Fashion Chances

I'd sooner wear a hair-wrap than attend a body painting session. I'm good with jodhpurs but not so much with top-knots. Shoes are judged by the foot and the leg and the circumstance. You know as well as I do what to wear to the gravel pit or the picnic. Baseball hats are for a segment of the population I can't relate to. I'd wear a fringed leather jacket or even a fringed suede jacket but the fringes better be long and supple. I'd wear make up if it was already on me but I won't put any on outside of someone wants to put some on me and I say ok. I would say ok and I'd also be ok walking around with some, but not for long. I've thought about skirts but not enough to do anything about it. Kind of like eating insects. Plenty of thought, haven't done much about it.
    I'd travel most places, I think, but won't plan enough to make it happen. I'd plan certain trips to certain places though. I need incentive.
    Maybe I'll gather my energy and build myself a great graphic design studio so I can make art that I like in an easy way and have the tools I need to produce and share it properly. I'd wear comfy clothes while I worked but would try to gather a nice wardrobe for special events. Something along the lines of Han Solo semi-formal. I'm thinking of one of those urban adventurer utility belts. I'd carry around with me a small note book and a pen, my mini-tool, business card and stickers, cash money and keys. One of the pockets would be reserved for ground scores.
    I'm going to look up some of these belts right now so I can imagine myself properly.
    I wish I had a jacket I'd be cool with covering in patches. I've had a wicked 'Follow Me' patch with a sword on it for decades. Never got the nerve up to commit to wearing it. That might have to change as I approach my fifties. I want to be that guy, that guy who never looked as good as he now does. That way, when I crack out the cloak and staff at seventy it will all make sense.

My Father's Garage

Growing up, the garage was my Dad's domain. It still is, though the house has changed and I no longer live with him. In the garage was/is a work bench of some sort, countless small cubbies and jars and drawers filled with the tools of his trade. When I was young my father worked as a cabinet maker before starting his own business running a diner. He's quite handy and would see to the home improvements himself, even larger tasks like cutting a hole in the kitchen floor and building a rounded pine spiral staircase to a now existing basement.
    His drawers full of washers, nuts and bolts, screws and nails, his assortment of tools, his odds and ends inspired me. Where he would put things together, I enjoyed taking things apart. Not with the view of understanding how they worked, usually they were broken things in the first place. I simply enjoyed the piecemeal pastime of slowly taking things apart, my dad's set of mini screwdrivers in hand.
    I would take apart the old clock radio and keep whatever piece I liked. My brother and I were avid scale model makers, so bits of plastic were often the very air we breathed - joined by Testors model cement. Putting models together, taking radios apart, I dealt in fiddly things. Small details, small hands. The parts from long broken models, or the secondary optional pieces were saved for future projects. We already were aware of scratch building and knew that a good model maker had an array of parts to choose from. My relationship with small pieces of junk is informed by this background - my father's garage, model making and taking things apart. Finding things would become the fourth horseman.
    My father's garage, it occurred to me many years later, was what I was ritualizing when I would collect rusted washers and pin them to my jean jacket. Whereas he saw these components as being useful - and knew how to use them, I abstracted them into fetish objects. I took his tools and hardware and turned them into sacred hippie relics, tied up in buckskin pouches, dangling from my closet door handle. He of course made fun of me, seeing me sitting cross legged in my teenaged bedroom, an assortment of seashells, stones, rusted metal, bone and plastic arrayed in front of me as I strung them into necklaces or fashioned velvet pouches to carry them in. I sewed many pouches in my day, and made many pieces of jewellery -part hippie, part urban decay. My father would poke his head in and comment if I was having fun playing with my la-la. Verbatim. My La-La, should be capitalized. Of course I took offense, but knew better to make a big deal of it and just deflected what I could.
    How does a hard working man, whose hands are gnarled tree roots that can easily break me in half, make sense of his long haired son weaving strands of macrame around his wrists, surrounded by pictures of Jesus, Mary and Gandalf ? How can he not make fun of that ? How could anyone not ?
    So today, I am a collector of small objects. I place them in jars, I'm making art from them. I've learned a thing or two about being handy in the real life way and am astounded that some of my forty your old male friends don't know how to put up a shelf. I've learned about home repair, not on a grand scale, but enough to not be too intimidated by renovations. I've taken over my dad's garage, the one he set up in the shop I now run. I've made it mine but have kept tons of his components. I use them. I use the tools. I have a foot in each country, my father's and my own.
   

Accretions, Breakthroughs, Collections

For the last several days I have been going through my various jars of small found pieces, organized by material - wood, plastic, metal. Some jars are mixed, if the piece I am hoping to keep somehow straddles worlds, or if the metal, plastic or wood jar was full. Beads, single earrings, snapped leather strands, glass knob, seashell, toy wheel - such things go into a jar invisibly marked miscellaneous.
    I have many jars, three devoted to colourful plastic parts. The jars started out as charming vintage ones, from pickles or some such, labels and all. These got scarce quickly and mason jars came into the picture. Mason jars are timeless, even the new ones have some old world charm about them. The plastic I keep can be the inner bits of a box of floss, a lost Kinder toy piece, a small doll shoe, a Spirograph wheel, a small tube from some pen, mostly toy details and obscure industrial components. I've always taken things apart, the ritual counterpart of seeing my father actually make things, his collections meant to be used.
    I've kept my old macrame bracelets, the pull strings from long gone hoodies, bathroom chain, rusted washers, dried rubber bands from date stamps, clock parts, half a dried lime, broken keychains. I've kept crap like this all my life. In the last two years or so, as a response to this growing collection of mayhem and the anxiety it can cause, I started on the dubious campaign of organizing it. Jars proved useful in that my collections took on discrete identities and were quite beautiful seen through glass. I even exhibited them in an art show centered around collecting and it's shadow side, hoarding.
    Now, with the jar trick, I was able to identify what it was that I collect. I collect collections. I have numerous ill-defined ones. Once a jar is full, I can more easily decide if that particular collection merits a second jar. Shall I start picking up more bits of shaped wood to fill a second jar or can I cap it at one ? One, it is ! This way, I can nip it in the bud. Sorry alluring bit of wood, you will stay where I first spotted you, in a discarded shoebox full of junk drawer cast offs left on the sidewalk on moving day, beside the fridge contents and the bedbug bureau.
    Since I've taken to organizing my collections, I've become better at leaving things behind. Not only that but I've also taken to using the parts to create something new, which may have been the purpose of starting to collect in the first place. I found, with being overwhelmed with actual real-life tasks and jobs, that I had neglected to book an exhibit for the gallery for a rapidly approaching month. Quickly, and with the support of my trusty girl-friday, I came up with the idea of mounting an exhibit of the accidental clusters that accumulate within certain quarters of the shop. Before I knew it, I pulled out a treasured found collection, one I thought would remain intact forever. It came from a friends basement, the detritus left behind by previous tenants. It came from an old Greek man, It was the bottom half of a two litre carton of milk stuffed with thin straight coloured seven inch lengths of bendable wire, jutting out like a rainbow obsessive nightmare. Pure potentiality. Of course, it was a perfect ready-made, something I was looking forward to counting as part of my art.
    I found myself pulling a length out and twisting it around some odds and ends. I added to it, antique fake leaves, my teenaged jewellery, rusted metal, spools of thread, toy parts, fishing lures. In a flurry one afternoon I cobbled together several of these fetishes, meant to hang on a bent nail from a stark white wall. I was using my junk. I was unabashedly dipping into thirty year old archives of once treasured objects and fashioning something new from them. Better still, I allowed my partner access to this stash so she too could make art from it.
    This might sound like no big deal to those of you who purchase wall units and glass and metal furniture, laminations of movie posters to go over the love seat. But to collectors of small found objects, who struggle with why they do what they do, this is a big deal. I've turned a serious corner. And to boot, I'm making art that I'm seriously excited by, art that waited years if not decades to manifest.

Altering Iconography

I found a sea shell on Long Beach and my uncle helped me make a small hole in it to pass a string through. It was my first piece of jewellery outside the traditional gold baptismal cross and the ubiquitous blue eye of the sea / evil eye talisman of the Levant. These two symbols, eye and cross, co-exist around many a Hellenic neck, orthodoxy and paganism intertwined.
    I like a cross large, and swinging like medallions should. I've had metal ones, woven leather ones, wooden ones. I'm ok with the cross, not so okay when they have a tortured man affixed to them but I can live with that. I've collected religious iconography since adolescence. I kept an alter of my own design in my bedroom since then. It has moved around, now living semi-neglected over my fully neglected work table. My altars always held Christian, Pagan, Buddhist, Hindu, SF & F icons as well as assorted found items that resonate with me. My painted lead Ral Partha figurines, meant to enhance role playing games, live on my altar today. So does my collection of Magi. The best parts of any nativity scene are the three wise men of the east. Zoroastrian Wizards come to say hey to baby human potential. Magi, magician. My plastic baby Jesus in his manger is surrounded by plastic allies. A witch doctor rattling his shrunken head wand, a great ape standing in for the one true king, Kong. A unicorn has come into the circle. This magic beast has come into it's own in recent years as a true archetype, leading the kids to achieve their dreams no matter what society says about which way they need to swing, medallion or not. There's also a black panther & red fox - guardians for the left and right. Caveman bearing his club stands tall and makes sure no one comes tumbling in neglectful of the ancestors.
    Today, if I was to pray, I'd pray to a triumvirate of powers. The Animals, The Ancestors, The Angels. I think whatever can be cobbled together today of my fractured spirituality can be somehow symbolized by one of these 3 powers. Us humans are part all of that. We would be remiss to neglect one or two or three of these aspects of ourselves and of the living world. Animals & Ancestors are self evident to most people, even the faithless rationalists. Angels, though, tend to be discarded as remnants of some prior world view. I view them as they are, intelligences of planetary, solar or cosmic scale.
    I hung the shell around my neck but the string twisted and the shell edges were sharp and prone to snapping. The shell was retired. I adopted a black string a few short years later, with 3 wooden beads, 1 plastic one and a small metal spring. I wore this day in day out for a decade. I always appreciated the natural side by side with the artificial, a New York Dolls of urban decay decor. It must be somewhere in one of my leather pouches filled with the magic of my youth. The ultimate fate of these collections remains unknown. Part of me wants to trot them out as capital A Art. Not some contrived object but the real deal, the stuff I put together long before I knew someone somewhere could rationalize it as contemporary art. I may bury them in the woods along with other ritual objects no longer in use. Blades, chalices, shadowy books, robes, cords, discs, rings. Buried deep, bundled strong. Sure some stoner may stumble on them, all the better. I'll make sure they've been properly cleansed, rendered inert. If someone needs to use the tools of the ancestors they can do so in good conscience. Only a fool would do so rashly.
    Maybe I'll combine all these details into the body of a statue, left to gather moss on some lawn of future home, greeting all the curious visitors, winking a blind eye to those who see. Come visit, drape a home-made necklace around the satyrs' neck.