Episode 1: What exactly is going on here?

Welcome to the very first Glowblog!

Michael, my awesome friend and wonderful web site designer is building, maintaining, and hosting a great web site for me and my glowees – http://www.glowees.com – He's advised me that to help promote my web presence, I should publish a regular blog.

If I'm going to write a regular blog, I want to make sure I always have something interesting to write about, so, as you can see above, I've decided my subject will be my crazy life as a Berkeley artist.

Definitions:

Artist:

This is the term that's hardest to define. My bare bones definition of an artist is someone who is creative, and whose creation elicits an emotional reaction from those who experience it.

So, that's how I define myself as an artist. The medium doesn't matter. Just some of the media I've used are: stone, earthen clay, modeling clay, polymer clay, wax, silver, bronze, water color paint, acrylic paint, fabric, pencil, packing tape, picture hanging putty, video, flexible eraser, lint, leather, theater, music, food, sex & life.

Life:

This isn't a definition of life for the Supreme Court like, “life begins at conception & ends at birth” or anything like that. This blog will be about how an artist lives his life, or more specifically, about how I live mine. Many artists, myself included, eschew a life of comfort and security for a life less ordinary. Believe me, I have nothing against comfort or security. I just can't stomach the 9 to 5 corporate grind it takes to sustain this “normal” life. I'm also more into collecting experiences rather than things, and have amassed a large and exotic collection over the years.

Example: I discovered several years ago that, due to the generally surreal nature of the life I lead, I'd lost my ability to perceive what's weird. I figured this out one evening as I was having a conversation with my friend, Bonnie. As we were talking, I noticed that people kept staring at us as they passed by. Each person that walked by was out and out gawking. After about 20 minutes of this, it finally dawned on me what was going on. Bonnie is a contortionist, and she was hanging on bungee cords from a tree branch with her own legs hanging up over her shoulders, looking like a huge, human spider. It took me an entire 20 minutes to realize that there was anything remotely odd about this. It was at this point I realized that I have no sense of the bizarre anymore.

Berkeley:

That odd town east of San Francisco, north of Oakland, and left of pretty much everything else, where artists, merchants, students & homeless people all know each other, often on a first name basis. Where some of the last vestiges of the great unwashed hippies from the summer of love are still doing their thing, and plying their crafts of tie dyeing, beading, henna tattooing & hemp braiding, just as they have for the last forty years. We boast the largest population of homeless Ph. D.s per capita anywhere in the world. Insanity oneupmanship is a sport here. Simply muttering to one's self is not only passé, but far too easily mistaken for talking on a Bluetooth. It's been tossed aside for more direct engagement, usually involving yelling or singing. Berkeley is many things, but dull definitely isn't one of them.

Crazy:

Trying to make a living an an artist, actor & musician.

This is the palette on which I plan to paint this blog, not only showcasing myself and my work, but also giving you a glimpse into all those crazy surreal moments that encompass my life and my world. I hope you enjoy it, come back often, maybe even visit beautiful Berkeley, California, USA. And, most of all – BUY MY STUFF! :)