LandE scape
Nora Maccoby
CONTEMPORARY ART REVIEW
very intent on solving the problem of Time Travel . It was a very dreamy time in SF . We were part of the largest migration westward since the gold rush . For me it was all about following the light . The east coast is very hazy from the coal burning and there ’ s a real difference in quality of existence and the ability to think clearly . They should move the capital of the USA to the west and people could focus . DC in the beginning was considered a hardship posts for foreign diplomats .
So it 1990 and I had been given the name and number of a guy named Carl , who another friend from Oberlin and Martha Vinyard , had said was a really interesting wizard and could make a spoon travel through the air . Supposedly he was a retired CIA guy , one of the one tried to kill Castro , and he owned all the warehouses of South of Market . This is before the dot . com so it was Skid Row , but I never felt afraid or threatened by anyone . I was completely fearless and stupid in those days . So Liz and I go to meet him and his reike group in this insane warehouse with a giant fish bowl and this very intense group of hipster wizards and I started studying with him . I did first degree reike and learned to work with energy on different points of the body and experiment with my own energy , which continues . I would go with him and others to do energy healing on sick people .
Liz was doing giant drawings of cadavers at the time , and I was making political posters of my own concoction of propaganda , for my own political movement . I always had this thing going on in my head that it might be possible to stimulate an evolution revolution by art and triggering people through story . We kept going with the Time Travel investigation and this led us to some very interesting experiences . October 25 , 1990 , we were sitting in a Vietnamese restaurant . We had kept a particular concept going in conversation for several hours straight and i suddenly looked around me and instead of the restaurant being there in 3D color , it was just an outline like a hologram , and the real space it was in was the black space matter of space , with stars in the distance . Around this time my friend Chris Brokaw of the awesome bands Pay the Man and Come , came to visit and Liz whipped out her guitar and started playing all these great songs . Chris hooked her up and she left to go back to Chicago and record what became the album Exile in Guyville . The first Gulf War broke out and San Francisco protested , closing down the Federal Building for a month and the bridges for a night . It got ridiculous but some of it was worthy and fun . We had thousands of people at our loft during this time who were involved in the demonstrations .
I was working on wood panels , 6 ’ x4 ’, and paper . But I was disillusioned with the idea of protest as an occupation . I have always been into being proactive as an activist stance as an artistic metier . To create in all dimensions in whatever form . My political activism is art . Anything that comes from the vacuum is creation and therefore has the potential to be art . The craft of moving thought to form has many process routes . To create rather than be victimized . To discover new worlds . I am a huge Star Trek fan . I used to dream I lived on other planets . I felt comfort with the indigenous people of the world because their ways do not mock people who acknowledge that the universe is vast and they are very clear that we are star people . Most dogma on this planet is still telling people that the center of the universe is Earth and it ’ s empty out there . The truth is more like , we ’ re a tiny planet on the fringes of the Milky Way Galaxy and we got a long way to go before we get to hang out with any of the major players .
My first defined ET experience was in SF in this loft , with the filmmaker and genius comic , Paul Roughan , who moved in after Liz left . This coincided with me deciding that theater and 2 dimensional panels were not going to be enough to impact the insanity that was wreaking havoc on the world , and decided to go to film school to subvert the dominant paradigm from the inside out . That ’ s been a theme .