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torrential
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Name: stephentorrential
Location: Los Angeles, California, United States
Birthday: 9/26/1983
Gender: Male
Interests: Old people, bees, the Salton Sea, musique concrete, urban sprawl, erotic surrealism, interstate exits, Middle Eastern men, funeral homes, Dolly Parton, meeting people from the internet, pretentious conceptual art, tentacle porn, Native Americans, aye-ayes, anvil clouds, flesh, local color, gas pedals, found objects, brass instruments, beds, Antarctica, Dear Abby letters, the ice cream man.
Expertise: I'm a sound, text, video and performance artist, wannabe meteorologist, internet meetings memoirist, former funeral home phone answerer nationwide, resident of ghost towns, Home Depot's current artist-in-residence, dumpster diving prank caller, back alley tour guide, cheeky little thing, homosexual motorist, temporary-tattooed public park defender, man on a mission, relational aesthetician, cop dater, dinosaur hater, a modern-day Ptolemy, your former empire colony, hedgepig daddy, hamburger patty, lightning rod, cephalopod, old-time comedy radio fancier, pompadoured tight-pantsed New Mexican romancer, climber of trees, lampposts and salt-flat ranchers.
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  torrential 1910
MSN: torrential926@hotmail.com
Member Since:
10/8/2003
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| I have three half-brothers in their 50s. They are all introverts with MDs, a wife and kids. My father says their mother named them all after children's book characters. Each of them seems to take issue with me for a different no good reason. Once my father dies, they will be my only family left.
The oldest one, Peter, is a born-again Christian. He lives in North Carolina and got a Southern accent. He said my being gay is like being addicted to drugs. According to my father he was once married to a witch. Then I'll ask, "you mean, she was a really bad person?" And he says, "no, she was actually a witch." Her name was Tori and she was at least ten years older than him. I met her once when I was four, but all I recall is the mini-mall we went to. She made him get his tubes tied, and before they met she already had a daughter, who now has a daughter of her own. That girl would technically be my ex-step-half-great-niece. Tori and my brother divorced after ten years, and then he married his secretary, Tammi, and became a born-again. I was recently scouting website domain names and tried "vandyck.us" which redirected me to his psychiatry clinic's site. It has a section called "ethics" which explains how his practice relies on scripture as much as anything medical. He told me he has clients whom he assists in recovering from homosexuality. He lives in a house made completely out of wood, even the bolts. My father told me recently that he was telling my brother good things about me, and then my brother asked for my address, as though he was rethinking the decision of not sending me a graduation gift.
My parents and I would travel to visit all three of my brothers almost yearly, though they rarely visited us. One time when I was sixteen we went to Connecticut to visit my middle brother, Chris. Excited and in a rare moment of talking to each other, I asked why it seemed like we weren't that close. He told me in all earnest that I was only half as important to him because I'm only half a brother. He explained genetics to me, how a certain amount of DNA moves on to children from the parent, recessive and dominant genes, etc. Then he said that human beings are more invested in each other based on how closely related they are. He said that because I'm only half as related, that he only has half as much at stake in me. Through Yale, he researches Alzheimer's Disease, motivated in fear of its being hereditary and omnipresent in his mother's family. His wife teaches a class at Yale about the brain, and my nephew is a music student there. When I turned seventeen they sent me a copy of Catcher on the Rye with a note in the front saying, "I hope this will change your mind about reading!" I'm not sure what they thought I thought, but I don't think it did, and I went on to be an English major. When I was 22, my father graciously lent me $2000 that I agreed to pay back while in school. Thus began a relentless barrage of calls from my brother telling me that that was his (Chris's) money and that I intentionally stole it from him, as though my father is completely senile and can't make decisions for himself. I had never even received a call from Chris before that. It was strangely relieving to get the attention from him. After this incident, he refused to see me or let me visit his family on the rare occasion that I was nearby in New York. In 2005 Chris bought our father's house, because Pops could no longer afford it. Now Chris charges him rent. Originally, my father left the house to me in his will, the equity of which would have been my inheritance. My father is 87; this isn't too far ahead. The house is now easily worth twice as much as it was when it was built. Albuquerque's market has continued to make a profit even through the real estate market collapse of the past three years. I found this out from Shirley Rich (that is her real name!), a realtor I sat next to on a plane to Albuquerque once. Now my father saves up his social security and retirement money to pay my brother rent, and my brother uses his frequent flyer miles to let my father visit me twice a year.
Thirdly is Tim. His ex-wife and current wife both told me that for some reason, Tim just plain doesn't like me. His first wife Jo told me this over the phone after they had separated; she was trying desperately to hold onto every strand of connection to him. Like Tori, she was also ten years older than him. They had been married ten years. The two of them lived on lakefront property on Lake Champlain right across from Burlington, where Tim and I were both born. Tim was born when my father first moved to Vermont, and I was born 25 years later, just before we moved away. My father says Tim resents me for "replacing him" as the youngest. Tim and Jo lived in a lakefront house and it burnt down, along with all their possessions and one of their two human-size dogs. Only a little over a year later, we found out my brother was with a new lady who was already three months pregnant. Now he and she live in North Carolina with their three kids. Tim works at a military hospital where he sees marines just returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Until I was ten or so, I spent all my time alone outdoors: playing in the park, hiking, climbing trees, climbing rocks, crushing rocks, New Mexico has a lot of rocks. We lived a mile away from mountains a mile higher than us. My parents prided themselves in having few possessions, and so I relied on the free goods: chunks of granite, loose cinder blocks, lizards, the layout of my neighborhood. I had cats, turtles, fish, a dog I didn't like. I cried when we got the dog. We got along okay though eventually. I taught him the command "husky!" which meant that he would pull me uphill on my rollerblades. Eventually I made friends. I always wished I had real brothers, and so of course I looked at these three cold men like they were Gods. It was a big let down whenever they never reciprocated. They're from my father's first marriage. One day his first wife left. She wanted to move to the city and become a careerwoman. My father said he would divorce her if she didn't come back, and he had to raise the three kids without her. My father is antisocial, sociophobic, rarely gave me hugs, doesn't know how to show love but has a lot of it. My mother was overbearing and emotional so I turned out okay. Perhaps this unideal upbringing led my three brothers all to become family-needing psychiatrists with no tolerance for a hedonistic art-fag half-brother.
My father has been in Los Angeles for the past week, thanks to another frequent flyer mile purchase from brother #2. Last week I brought my father to the Psychiatry: An Industry of Death museum. As we walked in, this Aryan blonde woman greeted us stoically. My father immediately says to her, "I have three sons who are psychiatrists." She responds, "A psychiatrist just shot a whole bunch of people last week! I hope it wasn't your son." She denied that the museum had any connection to Scientology, though it's even tax-exempted since 1994 because of its affiliation. The exhibit is a series of maybe fifteen rooms each containing lengthy videos and beautiful, elaborate installations of old torture devices and exaggerated doomsdayish signs and images. For the most part I found their points poorly argued, "evil" quotes by Freud taken mostly out of context, and relying almost entirely on fear: 17th-Century torture devices, lobotomies, even attempts to connect Hitler, 9/11, the Apartheid and Columbine to psychiatrists. There was no acknowledgement of all the satisfied customers of the industry, and no suggested alternative. But the whole time I couldn't help but think about my brother making money from his hyperchristian degayifying. That he went to an Ivy League school, has a PHD and is allowed to rake in six digits for administering drugs to and advising vulnerable people ("sexual deviants") to continue to live in fear of themselves, it's offensive. In its arguments, the museum maybe-accidentally showed sympathy to gays and even pedophiles. I agreed with the museum that psychiatry should not be used to subdue the different and individual, whose perspectives could be of great use to society. Unfortunately, psychiatrists are paid by the hour and not through a government system. Instead of efficiently educating patients, they make them reliant on their services to rake in what they can get.
Also in attendance were Katie and Andrea, whose house (which is behind my house) was being fumigated, and so Andrea brought all her meds with her for safe keeping. She took one pill while watching a video about prescription drugs. For the last hour we were there, she had disappeared, and by the time we were done we had noticed five missed calls each from her. She enjoyed tea and a nice dinner of sushi. As we exited the last exhibit room, a culty woman encroached on us to fill out surveys. Scientologists are known for trying to dam you in, talk your ear off to convert you. I said I had to check on my car, and Katie was concerned about Andrea, so we both darted away before they could block us. Instead, we left my father there, talking their ears off with half-relevant stories from his 87 years of life, perhaps their best use yet.
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|  A Day in LA: Washington Boulevard Art Concert
WHERE: The entire length of Washington Blvd., from Whittier to Venice Beach
WHEN: October 11, 2009 12PM-6PM
“A Day in L.A.” shows work from over sixty Los Angeles artists in unused public outdoor spaces along the entire length of Washington Boulevard’s 27 miles. For one day artists will perform works, create installations, facilitate happenings, and make music in unexpected spaces, such as on the sidewalk, between dumpsters, along railroad tracks and inside the audience’s cars. An official map of the day’s events along with schedules and other downloadable information will be available to the public starting on October 8 on the event website (www.washblvd.tk).
The audience can choose how long they want to spend at each spot, skip spots or drive at different speeds between destinations as they traverse Washington Blvd from Whittier to Venice Beach, culminating in an end performance at Venice Pier. Audience members are additionally invited to car pool with some artists between spots and to switch car pools at their leisure. Artists’ works include a Korean youth orchestra performance, a relational aesthetics taco tuck, human wind chimes, a reclaiming of the boulevard’s traffic islands, and more.
Building on the success of his last curatorial endeavor, The San Fernando Road Concert in 2008, Curator Stephen van Dyck seeks to investigate the possibilities of Washington Blvd as a site for artistic exploration. Washington Blvd is LA’s longest east-west street and one of the longest municipal streets in the world. This event will highlight this space as a way to view how the Los Angeles metropolis grew, and the massive in-between and negative spaces it left behind as it expanded. Additionally, this day will examine the Blvd as a cross-section of the city's diversity of landscapes and people. This exhibition/event/experiment asks, “How can we generate a new kind of LA experience, bringing meaning and attention to a collection of less obvious destinations?”
Participating artists include musicians, artists, writers, non-artists and residents of Washington Blvd's many neighborhoods: Danielle Adair, Karen Atkinson, Lara Bank, Ama Birch, Cindy Bravo, Bernard Brunon, Michael Buitron, John Burtle, Audrey Chan, Caroline Chang, Carolyn Chen, Andrew Clinco, Samantha Cohen, John D'Amico, David Dominguez, Ken Ehrlich, Daiana Feuer, Matthew Fielder, Flint, Robert Frashure, Nancy Ganucheau, Cary Georges, Mary Beth Heffernan, D Jean Hester, Julia Holter and the Open Academy Youth Orchestra at LATTC, Alexis Hudgins, Sarah Ibraham, Islands of LA, Katie Jacobson, Ian James, Kyoung Kim, Shaun Klaseus, Sojung Kwon, Andrea Lambert, Emery Martin, Anita K. Marto, Meghann McCrory, Midnight Ridazz, Joe Milazzo, Tracy Molis, Robin Myrick, Tucker Neel, Paul Pescador, Ali Prosch, Faith Purvey, James Rojas, Ally Sachs, Janet Sarbanes, Nate Schulman, Gary Schultz, Sepand Shahab, Veronica Shalom, Katie Shook, Cynthia Simonian, Mark So, Mariangeles Soto-Diaz, Jennifer Styperk, Robert Summers, Mathew Timmons, Carlin Wing, Austin Young, Luis Zavala and Yelena Zhelezov. 
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| Streets in LA are so long! Meandering through so many places and non-places, night life mingling strips and industrial wastelands, taking random twists, they end up in unlikely conclusions. Like a good story, not the most resolved mode of travel, but tells a complex metanarrative through its necessary structure. These roads are like symphony-length music staves waiting to be translated to notes. Not literally, like the singing road in Palmdale, which plays the William Tell Overture when you drive on it. Just take a drive on Washington Boulevard, which brings you from suburban Whittier to vacuous concrete warehouse-land, the LA River, then strattles between Korean and black enclaves, becomes Culver City's art district and results in bourgie Venice.
This one road, all with one name, is neither the fastest nor most direct way to get to and from each end of itself. There's a certain lavishness in that inefficiency. The name is asking for some connection to be formed.
I frequently get lost in this kind of thinking, map-nerd moments, overanalyzing the geography of LA, admiring how long and aimless the streets are, which is how I came up with my road concert idea. My original idea involved reconstructing a street as scores made of found materials from the street to be interpreted by viewers-turned-musicians. But I figured it'd be more interesting to be out on the street itself getting people to go from A to B inhabiting all the in-between spaces for themselves.
In LA there are massive amounts of land that everyone skips, that are as desolate and hidden from the populace as a rural mountain road. What if those places became the destinations, to skip our usual IKEAs, 405s and Denny's, to generate a new kind of LA experience by bringing meaning and attention to a collection of these less obvious spots?
So last summer I curated the San Fernando Road Concert, an all-day arts event organized to re-imagine unused urban space along all twenty-three miles of San Fernando Road from Sylmar to Lincoln Heights with experimental music performances, art installations, readings, discussions and carpool happenings by twenty-one LA-based artists, writers, musicians. You can check it out at http://stephenvandyck.com/sanfernando.htm. It's like an inverted parade art concert. On the day of the event, audience members drove the length of San Fernando on a loose schedule, arriving at each spot to experience an intimate interaction with and/or by each artist. This year, on October 11th, I'm organizing another, on Washington Boulevard.
Add to the list of Los Angeles's glitz the extravagance of 30-mile streets. Some of the longest city streets in the world are in LA, Sepulveda Boulevard being the very longest in the world at 43 miles. Many other claims have been made, some also in LA. The prostitution and drug-dealer-wrought Colfax Avenue in Denver is only 23 miles. Playboy magazine called Colfax "the longest, wickedest street in America," but they're wrong about longest. The Guinness Book of World Records listed Yonge Street in Ontario, Canada, as the longest street in the world at 1178 miles. Sounds more like a country road to me. Some say LA's Figueroa is longer than Sepulveda. Figueroa has the longest street-span continuously in the city of LA; Sepulveda dips into Culver City. But both are discontinuous. Figueroa puts you on the 110 north before it restarts off to the side just a mile north. The city of Hermosa Beach voted to change their section of Sepulveda whicch overlaps to the PCH to just the PCH. Even still, the largest bit of Sepulveda is longer than Figueroa, Colfax or any municipal chunk of Yonge Street.
It amazes me how one iconic name, Sunset Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, even Washington Boulevard, can cover so much and so many kinds of turf. One name can have so many different meanings. Some of the long roads of Los Angeles are so winding, even in the topographically monotonous parts of the LA Basin. Many of the lengthy LA streets originally started out as numerous disconnected streets in different towns that grew together. In 1915, the city of Los Angeles got an aqueduct, and easily convinced and annexed ten incorporated cities including Hollywood, Watts, Sawtelle and Eagle Rock. And then there are roads like San Fernando, Ventura or Valley Boulevard which were originally US Highways (US-99, US-101 and US-60 respectively) but got downgraded when Eisenhower built the Interstates. If you can imagine, most of what is now this endless metropolis was once all small towns with trolleys and orange groves connecting them. Car culture was an integral part of how LA developed, and consequently, Los Angeles has a very high concentration of flamboyantly designed drive-thrus, diners, giant statues of donuts and mechanics from the 50s, 60s and 70s. No one walks in LA, or so the song says. It’s just not reasonable unless your calf muscles outgrew New York. It's no puzzle why Businessweek Magazine named LA the best city for artists (followed by Santa Fe, blech!). There's so much God damned space. All the old warehouses easily convert to huge studios. But kinda ironically, LA has only recently made gains as a city for public art. Because public art here is drive-by art. So either artists make works that are conducive to being seen from a quick and moving eye, or they've got to tell the public where to go. In this city, just stepping out of the car in a new neighborhood seems like serious travel.
My father recalls LA in 1948 as a city that took a day to surpass. "There were no freeways. I can remember Olympic Boulevard, Hoover Street, Vermont. Those were the main throughways of the time. The clutch went out in my car. In those days we didn't have automatic transmissions. I don't think they existed. Whenever I stopped, came up to a traffic light, I'd have to turn the engine off, because I couldn't put it to neutral. Somebody'd have to push me. In those days we had bumpers so everyone could push each other. I'd have to get out of my car and ask someone. Going through LA, you couldn't bypass it. It took hours and hours, most of a day to get past LA. The idea of driving forever and ever without hitting a traffic light was utopian, unthinkable. The merchants thought they had an absolute right to have the main roads go past their businesses. There were no bypasses."
Whenever I try to sell LA to a skeptical out-of-towner, I explain how living here is customizable, that we can get in our cars and skip all the places we don't want to see, unlike New York where it's inevitable that you will walk every block and encounter every kind of person, not that this is a bad thing. The customizability combined with the weather is why the city attracts enclaves of large diasporas (or so claimed this Armenian lady I met on the street) like Little Ethiopia, Little Phnom Penh, from mostly-Armenian Glendale, mostly-Chinese Alhambra, mostly-black South Central LA and 79.5% white Republican Santa Clarita where the KKK has its California headquarters. And yet there are also some of the most integrated and diverse neighborhoods, like Long Beach, the most diverse in America according to USA Today: 15% black, 45% white, 36% hispanic, 12% asian, if that's how you want to measure or define diverse.
Why not have an event that embraces the extravagant car-based culture that this city was built on, instead of seeing our gas-guzzling transit mess as a wrong-needing-to-be-righted? | | |
| It's not easy writing a book and a blog simultaneously, especially when they're pretty similar in style, both relying on wandering descriptions and tangents of varying lengths. Have I lost readers? Did I have readers? Blog writing has always varied in purpose from themed, informative and inter-referential to chaotic, stream-of-consciousness and diaristic. I'd like it to land somewhere in between, valuing transparency and rawness over gimmick, but with purpose(s). I did get a tad verbose and confessional in some mid-00s entries. I think there is something gained from the currentness and immediacy of a writing, and even the lacklusterness. In my artwork I don't commit to endings, nor can I say a blog entry is finished by the time it's posted.
Anyways, my book is tentatively called “People I've Met from the Internet.” I wrote about it on here before (see February 18, 2008 entry) earlier in the writing process, so the way I describe it now may have evolved a bit. It's a sort of coming-of-age story about protective mothers and growing up gay with the internet and being an artist. And also a conceptual writing project about narrative conventions. And also an ethnographic study of gay internet culture and its evolution from 1998-2009. It started as an OCD data collection of everyone I ever met in person from the internet. Columns include names, screen names, the exact day we met, the city and neighborhood we met, a summary of what we did, how many times we met. The list is thoroughly footnoted to the point where some pages don't even contain the list. Annotations contain dry, clinical descriptions of what I recall of the people and the meetings. The annotations are an overwhelming, endless list of mini-narratives varying from a few words to involved short stories. They range in relevance to the annotated name, occupying both the highly scientific and the personal, linking to each other and stringing together into subplots about cleanliness, the oddness of strangers/other bodies, interconnectedness of a community, my ex-boyfriend, the act of writing such a piece as this, gossip, LA landmarks, macho sex lists, a vulnerability and naivete that evades death and danger. In the piece, I constantly find myself in parts of Los Angeles I would have never otherwise gone to, almost as though I was teleported there, to meet some stranger for who-knows-why, someone I would never have otherwise had reason to cross paths with. Just like the internet is merely a device to teleport me to new people and places, the book is sort of that way, too, for the reader, into gay internet culture. I've read from it at various venues including the Silver Platter, REDCAT and the Bonelli Contemporary gallery. And I've even gotten a publishing offer! But I won't get too big-headed about it; I haven't yet finished the project even. The best parts are still to be written, I'm hoping.
On April 23rd I opened my solo thesis show, including video installations of my projects “Home Depot Artist-in-Residence,” “Bathe and Drive,” “Customer Service” and “Post an Ad on Craigslist Inviting Strangers to Freeball (Go Without Underwear) with You at a Public Place.” And I read from the manuscript. I won't ever post anything from it on here, partly because it's highly revealing of so many people, but mostly because the writing makes the most sense in non-internet physical book form. Instead I'll give you the introduction my mentor Matias Viegener read at the start of my reading:
“ANONYMOUS is the title of Stephen van Dyck's reading tonight, but Stephen van Dyck could be the title and ANONYMOUS could be the author. Stephen's title, while perhaps coy, offers us a nifty handle on his work, which is an experimental narrative on people he's met through the internet. But how anonymous is anonymous? Is it possible to be too anonymous or not anonymous enough? Most of the meetings catalogued in Stephen's thesis are with other gay men, but not all. Some lead to romance, others lead to sex, and most lead to nothing but a meeting, or a second meeting. In some ways you can read this text as an allegory of modernity, or technology. We live in an age in which we are just as likely to meet each other in real space as in non-space. For gay men, especially gay teenagers, this likelihood is vastly multiplied, because for them there are more gay men in non-space than in real space, so the internet has become the most common vector for gay boys to become gay men.
“What Stephen van Dyck's text narrates is the key moment, the transition from non-space to real space, from personalities to bodies, and from ideas to things. Its form is appropriately doubled, with a kind of database on the top, a repetitive chronological list of names with seven categories of information for each. There would be nothing exceptional about this part, except for the annotations on the bottom. The annotations run the gamut from trivial to profound and start to really test the boundaries of narrative. you can identify at least two forms of narrating here, one being the list, and the other being the anecdote. But there's also a third, at least a third, in the echo between these two forms. And like Joe Brainard's I Remember, we start to read through the lines and through the constraint to get yet another story, which like I Remember is a gay story. It's a story of a double life which spurs a kind of double writing which we then subject to a double reading.
“Stephen van Dyck project is a form of conceptual writing: writing with an idea. Or: writing which is actually about something other than what it seems to be about. Or: the use of a text in which its allegorical function exceeds its denotative function. All of these are interesting, but to my mind what most connects Stephen's work to conceptual writing is that it attempts to use writing against itself, using a kind of constraint to make apparent what is hard to see, which is the texture of a life lived both in real space with real bodies and not.
“Forty years ago, metafiction writer John Barth wrote a seminal story called Life-Story, whose central conceit was of a writer writing a story about writing a story, or more precisely not writing a story, just writing about writing a story and never really writing the story, so the writing about writing the story becomes the story. One of the most elegant aspects of Barth's story is that is supposedly written in real time, over three hours or so on what turns out to be the day or the writer's birthday, and the end is basically an interruption of the story that ends the story. Rather than continuing to unpack this, I will simply point out that many things are being accomplished at once here. In Stephen van Dyck's tale of anonymity, many other things are accomplished as well. Along with a questioning of the nature of narrative we have an interrogation of the place of narrative – does the story happen on the top or the bottom of the page, or somewhere else? It's both a list and a story, an archive and a set of anecdotes. It's also a coming out story, a story about life today, and a life story.”
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| In February some friends and I went to the date festival—the fruit not the activity—though it was definitely more overwrought with the latter. There were pig races, a newly interpreted 1001 Arabian Nights play, the 90s band the Gin Blossoms, monster trucks, and a ton of people who were either pregnant, in wheelchairs or both.
Click here to see the rest of the photos.
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