HEY MAN CHECK ME OUT

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

MONDAY JANUARY 25th

Having my bathroom re-tiled. Not paying for it, as I rent. So I should say that my bathroom is being retiled. A guy named Elio is in there making a minimal racket. Nice guy. I find it impossible to think of his name without thinking of the similarly-spelled rectangular frozen pizzas, a childhood favorite of mine and of what I’d imagine to be a fairly large percentage of people my age. My landlord also mentioned that Elio really likes pizza, which I am pretty sure he meant literally, not as some sort of lame “Hey, meet Art. He likes art.” kind of joke.

It’s actually just the shower that’s being re-tiled. Previously there had been one of those horrid plastic enclosure things that people put in and think they’ve redone their bathroom for $300. The thing was impossible to keep clean…mold oozed from the seams no matter how often you cleaned it and the whole thing just made you feel not 100% clean after taking a shower, which obviously is a problem. Anyway, Elio went out to get more supplies and I went in to take a look at the demo’d room. A staggering amount of layers and different sorts of materials exist below the above-mentioned shitty plastic, all of which seem to have been put in place throughout various remodels since the house was built, sometime in the 1910s. Cedar-looking shingles, two by fours, faux-wood tile. A plethora of bad, bad shower wall ideas. I mean…wood! In a shower!

And so this sort of stark appearance of many discarded and previously pasted-over ideas got me thinking about my thesis in a vague way. Possibly the idea that the shower was made up of all these disparate pieces in various levels of completion and that that was what constituted the shower. Sort of like: It couldn’t have been that shower without all of these pieces. And so as I start to develop my ideas for my thesis, it’s ok if I hit a few wooden-shingle-in-the-shower kinds of bumps along the way. Sort of like: It wouldn’t be my thesis without these ideas. However, it was a shitty shower, so maybe it doesn’t mean anything other than there is a right way and a wrong way to construct a shower enclosure, and the wrong way involves using many different kinds of wood and putting cheap plastic over it.

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TUESDAY January 26th

My studio work thusfar in the DMI program has consisted of interactive video installation work. My first project was an installation that allowed the viewer to explore music videos via the lens of Jungian archetypes and similarities in cinematic language. My second project was a multi-screen, text and video-based installation in which the viewer would wear glasses with a sensor that detected the direction of the viewer’s gaze and altered the visuals accordingly. So, this would be one direction to follow. Both of these projects were sort of rough conceptual prototypes and it would be interesting to pursue an idea to its functioning end.

HOWEVER, this being the only direction that I’ve explored in the program, maybe I should pursue some other thangs (sic) and see what comes of them.

OTHER POSSIBLE BUT VAGUE THANGS THAT I SHOULD MAYBE LOOK INTO BUT DON’T KNOW HOW TO INCORPORATE THEM YET: Music (songwriting, sound collage), Writing (fiction), DFW, Don DeLillo, Twin Peaks, Whiskey.

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THURSDAY January 28th

ADDITIONAL REFLECTIONS ON THE TILING OF A BATHROOM AND THESIS AND WELL MAYBE THAT’S IT

And so the bathroom renovations continue. When I left for school yesterday at 2PM, Elio said he was going to stick around and finish tiling so that he could grout (and finish the whole damn thing) today. I got home after Design Studio 3 (AKA Design for Motion and Sound AKA Design for Motion and Time), one of the walls wasn’t done. Then I saw Elio this morning, and he explained the problem: he didn’t have the right tile. More precisely, he didn’t have enough of the right tile. Here’s why: my landlord bought all of the supplies from either Lowe’s or Home Depot before he went on vacation to Belize. He bought 4″ square tile at Lowe’s and the 2″ x 4″ edging tiles at Home Depot. This is where Elio as Great Tile Guy and Generally Really Nice Guy (for reasons I’ll explain at a later date) came into play: The HD tile and the Lowe’s tile are very slightly different shades of white, and Elio noticed this (my landlord did not) and decided that he needed to wait until today when he could go see his boss, pick up a credit card, go over to Lowe’s and buy more of the right tile. Something like one wall being a very very slightly different shade of white would drive my wife and I crazy, even though it’s just an apartment and we don’t own it, etc., so I’m quite glad that he caught this, even in the dim light of our little bathroom. If I had been Elio, I probably would have just said the hell with it and finished with the tile I had. But he didn’t, and that was the right thing to do. Not in a moral or really ethical way, really, but in more of an aesthetic-choice way. And so the valuable Thesis/Life Lesson to learn from this situation is that creatively/technically/aesthetically, it’s important to do the right thing, even if it’s a pain in the ass and there’s a lot easier way to basically accomplish the same effect. This is a helpful thing for someone like myself to remember in the waning days of January, as I try to muster enthusiasm until the semester gets going in a less…well, until more time has passed in the semester.