Lasaration

Sarah’s Apple

Sarah likes her apple’s green and her colour’s blue. What better deication is this here picture. I had texted her the riddle: “Imagine an apple that would be your all time favourite. What would it look like? I wonder if you can”. She hasn’t texted me since that day. It doesn’t really matter. It has inspired me to create this here work. Maybe in the future the technology will make an apple a different colour. Blue, purple, it doesn’t really matter. It will eventually happen, if it hasn’t already before. I wonder what it will taste like. Will it be the taste of a red or a green apple? Will the taste be of somthing else? Will the ideas of a certain few influence the apples to be bred in a way that they are instantly alcoholic? A cider infused crop? Will the apple be a smart apple? Eat one bite and you will have all the memory you will ever need or lost. Will the apple be designed as the new narcotic, one bite to forget all your problems.
As the future moves forward everything we know and love in this generation is being slowly replaced as the kids discover somthing new. Then they want somthing old when they get sick of the (what was once new) now becomes old. The world could not exist without the cycle in it’s axis. It spins when your’e alsleep. It still spins when you have stopped spinning. It continues to spin even after you are dead.
The blue apple. At the moment it is part of paper fantasy. Bright in colour and sweet in taste. Sickly sweet in imagination. When it gets born blue an apple, does it cease being an apple?

Floating bum (with balloons!)

Is your backside chock full of gas? Is it always emitting an annoying and if you are as emencely popular as myself embarressing? Not that being “popular” is embarressing but the thought of that unwanted flatulance. Even if you dont have all your friends (and a few certain strangers) all in the one room and in the dead of night you happen to let one slip. Even a tiny tune in bed beside your love one (or two, if you are having one of “those” nights) is bound to be a source for amusement, if not a bit of embarressment on your part from the part of you that is behind you. If “summer breeze” made Seals and Croft “feel fine” the same cannot be said if you had a certain herbed and spiced chicken before you went to bed as in the dead of night that dark silent bedroom of yours gets filled with the gas and smell that made the chicken famous and your arse equally as glorious as you have released it. Like a virgin you have the same amount of disgust and loathing as you lye beside your lover and attempt not to notice as she gets all the enjoyment out of the experience and you are left with the fall out. Trying not to remember the smell in your next intimate encounter may be hard. Especially if she happens to do it whilst you two do do it. Then as it’s going to be a rough night for you. especially if you have been privy to alot of farting from your partner when your own bum hasn’t even said a word.
Even the thought of trying to match your partner’s aeronautical display of an anus would be enough to try one yourself only to discover that your own body hasn’t produced enough gasseus- particles and more solid versions and a quick trip to the toilet and then the bathroom and then the toilet (to finish the job) may indeed suffice. Lighting a match may cause more damage and you only need the bond back from your landlord. That hoping that that very same landlord who in a vague way resembles Bela Lugosi and is seen parking his Volvo downstairs (in the early hours of the morning) doesn’t notice the smell and noise too. As his super vampire enhanced hearing can attest to he can and will be talking to all his other ghouls around the bloody cooler for nights and eons to come. As is this!

> insert visual surreal visual <.

Well like a paper-mache bum that is strapped to the end of several helium balloons floating several metres into the air, our bum is up! So what better way to lift the spirits of a boring converluted 21’st birthday party by releasing this piece of artistic wonder into the night sky. Yes, you two and a few (for the time, close) pissed friends can end up gathering all the balloons from the room ceiling and go onto the balcony and taking everyone attention that’s into the room to that said balcony you get about fifty odd people chanting and clappng on this (Artist’s impression) only to watch the balloon struggle on the weight of the balloons that for most of the night had a volume of the air sucked out as you made silly pitched sentences from your voice and your brain full of the helium. Only for months later to perform life changing and pathetically stupid acts that find you all alone and vagrant from the totally out of character performance that led her to leave you.
So in the way of tribute let me raise my glass, or in this case this here brush and wash sketch to you! In the way hindsight lets us look back on things as local Burnage speed-metal band: Oasis taught me “not to look back in anger” but to be in the thought that (it’s) good to be free, safe in the knowledge that some other poor bastard has to be on the receaving end of your back end. It’s artistic symbolism meets satire but to everyone else it’s just going to be plain surrealism!

Drunk/ choices

Australia, if you have never been here before you’d be foregiven for thinking that this place was as friendly a place as any. The truth beknown it’s turning into just as vile a place as any. The leadership of our Prime Minister The Hon Kevin Rudd is just that. The result of the smiling assasin that he is where his bleeding heart policies have told the Indiginous community “sorry” yet a generation is still doing what it did generation before. If change is slow then let me be it’s first critic corrected. Children left at home, coming to adulthood as drunks or worse still homeless and destitude. Their only choice for survival is to joing gangs to survive. Kids get attracted to colours. Let’s face it, they are inviting. They are a memory of a time when we were kids and the lollies were wrappe in bright colours. Packaging hasn’t changed all tht much. They have packaged “alcopops”. Fed the kids with their instinct and kept their hands clean by saying it’s their ow free will that bought it over the counter. These once well mannered kids have gone stupid on the shit. They are clogging the hospital emergency rooms with their inability to hold a night’s drink. In the old day’s if you coldn’t hold your own then you were told not to. Now it’s drinking to excess. There is no future. I think Bill Henson’s new works should have his adolescants with bright coloured filled bottles in their hands, with Henson’s trademarkblue television screehn in the backround. But that would only make it easy for the Anti Henson League to say he is “glamourizing teen beligerence”.
The truth is alcohol is great to remove ink stains from your dry wall. Try it some time. It cuts through it in seconds. It doesn’t mess around and the ink compunds don’t stand a chance. So why would you want to fool around with the booze? It’s great with a meal. It’s fantastic in moderation but when you do it on an empty stomach and you keep doing it without coming up for air you know it’s going to mess with your insides quicker than if you were to going dancing in the middle of the street. Knowing that you are drunk you don’t notice that you are in the middle of the street dancing because you are in the E.R wondering how the hell you got there, and you can’t feel your legs.
The truth is that the kids don’t really care very much. Nothing much has changed really. that is just the niavete of youth, the carefree outlook. Alcohol has always been there you say. True, then the kids keep doing the wrong thing everytime they mistreat it. That has always happened. So what’s wrong with it stopping? The kids are our future. This has been harped on many times in cheesy songs but who’ll take over when we are all too senile to remember where we left our minds let alone our underpants? The kids. They deserve better. Imagination, inspiration and idolation is all lost when you are drunk. Idolation when you are drunk is only for the wrong reasins and by the wrong people. the joke is on you.
Alcohol takes your control skills and leaves it to shit. So you like to be out of control do you? What can be so bad that you need to drown it out with booze? Is your life so bad sober that you need to enhance it drunk? The tragedy with this message is that it’s great that it’s on Red Bubble but Red Bubble is chock full of the artistic types who are open and free thinkers. Not the normal. We can eliminate the future by having less Jackson Pollock’s and Vincent Van Gogh’s. If there is a problem then don’t self mediacte but get the treatment that you require by getting the professional help that will give you a future instead of an obituary. There is more to life than being a body-parts shop for someone that needs your heart but your brain is pretty much useless. Educate yourself. It’s great that you are donating your organs but the more important impact you make is when you are alive yourself.
Once you know what to do then you know that you still have a choice. You can make it and remember it the next day. Moderation is one secret and skill to life. If you got this far then what are you going to do with your new found knowledge? Drink in moderation (if you are going to drink), drink to excess and you run the risk of death. Quick, slow or immediate without warning death is always on the cards when you are out of your own control. My what a good lookin’ Grim Reaper that is! Trust me, death isn’t as gutter glamourous as this! Human instinct needs experience. Humaninstinct needs experience many times before it gets the message. What a strange planet of beings!

Green Apple

What can be said about the green apple? I know for a fact that it’s green pigment is what makes it’s green exterior. If your going to be making Key Lime Pie this is not going to be one of it’s ingredients no matter how well you try to take it off as a Lime. The apple has been a symbol for reinvention and also for demise. One famous band had it high, real high. Then lost it or did they? The fans, the so called maniacs that had followed them to the end of the earth had literally pushed them off the cliffs. The fans, hungry, rabid and uncompromising. The utter thought of their favourate band disbanding lead to rumours, no I am not talking about Fleetwood Mac here ladies and gentlemen. The band so holy that they had no equivalent. The rotting apple of history will show that we as humans are the reason why we help the band but are also the reason why we kill the favouite thing we love to listen to. The mob mentality. Mania strikes at the ones least likely to go cold at the thought. Fame and the cult of celebrity is the curse of the human race. Why care where Osama Bin Laden is? The one truly missing is yourself. Think about it for one second. So a rich rock star sings about finacial and conceptual abstanence, so what?! It’s not your responsability to go blow his brains out. I will bet you all the bullets in the world that you are not the world’s bigest saint. That you haven’t done any wrong. That you are without fault. I guess the true meaning of this piece is to show that the perception of the warped is one thing yet the perception of the world and it’s people is somthing far scarier. How many of you want to aggress? Get one over like the simple (and often predictable) characters that Adam Sandler plays in his cheap and nasty movies that he stars in? So many do. So many lose out. All you need is love. Love is all you need. The Dali Lama teaches that within Buddist teachings aggresion only hurts the soul within. Yet so many get stuck in that rut that gets them in, so many times a rut will get you stuck for far longer than is really neccesary. Even ater you have dealt your cards you are still left playing solitare.
So humanity gets the upper hand. The response from the individual is, “You’re wrong Damien Lasaration, not everyone is a gun toting maniac”. I would say that you could be right. The young woman who shot at innocent children, the young man, who had his whole life before him now isolated and in custody after a nation’s worst massacre, a man who shot a husband, brother and father. One man, five bullets. One assasin, the same but so very different.
So we are left with the apple. What is that all about? It would be cliched if I had red splattered to “symbolise” blood, murder, death. So let’s do what the widow requested and remember him for his life.

Guitar self portrait

I love my Fender Jaguar. I had bought it brand new without a single scratch. There is nothing wrong with that. The last thing you want to pay for when buying somthing new is that it’s shonky or otherwise. When buying older more vintage guitars I have a fear of shops doing a hatchet job playing Frankenstein as they put parts from other guitars to the one you have the love lust for hanging in the showroom. Anyway, here is a self portrait I can be proud of. Me in the stairwell from a photo shoot that I did with Sara Lamond.
To tell you the truth I don’t know of any other artists in history who have picked up a musical instrument. Can you name one? I like to thrash the shit out of mine. The Fender Jaguar’s sole purpose is to have the belt-marks at the back. It is meant to have sun stroke and had a fucking big amp vibrate to the guitar’s core so the wood has arthritis between the wood’s age strips. I want the paint to crack. At the moment it looks as sweet as any pretty boy, what a little c*. I am going to take that look off your face next time I get you to a rehursal room. I plan on renting a few hours in one of those rehursal places. As I live in a block of flats I have to be conservative with my noise. Anarchy is a bitch isn’t it? So when you have the money to explore then I think its “land ho!”. It’s not indulgence, it’s an expanding of the mind. Doctors note that musos (who play at least one musical instrument) have a 10% chance of saving their memory when they get older in comparison to others who don’t. You don’t have to play an instrument, it’s all about learning. Healthy alternatives have stemmed from playing card games with friends, playing sudoku, crosswords, anything that stimulates brain waes in the cortex that deals with memory. As artists we often just use the creative side. We milk so much that we end up going “dry” with writer’s/ artist’s block. There has to be a healthy symbiosis, a combination of the two. I am just talking from personal experience here. Robert Winston notes (in his novel which I highly recomend you read, The Human Mind) that William Burroughs is claimed to have been so stoned when writing Naked Lunch and the intense sleep depravation of Francis Bacon in the respective creation of their individual works. It’s not highly recommended. It’s a great exercise in perspective but all you’re going to get is a lot of tired muscles. In my case an anxiety attack of me waking up screaming. Not nice for the neighbours.
One artist frind of mine likes to like outside of the city. I have never been to Byron Bay but apparently it works for him. Some banish from the city life yet are the toast of the art scene yet little indie’s like me struggle in the underground just to get a shred of a little recognition. I like the bush yet I need that city smell, sound, stink to get me normal. The country is a magical place and I wonder if it is as much about where you live. The perspective is dfferent for a start as the art is done by someone else.
I am learning songs on the guitar I like to listen to. This can be a hard task as many of the songs I like can be technically difficult but we are dealing with memory restoration here and the exercise would be futile if I was just paying lip service to myself and this expensive guitar (it wasn’t cheap) would be a massive waste of money for buying it! I know how to play Nirvana’s “Smells like Teen spirit”, Led Zepplin’s ” Out on the tiles” from their 3 album. I know the main riff from Chris rea’s “On the beach”, then I forgot it which is a shame as I love that song. Another song that if my first visit to Thirroul had a soundtrack that one song would be featured as it’s title track. That is a detail that keep very close to my heart. I think I own more Chris Rea albums than Brett Whiteley did, proven I am an even bigger dag-cat than he ever was!
I must have done a heap or art. alot. The other day I was throwing out some old t shirts. I found a lost INXS t shirt that I thought I threw out years ago. I used to have 5 of them. Now I just have the one. It’s celebrating the 20 years of the band’s togetherness on the “Lose your head tour”. The tour that never made it to this country. I threw out the clothes I didn’t need. I threw out the videos I didn’t need. I kep everything else that was close to me. As the storm outside starts I must have missed it by fourty five minutes. I am inside and lighter the person. I have just eaten three tins of lentals, I don’t know what kind of effect this is going to do to me, they are just sooo nice! Reading and keeping some old Moleskine’s and well they just keep getting older as am I.

Sex doesn’t grow on trees

So many people out there are going nuts and doing each other like rabbits. The times change with every generation yet the insanity in our society gets worse in my view. Kids taking their newborn to class? Movies like Juno have put subjects like this into the spotlight and subjects akin to this have been going on for years. The sex in the streets will not go on forever, it won’t last, it won’t run out. People are sending feeding, mixed messages everyday. Is the act of sex more powerful than heroin? Is the heroine you are making love to actually making love to you back? Ladies, have you found the right man?
So many times has the question been asked but never answered, it’s always straight into the sack. A few drinks and she’s anyone’s. This is not about the after effects. In some ways it’s so easy to “lay” with someone, or even to hook up but the hard work is the relationship angle. Men, even women in equal proportions shy away from the only prospect that can defeat lonliness. Let’s just say that there may be “an entire forest of odies to fuck”. Sex doesn’t grow on trees. She may call you back. It’s wrong to assume he might run away. So many possabilities. The human drive is someone else as the sex-drive takes you to place it convinces you want to go. No matter if you smash into the tree after the crash, it happens. It is probably happening now as we speak.
It is not about the guilt. This society has far to much of that and in a way it is useless to be remorsefull in hindsight as once that sinking feeling is foregotten it just happens again. If it happens too many times then it gets amalgamated in a ball of regret that might do more harm to the morale. It’s about the living of everyday. Respecting one’s self everyday. The times of living your life cheaply are numbered. You are a unique structure on this earth and you deserve another to match the same unique beautiful flower that you display. You don’t need a weed that looks pretty at first but will avage wht is at the core of your flower as the winds carry the “weed” to the next one and he oher. You deserve better. Man or Woman, this work is dedicated to you. This is about the love the way it should be.

Strawberry 1

What fruit can be sexier than this? I love strwberrie, I really do. I think figs are sexy, mangoes are somthing else but strawberries hold their own. To say they are sexy is an understatement. They are the firey vixen. If chilli was their cousin in crime then with the seeds of passion these little babies make the taste buds break with parts that’ll make your lust for this scarlett fruit more intense.
I was doing a little interview with this interesting female singing sensation. I asked her what fruit she thought was the sexiest. She answered, the strawberry! Lately strawberries have been on sale around me. Call it syncronisity call it marketing but I have been finding that punnets have been going for under $2 a pop. That to me is great value if you can get it. Usually I have known strawberries to go for $4, even $4.95.
The strawberry is a work of art. The way it is formed from the way it can match the most intimate of evenings. Add a bottle of champagne and you have a night of it. Dip the strawberry in chocolate and you have lust dipped in lust. White whipped cream chock full of desire is another creamy cousin to tame the attraction of the fruit. It’s the fuzzy handcuffs to the fruit that is as wild as a weed yet still holds the beuty in it’s taste where a Salvation Jane ends. These things are actually good for you! Strawberries I am talking about I don’t recommend you end up putting Salvation Jane in your sandwichs here!
The strawberry. its asexual in it’s design. It looks phallic it looks vulvic. It is a cross over into the unknown. It isn’t the sweet tongue of a mango’s flesh cut sliding in your mouth. It isnt the taste of a fig. The strawberry has a domain of it’s own. The strawberry has it’s own parliament room in the House of commons at the local fruit shop. The minute you take it home it grabs you by the collar and pushes you to your own bed. It is the mistress that could be as close as your only salvation. Shared with your loved one it is the threesome that’d be welcomed by your lover.

Due to the opening space restrictions I had to cut a few sentences out. These are the original explanations to my current crop of new works.

DL.
X