SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

When I used to be a school teacher, I’d give the children drawing assignments. They would be asked to draw representations of external subjects like a jack o’ lanterns, sharks, and flowers. When the children submitted the drawings to me for review, I often observed that the drawings looked less like the intended subject, and more like a poetic self portrait. I have also noticed that dogs adopt ways of being and looking that mirror the people they live with. This photograph is a persuasive argument for that assertion.

THE SEA RANCH, CALIFORNIA

An artist cornered by demons creates poetry in the fourth dimension, and pays tribute to a band from Detroit, Michigan.

THE SEA RANCH, CALIFORNIA

These are photographs of color, texture and light. Someday I’d like to photograph penguins in their natural habitat.

ISO 100 85 mm 0 ev f/4 1/200

ISO 100 85 mm 0 ev f/6.3 1/400

ISO 100 85mm 0 ev f/5.6 1/320

THE SEA RANCH, CALIFORNIA

Wild fire smoke engulfs Northern California. Our subject meanwhile, professes to have quit smoking. He appears physically unwell, and angry. The thoughts are expressed clearly though, and we learn that when the wild animal is no longer sedated, it is better left alone.

THE SEA RANCH, CALIFORNIA

Dear Reader,

We’ve made it to the third of twelve installments of a newsletter that comes out every other month, on the 29th day of that month.  

I’ve decided to rename this project “Skullface” instead of “e-newsletter” number sign whatever, because the ladder sounds like it fell out of the butt hole of a florescent light in an office store in 2003. I may want to change the name again in the future. I don’t like being stuck with the same name the same way I don’t like going to restaurants or dinner parties or religious occasions. I need to keep moving and I like to be seen only as long as I need to be seen. That sounds a little bit nasty, but I just mean it like a snake or a fox does. If you don’t like snakes or foxes, let me give you some advice: Don’t kick one. Especially a snake. People who don’t like snakes are always the same people who get mad that a snake bites you if you kick it. 

I don’t like my band name anymore. The Light Switches? I want the name to have fangs and claws, but then again, if you over-compensate you wind up with too much diamond jewelry, and perfume, and face tattoos, and it becomes too complicated to make up your mind about anything, so you wind up on those disassociation medicines that Americans of all political persuasions love now. You know, the Queen you worship, be it a disembodied corpse, or the fat, old fashioned kind. Either one pretends to provide permission for all the terrible deeds and thoughts that you’re ashamed of having, and all the joys you know in your heart of hearts you are not entitled to if this is in fact a truly meritocratic civilization. 

If you’re someone thinking something that someone else is reading it sounds like you’re turning into the bad umpire who could have just as easily joined the police, or the military, or become a circuit court judge if its’ family had enough stable money. But I’m not talking to you player, or to you civilian, or to you goat herder on a desert plane. The “you” in this writing is me, and when I write in my journal I refer to myself as us and we. That’s not a rhetorical device. I really do. 

It’s not something I learned in college to be more sensitive, it’s because I have a mental disorder where I break my personality into multiple pieces to compartmentalize the labor of fending off the inevitable, unnecessary inquisitions of hostile forces that my superego deems irrational. (Psychologists are witch doctors, just like astrologers, but I keep one on staff in the PR department to explain our company policy to people who otherwise may have proven to be a burden for our technical support operators.) 

I have an old friend who asked me for a picture I took of the ocean so he can put it in his office. That person is a faithful and good member of society. That is who this work should be for. I could set up a store on the website from where this message is sent out, and in that store have pictures I take of nature. I just assumed there must be better photographers with bigger travel budgets, but I could give some pictures away to friends and family in frames I make myself and then sell some limited number to a big old business person like Dracula for 10,000 dollars, which would keep the operation afloat, and I could have children, or feed an orphanage. Same thing for music. The Light Switches could be a tin pan alley music box for a rich person that’s a thousand years old and drinks blood and has a parrot and a really great sailboat or maybe a space ship but I like capes and old dusty stuff better in fantasies. Yeah. I like spaceships too though. I’d be a good astronaut so long as I was in charge or respected the person who was. 

What will I really do with the money though? Good question. I hope something that makes the world a better place, but we’d better not make a promise I can’t keep. Better to ask forgiveness than permission. Don’t name the baby before it’s born. Right now I’m learning how to make this newsletter and this website which explains a record of music that right now is stalled because I’m trying to convince the other light switch about a sixteenth note, and one beat per minute’s worth of difference in timing through an elaborate exercise, that is mostly unnecessary because he already inherently loves and trusts me, and the true problem is I’m proving myself to someone that can never be proven wrong, because they’re already dead, and I don’t mean dead in a coffin. I mean dead like defeated. I mean dead like vanished and exploded how stars do, and wizards and witches in movies for children or childish adults, and rotten pumpkins a month after Halloween, when someone like us walks by in the right or wrong mood depending on your point of view. 

I haven’t smoked a cigarette in over a week and my exercise level is high. I have so much energy it’s hard to fall asleep. I feel confident and unattached, but also struggle with the notion that every gesture, every word, is absurd and that there is not objective truth, and this neurotic obsession with political elections and money, and the imposition of human science, is a dance I’m childishly refusing to do in time, but honestly, even if I were to try to do it right, I’m garbage in a dance class. 

One time I forced myself to take 10 dance classes at a big fancy dance class place in San Francisco called ODC because I was so terrified of them. I was horrible at the modern ones like I expected. Sweating. Out of time. Embarrassed. The teacher hated me. I was reasonable in the Tai Chi one. The teacher wanted me to continue but I did not.

Then I took this Korean sword fighting one so I could check off the tenth box on my list and be done with it. I was the only student in the class. The class was in the basement of the building that was old before they moved to their expensive new location which I don’t know how they financed. The teacher taught me some basic skills, and then he all of sudden started fighting me like a crazy person. (I’m serious.) So I employed the lesson tactics I had just learned, in concert with the supernatural level of hand to eye coordination I rented by accident from the lord, until the teacher was completely sweating and out of breath. I thought I was finally good at a dance class, but when the teacher regained his breath he asked: “Why are you here?”

I said I was trying to erase my sadness by facing my fears or something like that and he said “You know this is all an illusion right?” and I didn’t want to seem like an idiot so I said “yeah, you got a good point there.”

What follows is a selection of works I’ve added to the website michaelmusika.com since the last time I sent out one of these which was July 29th. Someone told me Satchel Paige said “dance like nobody’s watching” and that’s true for being good at baseball when the world is really cruel and racist for a long time, and it’s true for anything you ever do ever, even if everything is all an illusion, because that’s an illusion too, and people who say that sound an awful lot like they just lost to a novitiate. 

First I’ll put the picture my friend liked. Then a review of a book I read. Then all the other artworks I talked about in a weird, roundabout way in the previous paragraph. Thank you very, very much for being here. I hope this has proven inspiring, cathartic, or some other helpful quality for your life, which is an honorable and precious phenomenon, alone and connected to all the others at the same time like photons and waves of light going through the hole in the projector that contains the reel of an old fashioned star of foreign cinema, who’s family fled to the southernmost of South America after World War II, smoking a cigarette patiently, explaining to the Greek adventurer, who was created in the image of an African one, that she is going to die. 

Good morning,

Michael Musika

Here’s one of the pictures I took of nature I’m going to give away if I know you and try and sell to Dracula….

Here’s a book review I did yesterday for the book review section of my online museum…The more I try to advertise, the more I sound like one of those people that has a million thrift store dolls in a dirty house. Gross! I have zero dolls unless you count a penguin and where I live is always clean so go to hell Johnny!

Do Every Thing Wrong! Xxxtentacion Against the World, Jarrett Kobek 
The musician this book is about was born in Florida. His father went to jail in Arizona because of the war on drugs which were a hypocritical, evil ploy on the part of the Reagan administration, who were profiteering in guns and cocaine south of the border while scolding citizens at home. This is the opinion of the author, but I agree with him. Ronald Reagan is Mark Twain’s space age Satan. If you like Satan or Ronald Reagan, I’m not trying to offend you. I’m just saying neither figure is as they appear. No one is. 

Anyway, Xxxtentacion came of age the same time the internet did, and Jarett Kobek, the author of this biography, uses the twitter timeline of his subject to contextualize a very short life and career. Xxxtentacion got shot to death when he was twenty. Before that he did lots of drugs and had lots of fights and sex on videos which were posted online, which I presume lended intrigue and authenticity to the music he was making, for the people he was making it for, ostensibly a fellowship of children mutually alienated by society. 

The music was really extraordinary. It was. I’d like to say that the music was extraordinary regardless of the sad and sensational parts of the biography, because it’s really annoying when people fetishize the tragic victim parts of stories. Sometimes corporeal forms are just gifted at one art or another and they’re going to create something great regardless of their circumstances. Making it about the narrative is an advertising ploy, because it’s proven that a certain variety of narrative sells. Now that we’ve been around the block a few times, and everyone films every minute of their life like everywhere is a piano recital, or a prize fight, or one of those stupid restaurants where they put edible confetti on your plate and you’re supposed to pretend you have slaves and chariots and like it, everyone’s perception has become a feedback loop. The curation of narrative and image has never been more self conscious, nor so individually located, and the assumption that your freedom and societal worth are dependent on the currency of this narrative, has never been more ubiquitous. 

The music Xxxtentacion made, from what I’ve listened to so far, isn’t really about the topics that popular hip hop artists seem remote controlled to talk about. The music Xxxtentacion made seems to me like it’s talking about feeling lonely and desperate and wanting to express a vision of beauty that is pure by virtue of its unwillingness or inability to conform to the inevitable influence of a corrosive world. It’s not music that’s trying to flaunt a resume of prolific vampire commodification statistics as its primary concern. And yet, the personality behind this music bragged in an interview about beating up a gay person in jail, and later, he probably kidnapped his girl friend and physically abused her. And in the process of discussing all this publicly and privately, he probably said the words “bitch” and “faggot” a lot. 

I report this in the conditional because, you know, we don’t know. We weren’t there. It might be on the internet but I’m old and I just don’t trust that. Besides, you know what Jesus or whoever said about stones and glass houses. We’ve all been faggots and bitches at one time or another, and said those words out loud too, ironically and literally, because despite having an ego centric multi personality disorder, deep down we know we’re all one, and this blame and division is a demon pissing in the wishing well. Anytime some one makes a comment about how someone else should get a job, know that they are actually calling that person a “faggot,” or a “bitch,” or choose your slur, and that this is societally acceptable, because a drawing of Thomas Jefferson and the word “God” is on money, and nobody seems to remember the fact that the old testament said you’re not supposed to write the word of God down, and having a picture of a ghost on the American permission slip is going to work less and less well the more kids stop being afraid and ashamed of dying. 

Kobek does well to point out that timbre is what makes a musician memorable, and Xxxtentacion had extremely distinctive timbre. It’s not what the musician says, it’s how they say it. Xxxtentacion had that timbre, and a genuine curiosity for the art form, and a willingness to make due with whatever limited tools happened to be on hand. He created extraordinary work, a lot of it, and fast, with an unprecedented lack of support from the music industry gate keepers. 

I really liked the book. It was a strange format and writing style that self consciously mirrored the chosen milieu of its subject, which is saying out of context what you’re feeling now directly into the gaping nothingness of the internet. I don’t understand how anyone does that correctly. People do though, and this book made that mystery more pleasing to me. The book was written fast and angry, and had a lot of weird typos, which is annoying when it’s the newspaper, but in this case I found it endearing. The author, and the musician the author is talking about, are just out there in the world making a statement, sometimes to expose hypocrisy and delusion, but sometimes just to create. Creating fast, relying just on yourself, not caring about how it appears or resonates vis a vis the status quo, that’s inspiring. You certainly should not say faggot and imprison your girlfriend, yes. Also, a lot of events should have never happened to you. Who’s counting anyway?

This book was suggested by a good friend, who can be caring when necessary, but also challenging when I get lazy or boring. I read it very quickly, over the course of a few nights in September of 2020.

Here’s a selection of journal exhibits I added to this online museum since the last time I electronically mailed one of these messages. Now I sound like an above average elementary school art teacher. We’re making progress. Continuous gesture drawing I didn’t understand at the time but now I do because perfectionism and ego problems are boring and also I have less fear and hyperactivity than I used to. I don’t know how to accurately evaluate elementary school art teachers because I only had one and now they’re trying to get away with not paying them in public schools because our civilization is in its drug addled teenage years. For the record though, I think my elementary art teacher was really good. She was well read, kind to children, and I think she cared a lot about her job.

SEPT 4, 2020 // AFTER SURFING GOOD MOOD GUY This is a movie where a partially articulate human, with an above average short term memory, espouses the practical wisdom of a society where people choose to pause from insulting each other. 

AUG 31, 2020 // COMMERCIAL FISHING BOATS + VENMO FOR HEROINE Here we have a movie where a brain damaged, would be criminal discovers that the math doesn't add up on importing heroine to a remote island populated by migrant commercial fisherman. This leads to the conclusion that there is also no free will. Sorry if that spoiled it for you.

AUG 1, 2020 // SONOMA COAST TO FOREST TO COAST Jessie and I walked from a parking lot to a beach trailhead, across highway one, and high up into the redwood forest.

OCT 1, 2005 // FARM CONCERTS Michael Musika and several other musicians from California were paid by a conglomerate of local entrepreneurs to entertain agricultural laborers.

JULY 7, 2005 // CHARLIE CRUIKSHANK’S AUNT + UNCLE The train ride to get here from the coast of Italy, I remember, was very long, dirty and hot. Charlie was a good sport, and so was Emily, though she didn’t feel well by the end of it. 

JULY 3, 2005 // AN ODD TIME FOR A WATCH I went for a long hike with an Australian named Marcus who worked as a hotel manager and could afford to take long, interesting vacations.

SEPT 1, 2002 // WAR PROTEST I took this photo at a protest of the Iraq war. Also this photograph, despite being yellowed and faded by spending several years on my bedroom wall before being scanned, shows world class photography skills.

SEPT 1, 1997 // PANAMA We were roughly nineteen years old and crossed the border from Costa Rica to Panama by walking on a bridge over a river. The air was warm and tropical.

THE SEA RANCH, CALIFORNIA

This is a movie where a partially articulate human, with an above average short term memory, espouses the practical wisdom of a society where people choose to pause from insulting each other.