michael-dean-k/

The morning after the wedding in San Clemente, I walk into a coffee shop to find a book club of seven identical surfer bros, each with bleached blonde hair and branded gear, taking turns reading the Bible out loud.

On the gallery we saw some guy selling black and white doodles for $180, and they looked a lot like my (post-it) doodles, except less mature. My wife was critiquing it, just as the guy (Tykneenen) came up and introduced himself. Nice guy. Later, we guessed that he wasn’t part of the First Walk officially, just a local (a musician actually), trying to make some money and capitalize off the foot traffic. Not a bad idea. I showed him my gallery of doodles, and he was impressed by the perspectial nature (and even said that, from our brief interaction, that I inspired a new direction for him), and I realized, huh, I forgot how much I enjoyed drawing.

Looking at “The Where” exhibit by Karey Kessler gets me wondering how I might able to weave prose/poetry into art/geometry/composition. There’s another one I saw that had pages from a book as part of a collage, and I wonder how typewritten pages and cutouts might play a role.

I’m most inspired by Ryan Hamburger’s Monomyth exhibit, which feels architectural and similar to some of my own experiments from the past. It got me nostalgic for my drafting board. There’s something to using straight edges and lead pencils to construct things, and then using watercolor to fill them in. I have a fuzzy mental image of what I’d create if, suddenly, I had all the supplies I need. Something like a geometric fractal where shapes occur at all sizes, but at different angles.

Futurists fear that robots and AIs will terraform and harvest the world, but it already feels eerie and unnatural to see midwestern fields carved out into perfect grids. It is as alien as crop circles, but more terrifying and less creative. Perfect 90 degree angles. It is brute order and dull patterns; a metallic fishnet over the midriff of America. I’d be surprised if there weren’t good reasons for this, but it is spooky in its orthagonality. FWIW, I am pro-grid; a grid-head FFS. But the grid to me is an invisible structure to guide the creation of complex, organic, natural forms, not the form itself, disappearing into the edges of sight.

Over Utah I look down from my plane window and see a frozen red sea, of a pink-purple hue, not blood, but still, the wow hues of death … a red sheet of ice? I pinched my lip; feels real.

I think back to my sequence of day’s events (to see if I am in a dream and could be become lucid; this is how odd a bright red sea is to me), yet it all connects: hiking through a bayside trash park with CansaFis > talking to Will in Vesuvio > seeing Dan Shipper on my plane … it is … distinct … but it all connects, despite the real-life dream logic. (Not implying I think I’m in a dream—recently an Alaska Airlines pilot had an LSD-hangover, and thought he was trapped in a dream he could only escape by crashing the plane—I'm just trying to convey the oddness of this one thought spurred from a red ice sheet — and when I look down now it’s all normal, just trees and hills.)

I can’t remember the last time I studied a plane wing, but I’m doing it now. It started because it’s turning dusk and everything is dull except the sun beaming on one triangular solid, now gold, protruding towards the back of the right wing (I have poor plane vocab). It felt unreal, which was a frame-burst that got me remembering oh yes, this is a wing, and a wing is not just an ignorable plane part that blocks the midwest scenery, it is a product of centuries of engineering, an invention so stable and durable that I can sit and log ten of thousands of feet in the sky without concern.

Should I be able to walk into Vesuvio and just make instant friends with strangers? What does that say about me if I can’t? Feels like the last 15 years have been a shift away from social fluency and sports and, instead, a shift towards obsession with creative expression and technical mastery. It’s a trade I’m glad I made. Once I have an intro or context, I feel fine, but there’s an inhibition I have in bursting through and creating contexts from nothing.

From the Venetian, we walked in 98-degree heat for twenty minutes to go to Shakedown Street, a Grateful Dead themed street fair in the parking lot of the Tuscany, which features, I imagine, some remnants of the original Deadhead culture (ie: people willing to camp in RVs in Vegas for 2-3 months at a time to sell merch during a Sphere residency), selling shirts and trinkets to tourists like us (just here for the weekend). Part of that culture is pranks (ie: the merry pranksters), and as we walked in, I heard two guys behind me saying, “let’s go fuck with some people.” Then I saw them run ahead, turn around, and greet us as boisterous trolls: “Make me rich! Make me really, really rich!” I guess they worked there. We collectively spent hundreds on merch.

1. In JFK there are several tie-die shirts, which is the long-distance way to signal to someone (from 100 yards away) that you are, a Deadhead, and going to the concert, again. If you look closer, there’s less obvious, less multi-color, less standoutish merch (a black shirt with a skeleton as a casino dealer, which tells you they went to the ’24 Sphere residency). The mutual noticing of each other’s merch is something like an unstated invitation to begin a conversation, which if not undertaken, is sort of rude. “Strangers talking to strangers” (isn’t that in Scarlet Begonias?). This taps into some old Tim Leary interview I saw, where his vision for the counter-culture was for instant immersion in real conversation—it was about the transcendence of elevator talk / keeping to yourself; about breaking out of default scripts and internal monologues and to take a risk in creating an interaction with an unknown person for an unknown result.
2. Dead & “Company” has a triple meaning; the first impression is that company refers to the new band members. The cynical impression is that it’s the legal entity that John Mayer owns 51% of. The open impressions is that company refers to all the fans.
3. Unrealistic goal this trip: Talk to 100 strangers. Not every interaction counts (ie: small talk). It only counts if you personally make an effort to extend the conversation one level beyond banter.
4. From the gate you could tell this was a flight of Grateful Dead fans: an older man had a ’90 blue and orange (Mets colored) hat from their garden show (sold out on Amazon). Someone with dreadlocks loudly asked him “how many shows?” I couldn’t hear his reaction, but based on his eyes I wouldn’t be surprised if it were 100+. A man in a bucket hat with his wife brought up “idiots talking,” (during the show) and “Disney Dead.” In first class, I saw a GD sweatshirt, along with a white "Phil Lesh & Friends" hat. On the tram in Vegas: “How many under your belt?” She answered that her dad’s a deadhead, she’s been to 10-12, and she’s going all 3 nights this weekend.
5. My Uber driver has lived in Vegas for 16 years. He hasn’t taken his kids to the Sphere yet (but wants to, and asked me about pricing). We estimated how long it would take for James Dolan to make his money back (he said 10 years, I said 4). He used to be a trucker in New York and South Dakota, found it way too cold there, and is grateful he overcame his smoking addiction.
6. On the ride from Harry Reid airport to the Venetian, somebody graffiti’d the bear on a wall and wrote “dance like Jerry’s watching.”
7. On my first impression of the sphere, it took the form of an obnoxious, 300’ tall yellow emoji. I notice this from the middle of the bridge I’m currently standing on with a homeless man. Now it’s a tie-die riverish 3D lava lamp. Now it shows hippies dancing.
8. I landed a few hours before my friend, so I wanted to walk up and down the Venetian/Palazzo to get my bearings. This place is designed to be a maze (like Venice, except for different reasons). At some point I was walking outside, using my phone, and passed by what looked like two showgirls dressed in fluffy bird suits (insane for 80-90 degree weather), and one of them said “Are you texting us?” I gave a sheepish laugh and kept moving, but this was the first interaction that felt like VR Chat (absurd characters in an absurd place with little inhibition). The next VR chat moment was when I saw a guy walking around with blockish, red, knee-high shoes.