Matterhorn
PRINTED MATERIAL BY J. K. JOHNSON
an apology for my neutrality
Failure. Impotence. An inability to finish. The weak, corrupt core at the center of the ill-starred organism. Nature underwrites the inequities from which we struggle to extricate ourselves. To accept that one is an unspectacular artifact of reflexive generational sprawl is to separate onesself from the skin of the human animal. Disabused of that burden of idiocy rooted in centuries of unthinking habit, one can begin to speak, finally, with a voice borne of conscious will. Below are three moments inexpertly logged within the porcelain bowl of solidly wasted spacetime.
The first unfinished child grew into a stunted adulthood and died, as yet, in flesh unfinished. A puppet show called 'Spambots & Ziggurats' spasmed, over a season, into a beast ten times its britches' size. Becoming, in turn, the bloated headless behemoth entitled ‘Apeiron I,’ the momentum from the one failure provided the fossil fuel for the next, and my inarticulate artistic pyramid scheme (or, rather, ziggurat scheme) slouched onward in the direction of blah blah blah.
All of the drawing and writing and adhering of things that went into these twin biggie-sized abortions was done from a place of learned ineptitude, to craftily cover for my rusty set of actual skills until I found my sea hands again. I put on a role every time I uncapped my pen, letting the mask settle with loose, haphazard whimsy onto the frame of bone within which my bare identity is entombed (and upon which all the fanciful niceties—all the sweetness and light, as Matthew Arnold would insist—of western liberalism's grand social project to free the greatest number of hands from the tyranny of the soil, so as to unshackle the mind and let it fly freely in an open sky of idle time, and thereby to tease out the Daedalus in all of us and thus to seed the whole world with the spirit of intellectual restlessness.
The video clip situated above and left of this paragraph is the first in a playlist on my youtube channel. This, and most of the rest of the miscreant audiovisual screenfeed to be found upon the same page, comes from the suite of four dvds which comprise the visual motion media of Apeiron I.
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Directly left, you can see my best score yet on Soundcloud; a track from the w/o [without] cd 'The Midi Demimonde Declines to Humanize' has pollinated over 3,000 heads on the strength of its title alone (certainly not because it's a hummable tune), which is: 'Ooh, child, things are gonna get much much worse before they can get any better.' Yeah, I'm pretty good with titles, if not music or video.
It likely will strike you as a revisionist convenience, a light gloss over the piebald, simple truth, when I take credit for all the failings of the Apeiron mess as if its weakest features were somehow genetic enhancements. I'm okay with whatever ambivalent suspicions you deign to lay upon my brow like a gold leaf disc haloed around my disingenuous header. "I'll marry your stupid ass!" to paraphrase part of a Mr. Show sketch.
Item three, if you can be troubled to direct your view once again to the left of this fishy copy, is a small color booklet born not to a perfect bound life but to blow itself up on the tiny, entrancing screen of your personal pocket-sized device. T. V. GUI is book six of my series of composted penseés and penmanship exercises plugged as 'self-help for the high-risk set.' There are a hundred pages between its covers, and a few thousand choice words, I'd reckon. This is the middle volume of a trilogy within the larger set of books which goes by the name of '<3,' or, 'the less than three trilogy,' if you need to verbalize. The final item of moving media on show here is a lil' ol' advertisement I had done made for said threesome which never found its place in the world 'til now. Click it, and don't worry about the price tag, fool—I got you hooked up with a free download of this whole trinity, homely.
I've always had a blind spot for you, audience. How many eyes dot the unblinking blackout of the inksoaked abyss? But if I had to invent you, gentle seatfiller, I guess I would want you to absorb the mismatched grab bag of mixed, remixed and chopped / screwed alt dot future threads all strangled and entangled throughout the fourteen books, four dvds and one cd that busts a hernia through the title that tries to encompass it all, while at the same time making me look bad by promising further numbers which will never ever follow. Poor 'Apeiron I,' right?
Ha! Wrong! The whole thing was to turn the malleable matter of story, locale and character into a gas of noncommittal combatants which would rise through the atmosphere and trickle into the ether rather than drop the detente between each constituent particle. Do you understand what I'm failing to explain?
Well, I'll come back to it again when I do another of these pages. Next episode: 'Tyler Perry's West End Girls' and 'The Foundation of Terror.' Bring a canister of black glitter, a full can of spray adhesive, a bag of useless crap and something fun to share with the rest of us for show and tell.