Escape The Vault

Metal support wire angles up a utility pole attached to a stake in the ground. Vines have cybernetically grown in and through the metal wire and yellow covering like a cyborg appendage.

We are partially made of plastic. Recycling won’t save us. Only stopping the source will. There are innovative start-ups like Timeplast that are creating plastic-like materials that can be programmed to dissolve in water with specific life spans: 30 minutes, a month, a year.

In David Cronenberg’s film Crimes of the Future , a group of evolutionists modify their digestive systems to be able to ingest plastics and other materials via a candy bar supplement.

It reminds me of another human-made technology with unforeseen consequences - the smartphone. Initially a tool to improve our lives, it is now rewiring our brain chemistry to become isolated, angry, fearful, and depressed humans. We are now seeing the mental health crisis of young people due to social media and its years of inculcation. Self-harm and suicide are rising, facts and fundamental truths can be destroyed with memes, and our country is on the verge of a dictatorship.

When I engage with my phone, I cling to lies of journalistic lies to assuage anxiety and fear. That’s what the media has done. Without facts, we are all just pushing opinions. And opinions are like assholes; we all smell like shit. The choose-your-own-reality of online content will destroy society. It already is.

I walk West Woodland's sidewalks. This is the antidote for me: embodied experiences using all five senses. A new brewery opened in the industrial zone as glacial zoning laws change with the death of old Ballard.

I walk in, and beer drinkers socialize among the stainless steel stills. I enjoy the non-hipster ambiance. I buy an IPA 4-Pack called “Escape The Vault.” The can says, “Quit your day job and escape the vault!”

Ikigai

Digital Art: Ohiso

My cats enjoy the initial traces of spring—eyes like saucers for bugs and birds, crows on gutter spouts, and seemingly precarious branches that bend towards the earth. They turn their noses to breezes and sunspots.

The cats teach me boredom in wandering thoughts of the unknown without expectations. I feel my heart slow to meet the pace of presence. I think about the movie Perfect Days, which I continue to think about weeks later. It’s the story of an older man who cleans toilets in Tokyo and leads a simple life of reading, listening to cassette tapes, daily routines, and taking pictures of tree canopies.

He has found his “ikigai,” meaning “reason to live.”

CCTV Star

Content Haiku

Maria Banda Memorial

NE 125th Street & 28th Ave NE

The inspiration for this art project is to memorialize a beloved member of the Lake City Senior Center, Maria Banda, whom a hit-and-run driver killed in 2019. Her passing hastened the installation of a crosswalk and pedestrian traffic signal proposed by the community to improve pedestrian safety. The art depicts Maria providing a safe passage for future pedestrians across NE 125th Street. In Maria’s Mexican culture, marigold flowers symbolize “grief” traditionally displayed during religious ceremonies and Día de los Muertos.

The project was funded by the Raynier Foundation and the Rotary Club of Seattle NE. Thank you for your generous support in bringing awareness to pedestrian safety. A special thanks to Lake City art instigator Mark Mendez who continues to bring local art to the streets of Lake City.

January Is This

January is over. During “the Monday of months,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald once opined, Seattleites vacation to colonized climes, unlike Si’ahl, where land acknowledgments before Zoom meetings absolve. White supremacy often masquerades as white allyship.

Weather talk perpetuates a first-month narrative rife with doom: seasonal affective disorder, rain, cold, darkness, and post-holiday anti-climax. Our selfish minds do all we can to control nature and, similarly, ourselves. Instead of feeling January, we deny it. And in that denial, we repudiate ourselves.

January is a jaundice-lit municipal tunnel from December to spring. In Zombie Island, Roni Horn says, “Roads lack dedication.” She alludes to the road as a denier of place, expedient, a destroyer of the present moment. January is this.

Ring Cam Famous

Ring Cam Famous is a new digital art book featuring nineteen digital drawings of Ring Camera footage around Seattle from December 2023 through January 2024.

You can download the book here for $1.99.

Heart Monitor

I found this wheat-pasted poster on a metal electrical pole in Greenwood next to an apartment building with ground-level vanancies and a tent encampment blocking a sidewalk. Commercial mixed-use real estate promised activation, foot traffic, business, and convenience.

The shopping district is a lacuna.

The black-and-white image reads HEART MONITOR. The decaying building and glitch esthetic look totalitarian. There is no information, link, or QR code to direct the passing viewer.

The poster is on SDOT metal. It has a short shelf life. There is a war for real estate on poles - the ruins of rusted staples and ripped paper corners preserved with packing tape.

I looked up the name on Spotify. There is a song called “Metaphor”. The copyright for the music says “2022 harvardbookclub.”

I google “harvardbookclub,” and find a website with the same name. The website features a creative named Yung Durr from Koreatown, Los Angeles. The marketing is urban, DIY with slick web design.

Yung Durr also has YouTube and SoundCloud channels featuring many videos and music projects with minimal clicks, sometimes in the single digits.

The democratization of creative tools and the hegemony of the algorithmic mob feed an abusive cycle of digital self-worth, hate, and violence. Today, the violence is present but quiet. The streets offer respite from the internet.

Finding this artist first in the physical world (flyer on a telephone pole) and then digitally (Spotify, Youtube) is called “phygital convergence” -the tactile and digital worlds intersecting in a hybrid reality.

Young saplings dead outside new townhouses. Wooden tree stakes support brittle limbs like stockades