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torrential
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Name: stephentorrential
Country: United States
State: California
Metro: Los Angeles
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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|  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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| I drive upwards, then I trudge in white mud. He stands motionlessly through a yellow-orange haze with a white cloth fitting tightly around his waist and upper thighs. I am wheezing and squinting at him, leaning my head toward him and refocusing, because of the haze. He is nodding. I find a glass. Separations in the backbone pull a little farther apart so they can touch better. “It means we have fun and we touch,” he is laughing. Rotating my neck to lock my eyes with his, he blinks back, nodding. I look over and hunch more to study the patch of evaporating puddle twenty feet ahead. The asphalt is a thick rubber like the sort used in McDonald’s playgrounds beginning in the early 90s. My fingernail catches between the edges of rubber and plastic. He stretches back, tugging the cloth’s drying glue, his skin now a flat orange, the wall speckled in black and yellow and increasingly green. I get up to pour myself a cup of water.
If you’re going to ask me about inches, I’ll have to show you in miles. I say that to him. He removes a farm. “How about now?” He takes out two mountain ranges and a national park. “How about now?” He pushes a toe between two of mine. “I’m not interested in things you really mean.” I pull my toe out.
He’s playing coy again, but who could blame him? He moves with his legs hitting the ground in quick succession, galloping down the steep path smirkily, less giggling and more of his typical Bratz doll expression, bouncing every eight feet, gliding over boulders, spraying widely into a dusty billow. A warm wind starts to pull through.
I know we’re always laughing for different reasons. Sometimes the distortion between them vibrates through the wind. I have to rethink my trust in him.
It’s interesting how we make things in assortments of colors so we can’t tell what’s really on them. A ladybug is red, and suddenly I’ll be terrified of Formica. We’re on our way to a museum. All I do is wet my finger to rub off a fiber of rust. He moans while the bacteria are already tonguing the scrape. Some older styled Russian lady is pushing her husband’s corpse in an oversized stroller through the bicycle lane. She makes a gesture with her tongue, just trying to be funny and then walks by. I think it’s important to acknowledge others.
He opens the door and places his bare feet on the concrete. We’re on La Cienega and Wilshire, and he suggests we need to go somewhere for fresh air so he can breathe. He’s in front of me, going down these giant metal stairs, the last one at the bottom is so big that someone left a rope so we could rock-climb our ways down. Past ten-foot-high mouse holes there are dust balls that could form tornadoes. “I could be someone else here and neither of us would know it.” He laughs as I smile. I start reminiscing about smokestacks.
It is deeply dark, no stars, no blue light, no hum from branches. We are in public. He rips apart the vacuum-sealed sediment and takes out the crank-like pipe to match the gears together. He hands me a card and keeps one for himself, putting away the extra ones. “We’re looking for penises in the shapes of states.” Something glimmers from an old hook in the ceiling panel, and my heartbeats grow speedy. We swerve and I fall into his shoulder. The joints in my hands are tired. He doesn’t pay much attention to my bumping into him, expensive as it may be. “Ooh! There’s one in the shape of Oklahoma.” We look down at the same time at our maps and he stamps his.
My hand is feeling along the gravel. His arms are wrapped around my chest, the weight of his abdomen on my pelvis, his feet skidding behind me as I crawl. “I wonder if we’ll find the Ambassador Hotel.” I pout my lips and return my attention to reading the pebbles. “Why do we still make maps?” he says.
6’2” 150 pounds. 20” screen. No hair, no pores. Lips, teeth and tongue in tact. “Pleasure to meet you.” What do you think of the asteroid belt? The question is ignorable, what with so many people whispering around us, their corners touching and different red and orange fogs. “I’m into it.” I don’t like his shoes, and I can tell he is into noble gases. I drive back onto the road and find a freeway.
“Why do people lie to each other and say they’re over forty?” I’ve never known the point. Everyone died in the 80s. “We are orphans.” I start shoveling the dirt under the tires again, knowing I can’t pretend to forget what has to be done. The next time I see my grandmother I’m crawling around on a shelf in her linen closet, curling up in a ball. I give her a hard time; I tell her she’s a phony. She tells me it’s not her decision to be capable of acting.
I look at him, he looks at me. It is afternoon. We’re watching Anna Nicole Smith’s dog running down a gravel path, ten seconds passing before each time its legs touch the ground. We both hum, trying to match the timbres of each other’s voices. We don’t say anything, but we stop. Then we think about where the land has been and where it is going. First we’re chewing it up, then we’re secreting it, leaving small balls of grout. We stand in the shadow of the only cumulonimbus cloud.
He and I are lying on a large flat grassy lawn in front of a windowless cobblestone building. “What about making a third person out of the two of us?” I remark. A woman in a shoulder-padded business suit appears and gives a list of names, favorite colors, genders and personing places. Then he says Connecticut is probably his favorite option from the last list, because someone else recommended it once, and it gives him the right feeling. “Let’s get lunch first,” he says. The woman gives us complimentary beads and suggests meeting again at her parking space at the Crenshaw Wal-Mart, then takes off.
If he likes my type then he might like me. I don’t want someone only for “love”; I have a number of scenarios that could work. In the produce aisles, the apples are always polished. If we’re going to dance, I want to hear it. I want my value.
If you’ve been talking to him, he’s not here right now because he’s been launched out the window and through the fog, catapulted beyond the San Gabriels, looking down over the same house repeating for miles on the other side. In a bed of oysters does the ugliest have the pearl, or is it the pearl? Maybe they all do collectively, or maybe he should stop looking for one. When he washes the deodorant off, he immediately goes and reapplies it.
When the door is latched, I know not to bother checking if he’s in there. My sarsaparilla sarsed, my jawbreakers broken into half-moons. He’s indulgent and I wouldn’t be shy to watch him eat. The many planets and suns swell to dimness and hang low in crisp tones around our heads and I purr like a cat.
He wraps my arms over his shoulders like I’m sobbing on his neck or looking down his shirt. He walks backwards one step, turns at an angle, then takes the other. He grabs me from the forehead to push off of him, then as I descend he grabs my hands from above my head and flings me back up. I wind around so I end up facing away from him, my back against his chest. The ringing noise from the animals is louder because we got closer. We’re frowning about the coincidence because it was a coincidence.
Whenever I hear that song about “waiting on the world to change,” I think about the San Andreas Fault and our viewing parties from the lookout point. Stucco crumbles so well, and everyone cheers and butts heads like it’s the Super Bowl. I massage the bottoms of my feet on viscous rock material to be polite.
He’s looking to be brought to that split-second moment between day and night. He’s looking for someone to relieve the embarrassment of his honesty for sharing that information to everyone. For this reason, he holds the cantaloupe in his arms when we walk to the check out, and he serves me some after I’ve brushed my teeth.
The spiny quills of dead sagebrush are stuck to my socks. From the canyon edge I can see a metal pole emerging from beneath the salt flat. This is hours before the sunset and its burnt plastic odor are both supposed to end. Now half the LA skyline has peered out, caked in nourishing dirt. The yellow fog also rises, smelling sweet of lemons and pine. I worry about getting a parking ticket for having left my car in there.
When he has important things to say, I am not on another mountain. I am sitting in front of him cupping my ears and with my legs close together. When I’m more interested in the land, I’m already blindfolded in an empty room. He is naked and I’m clothed. I’m grabbing on tightly to one or two penises in each hand, and with them he drags me around the room. Blue or yellow, any color or flavor, it doesn’t matter.
Driving toward the Hoover Dam, looking over the steering wheel I watch several people swinging on a body. I climb on. I can hear all of its memories as we go back and forth, rapidly spoken as if the audio was edited to remove pauses. Four miles southwest of Cal Nev Ari, Nevada, he’s massaging the nerve endings and prostate, unsure why neural systems and solar systems aren’t skeletal systems. | | |
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