on an old dance theater piece with anna b as the mummy — a mobile sound device in japan

my own private conceptual art film

so i have decided to join the northwest film forum‘s film challenge for 2008.

the challenge? to produce all your footage for a short film in 24 hours in one location specified by the film forum and turn out a film of no more than 5 minutes in length. by august. i think i can do this.

of course, since it’s an artofmulata production it’ll be a conceptual art film. how anyone does anything other than that i don’t know; who can be bothered to walk the finite lines of lateral thinking when explosions are happening all around us, infants sell us crack to be smoked from the barrels of miniaturized weapons appliances and barack obama is so boring to listen to (i’m sure history will deem him a nice guy)?

i am also looking for people to be in the film. no speaking necessary. no nudity or sex. it will hopefully be provocative in its imagery and something that you will hide from your parents. unless your parents are like that… i hope your parents are so very like that.

shooting will start in mid to late july. if you are interested in being in a small effort of conceptual and projectable media contact me at artofmulata@gmail.com i will send you details asap.

and i promise i will be very grateful and willing to express that to you!

on the muse

i just finished reading germaine greer’s article on the artist’s muse.

for the last year i have been contemplating this very same concept. i came face to face with my muse one year ago and i have been enveloped in a heady, headstrong rush ever since. it’s life threatening. it’s altering. it’s a knife to the cocoon. a bullet to the balloon.

this ephemeral being has enveloped all of my thoughts and inspired an output and a desire to output (‘put out’) like i haven’t experienced in years.

but unlike the classic concept of the muse as totalized by ms. greer so sweetly and lovingly in her pitch for the guardian uk, my conception of the muse is more ephemeral.

it is not a model you use.

it is a mental construct, an ideal like the islamic concept of the Beloved. (1 2) a concept that inspires the artist. this unpacifiable being functions as a call to apostasy. one which we should give in to readily. it is better to drown in the milk of creation than to thirst in a desert of stagnation.

i see my muse as my friend, as wife and mother of all my work. you can follow all the explicit ideas that engenders on your own. if you know what i mean…

when i found her (or, more accurately, when she chose me) i was in a state of deepest creative funk. and in weeks she had resurrected me. in the most literal senses. i was dead when she found me. suffocating in so many ways. and as saul williams (yo holmes!) said, “we all know what a lack of breath signifies…”

but back to some semblance of conscious thought. i can wax about the ecstasy of my being chosen forever. ask anyone who knows me.

this idea of a model who gets paid X bucks an hour to get your artistic jollies off is just absurd. i can understand, though. for years i stood around naked and immobile for photographers and painters, sketch brands and horny old guys pretending to not be pornographers (i hope no one ever finds those shots). and i don’t decry them their needs (except that damn perv pornographer. i did not know what i was getting into. folly of youth and broke on the streets). it was the classic method.

not that i have ever been a muse in the classic sense. but i know that at certain points i have been an inspiration for certain people and, um, institutions. and i have found mine in so many places.

and the ones that last, that we continue to return to, are the muse. they are our obsessions made manifest. dk pan always told me that it is our obsessions that we should follow to make our art. i don’t dare contemplate what that means after some of the things that guy has gotten me to do in the name of his art, but i understand his point and i love him.

and while it would be interesting to have some amazing human around to draw and paint and whatnot i don’t really work in those mediums. so i had to find a form of living theater to draw out my demons and let you be exposed to them. when i feel lost and afraid of my self and my work i draw out that modern scrying ball, my cell phone, and contact my muse who gives me the cheek up. or i find an avatar in the form of a friend who i can project the aura of my chosen one upon and listen to their advice. it always seems to work.

i suppose it is a form of black magic. luckily i believe in magic. i don’t believe in god. and my muse always tells me that the universe loves me. so sweet and so true. if it wasn’t i’d be horribly disfigured, imprisoned, dead or on that murderous rampage you read about.

and another reason why that untouchable being wouldn’t work for me is because, as an ex-girlfriend of mine once said by way of explanation for why she ‘did it’ with that bland motorcycle jock behind my eye, “i’m like a cat: i have to play with it until it dies…”

but i want to thank germain greer for her essay. it filled me with rhapsodic joy. i love my muse. i am in love with my muse. and my muse loves me. or i wouldn’t be floating night and day in tears of such profound sorrow, grief and happiness.

do you know that feeling? when happiness strikes and you want to cry and throw up and you get dizzy? have you felt that power?

if not you should drink more.

love.love.love.

hippy-ing out for you tonight,

pol

*special thanks to models ‘dan’ and ‘creampuff’

I This A Little Too Revealing?

what is wrong with my head?

i’m not really going to look too closely at my psyche to examine this sensation, but i was just tickled by this poster i saw yesterday:

i am not afraid of porn, punks or pabst; i had two of them just last night.

tidings

stumbled across this photo recently.

it’s from the smoke farm show that the implied violence kids were kind enough to have me in.
looks a real winning kind of guy up there on the old green, no?

this is just a distraction from what’s posted below.
seems like a good idea to keep a low profile on the normal madness that i litter this thing with now that grant gifting orgs may well be climbing all over me soon. i’m not going to take anything down; i’m not ashamed of my work. it’s too far into the game for artists to be distracted by petty notions like shame and embarrassment.

if you’re going to do it you might as well enjoy it and be proud.
it’s not as if we can take anything back.
and why would anyone want to.

if anything the persecutor should learn to forgive, embrace and relax.
it’s probably of the finest causes for the rampaging amount of boredom that swathes this city.
hell, i just spent my friday night curled up with a good history book reading about how jesus was probably a mystery school initiate and john the baptist was the true hero of the gospels. modern day gnostics. i love ’em.

yesterday, in lieu of sleeping, i practiced my patanajali exercises. you know the ones. you start off listening to your heartbeat, but inside your chest cavity with with a practiced ear. slowly you allow your senses to expand and take in the sound of blood moving through veins and lungs rising and collapsing. eventually, you’re at the threshold of the skin listening to static magnetic hairs sway. then you do the big thing and move out. listen further and further from the body. probably the most fun meditation for a musician out there.

yeah, i skipped a friday to hang out with jesus. but then it did seem like the appropriate thing to do. it was leap day remember? and everyone was trying to come up with cool things to do as commemorative genuflection. at the bank of america where i gathered some pennies from the vault, the very cute teller explained to me that all the ladies there were wearing ties and matching blue sweaters. not my idea of a lot of fun, but who am i to argue with a lack of progress? i wanted them to just give away free money, of course. i asked, too. you never know. it’s the end of the 4 year span; anything can happen. as it was i left a little richer, but only because i’d earned it. where’s that free lunch i ordered a while back?

but what is a person supposed to do? my friends josh and ginger looked at the last thing i slipped in here, ‘sense of being,‘ and proclaimed it boring, beneath me, and chided me further by proclaiming the entire concept of blogs “retarded.” that is a fine and admirable take form a couple of very smart hipsters out in brooklyn. and i listened to them, too. not that i paid any attention. i love the post; i want to do more just like it. and it is hard to take criticism on the deployment of mass media from a guy who used to do pirate radio. god josh, how seventies. how off the london shore. how Voice Of America.

someone else accused me of rampant narcissism. wow. i wasn’t sure what to make of that. i’m still not. i’m an aries though: we don’t respond well to criticism.

look, i’m writing this to put space between the two articles. if you want to see it and that’s why you’re here then by all means scroll down. but i hope you’re of age and not someplace where looking at those photographs will get you terminated. that’s right… you have been warned. and if it does offend you then please go talk to a spiritual advisor. no more strange and viscerally peculiar letters of retribution. i’m saving them. i’m going to make posters of them for the exhibition.

p.s. i don’t know who took this glamor shot, but i would love to give somebody credit.