- August 1, 2004 (Sunday) - 1 Evil Deed a Day / My History of Guerilla Love at Work
So I have been working for Dark Dynamite since I last wrote and I have been having lots of fun. I still can't believe how lucky I am to have such a great job. I remember when I started my job with the Japanese tour company and thought It was going to be so much fun. Of course it was a living nightmare. No.. Actually it was alot of fun, but it was alot of days when it felt like a living nightmare. I was lucky to have great co-workers and I really liked the people at the office. It was also really good problem solving expirence.
But as for now, I am more than happy to be in a job that is much less problematic. For the longest time I had this horrible feeling that I was going to be stuck in soul-less dead end jobs, and that all my artistic projects would be these little insignificant things that no-one would appriecate.
But looking back on it all I am actually really happy about how things have gone so far. For example, I was working a low paying warehouse job last winter. My job wasn't helping anyone, I was just putting overpriced herbal suppliments in boxes.
In spite of all that, I really feel like I was able to make friends with all those around me. And I feel that I was able to add an artsy touch of whimsy to what was otherwise a dull workplace. I would try to learn what made the individual people around me happy, and then I would go out of my way to do that on purpose. There was some bad office politic, so I would try to make friends with people who were enimies with eachother.
I think the crowning moment was when I started putting artwork on the breakroom fridge. By the time I had quit my job there, people were buying prints off me! It was so much fun. It was like guerilla warfare, only instead of fighting with weapons, I was fighting with love.
I worked there for 1 month. By the end, I would always get this crazy emotional high after work if I was able to make someone's day. It kind of warped me a little bit. I started looking at them like a scientist looking at his lab rats and obscessing about how to get them all to love eachother. Not that I was putting myself above them or anything. Deep down I was just one of the rats, probably the runt.... Yeah, I'm warped.
So I sort of fell flat on my face in las Vegas, now I'm working right in the heart of Salt Lake City. I ride the bus to work every day. It has my rekindled my infatuation with public transportation & the incredible excess of human interaction in the city. I try to do an evil deed every day, to balance out all the good ones. For example:
I see a man ride by on his bike. His name is tattooed in Japanese on his arm. No one can read it. But I can read it. His name is chris. So I yell out "Hi Chris!" he immedietly assumes that he must know me becuase I knew his name. It was fun to see him try to pretend that he remembered who I was.
another one:
I met 2 Japanese men in the toilets and had a little conversation with them in Japanese. I don't speak a word of english. A man steps out of one of the stalls. I ask him, "I wonder what kind of crazy language they were speaking???" The man is bewildered. "I dunno." he says.
- June 27, 2004 (Sunday) - Operation Salt Lick & The Strangeland Stare
First off, I love my powerbook, the power went out but my computer wasn't phased a bit by it. It's very wonderful to be able to type in a power outage. Life has definetly been interesting lately. I have been very very busy. Where can I start. . . ?
Last weekend was the Utah Arts Festival, which is one of my favourite things. They now hold it at the wonderful new Salt Lake City Library. We went on Friday. I got to meet one of my favourite artists, Szugye. I own one of his prints. There was also a very neat new artists who did amazing photographs of little scenes made out of food and stuff, but I forgot to get his name or website so I will have to wait another year to find out more about him.
A few other neat things I saw there this year: A metal sea serpant in the fountain, cabbage throwing, flaming houla hoops, an inde pop slide show playing family band, glass elevators, and giant tiki torches. I really enjoyed myself.
The next day (Saturday) was very fun, hard, busy, and exciting - It was quite the adventure. First off was the filming of "The Lost Galaxy", later dubbed "Operation Salt Lick". We shot it on location at the Spiral Jetty which is located on the shore of the Great Salt Lake about 2 1/2 hours northwest of where I live. Me, Brittany (my sister), and Ryan left at 8 AM sharp. To get to the jetty requires 17 miles of driving on dirt roads. The last .5 miles is too trecherous to be driven on by a normal car. Usually one just walks the last bit, but because we had so much gear to carry we risked it and went on 'the forbidden path'. We almost reached the jetty when we popped a tire. So we decided to park right where we were, film the movie, and then fix the flat on our way back home.
Shooting went well, although due to very strict time constraints, and burning sun and heat I had to scale a few of my ideas back. We got everything done, and got all the gear back to the car. Ryan had been a great sport about filming in the heat and he did an amazingly fast job of changing the tire. Brittany had also been a great sport and we couldn't have done it without her help as our production assistant and driver. Nevertheless we were all very nervous about the trip back because we had to drive over the rock that had ripped a gaping hole in the side of our tire on our tire on the way in. If we popped another tire we would be in big trouble. Thanks to a little luck and a lot of very skilled driving by Britt we made it back home.
Now as soon as we got home we only had about 1 hour to rest before we had to get ready for a fashion show that night. Jared Gold was featuring pieces from his Fall '93 line "The Strangeland Stare". My Sister, who is the company's paralegal, was one of the models, and I was going to be taking video and photos of the show. We hurried and got there for our 5:00 call time and helped get everything set up.
The fashion show it's self was a lot of fun, except for a few things.. The venue was kind of creepy. It was the 'Dark Arts Festival' which I thought was just the gothic version of the arts festival. But I never knew how over-the-top the 'goth' look could go. I have never seen so much fishnet and vinyl in my life.
Jared's stuff was the last in the show, so I had to sit through the other stuff waiting to photograph Jared's stuff. As for the other designers in the show, the first couple were pretty much what I expected, a few things that I thought was slightly interesting, and some of it was downright silly. But the next few designers stuff totally grossed me out. It was like being in some kind of crappy haunted house. They did all this stupid stuff for shock value - like stabbing dolls and pretending to kill eachother on stage, and it was totally in bad taste. I felt so bad for our friend who came with to be a model for Jared - she was totally in shock.
When Jared's stuff finally came on, it was like a breath of fresh air. Even his music was 1000% better than everyone elses. But I have always had a soft spot for Wendy Carlos. I snapped as many photos as I could get, and we called it a night.
- June 21, 2004 (Monday) - Will someone say "Otsukaresama deshita", please?
Right now I have just finished the new site (knock on wood). I worked all day finishing it, it's 11 PM, I am very tired, and I still have to upload and test thew whole thing, so I am going to keep the journal short and simple for tonight. In spite of the tiredness, I am really excited about this new site. I feel like I have a fresh start, like I can move forward from here.
Journal entries from the old site (before June 2004) can be found here.
