Did I tell you how happy I am to be back at UMW? Well, if I haven’t yet, then this post will seal it.
Carole Garmon (whose sculpture blog Prodigious Builders rocks!) stopped by this morning to tell us about the student art show that went on this past weekend — which I missed, bad, bava, bad! One of my favorite student bloggers came up during the conversation —the great Roblog— a blogger I feature at just about every conference I go to. In fact, the piece that I talk about below, which features a cigarette in a toilet bowl, came up on the screen during my presentation at Northern Voice, and I thought it was a human “deposit,” and really didn’t know how to play it off, so ran with it explaining the wonderful, outlying, experimental work these crazy UMW art cats are doing under the insane tutelage of Carole Garmon (and I mean insane in all the best ways here, Carole 
).
Well, truth be told, I actually didn’t read the post through the entire post immediately, and as time went by and I struggled with my return to UMW it slipped away. At least until Carole brought it up again this morning, and boy am I glad she did. We went back to the Roblog and read through the Statement of Intent for his conceptual, multimedia piece titled Storm Tossed Ship (Gonna Make it to the Ocean).
And let me tell you, the song alone is worth ever second of the two minutes it will take to listen (as Martha said “it’s Dylanesque”). You can read the Statement of Intent for this project here, and the yet to be released video loop of urine streaming down on the cigarette is the missing piece that this post will serve to bother Rob about getting it up (don’t hesitate to bother me, Rob). Below is an excerpt from his Statement of Intent that frames this nicely:
Storm Tossed Ship (Gonna Make It To The Ocean) is a video artwork which couples an original guitar-and-voice song with a brief, looped video clip of a stream of urine pushing an expended cigarette butt, which floats in a white porcelain toilet bowl. The song, which is sung in a puppet-like voice that is barely discernible itself, features the singer describing himself as a storm tossed ship, a giant squid, a captive whale and a rusted pail, all of which are going to “make it to the ocean.”
And the song by his band (which I think is just him, but I could be wrong) Dangerfield Poisonberry can be found here, or listen to it below (and I really, really encourage you to listen to it, and reflect on its implications of the excerpt above…Genius! Genius!! Genius!!!).
Download Dangerfield Poisonberry: Storm Tossed Ship (Gonna Make it to the Ocean)
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Remember me? We met in the elevator last Thursday night. I’m glad you’re back at UMW again! I promise, I’m not really as strange as you may have thought–I wear hearing aids and I was having ear problems on top of it that week. So I do apologise for not hearing your words that night. I knew you were speaking to me, but I didn’t get most of it. I put it together later that you said your name was Jim and you recognized my name from Gardner’s blog.
Now I know what your face looks like :o)
Mary-Kathryn
I knew I knew you from the blogs. I had read you blog during Gardner Campbell’s Film/Text/Culture class, and I had a lot of fun. It was nice to finally meet you. Let me know where you are writing online currently, so we can connect more regularly outside of elevators
Jim
You are a fast responder! ( I am up late and giggling insanely while writing this wild fiction story for Prof Earnhart) I’ll hit you up on Twitter–I re-joined back in January but I’ve been slow to get going until tonight. :o) I also blog regularly here: http://christabelbythesea.blogspot.com/ so come by and hang out with me at my blog. :o)
Until we meet again in the elevator.
Mary-Kathryn
You are the esteemed author of Surviving Winter. I know that blog, in fact I subscribe to it, and couldn’t agree more with your opinions of Professor Foss, I am a big fan too. I also though it was wonderful how much you shared about your experiences in Professor Emerson’s poetry workshop. Wow, how small are these nets afterall.
Be seeing you,
Jim