I officially moved to San Francisco about a month ago. Since moving to the Bay I’ve mostly been trapped in my new Bernal Heights home, which is kind of a #TBT to when I lived in the Bay before and never left my apartment. The new Bernal spot is lovely and has good light. Bernal is very windy. All the time spent in the new apartment has mostly been on account of me being deep in this NFT project in which I’m attempting to produce 10,000 images. I also have a weight setup in the apartment so it means the one activity I used to leave the house for, working out, I can now do inside.

The other day I took a long walk to the Haight to:
1.Pick up a prescription of Trazadone. I had my prescription transferred from the CVS by my studio in Los Angeles to the CVS in the Lower Haight. I started taking Trazadone about a month ago for sleep problems. I take the lowest dosage of 50 MG. I’d say it’s been effective. I’ve started dreaming again. The other night I had dinner at Keith Boadwee’s house in Emeryville and there was a dog there that also takes Trazadone. My doctor friend in LA told me all the doctors have a joke about it being called “Trazabone ” because apparently in rare cases it can give people Priapism, which just means you have an erection all the time. I’ve noticed that my NPT (nocturnal penile tumescence) has been a lot more intense lately, often waking me up in the early morning.

2.Buy some skate shoes. As some readers may know I used to be a skater, or actually I still consider myself a skater but now so more in a conceptual way, but I want to become a (studio) skater again. Everytime I see my friend Ted Barrow I tell him how I’m going to start skating again and we make plans. The plans always fall through though because I don’t have shoes, don’t have a board, and am working on NFTs. The whole thing has started to make me feel like a poser. So not wanting to seem like a poser I went to FTC on Haight to secure some shoes. This was all on the same day as the Trump assassination attempt, and no one in the shop knew about it. Me explaining a presidential assassination attempt to a bunch of skaters was very surreal.

3.Get my ear re-pierced at Cold Steel USA. I didn’t actually have to get it completely pierced again; they just used a thing called a tapper, which stretches the ear. It’s good news because it means I don’t actually have to heal from a puncture wound. The new jewelry I picked out is a tiny rose-gold hummingbird.

4.Get some exercise. I’m trying to get back in shape. Walking is very effective for burning fat without destroying muscle. SF is a great walking city. You can’t really walk around in LA.

Question: Why is Upper Playground called Upper Playground? It’s in the lower Haight. Shouldn’t it be called Lower Playground?

This week I’m having dinner at a restaurant called Bar Jabroni in the Lower Haight. No idea if it has to do anything with what the Rock is cooking.

Note to self: make sure my GF watches The Rock starring Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage.

Nico and I went to school together and the first time I saw him after he moved back to SF he asked me to do something at Climate Control. Unbeknownst to me he had seen my and Juliana’s show at Bel Ami in Los Angeles last year. Juliana and I had been planning on doing a follow-up show and this seemed like a good opportunity. Since I’m living in San Francisco now and this is the first show I’ve had in the city in maybe a decade, I’m really trying to make this show special. This was sort of the impetus for us deciding to do a second installation to open during the book fair. While we were first working on the show, I had wanted Pandasex to paint on the walls of the gallery, but he was going to be out of town for the first installation. PS now being back and available to do something provided another reason for a second showing.

I hadn’t planned to write any kind of text for this show but some ideas started popping into my head this morning while I was meditating/ high on adderall. Juliana wrote such a great text for the last opening and it was mostly about her but had some moments that pointed to me and I felt like I should write something that was mostly about me but pointed to Pandasex in a similar fashion.

Pandasex (パンダセックス) and I first met in 2013 in Portland at some mutual friends’ art show. We are both Yonsei (I think) and both had family that were in the 第442歩兵連隊. In 2022 we did a show in Downtown Los Angeles in a former retail space that used to be occupied by Theory.

Pandasex is a member of the legendary Drugs crew (also a ching chong in CCLB). Drugs pioneered what is often referred to as “anti-style” graffiti. Someone asked me what this meant the other day and the best explanation I could come up with is that Drugs is a kind of Postmodernist graffiti crew, in that if you think about graffiti in the PDE (pre-Drugs era) it would be akin to something like high modernism—overly concerned with form, projecting authenticity, believes in the artist as revealer of mystic truths kind of stuff- rizzed up swag lords with the freshest tags. And Drugs is the antithesis to all of this— unconcerned with authenticity or ideas about what constitutes “good” graffiti style. Drug’s last show was titled “Toy”, the graffiti equivalent of “poser”.

From the outside, beyond my and Pandasex’s personal connection / family histories (the tag in the gallery reads “nikkei”), there isn’t an obvious connection between his wall painting and the art in the show and I’m actually struggling to make a connection between his and Juliana’s art, other than that I’ve done two person shows with both of them. Here is an email I wrote to someone recently about the process I used to create my paintings:

Actually I decided not to share the email explanation because I’m planning on writing a longer text that will come out later this year and I don’t want to spoil my dinner. The main objective of the email was to familiarize the reader with how elaborately layered and complex the process of making my paintings has become. This is useful in understanding these paintings in the context of the idea of the palimpsest. From that we can take Pandasex’s graffiti base and blend it with my paintings and ingest the combination as a kind of bespoke, palimpsest cocktail.

Graffiti has a lot of parallels to skateboarding in its reimagining of existing architectural forms, its relationship to law and order, and its reverence of style. At their core both activities are truly radical, whereas most art (within the mainstream artworld (within a market)) strives to point to radicality, but in the end, because of art’s ties to capital, fails to achieve this. The most radical artists are the ones that tend to reject the art world, but even Cady Noland is now showing with Gagosian. Maybe through skateboarding or pondering the radicality of graffiti I’m trying to make myself feel better about wanting to be involved in the mainstream art world? I’ll probably just end up skating at the skate park though, which in my opinion, is antithetical to the whole reason one skates. Skating at a skatepark is like showing graffiti in a gallery ;).

-Parker