"Human Land Mine" :: Sunstroke :: Nathaniel's, Greensburg, PA

.:. Winner .:.

That's my old pal, business partner, & collaborator Phil Platten on bass and vox.

A delight to revisit our collaborative work. We were called "Sunstroke" after a contest to name the band brought forth a few barely mentionable names. Gosh, something like "....Beaver Twins". Does anyone recall the third-place entry?

Would not have broached the material but for the fact that Phil moved on a year ago this month. And but for the fact that another bass player with whom I had a band also took flight.

[I could not bring myself to say that Phil and Dick expired the first or second draft of this post. Dare I say it now...but 'moving on' and 'taking flight' are two terms that seem correct for what happened to them.]

Dick Bungo: a consummate musician tho I don't remember him being in any of the bands, singing groups or orchestras in high school. Not much of a 'joiner' our Dick. Neither have I turned out to be.

This can only be considered a first draft of the video of the piece, for I will want it as part of the soundtrack for "The World's Longest Open Love Letter".

The lyrics remind me where was emotionally in December of 1980, when this was recorded. Can't yet quite get my mind around it but in the editing -- in the meditation that is editing -- am certain all will become quickly clear.

Miss my old friend, roommate and Nathaniel's owner Dave Clark. Where are ya, Dave?

The full performance from that night may be found HERE for download.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: music, phil platten, jan mclaughlin, sunstroke, greensburg, pennsylvania, pa, nathaniels, dave clark, wloll

Feeders for Human Birds :: a page from The World's Longest Open Love Letter

.:. Survivor .:.

In preparation for the Faux Parade. With Cosmic Ray.

Part of a very long meditation on the nature of love.

One of the things I love about making art in the physical world (as opposed to the digital realm) is that is creates an 'open space' in my brain for listening to what my body and soul already know.

A wise friend once told me that, "You already know all the answers. Just listen."

Making art is an indirect way to open your ears.

It also helps me breathe.

G'head.

Make a drawing right now.

A 30-second self-portrait. Even if you just draw it in the air or sand.

Pay attention to your breath as you do this.

Cool.

Formats available: MPEG1 Video (.mpg), Flash Video (.flv)

Tags: faux_press, human birds, cosmic ray, wloll, worlds longest open love letter

K.M Bihr :: Fine Art

.:. Survivor .:.

Paintings, wall sculpture, drawings.

This was a gift to my colleague Katie.

Because I can.

Because it's something she needs and will use.

Sweet.

Because part of healing is giving back.

Having - as part of my own healing journey - honored my gifts, I learn that gifts must be used lest they atrophy.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Morning Dove Conversation :: Storytelling

.:. Survivor .:.

Show.

Life = Work.

The old iPod has returned in working order with a 30GB hard drive, new screen and battery. Less than $200. I love this tool. It helps me hear. Great to have it back in the arsenal.

An audio portrait of two birds.

A meditation on courtship and authority.

Formats available: MP3 Audio (.mp3)

Tags: mindfullness, storytelling, faux_press, jan, mclaughlin, life, work, morning, dove, birdsong, conversation, wloll, process, metaphrasty, courtship, portrait, spring, birds, sound, effects, fx, lo-fi, ipod, italk, griffin

Public Domain Tibetan Meditation Bell

.:. Survivor .:.

A gift for you.

Formats available: MP3 Audio (.mp3)

Tags: tibetan, meditation, bell, sound, effect, fx, public, domain, wloll

New York Poems :: Joy

Another of my favorite collaborative efforts.



Elaine Jones & Ed McPhillips read. The words are theirs.



Wonderfully frightening meditation on obsession.



I'm posting it everywhere - to all my sites - because this poem just works on every level I can think of at the moment; and because when violence is associated with love weird things worthy of study happen.



Don't have a still photograph of Elaine & Ed together, but there is a film school video not yet digitized that might well go up.

Mobile post sent by Jan / The Faux Press using Utterz. Replies. mp3

Going Public :: WLOLL and Publishing :; a Story

http://depressionstrategies.blogspot.com/ - publishing The World's Longest Open Love Letter - Vol. 1, No. 2 was pink - a short story about Vol. 1, No. 2 - early media ripples - ephemeral artifacts - "publishing".

Begin to publish the address of this videoblog, make it public.

Ow.

Frightened of the implications.

Feeling alone in it.

Mobile post sent by Jan / The Faux Press using Utterz. Replies. mp3

Publishing the World's Longest Open Love Letter :: Part I

.:. Survivor .:.

"World's Longest Open Love Letter" publishing endeavors take unexpected turns.

More adventures in advertising.

Promises. Trust.

Posters / art.

Canvas, metal, string, plastic, paper, wood.

Art as meditation.

'Publishing' the pages was the excuse to get out of the house, and collaboration another way to reduce isolation while safely serving the creative impulse (eros).

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: wloll, worlds longest open love letter, jan mclaughlin, art therapy, performance, publishing, alternatives, posters, advertising

Florida Poems :: Garage Closets

.:. Survivor .:.

Closets. A closet was my refuge as a young girl.

Garage Closets

- Jan McLaughlin

Take a glimpse,
a verve,
a clock along a passage,
grim,
with the must of garage closets
whose dis-remembered contents
will not pardon,
have no mercy whatsoever.

None, at all.

The glue has come undone
from every box bottom,
spilling contents at the feet of dancers
who mark time better than middle-aged children,
latching onto life
as tightly
as reputations.

Sam Perry, artist.

Spring Raulerson, artist.

Jan McLaughlin, metaphrast.

Bruce Weber, poet.

We made the audio together for my meditation on the past.

This is one of my all-time favorites of our collaborative works in Florida.

You can see a wee bit of Arturo Rodriguez camera right and a bit of Demi, camera left.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: garage, closets, poetry, poem, sam, perry, spring, raulerson, arturo, rodriguez, jan, mclaughlin, stoop, painting, wloll

Florida Poems :: Night People :: CONTENT WARNING

.:. Surviving .:.

WARNING :: Not WORK SAFE.

SUBJECT MATTER :: Finding the body.

Returning to the body.

Honoring the body.

Whew.

This was a rough one.

Somewhere in the healing process came the re-discovery of affection.

A comfort with it.

At some point, even the slightest touch beyond a handshake made me very nervous; a gentle hand on my arm literally 'burned'. It was terrifying.

PROCESS: I begin to collect the still images and art that seem relevant to this exercise of getting back to the body in order to better understand the historical context. To help my imperfect memories. These are the images you see 'under' the poem.

"....The search continues for 98.6 and a union of tongues...."

This is a subject of interest to folks whose bodies were hurt, regardless of whence the violence originated.

It's my theory that 'physical' therapy is important in this step, but something not easily addressed or tackled. I think I'm ready to approach that healing now.

How, where and with whom did you address this part of healing?

Courage.

Tags: Self-Help Art Depression

The Clothesline Project

A .pdf of The Clothesline Project's brochure is enclosed with this post.

From The Clothesline Project Site:

The Clothesline Project (CLP) is a program started on Cape Cod, MA, in 1990 to address the issue of violence against women. It is a vehicle for women affected by violence to express their emotions by decorating a shirt. They then hang the shirt on a clothesline to be viewed by others as testimony to the problem of violence against women.

For more information, drop a line to our National Contact Person:

Carol Chichetto
P.O. Box 654
Brewster, MA 02631
ClotheslineProject@verizon.net

Admire this effort for so many reasons:

Art.
Emotion.
Truth.
Community.
Testimony.
Witness.
Marketing.

I've added this project as a 'Resource' to the sidebar. A great example of the creative ways in which we end the silence.


[Clothesline Project Web Site]
[Clothesline Project Brochure Download]


Tags: Self-Help Art Depression

Film = Sculpture = Architecture :: WARNING :: Body Images

Click To Play

WARNING: There's some near-full and full-frontal nudity in the artworks.

Revisiting some motion pictures that were at one point or another diverted and lost to VHS.

What did it mean to my survival to give these films my entire attention for the better part of a year?

It was only in returning to them after some time away that I realize the repercussions:

• I'd looked closely at one of my p*rps (made him into a kind of clown)
  
• looked at the unacknowledged anger with my mother's unwitting betrayal
  

I was easily able to forgive my mom and dad. It wasn't their fault.

• 

Demi, the painter responsible for the image @ right, had admonished me to be 'honest' when she gave it to me. Looked at that painting for years before the capacity for honesty sunk in. Demi's a survivor who's used art as healing tool, too.

TECHNICAL NOTES: Thanks to Ms. Jen Simmons and an eyetv 250 Plus, I'm able to digitize and revisit that footage.

The soundtrack's right channel offers a director's commentary. Below are links to two of the original, unadulterated poetry filmworks:

"Yoing" - written by Mikki LeMoine

"Mommie's Coming Back" - written by Jan McLaughlin

"The Psychic Poets Show" - written by Jan McLaughlin

The first two were originally shot on 35mm black & white stock - the same stock that Spielberg's 1993 "Schindler's List" was shot on. Our production performed pre-Schindler Beta tests for Kodak.

The other - "Psychic Poets" - was shot to a Beta deck.

Have lost touch with a lot of these people, in large part because of the depression.

No regrets.

Formats available: Quicktime Flash, .m4v




Tags: Faux Press Art Metaphrasty





Tags: Self-Help Art Depression

Mission Statement :: The World's Longest Open Love Letter

If you're curious about what I'm up to, I've constructed a collection of posts that together constitute a Mission Statement HERE.

The current Mission Statement link will always be found as a 'Category' on the sidebar.

WORKFLOW: This 'documentary' - each frame another page of "The World's Longest Open Love Letter" - will be constructed piece-by-standalone-piece with a backwards time line dictated by the blog-form in which its public process lives. Read it last post first.

CONCEPT: I put 'documentary' in quotes because this project takes documentary-making into the digital age, using Web 3.0 digital tools for sharing, growing, healing, researching, community, communicating, and conversating. A grassroots-based documentary that grows up a beautiful flower and life-giving fruit or vegetable from the manure of violence.

SCOPE: Even though I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse - and its own kind of violence - there are tons of survivors of craploads of categories of abuse. I needn't name them all here. The common thread is this:

PREMISE: All survivors of violence have strategies for doing it - surviving - well.

Those strategies are what I'm most interested in talking about.

So that's where I propose to begin.

STATUS REPORT: As of today's date I've pre-interviewed four individuals. Those four point me to three more. Momentum gathers. Conception has happened, 1 has been iadded to 1 and that equals = 2 and those two subdivide, and subdivide again. The project has a life of its own.

CASTING IS EVERYTHING: Two men are survivors of s*xual and emotional violence. Three women are in grassroots social services, and one is the loving aunt of a 13-year-old girl m*lested by an officer of the law who sat faithfully through the trial and conviction of said officer. Brava.

We need some mental health professionals on board, too. Calling mental health professionals, yo. :)

So much courage.

So much collective wisdom.

Difficult as it is to say: I need you. We need each other.

We need to hear each other speak truths. Even the unspeakable truths.

We need to hear from state-of-the-art professionals the how, where and who of current work to dig this thing up from the root. The root includes looking at p*rps.

In the words of the amazing Ann Emmerling who's agreed to help where she's able:

"The Blackburn Center is a resource for understanding, but more than that, an instrument for the social transformation of patriarchy."

Ann Emmerling
Executive Director
Blackburn Center Against Domestic & Sexual Violence
P.O. Box 398

Greensburg, PA 15601
724-837-9540, x 115

Another Premise: survivors can influence future treatment modalities for the better.

To ask for help is as foreign to me as the idea of how radically quantum mechanics research may change our worldview in 5 years.

To live well is to win.


Tags: Self-Help Art Depression

Sanitary Napkins :: Aftermath

.:. Survivor .:.

A wee bit of a meditation on body image.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: faux_press, jan mclaughlin, sanitary napkins, unsanitary, art, cognition, intelligence, philosophy, poetry

Re-Vlog :: Love Medicine

Ms. Sanders speaks succinctly & softly to wounds and healing through art & consciousness.

Difficult to visualize the body as sacred.

Orgasm as sacred.

Whew.

Working on a video art piece that deals with body image and will post tomorrow.

SPOILER: In the meantime, if you're squicked by gentle, soothing words on the subject of the body, you should not play this fine piece.

Ancient wisdom.


Tags: Self-Help Art Depression

Birds in Distress :: Know the Signs

.:. Survivor .:.

A public service message from The Faux Press.

What do humans in distress sound like?

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv), MPEG-4 Video (.m4v)

Tags: bird, distress, signs, birdsong, politics, metaphrasty, faux_press, activism

Documenting Depression :: CAUTION :: ONE S*XUAL IMAGE

Click to Play

CAUTION: about a minute in there's a kinda s*xual image. You might want to close your eyes if you're feeling raw.

I can usually pump out videos pretty darned quick. This one took a long time. It's not perfect. It feels dangerous.

Based on previous experience, seeing how whiney and pathetic I am when in the throes of depression will eventually help me understand its mechanics better.

I have a long-term documentary video project that I'm hoping this web site and the community that grows around it will help me finish. It's called "The World's Longest Open Love Letter" and was in its earliest states, a series of meditations on anger, then love, and now, on action.

Creating the "Anger" painting below opened me up to the possibility that art could help me heal.

Subscribers and visitors to this site as witnesses to the process of healing. Witnesses healed and grown by virtue of the gift of granting forgiveness to the innocent.

Lots of books, plays & films have been released in the last few years on the subject of the sexual exploitation of children by adults. I've already collected them and will share links to all of them here.

My "World's Longest Open Love Letter" project will be a day late and ten cents short, but the point is to make it. The point is the process of making it.

Wish me luck.

Quicktime Download

Painting as Meditation :: Self-Portraits

"Self-portrait with Scanner", digital image, 2000

This is not a painting, but a self-portrait with hand-held scanner. As usual, was just playing around with a newly-discovered tool, but in making this self-portrait there came a moment when I understood it to be an important part of the healing process.

The underlying question to answer is this: how do you see yourself?

[Image Source]

Learned the import of that question from sculptor Petah Coyne.

My then-shrink had asked me what I looked like inside. I'd no answer.

Shortly thereafter I had occasion to see a collection of Ms. Coyne's work at the Norton Gallery of Art in West Palm Beach. Her sculptures of tar, razor wire and straw represented precisely my image of self.

Needless to say, it came as a kind of revelation that I thought of myself in that dark way.

No way to change something you're not conscious of.

Consciousness of self-image is an early step toward changing it.

How do YOU see yourself?

Thanks, Petah.

[Petah Coyne BIO]
[Coyne Exhibit]

Tags: Self-Help Art Depression