My Notebooks

Last week I tried to give a little background to my taste in art that led to my love of my favorite painter Remedios Varo. It was way too ambitious. I didn’t talk about her at all and I couldn’t even scratch the surface of all the people and movements that have meant so much to me.

Maybe I’ll start a new blog with each post devoted to a single painter.

I went through a lot of my old notebooks looking for Tony Patti’s drawing of his Multi-Diagonal Mighty after last week’s post. I never could find it but the sheer volume of notebooks I filled up in my youth was staggering.

Independently of each other, my friends and I all used to carry notebooks around. We’d fill them with stories, poetry, songs, plays,film scripts and art. I even made flip animations on the sides of my notebooks. If I ever get the energy, I’ll make Flash animations out of them. I never did keep a journal, which I regret now.

We’d experiment with automatic writing. I wrote stories together with friends and we played the game “The Exquisite Corpse”.

To play, one person would start a picture or story and expose the very end to the next player where they’d pick it up. The finished product could get pretty surreal and sometimes downright hysterical.

Here are pics from various notebooks---------

1. A drawing of me bussing tables at Duff’s Restaurant around 1976 by my buddy Bill Schmidt. I used to bring home food I found in the bus pans to feed my roommate Tracy. He thought I was buying the food.
2. A 2 page spread by my buddy Fojammi around 1977 or 1978. On second thought, it might be Bill.
3. An imagined image of my boss Mr. Wong at the Lantern House Restaurant in University City. I used to wash pots and pans and it was almost impossible to please him. He would yell, “Too Gleasy!” Fojammi did this around 1977.
4. Another picture of me by Tony around ’77 of ’78.
5. A pic by Dominic around 1977. Note the penis arm.
6. A prototype of a batik I did about God. The batik portrayed God as Louis Armstrong playing his horn. His music is all of creation. I wish I still had the batik, it turned out quite well.
7. Another by me around ’76 “The Saliva Sisters” .
8. Another page by Bill with 3 panels. The bottom one is a futurist druggie scolding a square. He’s telling the square to “Get Jarve”, a 2013 way to say hip done in '77. The middle panel is me in a room full of weirdo squares.
9. A 1980 pic of some fat monster. I can’t remember who did it.
10. The last one is a Logo Dominic was working on for our band Wax Theatricks. It’s an actor made of wax holding a flame skull. His head is also a flame. Click on them to enlarge