INTERVIEW WITH AIDS 3D

Larrys : Phillip K Dick apparently wrote on amphetamines for a number of years, which was good for working because he could write for long sustained peri-ods of time and also experience paranoia episodes that fed in to his novels. How do you go about finding ideas for making work?

AIDS 3D : I think we both tend to be mentally hyperactive and obsessive, so we think and talk about things together a lot. The repetition is important, we have an ongoing conversation around the themes and issues that we are interested in. if we took amphetamines we would totally freak out and so we try to stay chill with 420...

L : I know you like several artists that work on the margins of the artworld. I’m thinking for example of mask-maker Kerry who makes weird female masks and body suits and sells them on the internet, or the resident artist at the airbrush store here in Neuköln. Looking at your work, it’s obvious you’re also interest in artists that are “in it”...

A3D : Certainly we’re more directly inspired by cultural detritus (the internet) and outsider anomalies, but we’re equally interested in the megalomaniacal po-tential of mega-studio processes, which can only come with institutional support (i.e. the big $$)Some of our favorite “real” artists include Olaf Breuning, Jeff Koons, Dan Colen, A.V.A.F, Noble and Webster, Mike Kelley, Brody Condon, Oliver Laric, Gelitin, Damon Zucconi, Cory Arcangel, etc.

L : You’ve showed work and performed both in „institutional“ and in „club“ contexts on the occasion of nights where you or others dj-ed. Do you conceive the work differently depending on the situation? Should the club should be more like an art institution or the art institution more like the club?

A3D : In the Chi our professor, David Robbins impressed us with his idea that-between art and entertainment (high and low culture) there is a third point, high entertainment. In an inversion of the pop-art process he suggested that we communicate ‘art ideas’ through mainstream entertainment channels. We’d like to fill that niche with exciting, accessible, yet ultimately critical work.

The club is a place where we have had good success showing our work because people come there to be happy, they associate us and our work with that happi-ness and also lack of pretension. It’s been a good strategy as young artists to toe the line between visuals and installation art, because we were able to get expo-sure, but its been stressful as well, as we have had doubts and fear that we were not making work that would be taken seriously, and really, we don’t even like going to clubs very much, we just like their potential. In the end, our website has allowed us to contextualize all our parties and happenings.

L : Your work sometimes references drugs, especially ecstasy and weed. You even once had a performance where gave out ecstasy pills as a communion to members of the audience. In what ways are drugs influencing the stuff you make? Do you make art „to take drugs to“?

A3D : The drug ritual is an important part of our experiences growing up and as depressive self-medicated types. We’ve tried a lot of drugs, but in the end we only really like smoking pot, everything else makes you crazy.

L : There is a beautiful catalogue by Mike Kelley for a show called „the uncanny“. It is a collection of found images and objects put alongside work of his and you can’t really tell what’s what because nothing is clearly labeled until the index at the end. Weird dolls, scarecrows, menus from delis and other oddities scavenged from the midwestern garbagescape along side sculptures, found pictures, an occasional art piece... Your website also entertains this found stuff/made stuff ambiguity with a somewhat similar sensibility.

A3d : It is important for us to create work that can exist next to its inspiration and the internet is the perfect place for that. People can learn a lot about our inspirations by making connections between the images. Following an image thread and then creating something to add to that thread, but keeping an educated awareness of the whole process is fundamental to aids-3d.com.

L : A lot of the new „cyber art“ that has been happening since the early 2000’s has been about people „interacting“ with artwork, making inputted data do things and building robots in close collaboration with engineers and scientists. Central to a lot of the works (or to the grant applications to fund them) is the idea that the viewer has an input (both litterally and figuratively) in his experience of the piece. Where do you situate yourselves in relation to that? Are you more inter-ested in technology as a means of empowering or humbling the viewer?

A3D : We like the idea of shock and awe. Sometimes its refreshing to be humbled... technology is the future and it is changing the way we live our lives everyday. We have a political/historical responsibility to discuss the things that are chang-ing the human experience. EVERYTHING IS CHANGING SO QUICKLY! We’re seduced by the technological promise, we look forward to space tourism and virtual reality.

L : I noticed that a lot of your work looks really good when looked at in the dark. If you ever got commissioned to make a large-scale public sculpture that had to also exist in daylight, would it simply be a bong?

If it wasnt a monolithic stone thing on the scale of the pyramids or stonehenge it might be a giant laser bong. Making bongs and flouting the law, it is a political statement, there is something totally satisfying about gathering a group of people around a big (institutionally sanctioned) bong and revealing the secret that everyone has a sack. and we can all come together in a sharing and caring puff puff pass love circle.I also think that is unique to weed, its just not safe to share a big needle. and cokeheads are notoriously selfish.Seriously, We support the legalization of marijuana. Give to Norml, Civil disobedience and stuff, write your congressman or local Bundesrat Mitglieder, ....LITE IT UXP.

vi was told that i couldn’t play music. and y’know they gave me this little plastic thing and they said ‘go home and play yankee doodle dandy.’ not one of my favorite tunes. even though i was only in the fifth grade i had this little thing and i was like ‘deeee doo dada doo..’ and so y’know i took the thing home and i learned to play other things with it.. and, y’know, i was just not that interested in it. and when i got up there they said ‘play yankee doodle dandy’ and i said i don’t know how to play it and i don’t wanna know how to play it. and they said, ‘you are not musical.’ and my father was a musician and i’d been playing music for years and i went ‘that’s crazy.’

so i got the idea, perhaps people lie to you because they’re stupid. and this is what happened. just think of all the years that you people have not played music thinking that this was genetic. musical ability is not genetic, it’s learned. and you’ve been deprived of all this pleasure by somebody who thought the idea of being a musician was teaching 3rd graders symphonic music. which i don’t know about you guys, i think that’s stupid anyway. i think that we should teach third graders how to play nursery rhymes, and how to play rock and roll and stuff like that. it just would be better.. i would be geared more towards they’re thing.. rather than trying to teach people who are seven years old how to play mozart. mozart’s dead, y’know. don’t wanna play dead people’s music. y’know, when you

get a little older you can play rachmaninov, i know kids who were tortured the whole time they were grow-ing up they had to play all this fucking music and all they did was learn they hate it.

i mean, to me, we have to teach people not just that things exist, but to love and enjoy them. how

many of you were told you’re not artistic? when you were in elementary school. get that. in elementary school! think it over. you do not you do not draw, you do not paint, and human.. the one thing in every cul-ture all over the face of the earth is that humans have a need to express themselves artistically. and i think it’s as important a need as any need that humans have. but yet, in modern society, we have people who are so smart, they know when you’re in the third grade whether you’ll be able to draw when you’re an adult. by the way, scotland has got some of the best beef i’ve ever eaten i know some of you are vegetarians, some of you went to tony robbins and he said ‘you can’t eat meat,’ y’know, ‘you can’t eat cheese, you can’t drink milk, you can’t smoke..’ y’know when i taught tony’s course i gave everyone a phobia of vegetables.

i did! y’know, i’m not kidding. y’know, i figured then they would have to decide, because i don’t re-ally have rules about what you should and shouldn’t do, the only rule i have is that you shouldn’t be mean to each other. y’know, that it just doesn’t work, see.. it’s all based on this experiment, y’know, y’know i got hired alot of times because i can see through alot of the flaws of scientific thinking. and like, the behav-ioral psychologists they built these huge mazes, and and the rats ran through the mazes and they said ‘oh! this is all learned behaviour and it’s stuck in the mus-cles and the rats don’t think. and anybody who says ‘rats don’t think’ did not grow up in the city. number one, this guy b.f. skinner did not grow up in the city. i think he’s a country boy, because where i grew up the rats got together and drew blueprints of everything they were gonna do they’re so clever these animals. and, but they say that dogs don’t think. how many of

you have dogs? do you believe your dogs don’t think? not me, i know my dog thinks all the time constantly like this, making plans.

‘so ok, if i go by the refrigerator and just look at it he’ll get the idea.’ she comes up and stares at me like this, ‘ i have a picture in my mind, open your mind wide, hu-man. open up the mind the idea will come in.’ but my dog’s weird anyway.. she does all sorts of weird-ass stuff that they’re not supposed to be bale to do. she seems to undestand language quite well without this nonsense stim-ulation-response, but anyway, they just built a new three million dollar facility, and this is twenty years ago when three million dollars was worth a lot more money. i don’t understand how money can be worth more or less as time goes by, but they tell me now ‘a dollar isn’t a dollar any-more, and the pound is no longer..’ in fact the pound and the dollar changes on a daily basis. and this just confuses the hell out of me y’know.. sometimes i come to england and i give them a dollar and they give me x amount, and sometimes i come and they don’t give me nothing. they go. ‘well here’s a penny.’

now who’s making these decisions? i bet it’s bankers, and i know who they are they’re not to be trusted. y’know how i know this? they offered me a job of being president of a bank. not just the bank, but the chairman of the board, the whole line of banks. in north carolina. shows what they know. i mean my wife wont let me go out with more than a hundred dollars. ‘cause i have no sense of money at all.. and i looked at these people and i said ‘you want me to be in charge of a bank? i can’t even get up that early for christ sakes.’ right, i’ll change it so we open the banks at five and then keep ‘em open all night. but they’re theory was that i had made some good investments, that i could take the money and invest it wisely, but i figure if you get millions of dollars why invest it?.. why not spend it?

but anyway, i went into this three million dollar facility, all these behaviorlists, and they showed me these rats running through the maze, and i asked them a question, i said ‘when rats swim, is it the same as when they run?’ and they said ‘of course not.’ because they believed this was all implicit muscle memory. so filled the maze up and the rats swam right to the cheese. bang, just like that. three million dol-lars down the toilet, wasted. they were not happy campers, they looked at me like.. so i’ve been hired to check on lots and lots of research projects over the years because they don’t think about things in terms, well, y’know, like when i talked about it could be psychic. they didn’t consider it. if you separate identical twins at birth and they both end up crazy in the same way, maybe that’s because they have a way of communicating with one another that others don’t. that doesn’t mean that it’s genetic.

but even if something IS genetic, i still don’t think that it can’t be changed. that people are evolving all the time. that evolution is not over. think about it. auditory in, auditory out. y’know, kinesthetic in, kinesthetic out. olfactory in, olfactory in, olfactory out. y’know, esthatory in, and, y’know, it certainly, y’know, esthatory out, everybody has their own taste. but then you have visual in, and.. and ‘hmm’ is the right answer, perhaps evolution isn’t over and i for one am glad for that. i think that human beings need to evolve and if, and part of what my work is about is creating evolutionary tools. these are tools by which you can begin to modify yourself. i’d like to grow a pair of headlights, for example. i can never find my keys at night and i thought it would be nice to have a pair of headlights. either that or infrared vision. and i don’t see any reason why ultimately we can’t develop these things, ‘cause i found out hypnotically we can do all kinds of things.

i built a hypnotic telescope, and it works as real as the telescope i have at home. because, remember, it’s not, it’s not, your eye doesn’t actually see what’s on the outside, it all goes through thalamic interven-tion, by which it is modified. if you put on glasses to turn the world upside down, in two days you’ll have it right side right side up. and when you take the glasses off everything will be upside down. then two days later you will have adjusted. the thalamic interven-tion inside your eyes is capable for compensating for all kinds of things. it’s not necessarily the telescope that makes it so you see more, it tells you what chang-es inside your brain so you can compute more. and there’s no reason why you can’t make those computa-tions anyway. except for things, except for what they tell us in school turns out to be post-hypnotic sugges-tions that will stay for the rest of your life. unless you start canceling them. those that told you you were unmusical, it’s a lie. you can play great and wonderful music. all you have to do is set yourself free. go in and cancel those suggestions and make it so that you just crave making sounds on an instrument. you don’t have to go and learn what mozart did, he didn’t even play music auditorally. he did visual things on paper and then played it. it looks great on paper but most of the time it just sounds like nervous stuff. y’know, ‘dididididididididididididididdidid..’

and a lot of people go,’well isn’t that wonderful.’ and if you look at it visually, he just did it all visually and then played it. guys like beethoven were obviously auditory. except the trouble with an auditory who was slightly deaf, is that, y’know, is that symphonies get really loud! right, and i wonder why. ‘eh?! what was that?! louder! louder! eh?!’ you’ll find that in all kinds of things that represented through history are really practical understandings. he beat the harpsi-chord so hard they had to invent the piano. because

he broke them in half. he did. beethoven was so hard on instruments that he just kept hitting it harder, but the sound didn’t come out louder. he literally would break strings off of them. so they invented the piano, because it gets louder and softer depending on how hard you hit it. harpsichord doesn’t. doesn’t matter how hard you hit it, doesn’t get any louder. but beethoven didn’t believe that.

he’s like people that go to a foreign country like mexico, and they go up and they’re like ‘where is the bathroom?’ and they go ‘no, no speak english.’ and they go ‘WHERE IS THE BATHROOM?’ like somehow or other enough volume and it’ll get through the language barrier. but any-way they called me in because they did this experiment that they were miffed by. i, however, loved it. they took a yogurt culture, and divided it in half, and galvanic response - that’s electrical response detectors - and they got the yo-gurt, and they poured milk in the other half, and when they poured milk in this half, this half responded instantaneous-ly. and went wild. it basically was saying, ‘where’s the milk?’ that’s what my response would be. and they looked at me, and they were like ‘richard, how can we explain, that when we feed the yogurt over here, how does this yogurt know?’ and i said, ‘cause they’re twins.’ well they are. well they looked at me and they said ‘that’s not much of an explanation.’ and i said, ‘well, there’s one other simple ex-planation, yogurt know yogurt.’ they looked at me totally confused like.. like that doesn’t make sense, yet all the stu-pid theories they have do. you know they tell you an atom is the smallest thing you can have and then they tell you what’s inside it?

you guys got that story.. you got the proton, and the neutron, and then the e l e c t r o n s are spinning a r o u n d . . right.. but the atom is the smallest thing. right. wrong.

well, it turns out there is no neutron.. but yet we computed all these things chemically which is based on the periodical chemical chart, which is founded in this theroy. this guy neil schwartz won the nobel prize for this. and we found out it’s all malarky. but yet everything that was invented at the base of it is still there. for example: plastic. there’s a thing made out of plastic there, and since even though we know it’s not true, because now we go down inside and we found particles. and particles have certain character-istics, like charm. isn’t that something? this is certainly getting loony. not that we always weren’t. but basically we found when you get inside of everything there’s noth-ing but smoke and mirrors without the smoke and mirrors. but yet objects still stay together. and all the scientists are going “well how do they know to stay together?” and i go: “because they know.” and that’s enough. the reason things don’t fall apart at the molecule is because they understand each other. and they have there own way of understand-ing.

see, i believe that everything is alive in it’s own way, in-cluding ideas. and this is what makes it so important. see, they tried things like they put walls between yogurt, they made them out of wood, they made them out of steel, they made electro magnetic barriers, and still when they fed the yogurt the other yogurt went wild. and they said “well, we just don’t understand.” y’know, “there has to be some ex-planation for this.” and i said, “well yes, there is a simple explanation. now you guys leave the room, give me these materials, and i’m gonna build a wall and the yogurt can’t communicate through it.” and they said “we’ve tried ev-erything.” and i said “no no no, you haven’t.”

so they went away and a week later they came back again and i had a plastic thing, a barrier, and they brought their yogurt culture in and they sat it down, and they fed this one and this one did not respond. and they went “well what is this barrier made of?” and what it was was a fish tank full of yogurt. because when it vibrated into the yogurt it got absorbed. only so much of the vibration can go so far. and this is what makes it so important for you to realize that the state that you’re in becomes the primary tool that you’re really working with. that you can’t go in and be depressed and help people to be cheerful. this is what psychiatrists try to do.

a big mistake that they made was that to understand how they did things, because they could do them, for instance, tell the difference between reality and things that aren’t real. if you don’t know how to hallucinate, you’re not going to be able to help people who are hal-lucinating unwillingly. see for me it was very easy to sort these things out. there was a guy who was also in a hyperfrenic state, hallucinating that there were these snakes everywhere. he was a very successful business man who one day just started screaming and writh-ing around on the floor and screaming at the top of his lungs: “snakes! snakes! everywhere snakes!” and he would be running and brushing things off of him that no one else could see, so to try and help this man they tied him up in a straight jacket, pumped him full of drugs and took him to a mental hospital.

he’d been there for close to five years, and during the time he’d been there he had states where he would scream and yell “snakes!” and freak out, and they would tie him to a table and sedate him. now, i don’t know about you guys, but that doesn’t sound like the right approach. the last thing you need when you’re being chased by snakes is to be tied down, and then if you didn’t stop struggling, then you would be sedated. so you learn that when you become afraid, you start to feel goofy in the head. because at that time they used drugs like throazine, which is a very very intense drug. over the years they’ve evolved and they now use things like halophine, which is a derivative, which only has a six month half-life. which means even when you stop taking it it takes almost six months to get out of your system. and if they used LSD, it would be out of your system by morning of the next day.

but they considered LSD to be dangerous. timothy leary treated prisoners, you know, criminal prisoners, guys who robbed and raped and they did things with LSD. he sat around taking LSD with them on a weekly basis. and it turned out that most of them didn’t go back to prison. and he did this as a research project, and it turns out that if you get really really high the idea of going to jail doesn’t sound so good. you start thinking about other things, like candy. and most of the time, whatever ways we deal with people in prison, they have terrible revisitation, especially in the US. we have the worst records with criminals anywhere. we don’t mistreat them badly, we let them mistreat each other badly. which is just as bad, i think. weather the government tortures them or the torture each other, it’s still a horrible thing. it does not make sense to me to put all the mental patients together in one place so they can get a firm grip on reality from each other. it just doesn’t make sense to put all the criminals together so they learn bad values.

it doesn’t make sense to put all the educationally handi-capped children together, the ones who are having trou-ble, all the dumb kids and put them in the dumb class, because they can’t teach each other the things they need to know. i took educationally challenged children from every class in the school, brought them in, and sent them back two hours later, and they were able to do the three primary skills that you have to do in school better than the other people in the class. and so they got rid of me and said that i was engaging in satan worship.

satan had nothing to do with it. i taught them how to spell because i taught them to make pictures of the words and copy them down. and i taught them that math is not done like they tell you on paper showing

things, it’s done in your head and it’s done kines-thetically. all the great mathematicians on the face of the earth have done their math kinesthetically. it has to do with digits. think about it. like, they even call them digits. why do you think we have a “ten” sys-tem in numbers? what do you think it might be? it’s just like an abacus, you can learn to multiply and di-vide and if you do it unconsciously it goes very fast, but if you try to do it the way the teachers teach you in school it’s no wonder no one can do math. people do ok until you get to the fraction thing, where you get the pie and divide it up, even that parts ok, but when you have to convert and multiply everyone gets a stomach ache.

and then they start the stupid stuff where they have trains coming from new york, and one coming from san francisco, this one’s going 200 miles an hour and this one’s going 175, and i’m going “well how come this train’s going faster than that one?” and they al-ways said to me, “that’s not important.” and i’d go “it sure is! because i want to go on the fast train! i don’t want to go on the slow train.” i go “how come trains are going slower when they’re going east?” and they go “look, it could be going 200 miles going west” and i go “well then why isn’t it? why aren’t they both going the same? and why would these trains want to meet in the first place? do you breed the two trains together? what do you get? a volk-swagen? it doesn’t make any sense.” and they’d go “that’s not the point.” and the fact is that there was no point. that’s my point.

now as it turned out, when i built the wall out of yo-gurt, i understood that things that vibrate, vibrate. when you pluck a piano string, all the strings with the same harmonic will also vibrate. and it’s just that things know each other. which means that if you go around grumpy, you will meet grumpy people. peo-ple will be grumpy around you. you see, you reap what you sow. so when you become a therapist who believes that people can’t be helped, and you go in and feel that things are hopeless, when you look at catatonics and believe they can’t be woken up, when you believe people in comas can’t be woken up. they have them in the US i don’t know if they have them here, coma wards, where they have these people on maintenance, where they have tubes sticking in ev-ery hole, feed them fluids, and you know they have in tubes, and out tubes, and i tell you, you grab ahold

of that catheter and you start shaking that puppy, you get a few twitches out of these people. that’s the thing you stick up your dick.

I’m a P.C.

- I like the ones with the pretty eyes- Well, i like all kinds of guys. - How about the ones we especially like? You know the ones with the cars that go…

We were cruising in the Jag or the Lambourgini, when low and behold there appeared a mirage: he was hooking up a car in his daddy’s garage. We stopped short, did a double take, he was looking so hot, I thought I wasn’t awake. He was hook-ing up bass, I asume, but then he turned a little button and the car went boom.

I’m a Mac

- Do you feel so dispossessed of your creative energy?- No.- But then, if you say that, you’re automatically assimilated to the notary’s wife, exstatic in front of her closet, while her husband fucks his secretary.- I know!- But do you feel like a terrified lamb everytime you get home around 11?- No.- But I work! I’ve been working for ten years… While all my friends constantly had pearl necklaces and silverware on their minds I got my shit together. I never let anyone support me.- Beautiful… but by saying that you are the alibi, the excep-tion that comforts male oppression, you are a traitor as well as a whore.

AG: Hi! I bought a coat.

MS: Congratulations. What kind of coat did you buy?

A Stephan Schneider coat.

I don’t know who that is.

He’s from Belgium.

Ah. Well, are you newly on contract at Interview?

I’m on staff, so i have to negotiate my other freelance stuff. I have to stop writing for V and for Paper, obvi-ously, because they’re direct competition. So I sent them each an email yesterday saying that I have one week left, so pile it on! And I’m negotiating artforum.com, Art Papers, and I’m allowed to do any-thing that’s foreign. So were Butt or Fan-tastic Man theoretically to ask me to write something that would be fine. My point basically is about compensation, and that if they want my skin to shine the way it has in the past couple of weeks, I’m going to need to have other things going on. [Alex is really into high-end skin care]

What was pulling you to get involved with Interview?

Well, it recently relaunched. And it was really less interesting for a while under the prior regime, and then in April they announced that new people were taking over and it’s been a really exciting thing. They’re relaunching the website with sort of a new team, and the website is going to be totally different, and more… 21st Century…

So like, it’s going to be all in flash?

Nnnnno that’s sort of what it’s like now. It’s going to be more of a magazine web-site, with blogs and features and things like that, and will ideally be quite user-friendly. And my job is entirely editorial content, so I wont have to worry about budgets or anything, which clearly I’m not good with.

Right. Are you going to be working on a blog there?

Yeah, but secretly I’m not really into blogs. It’s not that I hate all blogs, there’s some that i’ll look at regularly. I realize that I talk about V all the time, but they used to have a really shitty website but recently it’s gotten a lot better. A friend of mine is the art editor there and he’s doing an amazing job. Or there’s vvork, from Berlin, and they do a good job, but—and I’m not trying to posit a seismic shift in their blog—recently I’ve been less interested in it for whatever reason. And, I mean, I always read fashion blogs, obviously.

Obviously.

Obviously. But recently I feel like I don’t know which is a cool fashion blog. It seems like everything that was cool a minute ago is no longer cool.

Um, I think that’s a called trending..

No, not just in terms of trends, but also in terms of how the advertisers will shape the editorial content once the blog is recognized. There is a New York- and LA- based fashion blog called refinery29, and it was all about in-dependent designers and reached out to this downtown bourgeois creative set, which, you know, I’m sort of into, and it was always reliable and I’d always read their stuff,

but recently they’ve been doing features like “shopping for a budget.” I mean, sure, shop on a budget, but I don’t want to read about it! Or they do 24 new coats, and 3 of them are from banana republic. Who that takes time to seek out and read a fashion blog needs the hottest scoop from Banana Republic? it’s crazy!

I wanted to ask you about Chinatown. You’ve just moved in down there?

Yeah, in July, although we’ve pretty much exhausted all the restaurant options already.

Really? All of them?

Well, I don’t really like to eat Chinese food. The first time I had it down here was right after I had just moved in, and my dad helped me move and wanted to go out for Chinese food to sort of usher acquaint ourselves with the neighborhood. I was like “fine” but it was totally bor-ing. The second time I went with a friend who would’ve thought it was snotty if I suggested another restaurant. So we had our meal, and it was fine, but I couldn’t pay with a credit card—and I don’t carry cash because I spend it too quickly, so i couldn’t even buy my dinner—and then later on I ended up puking it all up anyway. I was in a bar and I had t go across the street to a less busy bar to puke up my stupid Chinese food.

That’s horrible!

A friend of mine also asked me the other day if I wanted to go eat chinese food and I said “I really don’t want to eat Chinese food,” and she looked at me with such disgust. I mean, clearly it implies an element of imperialism, and I think I under-stand it.

I was trying to make that point the other day. I’m curious to know how the Chinese community re-acts to over-dressed scenesters moving into their neighbourhood..

Shut up!

And who are basically making no effort to integrate.

I don’t think they give a fuck because they charge so much more in rent to white people that it doesn’t really matter. (Laughs). I mean, living here is really the most prototypical bourgeois bohemian experience one could imagine. It’s true, and yes, I get it... but there’s something unique about me. (Laughs). So it doesn’t matter about my historical situa-tion. Because it’s just me.

If course.. I feel the same way.

I mean there’s no real way out of it. I don’t want to live any-where in Brooklyn, and I can’t afford other places in Manhattan. Nor would I want to live there because the people who live there are too numerous, and are pretty tacky in my opinion. There are certainly major class implica-tions in my stomping my foot and saying “Well, I just will not move to an outer boro.” But there are different connotations for each of those neighborhoods too, many of them similar to my own. I think it is relevant that I work very hard in my neighborhood, and I spend money in my neigh-borhood.

Do you know much about the Chinese community here?

No. I mean, it’s an immigrant community, and I don’t know enough about the immigration patterns to really say. Although, for all intents and purposes it seems like the chinese commu-nity is sustained as an isolated entity because of an incredible language barrier. But it differs from a community like the Has-sidic population, because there aren’t rules of integration and exclusion dictated by religion.

I wonder why that seems typical of Chinese com-munities?

We wouldn’t know, because we’re children of the 80s and 90s, which is when a lot of Chinese fami-lies were first able to immigrate here. I imagine the language situation is not so different from any other immigrant community. It’s a typical racist complaint about immigrant populations that they won’t integrate. I think to say that Chinese com-munities are intrinsically non-integrational has some insidious consequences. Besides, then you’ll be nostalgic when they have integrated. Another issue.

“THE WHIP-POOR WILL”

The five boys in Cabin 11 at Summer Camp Treehouse realized early on that their camp counselor slept like a log. He snored like a chainsaw and never woke up when Carl would bang his foot on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night, something he did a lot. The youngest in the group was Jim. He was also the bravest and most honest. One night on a dare from the other four boys, he snuck out of the cabin determined to prove that he wasn’t scared of the dark woods. He told them he’d bring back something from the woods to show he’d really gone in. After a few minutes creeping around the thick forest Jim came across a small clearing. The moonlight seemed to shine down like a spotlight on it. For no particular reason, Jim lay down on the soft floor of pine needles. Suddenly a bird starting singing, as if it had been practicing all its life for this very moment. “Whip-poor-will!…whip-poor-wiill!…” Jim sat up. A Whip-poor-will! he thought. They’re rare around here! I’ve gotta tell the guys about this! He quickly got to his feet and scurried back through the woods to the cabin, where he told the other boys about the clearing in the woods and the beautiful cry of the Whip-poor-will. They all got excited and swore that the very next night they’d all sneak out to look for the bird. Jim had a feeling it would be in the same place, by the clearing in the woods. The next night, after their counselor was deep asleep, all five boys snuck out the cabin door and Jim led them to the spot in the woods. The moon was shining bright, just like the night before, and right as they entered the clearing the bird began to sing. “Whip-poor-will!…whip-poor-wiill!…” So every night for the next week the boys snuck out of their cabin to go sit and listen to the Whip-poor-will. The fact that no one else knew about their secret in the woods made it even better. One night, as they were all lost in thought listening to the bird’s call, Jim jumped up. “Wait here, guys, I’m gonna try to see it! The moon’s bright enough!” At that, he dashed noiselessly into the woods. All of a sudden the Whip-poor-will stopped singing. The boys sat still. “Maybe he’s playing a joke on us,” said Will, once they’d been waiting a few minutes. “It’s no use sitting around. Let’s go back.” The other boys nodded in tense agreement. Each camper fell asleep that night thinking about Jim, his empty bed, and their bird, the Whip-poor-will. The next morning Jim was nowhere to be found. The entire camp conducted a search to find him, but they uncovered nothing. His bunkmates didn’t want to say anything for fear they’d get into trouble for sneaking out. They played dumb when questioned by the counselors, and when no one was listening made a pack to sneak out again that night and go look for Jim themselves. What they didn’t know, and what the camp director avoided disclosing so as not to cause a panic, was that a patient from the mental hospital down the road had recently gone missing. In the middle of the night, guided by the moonlight, the boys found the clearing in the woods. And once again, just like the night before, they heard the beautiful, mournful sound of the Whip-poor-will. “Whip-poor-will!…whip-poor-wiill!…” “Look! Over there!” Will pointed to something flashing just inside the woods. The moonlight was reflecting off something in the leaves, something shiny. The boys slowly approached the object. Sammy, whom everyone called Eagle-Eyes, was the first to recognize him. It was Jim up there, hanging amongst the leaves. Blood was all over his chest. He’d been impaled on a tree branch, right through the heart. Another branch was poking through his head where his right eye used to be, like an index finger pointing down at them. The boys stood there, speechless, watching the moonlight play off Jim’s bloody body. Something rustled behind them, and they whirled around to see a man emerging from the underbrush. His wild eyes shone as he stared at them and began to cry: “Whip-poor-will!…whip-poor-wiill!!!!”

2................Nicolas Ceccaldi - coffin combine painting3................Nicolas Ceccaldi - red-purple-blue jeans painting4-5.............Asher Penn – face drawings6-7.............Mathieu Malouf – interview with AIDS3D8-9.............image from the Nicolas Ceccaldi exhibition „Weekend at Larrys : Fortune Greets genius“ at Larrys 08/24/08. Photo by Heji Shin10-11.........Nicolas Ceccaldi - digital/analog charcoal/photoshop study after a projected digital picture from the exhibition „Weekend at Larrys : Fortune Greets genius“12-13........Asher Penn – face drawings14-15........Maxwell Simmer – pictures of sculptures and Richard Bandler excerpts16-17.............Mathieu Malouf – ideas for lamps, pictures of unfinished paintings, cologne bar drawing and exhibition ad + text = press release for a group show by Nicolas Ceccaldi18.............Maxwell Simmer interviews Alex Gartenfeld19.............Maxwell Simmer – picture of still life20-23........Martin Thacker – photos of Felix24-26........Kayla Guthrie - „problems“27.............Mathieu Malouf - t-shirt28.............Agathe Snow – Canadian contribution29.............Max Bach - The whip-poor-will30..............Ron Tran – photos of sculptures taken at a professional photo studio somewhere in vancouver, canada31.............????? - portrait of Terry Ray Brown

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