Author: Joshua Kochis

Every Thursday I go see the Penny Stamps lecture series at the Michigan Theatre – partially because attendance is mandatory for all Art & Design students, but also because it’s really great and the only lecture of its kind in all the land, and these terrestrial creatives come talk to all us college asteroids floating aimlessly aspiring to their level of planetary gravity, and they say grand inspirational moving things and remind us that BFAs aren’t useless after all. It’s a shame that most of the people there would rather be somewhere else, hence all the little glowing rectangles that can be seen glittering in the sea of chairs, mostly the back seats, where thumbs are twiddled and absent minds discuss social media in undertones and the rebels huff and scoff and always find imaginary or otherwise flaws in the person on stage even if they radiate with the intensity of a hundred suns. It’s a shame that the only reason people don’t want to go is because they’re forced to go, but what can ya do.

This particular Thursday’s speaker was Sanjit ‘Bunker’ Roy who founded the Barefoot College in Tilonia, India, which among other things teaches illiterate grandmothers in Africa to be solar engineers and pass on this knowledge to their villages and show everyone how to be sustainable and generate light from the sun and not just wood and gas – grandmothers because they say males have a tendency to head out to big cities and leave families once they’ve got diplomas – grandmothers, however, are dedicated to the childrens, neighbors, friends, farmers, tradesmen all of whom could really use more better light. The college only accepts students who don’t have a degree or diploma of any kind, favoring instead the hands-on knowledge of experience, competence, and confidence. The reasoning for this is to protect and enhance traditions and practices that have been used for generations, resulting in specialized skill sets that can now be shared across cultures and spaces. When the grandmothers return from their crash course, which lasts about six months, they become the teachers and soon enough every hut has it’s own little glowing piece of sun and they don’t have to burn so much and life generally becomes at least a little easier.

I think this idea of teaching only with the hands and no books or exams or theories is one with great potential, one that makes me think of guilds back in the day, of passing on a different kind of knowledge than academic proficiency, tacit knowledge, skill trades, how to do things and change life and not just talk about it like stuff’s gonna happen on its own. Of course, in an ideal world everyone can read and write, but this kind of education has the ability to transcend the invisible barriers of language and culture that conceptual education has constructed. The ability to make things with one’s own hands seems to be overlooked these days, what with so much of the open space for innovation existing in the digital universe. I vision a future where these kinds of experience-based institutions could work together with the academic centers based on theory over practice, every university consisting of two halves, one for books and one for hands. I see a time when we can admit that we all have something to teach each other, always something new to learn, things that can’t be taught in a book or on the computer. After all, there are hundreds of grandmothers all over Africa that can now build solar lamps, which is something I can’t say I could do with four fifths of an undergraduate degree under my belt. Could you?

Barefoot College: Solar Training Workshop

Once upon a time this is how I cooked: look in fridge, see all the colors vegging – red green yellow pep, translucent white onions, sunset tomato, garlic (also white ish), earthy orange carrots, more green broccoli and of course pale root potato – chop it all up into rainbow dice, throw it in tortilla wrap with lunch meat, or a quesadilla (basically the same but cooked and folded rather than raw rolled), sauce on the outside over lettuce bed, salsa rice side dish instead of chips or fries and the point is everything went in all at once and always with cheese because why not?

Whatever it was, breakfast lunch or dinner it all went in – I said it’s healthy, keeps my colors nice and crisp and lucid like the nuclear reactor my brother saw at Indiana University, a small cube two feet all around submerged in a deep circle well and the water is the cleanest around and it vibrates – that’s how I picture my mind after a meal with all the vitamins present and glowing and I don’t eat enough as it is – got no time to coordinate ingredients into cohesive meal, all it is is protein, veg, fruit, grain and alcohol, five groups, mostly grain and booze, so when there’s room for one veg everyone tags along and I developed a blanket veg taste in everything I ate and I stopped enjoying food. Call me picky but life is just too short to eat the same taste for every meal, to take a thing like food and make it consistent and I thought of the movie Wall-E and how they drink food out of straws and that’s the least of their problems.

And it’s not just about food, if I can’t enjoy a simple meal and have to rush to get it down and on to this or that, then what else is flying over my head, under the radar? And if not I then who’s there to enjoy anything little and sparkling and insignificant anymore, and I see my future self in a dream never being impressed with visions and sounds and strange tastes and sooner or later I am on the edge of the grand canyon and I’m trying to locate the exact spot where a high resolution digital photograph I saw on the internet was taken and there it is and I’m seeing it with my own eyes and I am disappointed – I can’t zoom in or sit down and it’s hot out and I wish I had stayed home and known this place strictly through the laptop window, and it’s all been seen and lost its shimmering newness. And I wake up and wish future Josh had walked off the edge of that cliff.

Back to food, I had thoughts of how there are words between lines on pages, there’s music in the silent bars of a classical symphony or wild bop ride, and there are knives hanging from strings off of the end stops of poems stacked in my bookshelf, there is color and beautiful silence in the shy spots of a painting or the empty white of a fresh canvas – this applies to food because if everyone cooked everything together for every meal we would all be eating the same rainbow mush from a blender (for convenience) and our tongues would devolve and forget about how things taste better next to other things like colors and words vibing and rhyming and rolling off the tongue and eyes just right and you can tell – it’s cooking as a process of elimination, what not to cook, that’s the real question and it’s really what not to see and I ask myself all the time when I’m walking around outside and looking down at all the little colored stones in the sidewalk and my portion control is much better these days. I probably still don’t eat enough but I’m enjoying meals and sticks and puddles and little tricks of light in windows at dusk and passing moments with strangers and smiles and I think what a shame it would be if I threw these things into a blender and ate them all at once.

I open my eyes to a courtyard of tan brick walls and a tan brick floor, and there are Spanish words being tossed around and to my surprise I catch a few of them – mostly names – “Gala” … “el Mar Mediterráneo” … “veinte metros” … “Abraham Lincoln?” There are three arches at the far end of the brickfield and the center one frames a face I recognize and it really is Honest Abe – a gaunt silhouette up from broad shoulders, straight unmistakable nose and hard cheekbone confirm this feeling but something is off and what’s Abe doing in Spain and this is over my head. I approach him and he begins to shift, his features flatten out, there are divisions all over and his face is made of pixels. Larger square versions of the yard bricks, ochre bricks, warm and cool, clouded fleshy greys and umber, shadowy blues and it’s a painting. A very large one at that, about six by eight feet with a strip of red around the edges and he’s calling to me in a deep, rumbling and perfect Spanish.

I am within twenty meters now and it is apparent that Abe’s face is really a hundred and twenty-ish cubic paintings in one frame, a hundred Rothko color fields talking politics and they are each in perspective. The blocks stack and build and turn and seem to move but don’t, and there is anticipation in their stillness. Even closer and the curves of a woman’s body replace Abe’s nose and she’s naked. She faces away from me and looks longingly out a window that is the shape of a stout cross and it’s filled with light and frames her dramatically. It becomes apparent that the window is the source of this dynamic tension in the blocks and the atmosphere and Abe’s head is full of dancing billowing flames and a white-yellow sun and a sliver of the sea; the water is absolutely calm and it is the stillest part of the painting and the center of the composition. Little dashes of sky blue pepper the fiery flowing sky all twisting and blowing in spirals, little moments of quiet, and there is a particular blue patch right next to the bursting sun and it, too frames something like a limb.

Closer still, close enough to where the woman is about life size but floating in the perspective of Abe’s shoulders which have become the ground. There is definitely a body in the sun and the crucifix is on my mind already from the window shape and it almost looks like Christ but not how I am used to seeing him. I look down at the top of his head as he does the same to Gala who is about twenty times his size and he’s obviously quite far away and looking through the depths of space and time. And all I know is that Abe is gone and there is a whole metaphysical scene taking place before my eyes.

I wouldn’t consider myself a proponent of the electronic music scene. It takes a specific time, place, and mood to get me into most of the dubstep and livetronica that’s being tossed across airwaves at bars and parties and, most recently, television commercials. But these platforms take the electronic genre out of its true context in the live show, which is something I’ve been very strongly reminded of in the past couple weeks, having seen Lotus and Big Gigantic play this February. I consider both of these events as life-altering experiences in the way they’ve shaped my relationships with those present as well as my perception of light, sound, and self.

I know it sounds like a stretch, especially for those who’ve never attended one of these shows with all their strobing lights and pulsing baselines. Overwhelming noise and visuals in combination with lurching sweaty crowded bodies is simply not everyone’s cup of tea. But I would argue that it’s nearly pointless to attempt making a real connection with the music, the kind of connection that yanks and strums the heartstrings, ignites flash bulb memories in the mind’s eye, and gives the body no choice but to swerve to the beats and synthy melodies, without having experienced it in proximity with the lights, the performance, and the camaraderie of the crowd. It’s like eating French fries without Sri-Racha (or ketchup), like watching a youtube video of someone sky diving: still pretty good alone, but nothing like the combination of elements that work together to produce a whole that’s impossible on its own.

Enter a shadowy concert hall with vaulted ceilings. The air is dense with smoke, body odor, and anticipation. There is a pulse in the room, some bodies following its lead more closely than others, but all movement altered by the sound. Even the bartenders shuffle and duck in time. The openers fade into pits at either end of the stage, and the room goes quiet. An eruption of primal cheers signals the headliner’s arrival, preempting the exploding lights, lasers, projections, beats and screes and womp-womps. The baseline becomes the heartbeat of the crowd, everyone sways and dips, arms up, fingers outstretched, bobbing and crashing like an ocean of individual ripples, each swelling with its own kind of life. Everything is a shadow but for the sunbursts that illuminate it all like lightning, and you catch the ecstatic expressions on your neighbors’ faces for seconds at a time. Everyone is touching everyone. Skin on skin, you share the air with every mouth, and it tastes like smoke and sweat but also energy, and everything is shared. There is no self. Communication happens in the eyes and smiles because nothing else is heard but the jams. Hours later, the music stops, the lights flick out. How long has it been? There is a ringing in the ears. Your shirt is soaked. You feel new. You will never hear the same and you don’t want to. The flashing colors and pixels will appear when you close your eyes for days after. You’ve shared yourself with everyone present, and they with you, and everyone is carrying pieces of everyone else out the door.

A day, a week, a month later, one of the songs I heard that night comes up on shuffle. Instantly I’m thrown back into the moment, I feel an intense longing for the flashing faces all open and euphoric, I have visions of pixelated landscapes juxtaposed against cats, I begin to tremble. It isn’t the music itself that makes me feel this way, and although I’m enjoying the sounds, it’s what they trigger that gets me smiling and moving uncontrollably like a shot of adrenaline and serotonin to the heart. And I don’t remember my friend getting sick in the parking lot, or taking an elbow to the cheek, or almost getting lost, and I’m glad I went.

I am a bum with a soft spot for lost things. Lost things to make other things with. I believe in second lives, third lives even; an object’s character comes from age and use. Like an old fork, faded spots where most people grip, oil fingers stabbing food to mouth, minor teeth marks and chips from being dropped on the ground. Floral decoration at the end, crevices blackened in contrast to clean iron. Not just any fork, this fork.

My bedroom is made for two people, but I fill it out myself. In all the corners are cardboard boxes of unusual proportions, tall thin boxes I can fit in, like cheap coffins or suitcases for carrying many long panels down the street. I keep crates that stack up and become a portable studio, easy to bus with, especially ones with cryptic geometric designs on the bottom that would make nice stencils, pop crates my mother used to stock her vending machines in dad’s warehouse. There are nine blocks of Styrofoam in various sizes stashed behind my Lay-Z-Boy, for packing fragile things or even just to make form studies, a pile of squeaky blank space. Fiberboard scraps lean on the opposite wall, MDF to stack and glue, a block to band saw, sand it down, nice and smooth. Blocks of wood are even better, grain to carve and hack, prime and paint, nail together and pry apart, construct a hut from crap pallets spied by the dumpster and they become a new and living thing. I’ve always got at least a small stack of panels, good for painting heavy textures, long planks in which I always vision landscapes or turned vertical become ancient Eastern compositions where you only get one sliver of a horizon but a little of everything from top to bottom. In the closet so many gallon gesso buckets now random mixing buckets, large amounts of color, also good for keeping old clay slip for an extended amount of time, shake it around every once in a while or it layers up and gets all bottom heavy. I put Sri Racha on everything and always keep the bottles, they make good solvent bottles with perfect flow and clear so you can see the color and consistency, I have about five lying around any given time. Little glass dishes or old cutting boards, even small plates make good painting palettes, especially if they have a small incline at the edges for no spill, white plates best to see true color.

I hoard tools to make stuff, hammer and screw drivers all sizes, putty and steak and palette knives, nails and screws for building and eyehooks to hang from the ceiling. I hoard all the brushes, never too many brushes; hard wire ones for cleaning, some strictly white paint and gesso brushes others acrylic and still others just oils. This summer I worked for housing and was given brushes, buckets, rollers, sponges, drop cloths – enough to run my own painting business, should I ever feel so inclined. I re-appropriate utensils, things like chop sticks, sporks, toothpicks, Q-tips, drum sticks (I don’t have drums [anymore]), folded unplayable Bicycle jokers, big rubber bands, blue and pink and orange, good old string, fishing wire, steel wire, glue and rubber cement, strange plastic disks with grey plastic grain and a peel-off wrapper, chipboard scraps from architecture 3D print-outs, old plaster molds and casts, canvas, plastic, rags (T-shirts), bags of bags of bags, more damn plastic, metal rods, dry crusted paint chips, bits of charcoal, many rulers, stale ink and rusted Exacto blades, rolls of paper, paper towel rolls, toilet paper rolls for smaller jobs, paper clips, wax, graphite powder, old spray bottles and spray paint, all glowing.

It’s all in my room with this crippling potential to make stuff, raw matter of the trash heap age. There’s always something to be found, and it’s best when the find is unexpected, when you’re not looking for anything in particular. The best feeling is standing before a half finished painting, maybe a still life of the greenest plants in the world, and needing a specific something and not knowing what it is but what it has to do, and looking through loosely organized drawers boxes stacks in my closet, organized chaos is what I call it, and finding some potato masher or spatula picked up on the sidewalk and extracting it from the depths with force and purpose. The discovery is almost better than needing something and knowing what and where it is all at once, there’s no anticipation there, it’s too easy and I often keep looking for something better and by better I mean more surprising.

The other day I had new mad craving for the fresh air, so I wandered straight into the woods at a particularly deep looking spot off one regular path I walk to class. Soggy leaves and fallen trees everywhere, trees fallen all over other trees; I walked up and jumped down each one I came across. Five trees and five thuds later was a road I pass literally every day by bus or car and realized at that moment that I’d never crossed to the other side on foot, and the woods over there are pretty vast. It was decided and off I went.

There were many more leaning column-trunks on this side of the plain and I shimmied up each one in order to know its intricacies and discern whether it was the Path or just another path. I rose and descended probably twenty-seven times, and such is life, all ups and downs and always something new, and on the twenty-seventh landing I shot snow sparks into the air with a little more oomph than the previous twenty-six and even though I displaced a large amount of snow I looked down and smack in the middle of my feet was a deer print, clear as day. The tracks wandered up over the horizon to uncharted mysterious landscapes and I followed into the void to get lost, which is only a good idea if it’s completely intentional.

Right off the bat I spotted the perfect walking stick which I would have paid real money for and gotten a deal – about my height, thick and sturdy but not hard to wrap my hand around, smooth and devoid of jagged splinter shards. I had really found companionship and balance in one scrap of forest, a new friend whom I assured could do the leaning on me whenever he got tired but he never did. I had forgotten about the sounds of cars because I hadn’t been able to see any and now they began to return to my consciousness, whoosh-tossing spray dirt mist into my clean tasty air and I was still way back in the woods but I could taste it from there. I saw the distant strobing lights through a web of foliage and they looked foreign and ominous, glowing and dodging around trunks and branches.

It was here that the single set of tracks became five, seven, ten sets as I had a vision of deer hordes at marathon parties for days and dancing mad to the strange rhythm of the cars and dramatic lights. Past the dance floor seemed to be bedrooms, if deer have bedrooms then this is what they would look like, little mats of patted grass bare of snow and too close to the loud bright road for my liking. I squatted hearing the city whisper from my dry warm bed patch, a scraggle tree canopying over me with five spindle fingers and I wondered how anyone could ever sleep here it was so loud. The rushing wheels made me anxious and I wanted to leave when there must have been two red lights simultaneously on either side of my sanctuary and everything went quiet and still for exactly three seconds before the whoosh resumed and everything began moving again and I saw it all crouched amidst dull pink snow in my bare leaf spot. Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the sense that I had overstayed my welcome being part of that sharp metal world which felt so cold from out here, colder than the night air which was really more wet than anything and I had truly forgotten about my soaking feet. I began to fear that the deer whose bed this was would smell me on it and never want to sleep there again, the way it’s truly difficult to feel comfortable in a house that’s been broken into. I tried to give off friendly smells and vibes. I took it as a sign and returned to the depths of the forest.

Next thing I knew the ground was all steep underneath me and I was descending a hill, which I would have fallen down if it weren’t for how fast I went all whooping feather joy in strides like running down sand dunes and this time cleared into a field with reeds and a frozen silent pond. On the other side of the pond stood a deer, my deer and trailblazer with bilingual instincts. I bowed as I passed directly opposite from him, giving thanks for showing me the way and the bed and the twisting trees and glowing pond and path home.