In September of 2018 I was invited to an artist residence at
@air_byrdcliffe in Woodstock, NY with
@kelseypietropaolo . Her and I lived in a little cabin up in the mountain for a month with no responsibilities besides working on whatever we wanted to work on.
Prior to leaving for Woodstock, I got it in my head that I was going to make a wooden mask, like a ceremonial African mask, in my ‘off’ hours from writing a play about train hoppers in the 30’s. A big storm had blown through my hometown, and this giant maple tree had fallen in someone’s yard and I got out of the car and asked if I could have one of the chunks and the guy said sure.
So now I had this 60-70lb raw hunk of solid maplewood that I was to make a mask out of, and a couple drawers of hand tools that were left in the cabin by lord knows how many other artists in residence from years prior, and I ‘got to work.’
It seemed important to avoid using anything electrical for my mask. How was a mask supposed to have sufficient spiritual energy if it was slapped together in all haste by some lifeless, fuck ass, mass-produced machine? As the Amish know that electricity is somehow evil, I knew it would ruin my project. The whole thing would be off.
It was decided, no machines. The first thing I needed was to get it from a log to a slab so I took a coping saw from the drawer, and started sawing at one bare end. I was listening to a lot of Frank Zappa’s ‘Uncle Meat’ at the time, so I had that going on my phone speaker in the corner while I sawed. Kels only liked the song ‘Electric Aunt Jemima’ and really didn’t like the rest, and had her own stuff to do, so she stayed away.
After a few hours of sawing I realized how fucked this saw cut was and how fucked the whole idea was. This was clearly not what anyone was doing to build their masks. Not the Africans, not anyone.
But it was working. I could see that it wasn’t completely impossible to get through the whole thing, and maybe my diligence would yield a more meaningful mask. I sawed on.
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