1000 Miles Zine Collection
For reasons I'm sure I'll constantly be trying to comprehend, unpacking a suitcase is sometimes the most melancholy task for me. Home has been an intangible in my life for so long, something to think about and mull over whenever above the air or in a vehicle on some random road. And just as the most seemingly profound thoughts can come to one when staring out the window of a moving vehicle, so too can the most depressing come from unpacking a suitcase in a city you're stuck in. This isn't meant to be some downer or diatribe, but rather whatever honest words that I can somehow put down here about living in Los Angeles. It, more than any other city I've been in, is unknowable and ungraspable while somehow simultaneously remaining contradictory in that it affords a huge freedom and ability to continuously discover something new. It is very much a city to dream in, reminding me of a run-down carnival where most of the rides are broken, but the ones that are still working make being there worth it. The zines below represent the culmination of my 1000 Miles Project, one of the largest performance projects in the history of Los Angeles. The project, dealing with fragmentation and the question as to what the comminuted substance is of the intangible, is presented below in its own tangible form- each zine representing 10 days and 100 miles from the total 100 and 1000 covered on foot. Whenever walking, after a few hours of being alone with nothing but one's steps and thoughts, there is this wonderful moment that happens when the fissures of whatever street and sequence in front of you start to tear and show coincidences inherent only to those looking for nothing but nothing, a kind of sacred and unseen geometry of every object's trajectory. I know that probably sounded like a bunch of bullshit, but here is where I'll return to the beginning feeling: melancholy and how impossibly sad it is that a person whose medium is words is incapable of using them to ever describe precisely what he or she feels. My friend David, before he hung himself, would always describe this paradox to me along with another axiom: how perfection is the enemy of getting things done. My mind wavers everyday as to whether or not it agrees with those words, but I thought they would make sense here in introducing these zines and books- the objects I've come closest to creating with perfection.