In a previous post, I wrote about my departure from live music journalism due to distance, troubled finances, disappointing DJ dominating lineups, and a personal bout with mental exhaustion. If you’ve been following the story, you witnessed my escape from cockroach motel, avoided chaos living on the road, and numerous confrontations with my parents – Eventually landing in a tiny Poconos community.
Misty mountain tops, lake beaches, and cold beer by the fire, right?
Wrong.
My parents bought a cabin against my best wishes, I felt a bad vibe and have spent four months fighting for clean water, suffocating from gas leaks, moldy insulation, dead mice, and clogged sewage without ventilation.
Not to mention my PennslyBama neighbors.
The process degraded my mental health – the cherry on YEARS without proper sleep. Constant wars with family members, police intervention, homeless excursions. I just wanted a place to lay my head.
Not yet, said the universe.
Whatever, learned how to stick up for myself more.
Especially when the most basic of needs weren’t being met.
I took a break from shows, and opted for discovering new mediums.
Without a studio for recording music, constant rain, and backlogged anger, I was desperate for a form of expression. I texted my therapist complaining that my mediums were too tedious…. video editing, electronic music production, glitch…. these mediums aren’t always the most immediate and expressive. Sometimes I need to release energy without hesitation, without dialing audio levels and FX, or neurotically trimming clips.
Anger is explosive. Why hold it back?
Instead of producing music, I drove around the Poconos filming Vlogs and drawing on free priority mail stickers, a trick I remembered from the street art documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop”. Painting BADBOOB.COM along with demons and devils, paranoid avatars, and gritty figures alike. Ejaculating them upon my choosing. Philadelphia street corners, Appalachia alleyways, highway rest stops, WAWA parking lots, and porta potty’s are all viable locations for STICKER SLAPS.
The idea arrived while shipping eBay returns and t-shirts (merch), and became a regular form of self-expression. Sharpies, acrylics paints, and priority mail stickers. Through the exploration of this medium, I encountered a discovery. The less thought, the greater the art. Intuitively, my mind scribbled graffiti-style cartoon characters. An unconscious repetition from bored years behind a school desk. Trapped with only pencil and paper.
The graffiti aesthetic echoed early hip hop and hardcore punk influences, listening to artists like Odd Future, Tribe Called Quest, KRS-ONE, Minor Threat, The Descendants, The Sex Pistols, and Black Flag.
Sharpie’s sprint across laminated priority mail stickers, spewing ink across government tax dollars hard at work. There is great enjoyment from slapping stickers across your local town, big city, anywhere really.
Find a location, thumb the corner, peel the laminate, SLAP.
Why not give it a try?
What’s stopping you?
Just grab a stack of FREE PRIORITY MAIL stickers from your local post office, or even better… order a stack from USPS.com… for free!
Sticker slaps not only assisted anger release, producing hundreds of stickers in a single session, but also assisted my overall message.
Street art often portrays themes, messages, talking points, criticisms.
Have you seen the work of BANKSY?
Bristol based street artist, BANKSY, known for displaying political themes and controversial messages, primarily taking shove at power structures, the military industrial complex, corporations, and dark human psychology.
Using a childish, naive artistic style fused with elements of graffiti, punk/metal, and freehand grit, I’ve been able to explore themes like the Oedipal complex, childhood developmental disturbances, narcissism, the mother complex, and childhood trauma.
A college friend relayed a message regarding the illustrations, “they definitely make you feel a type of way when you seen them which is good or bad.”
A lack of artistic brilliance is replaced by raw, unhinged emotion, expressionism; primarily repressed anger towards my sociopathic mother and codependent father.
While placing stickers in the streets of Jim Thorpe, I was beckoned by a woman – thrilled to catch an artist in the moment of mounting his work. However, the woman’s smile alchemized into a frown after making contact with the silhouetted woman glaring from the glossed paper.
“Is there a message behind these”, she asked intuitively.
Sure, I thought, as another woman, covered in black – goth, peered uneasily into the drawings, shifting nervously.
“I like your shirt,” I said, eyeballing the surrealist monster climbing from the void presented on her charcoal t-shirt. “What is that?”
“Goth band,” she said. (Sorry, I don’t remember the name)
“Damn, that’s cool.”
“I know,” she said, ” I have to get back to work,” and slithered from the local whiskey still.
A brief moment in contrast, as the two people standing before the woman couldn’t be anymore different in energy.
Narcissists are everywhere.
There’s no shortage.
The goal is to poke and prod the unconscious mind, to penetrate the deepest crevices, to unlock memories and trauma. To get people talking.
I don’t expect to be greeted with roses and wine, but I did take a few moments to test the whiskey’s provided by the woman working the local Still, who, for the love of God, wished I’d leave.
It’s not easy being THE BADBOOB.
It’s not easy being the contrast in people’s lives.
But this is the job of the intuitive empath, light work, to brighten the darkest places. To carry the torch under raining stones.
Additionally, the mounting EP’s, singles, and eventual album will require visuals to complement. Glancing at the Youtube channel, I realized video content was rather lacking. I opted for long format visualizers versus short form content, which slowed traction and prevented the initial launch.
Oh well, I was thrilled with how the visualizers appeared minus the conditions they were produced: moving constantly, state of chaos, uncertainty. However, I was able to produce a majority of my EPs plus visual content.
Recently, camera clutched in hand, I ventured to small mountain towns and sceneries: Weatherly, White Haven, Francis E. Walter Dam, using my camera for practice: taking photos, searching for cinematic angles, learning how to use the damn thing again.
Through this process, I learned how natural the camera felt.
How each shot felt connected to an intuition.
I’ve been using cameras to express myself since 2006, using a flip phone to capture lego annihilations, ketchup; and all, eventually receving a Canon ZR830 after receiving straight A’s in sixth grade.
Horror movies, Lego animations, and action comedies.
The summer of 2006 was exceptional for creative exploration.
I discovered a craft, draining hours of the day producing stop motion, editing fake trailers, practicing visual fx, fastening blood squibs to my brothers, screaming “ACTION”.
I think I’ve been neglecting this part of myself…. although the audio exploration wasn’t a waste, providing me with the much needed John Carpenter education; movies like Escape From New York, Halloween, Into the Mouth of Madness were childhood favorites.
I think it’s time to switch lanes a little bit.
I’m having difficulty breaking onto the EDM scene, primarily because of politics; also because I produce ambient/cinematic thought-pieces.
Following artists like G Jones, Eprom, tsuruda, Chee, Noer The Boy, and Little Snake, I haven’t delved into total IDM (intelligent dance music), but am surely tip-toeing the boundaries of experimental bass.
Instead of melding into the EDM scene, the ability to remain solitary allows for more exploration into my identity, my sound, and where I’d like to steer this project, THE BADBOOB.
Honestly, I’m not sure I want to be classified as “EDM”, instead drawing inspirations from Death Grips, Autechre, Woulg, and Flying Lotus’s label ‘Brainfeeder’, exploring the wild, weird, and experimental.
Together, the surrealism-horror visuals combined with the gritty-guerilla style filmmaking, raw glitch beats, and lifelong knowledge of film might aid the unravelling of what I’m ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO BE DOING.
Because I’ll be honest, I still haven’t connected with my true purpose yet.
If it’s not yet apparent, i’m going through a trial and error process, testing different mediums, forms of expression, styles, and building the arsenal of what works best, what screams NICK RUBINOFF.
I do not expect to discover the answer immediately:
Isn’t this a part of life; discovering who you are?
If so, why should I expect immediate results?
I don’t, so in the meantime expect more trial and error, more random uploads, more play. Because isn’t that what it means to be an artist, to find love in your work, in the words of Alan Watt’s:
“To treat your work like play?”
THE BADBOOB 