alex joins

whatsa

crosstown arts residency
June-September 2018

memphis, tennessee

Not having a car i walked around alot, sometimes all day, discovering I could see into william eggleston's home and life from a certain park and also that I could walk all the way to arkansas without drinking any water. on Mud Island you can lay on the grass and listen to the riverboat tours echo off the tall buildings of downtown. Some of the other people at the residency were alright, we went to this extremely technicolor & haunted bar a lot that was down on Beale Street yet managed to have no crowds, Earnestine & Hazel's, where during a recent renovation human bones of an unknown source came tumbling from its walls.

Another bar we went to was right around the corner from the compound--they housed us in a 2.5 million squarefoot re-utilized Sears distribution center from when you could order a whole lifestyle via catalog: kit house, car, puppy. all from sears. It was 8 stories high except for the clock tower that stretched up above the treeline of memphis. They put the writers studios up there. The bottom floors were rented out to a mall of retailers such as an artisanal peanut store called "SoNuts" and vegan stuff with expensive toast. Somewhere in between were our minimalist pod apartments that all had one glass wall which faced a giant annexed Hole in the building that had a big skylight letting in light for all. Anyways around the corner was a bar named Alex's. There was never anyone there and they had shuffleboards with sand and everything and lots of allen toussaint on the jukebox. The bartender was always trying to get us to work on a logo for his softball team, for free. It was great. I became very depressed however.

For reasons yet unkown the program asked me to stay 3 extra months when i was just supposed to be there for 3 weeks. The first few sessions I made very good friends and afterwards i felt imprisoned. They had an amazing gourmet chef who made an entire spread for every single resident's food sensitivities. I ate a lot slept a lot and walked all day in a town where no one walks then after my new friends departed back to their lives i began to get this manic energy around 10pm that lead to becoming nocturnal and chronically sleep-deprived, a familiar but avoided pattern.

If anything it was a good recipe for ripe studio time. 15% mentally unhinged within total assuaged comfort and a lack of context or routine to stay on edge you start to do strange things. I was no longer having meaningful conversations. I was much much younger than any one in the program and turned 25 in July at a disco club with those light up floors, having fun but coming home to the Mall that i called home full of disgust for the approval I had been receiving. It confounded me to be lauded as a pet of the program. Why was it such a problem to be given an opportunity? "Who the fuck do they think I am?" were my words.

There was no problem other than my bad attitude. Who these people thought I was was the Me I put down on the residency application. These people were working to please me and it really freaked me out. I felt filthy rich. I looked in the mirror and watched my appearance betray me like an unfurling thing. I appeared innocent and youthful. This is what they saw. An artist. Laughing! I really laughed about it and felt quite insane. This would happen every day at the upstanding art residency.

I worked hardest to supplant all of this moaning with the glory of the world.

The heat coming off the cemented western tennessee plateau was the hottest I'd ever experienced. I took it in like a sauna and allowed it still to propel me. To see things indescribable like: the quality of the brown of the mississippi river inside the knowledge of all it has been. How could the world be as it is today without her? Through the green orange of her tint the lives she swallows like nothing. What rivers, i worried, should I be thinking of similarly, far away? Other parts. What rivers should I be respecting? Those are not my rivers. It was grounding to know it was the one in front of me, spending my adulthood looping like a hawk far above the explicit reality of the land we exist within quite so unabstractlee

The stupid sight of those tourist replica steamboats going around like a bike with training wheels that dont touch the ground at the same time. This cuts in over the mighty body. Yeah basic take on tourism industries, selling back a story as a natural resource. You like to watch the little floating toys. It is an incredible sight to behold in this town that struggles, drenched in the same issues as ever. They sell their tragedy as well. They sell everything. I sold my plasma on the way home to the mall one day. When in rome. Next errand a bust, the Dollar General was closing since it was legally too hot to remain open as a business with a broken air conditioner.

The crosstown concourse is unadulterated art-washing in a rigidly segregated southern city. There was little discernable art "space" in the city before it was instituted. It is located in the Crosstown neighborhood, one known for high drug traffic, crime and poverty. I don't think I contributed to anything destructive by being involved in the whole thing cause I saw zero families in the area really. Just sort of the wild west. Closed businesses and down on their luck people waiting for a way out. Predators and psychopaths too of course. Walking down the street was always something. Everyone was always asking me, well first for a cigarette, but what the fuck that building had been turned into. A big mystery like the death star with little storm troopers going in and out and over to the parking garage.

as part of the program I was asked to give a public artist talk. In an agitated state I wrote 60 haikus by light of the memphis moon. These are those.