Desert Time. Scenes From a Lapsed Blogger

Flyer for "Lost," Anonymous was a Vlog, 2018

Video Still, "Cloaked," Anonymous was a Vlog, 2018

Video Still, "Nature Girl," Anonymous was a Vlog, 2018

Desert Time. It's a real thing. I believe it means something along the lines of, "eventually." Since moving out of LA, I've been told on more than one occasion I'm "so professional." Usually this would be a complement, possibly even a side-effect of being in a career which requires one to be able to show up, make work and deliver shit by certain dates without being a total spaz. But hey, it's 2018 and enough of you sat the 2016 election out, and by sitting that out, I mean, "but her emails"— that I'm constantly negotiating what constitutes a sense of professionalism these days. Before Desert Time, there was The Slower Pace of the South.

I'm learning to unwind a little out here, but not really. This summer was unbearably hot. As a result of not being able to lift a finger for fear of heat exhaustion and outright lethargy, I began a vlog. Vlogging has been on my bucket list for a while. It's a rabbit hole of research for sure, but after having a conversation with an artist friend, I was inspired, and thus the first episode dropped mid-summer, July 5th, I believe. I only say 'dropped' becuase all the hipsters say dropped. What really happened was that I uploaded a low-res .mp4 to my YouTube account, mahvideo1000. The account name was inspired by Ursala 1000 back in the late 90s. File under Geek101.

The goal was and still is 52 episodes.  I'm not making the weekly quota, but as the Celestial Deity of Video Art and DIY Video Tutorials as my witness,  I'll get those 52 episodes done by next summer-ish. I'm at 12 eps now. September and October were a bit of a wash. I took on some freelance work—priorities and all.

Link to the current playlist here. And remember. they're low-res downloads because nothing in life is totally free.

I'll be reporting back with some upcoming shows and news for 2019. It's slow, but I have been productive.

And this. Soft Launch. We're still in beta. Hello Smack Handy!

http://www.smackhandyfilms.com

It's been a productive month or two. As an artist, it always seems like it's considered taboo to talk about things such as work, as in earning money for hire, but I for one, like the idea of combining work and pleasure; art and life; money and food. 

This past April marked the one year anniversary of my secret or not so secret investment into refreshing some tech skills, upgrading my equipment, and putting together a modest edit suite. I still have a few more items on my wish list, and thanks to planned obsolescence, I'll always be learning something new, but after returning from the residency (oh snap, I did mention the residency again) I felt the time was right to roll out the new site. 

Running a business is not easy. Running two businesses is twice as not easy, but I can't think of anything I'd rather do than work in the studio figuring out this soup called life and and work on films and video helping others doing the same. Take a look if you'd like and if you need an editor or have a story to tell, let me know. 

And if you're wondering where the name, Smack Handy came from, you'll have to visit the site and look for the clues.* 

The Palette. 2:38

The Palette, part 1 from Mary Addison Hackett on Vimeo.

Well, since I discovered it's not rocket science to embed videos...

http://www.tanyadavis.ca/
http://www.youtube.com/user/andyradorfman

I first saw this posted on Carol's blog and had to repost it here. I've been really rethinking quite a few things lately. In a galaxy far away, I might not have appreciated the simplicity of this video, but today, I find it beautiful.

The Law of Entrainment

(starts in the black.)

The Law of Entrainment, © M.A.Hackett 1999

Entrainment (n) (of a rhythm or something that varies rhythmically) cause (another) gradually to fall into synchronism with it.

I put together this video from found footage and found audio. The audio is about 7 layers consisting of a focus group about toothbrushes, surveillance footage from a fast food drive-in, and I really can't remember what else. I think I ripped a segment from The Tape Beatles who had already ripped from somewhere else. (Sorry guys, but I couldn't locate you in the late 90's.)
It was one of my last videos before I shunned technology and went all touchy-feely with paint and canvas again. Right after graduating, I landed a primo dope job as a 2nd shift, tape op and conversion engineer at a conversion facility in Chicago, appropriately named, International Video Services. I suspect that the whole operation was a front, but I digress. (The mere fact that I knew how to convert NTSC to Pal and Secam, elevated me waaay above the rest of the yahoos who were simply working at dub houses. I worked the evening shift with my co-worker Diedre. Mostly we converted The Oprah Winfrey Show to Pal, but a lot of industrial video came through the room. I frigging love industrial videos. Something about the machines working. Work work work. After that I worked 4 more years at a post house (Avenue Edit) in Chicago. I cut the video while working there, thanks to the generosity of Rick Ledyard, the owner, and sound guru Raul Rosckes. I guess technically I should credit the STBX because his video, Things to Remember About Daumier, is why I chose a structuralist style for cutting. Ah, love.

It screened at one art exhibit in Chicago and about a year layer later, I moved to LA and you know the rest of the story. Caveat- the video is extremely frame-accurate and due to some compression stuff, some information may have gotten lost in the process. Not much, but it's a little crunchy.

People, we have old video....

This was done just in time for Series 100 + Spare Parts exhibition back in 2001. Thanks to STBXMK for animation. It is not indicative of any of my other videos- just something fun to have playing on the computer screen during the opening. I'm finally getting around to digitizing the videos.

Corner Piece, 2002-03
watercolor cutouts on paper, pinned in a corner.

I have something like 200 or more of these individual shapes that I cut out and arranged in some kind of narrative fashion back in 2001. See my first blog entry for details.

Had I stumbled upon that link just a wee bit earlier, I would have gladly participated. [Wait! What link?! This link.]

They starred in a couple of solo shows and all of them are scanned. They're just waiting for their big print break. This is when an assistant would come in oh-so- handy. Such the conundrum. Perhaps deferred pay or points on the back end.


I have a clean studio after a 2-3 day overhaul last week. There are still some things to organize, but the palette got scrapped, the desk cleaned and misc. papers and drawings put back in place.

Then out of the blue I woke up with itchy eyes. small body aches and a dull headache. See the back of an Ibuprofen bottle for more. It snuck up on me. I'm better now, but still a bit tired.

I've been giving private lessons to another artist a couple of times a month. If there is such a thing as painting completely opposite of someone, she paints completely opposite of me. The headache could have been attributed to her accidentally bringing noxious mineral spirits into my studio space as opposed to odorless mineral spirits. I didn't think it would bother me, especially since we had the doors open, but I forgot how sensitive I am to toxic crap. I've been using Gamsol OMS for quite sometime.

Her work is highly representational aka realistic, nearly photo realistic. She asked if I would be interested in helping her loosen up with her work. She can render anything, something which I have no interest in doing and I would be hard-pressed to tell you it's a secret desire of mine. It's just not. The camera was a fine invention. Thank you, Daguerre.

Obviously the above statement is somewhat of a lie seeing as I am referencing photographs and painting abandoned swimming pools during what I now refer to as my mid-life painting crisis. If I start painting chandeliers, take away my paint brushes. I have a 3rd (or 4th, if you count last year's) pool painting in the making.

Whateverness and Other Revelations of Revolution.

Well, I'm slowly shaking off yesterday's oddness. The cause of my discomfort was that I quite suddenly and unexpectedly got the feeling I was being fed excuses about something and that if one excuse was solved, there would be another one in its place. And for better or for worse, obviously worse, it reminded me of my marriage and how at a certain point, there was always going to be some problem that was not fixable: No use working on X, because there would always be Y. If we addressed Y, then there was X. So now that I've identified that unhealthy and slightly, albeit not entirely, irrational connection, I can pretty much dump it in the 'whatever' file and move along. Which is quite funny, because as I was thinking that, someone on FB had posted a link to this video by Liam Lynch which has made me laugh all day. Okay, maybe not ALL day, but it was a good laugh. How did this guy escape my radar?



I'm in the process of pulling some paintings from storage and placing them back in my studio. One, it's just easier to have them here for studio visits. Two, in a perfect world, I could give up my storage space, but three, sadly we still have stuff in a larger storage space and among some of my worldly possessions that I cart from city to city, is an antique Jenny Lind spindle bed frame that belonged to a great aunt or grandmother and I have no room for it at home. It's a tad quaint and unsexy as hell, though it's a four-poster bed, which gives it some sex appeal, I suppose. It would make a nice guest bed. Problem is, I don't have a Victorian era guest room. Or do I? hmmm. [Lightbulb]

Okay, suddenly, it just occurred to me that I could rent out the spare bedroom as a guest room type bed and breakfast thing to maybe other art people types. I'm in Culver City, walking or at least bicycling distance to downtown CC. It's centrally located on the west side. Several restaurants are one block away and the YMCA is one block away. I'm going to seriously look into the legalities of this.

Other news. A smaller, not smallest painting did sell. That's good news. And as soon as I log off, I'm going to begin a day job project, except that it's almost night. I just need to get started.

Flashback Friday #4

Here are some stills from videos I did while in grad school. One day I will take time to compress the videos and post them to YouTube. They're short, except for the bed-making video, which is about 11 minutes.

The image on the bottom is from a video done after grad school from found footage I copped while working in the post-production industry. I had a sweet collection of industrial videos. I love industrial videos. Work work work. Machines at work.

I enjoyed doing video and was quite engaged with that medium at the time. The 90's was a good decade for video art. During that time though, I came across the following paragraph in an essay by Juan Downey called, The Smell of Turpentine. The essay is about his need to communicate through electronic media, but as soon as I read the paragraph, I knew what I needed to do.

"I do not recall whether I read or dreamt that Marcel Duchamp had said that some artists continue painting because they are addicted to the smell of turpentine. Their activity is therefore not aesthetic but instead a biological dependency of the chemistry of that medium."

Soon after, I went back to painting, but I dragged some of these ideas with me.