My New Blog on Tumblr

I’m happy to announce the launch of a new Tumblr site that will be a combination of my multimedia art portfolio, blog, and an experiment that explores the creative process. The Tumblr site replaces this WordPress blog as my main blog for now, but this one will continue to exist as an archive and may be revisited in the future. I encourage followers of this blog to also follow me on Tumblr, as I will not be sending out obnoxious announcements about things being posted.

The site is here: //thedannelson.tumblr.com/

Examples of the process will be provided by my art, since I’m more familiar with it than anyone else’s, and since it proves somewhat of a conundrum. What thematic elements or ideas or energies are common to this work that exists in many media? Am I writer? or an artist? or a musician? or a blogger? or visual? or conceptual? In response to the puzzled looks of strangers at cocktail parties, this site will explore these questions in a playful way, one that seeks answers but does not seek to limit possibilities or impinge on the expansiveness of the mind. Or = and.

I’ll be posting, in rough chronological order occasionally interrupted by thematic association, works that I have made with a short text to accompany them, one work at a time, at least once a day (there are hundreds and hundreds of pieces.) Sometimes I’ll post the work of an artist or musician or writer friend with commentary or reflection. Each post will be tagged with a date, medium, themes or ideas, and any other relevant info that will allow you to filter work as you wish. Work made under the age of 10 will be shown and, for the purposes of this site/experiment, will have the same weight as those in the DN canon.

Go here: //thedannelson.tumblr.com/

I don’t have a gallery after all, and nothing is at stake publicly, despite this being the age of (simultaneously) oversharing and an overattention to and concern with one’s image and branding. The flipside and one of the positive aspects of this Age, however, is that you can bring people along so they can discover things with you. There’s a quote on the wall at Atlantic Center for the Arts by Gilles Deleuze that blew my mind open last week, and continues to every time it pops up: “Art is not a notion but a motion; it is not important what art is, but rather what it does.” The perfect polished artwork, blog post, picture, etc. is not relevant to this project, which is about process, motion, and energy. (Strangely enough, I’m not totally against commodities, but not everything is or should be a commodity, just ask the shaman about his mask or mojo stick.)

In the spirit of Process Process Process, please contribute to it by commenting, challenging, and asking questions–nothing is finished here or anywhere else, a painting in storage is not finished, an unheard piece of music ceases to exist, there is no such thing as a one-sided conversation.

A discography of my music is available at //thedannelson.com/music.

A current portfolio of my professional marketing and design work is at //thedannelson.com.

Let’s go deep, people.

Cocktail Recipe for The Bjöko

In tribute to Björk and Yoko Ono…

Bjöko

1 Queen of the Night tulip
1 oz. Aalborg aquavit
5 oz. Icelandic glacial meltwater
1 Kumamoto oyster on the half shell

1. Pour the meltwater into a chilled champagne flute.

2. Place the tulip in the flute. The flower should be newly bloomed and very fresh so that it can support the weight of the oyster. (If necessary, a thin wooden skewer can be inserted into the stem for support.)

3. Place the oyster carefully on top of the tulip.

4. Stir the aquavit for 30 seconds and pour into the oyster. Serve.

Pablo Escobar Cocktail Recipe

The Escobar

2 oz. rum or pisco
0.25 oz. blood of an enemy
1 spoonful cocaine
3 dashes Angostura bitters
1 small banana leaf
0.5 oz. jet fuel
1 Cuban cigar

1. Using the blood, make a cocaine rim on a martini glass.

2. Shake the rum or pisco and bitters with ice and pour into the glass.

3. Using a bar spoon, carefully float the jet fuel in the glass.

4. Place bana leaf in glass.

5. When serving, light the jet fuel with a cigar. The cocktail should create the sensation of a drug plane taking off from a tropical landing strip.

The ISIS Cocktail Recipe

6 oz. espresso
1 oz. mescaline
1 time-release strychnine capsule

Mix in the warm shell casing of a surface-to-air missile recently launched from an M72 Light Anti-Tank Weapon. Drink as a shot.

Do the Shuffle

On the other side of the block, an ice cream truck is parked with its music playing. An incessant medley of every kind of tune you can think of, from “London Bridge” to “Deck the Halls” to “Unchained Melody” to “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” all textural, historical, and sentimental differences ironed out by the electronic device that’s piping it out. It’s an apt soundtrack to the New Yorker piece about insider trading I’m reading.

The way Steven Cohen and his cronies at S.A.C. Capital shuffle stocks around–not even like money or even anything tangible–strikes me as strange in a way I can’t pin down. Isn’t it funny that there are professions where people become fantastically wealthy simply by virtue of what they shuffle around all day? Chefs manipulate food, potters manipulate clay, writers manipulate words, and hedge fund managers manipulate financial instruments. Money buys things, buys time, and creates opportunities, and it seems a matter of chance that it’s the stuff some people work with in the job that makes them money. Clay just makes pots, words just make books, and both of these things can earn money, which then creates time and opportunities. But when you make money from money, the time and opportunities are exponentially greater. And that’s strange, even arbitrary.

Ice cream truck music also relates music posted on YouTube. I go to listen to something on YT–generally so I can send it to someone, “you’ll dig this” kinda thing–and usually the song will be preceded by an ad. So user “Nucky_4434” posts a Korn song (as a reeeeally for-example example). It quickly gets about 5,000 “views.” YouTube a/k/a Google sends Nucky_4434 an email (I know because I got a similar one) and says, hey don’t you want to earn some money from this by agreeing to let an ad sho before the video plays? Nucky_4434 says sure why not, and before you know it the video has 1,254,309 hits. The only glitch in this is that as many as 1,254,309 people have, instead of paying Korn for the song, listened to it for free on YouTube. And the only entities that have profited from that are Google, Nucky_4434, and the 1,254,309 users’ smart phone carriers, who have charged them for the data used to stream the song.

Stay with me here. This is a well-documented characteristic of the Internet: that, at the same time that it brings people into closer or direct contact with artists, it also interposes more middlemen. When pre-Internet bands were signed to big record labels, the bands were the last to get paid and were paid the least of all involved in music creation, promotion and distribution. Now it’s no different, simply that along with managers, bookers, club owners, bouncers, merch people, producers, etc. etc. there’s Google, Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Apple, Spotify, and good old Nucky_4434.

What does this have to do with Steven Cohen? Money and music have both become data. For that you can thank Claude Shannon, the most influential person of the 20th century, although he is probably weeping in his heavenly cocktail and has been for some time. Claude Shannon worked in Bell Laboratories, which was the R&D department of what was then Bell Telephone, now AT&T. In order to figure out a way to make long distance calls higher-quality, he developed ones and zeros: turning people’s voices into data made transmission cheaper, faster, and reduced distortion, making calls clearer. The unintended byproduct of this is that, 75 years later or so, all music, writing, images, etc. are content and content is data.

We treat everything as data and reward those who distribute it, charge for access to it, stream it, promote it, finance it–and occasionally those who produce it (just enough, however, to create the smidgen of hope that is necessary to keep them producing). Look at any industry and you’ll find that the higher the job title, the more abstract the work, and the more abstract the function someone actually performs, the more they’re compensated for it. This isn’t to minimize the skill required by positions of great responsibility–but is this skill of more value than the unique skill set of someone who produces content? Is forecasting or budgeting or managing for example really 100 or 1,000 times more difficult and therefore rewardable than writing a song?

True, Steven Cohen makes money for a lot more people than just himself when his bets pay off. But a band also makes money for a lot more people than is obvious. The difference being where you are in the queue when they make the payouts.

Team DEATH Baseball Shirt

Only four days left to pre-order the Death baseball shirt at customflotilla.com

Custom Flotilla Online Shop and new Shirt

The second shirt in the Custom Flotilla line, “Stop Faking Sense” is a hot pink reminder to the general public to get real. Men’s style shirts are 100% cotton, women’s are 50/50, all fitted American Apparel. This color combo (magenta ink on black fabric) of the “Stop Faking Sense” shirt is in a limited edition of 40, hand numbered by the artist. Grab one at the new online shop before they’re gone.