[eerie music]
- I can say, I can sit here, and say right now,
I got a calling to do self portraits
everyday for the rest of my life until I die.
But that's not necessarily being honest
because there's some thought involved with that.
It didn't take a supernatural being
or some magical thing to happen;
it was just a decision I made,
a logical, rational decision I made.
And then all this other stuff, everything else,
just all this bloomed out of that.
[eerie music]
There might be some desperation there,
where you feel desperate, like you're alone.
Maybe for me personally, I'm like,
"Oh, I'm alone in the world," or something,
or maybe I thought no one understood me.
You know, whatever type of negatives--
Part of me, with the self-portraits,
wants to get as much experience out of life as possible
so that by the time that I die
I will have really lived a full life.
I really don't like it when people say that,
"I was chosen," or "Painting's my calling,
"I can't imagine without it," or something like that
because it tries to make it a mysterious type of thing.
So, like, someone with some depression
or low self esteem and beats them self up
or someone that's a little bit psychotic,
maybe even have a whole bunch of psychotic in them.
It just creates all this baggage
that they don't need when they just want to--
They just need a little bit of encouragement and self worth.
Sometimes I'm easily excitable
so I can get really outrageous.
I get on the bullhorn and yell at people on the streets
and just act up and stuff.
I don't get depressed too much
more of some mania, but not really too bad
where it can't be kept in check.
Ever since I got in that knife fight
and went to prison, I always knew, "Don't carry a knife."
If you don't have a knife in your pocket
you can never use it, you can never stab someone, ever,
if you don't have a knife.
I never stabbed anyone after that.
But then, I did cut--
I was just so much of a trouble maker then
and doing so many terrible things
that I didn't really get to stay with it--
I always liked art, and stuff, but it wasn't until
I went to East Tennessee State University
that I really saw that I could use it to help me
psychologically and emotionally and socially.
[deep piano music]
I don't have a lot of joy.
Doing the self portraits I get some joy from
because I know that no matter whatever happens to me,
unless I'm in a coma, or have a severe stroke,
or frontal lobe damage, there's no way that I would--
I think even if I had frontal lobe damage
I would still be able to draw my self-portrait everyday.
I think, by now, I would not forget.
I think it's so much a part of my daily life.
Like eating or something, I might forget to eat,
I might forget to bathe, or something like this,
just because I'm wrapped all up in art.
[dramatic music]
[traffic]
[light music]
When it comes to the dark side in the arts
and the tortured soul and the tortured artist,
teachers, educators, and people will like to say that,
"That's a myth and that you don't really need that."
But there is some kind of connection there.
I'm not going to lie, there is some kind of a connection
because a person that is a tortured soul
is a frustrated person, a person that has
some kind of inner demons, or maybe
they don't like mankind, or maybe there's things,
like they love animals and they don't like people;
the way people treat animals, or maybe they
have real serious problems that
they're witness to in these times.
And it bothers them and creates a conflict in them
and then they have no way to really express it.
Art is the best way to express things culturally.
You can go to church and witness, and give your testimony
and say, "Oh, this terrible thing's happened,"
and stuff, and you have a support network in a church
and stuff like that, but you don't--
It's not your own pulpit, like art.
You're a congegration member
or something, and you get a little bit of time
to ask for a prayer, or something like that.
But art is like, you're the preacher,
you're the pulpit, so it gives--
I think it's a great motivational thing,
the dark side, I'm not afraid of it at all.
I'm not afraid to face that because
I'm inspired, by a lot of that
and I'm inspired by some desperation.
Someone a long time ago said,
"Desperation was a great inspirer."
Feeling desperate, and then still continuing
down your artistic path is a great inspirer.
[deep piano music]
The self portraits, I used them
for long time I would tell people
I was growing my feelings.
I was using them to grow my feelings
because I kind of had some sociopathic tendencies
but a lot of people wouldn't necessarily see it
because I can pretend.
I see how other people that are emotional
all the time, and I can imitate it to--
not a great actor, like a professional type of actor
but I can act like I feelings really well.
But I would use the self-portraits
to put my real feelings in there;
I called it my true feelings.
I would use the self-portraits everyday
as a way of purging the negative feelings
and allowing myself to have more positive feelings;
dealing with stress daily, like a therapy.
So I think it's really helped a lot.
[dramatic music]
I don't know if there was a magic, eureka moment,
I don't know if I ever experienced
a magical, eureka moment where I would say,
"I'm going to be a professional, full-time artist."
But I know the day I drew the first self-portrait
and the series of all of them in my life
I knew this was my life calling
because I knew that the possibilities
were endless and infinite.
And I can do them under any circumstances;
if I have a headache, I do a headache one.
I have insomnia or something, I can do an insomnia one,
if I'm totally exhausted I'll draw till I fall asleep.
No matter what the circumstances are
I can do a self-portrait.
It's really ingrained in my central nervous system.
January 6, 1999, I'd been doing a self-portrait
everyday since March 30 of '95
and had never missed a day.
After I did this one, I realized
there's no way I will ever miss a day.
I didn't remember doing it, I had gotten
into that argument with that girl in the other book
where we were breaking up or something.
Well I got really drunk on some cheap liquor
early times and it was a snowstorm, like a blizzard.
I just remember getting lost and falling down in the snow
and I kept finding my way back to the liquor store.
Then I ended up at this girl's house
and she let me in and then I spent the night there,
or whatever, and she took me back the next day.
And I felt so hungover and just awful
and I thought, "Oh man," on the ride back,
I was like, "I did not even do my self-portrait yesterday.
"Oh my god, I missed a day, I can't believe it."
Then when I came into the office
I opened up the door and my book was laid out
just like this, and that picture was on the page.
And I was like, "Oh my gosh," and she
was there with me and she looked at it and said,
"You sounded exactly like that on the phone.
"You sounded exactly like that."
And that's when I knew, because it
was like a drunken blackout,
and I still did the self-portrait.
Then I knew, unless I'm in a coma,
I would never have to worry about missing a day.
[dramatic music]
Oh, I think I was in the process here
of starting to break up with this girl.
Yeah.
Oh, I was crying.
This is probably one of three pictures, total,
out of 9,000 where I drew it while I was crying.
There's another one I did where my aunt,
my great-aunt passed away, and I was crying a little bit.
I don't really cry too terribly much, or anything.
[dramatic music]
Whoa, that break up must have been really troubling.
Yeah, here she goes.
"Doing better."
She was a really short girl.
[dramatic music]
I'm not so concerned with composition
and figure ground and all these types of things.
I don't think of drawing; when I do the self-portraits
I don't think of them as--
I think of them as all as one piece together.
I don't think of each day as an
individual work of art, really at all.
Even though I might like one and share it
with some people, show some people or something.
If it's crappy I don't care because
it's the act that's more important to me
than the final product.
I had this real feeling that filled my whole entire being
that no one way of interpreting myself
should set the standard for the way I see the world.
Because, you know, I was taking art history classes
and things, and all of these artists
like Van Gogh would see the world one way;
Cezanne would see the world another way.
And Paul McCartney, a performance artist,
sees the world another way.
Everybody from hundreds of years
has being seeing the world in their own unique way.
And I thought, the truth to me was that
everyone is different, and then I thought,
"They really encourage you in school
"to develop your own style, your own
"unique way of seeing the world."
And they give you these assignments
where you try out all these different types
of ways of doing different media.
So that way you can get, like, a bigger palette
to interpret your expression.
But I don't know, something in my physical body
was just like, "Wow."
Today is not the same as yesterday
and if I'm happy one day, and then I'm sad
the next day, why do I have to limit myself,
limit my media palette to this one form of expression?
But I knew that if I did this everyday it would come out.
I knew that subconsciously, or even consciously,
I would be able to have a means of expression
that was really super-rich.
[dramatic music]
[island music]
Very rarely will I just be an abstract thing.
Usually I try to at least represent myself somewhat.
Here's me as an island; I made myself an island.
We'll skip that one. [chuckles]
Let's see.
I don't know, these are probably...
I don't know why I'm crawling.
Something happened.
Oh, uh, I was mad about a sandwich.
That's strange.
Going back to this one where I was an island,
where I said I hardly ever draw myself,
like abstract, where there's no representation,
this writing it looks like some kind of nonsense,
"Mudaks and vudaks and woodaduku,
"mujudak mujadak daku maku."
It sounds like the ramblings of something
of a weird person, but really what it is,
is I had read a book by Nietzsche
that said, "I had a pain and call it "dog"."
And one of the first steps toward
controlling pain is to name it.
So what I did, was--
well because you'll probably see later on
in some of the other books,
like some stomach aches and stuff like this.
I was plagued all in my youth with
these terrible, terrible stomach aches.
Well, after I read that I named it "Daku"
and so this like some weird type
of trying to make a little nursery rhyme
or something out of it.
But years later once I started performing
I ended up making an album about
the evolution of my interpretation of pain over the years.
And then the album is called "Daku".
Daku is the negative side and maku's the positive side
that I just have in there.
[dramatic music]
A couple thousand of them are just
a daily purging of anxiety and stress.
Like a mental health maintenance.
Sometimes I will be happy with myself
and do something kind of like that and, like,
I say, "Oh, it's okay to love yourself," or something
[deep piano music]
This one, I think I was a little bit blue,
and little bit depressed.
I had noticed, over the years, that
when I do black and white drawing it's depression
but I was thinking of all these colors,
like the color of life or something.
But it was just a thought, like I didn't
have a color in my life.
So I forced myself to put the color in my life.
It kind of looks stressful now.
[train horn]
Yellow and green to me have always been--
I see other people, other artists' artworks
and they use a lot of yellow and green.
To me it's a sign of mental illness
because yellow, they want some kind
of spirituality and the green, they want
some kind of calming thing.
But when you put--
They're trying to express themselves
and do something, but they're having
some kind of problems and so
a lot of times yellow's spiritual
and then they went to calm,
but when you put the yellow and green together
it's really electrifying and it shows their mania
and their not really aware of it.
I've got this--
probably my heart's cut out, or something.
That girl cheated on me so I
did a yellow and green one on purpose.
I must have been thinking I was having
some type of little bit of mental problem.
[intense music]
I had a spontaneous pneumothorax;
my right lung just popped.
[intense music]
That's my painting from the hospital
and I did this one in the emergency room.
Here's me in the hospital,
and you can't really see it, but they
had a monitor or something, that's an IV bag, I guess.
They had a chest tube and everything.
It was pretty crazy, but it's happened before.
Oh yeah, here's the chest tube right there
and I made myself kind of surreal,
like part of the equipment.
I don't know what kind of medicine
they had me on at that time.
And there's me looking in the mirror.
I finally got up and was able to walk around a little bit
and then look in the mirror.
And then there's the chest tube going in there.
It was real painful.
There's the scab, the scar, not the scab.
I was drawing the open wound that I had.
They don't seal it off whenever you
have an open chest wound.
It has to heal from the inside out,
they can't just stitch it up.
That's what it looked like in the mirror.
Then I got some kind of chest infection.
Here's me as some kind of crazy little voodoo
trying to make that chest would, chest pain thing
into some kind of, like, a talisman,
or some kind of magical thing.
This is after Picasso's "Women of Avignon"
and my open wound is an eye and a mouth and vagina,
for the ego, the superego and the id.
I just put myself in the same poses as the women
from that very famous painting.
And then the scar almost healed up completely
and I'm sitting in this building,
one floor down I lived in a different apartment.
Some guy gave me some religious picture;
I don't have it anymore.
Oh, then I started riding my bike.
I got a bike, that's the day I
got my brand new bike helmet.
And the doctors said, "What can't you do?"
on the follow-up for my pneumothorax.
And I was like, "What do you mean,
"what can't I do? I can do everything.
"I've got a bike and everything."
And they were like, "Really?"
They were expecting me to not be able
to go up and down stairs and stuff,
but it's happened so many times
I've had a pneumothorax, if I get
too stressed out one of my lungs will just pop.
I'm real used to it.
I get a pain in my chest when he's not in his nest.
I can't walk when he's hungry.
I can't sleep when he's lonely.
I've often tried to talk to the Daku
but he doesn't listen very well, either.
He's unruly and I think Daku is deaf.
If I stabbed him I'd be certain of relief.
Daku hates to be petted so I poke at him.
He's outgrowing his tank.
Daku can also eat in two different places at the same time.
He's right here just begging me to stab him,
gut him, gut myself, pull him out
and stomp of the Daku.
Daku is no friend, Daku is killing me!
[dramatic music]
One time when I was, 19,
I had major depression and I stayed in a room,
I was living with my girlfriend at the time
and I stayed in a room for, like,
six months in a straight, hardly ever left
the room but to use the bathroom.
I've had times where I've had
some types of delusions of grandeur.
[dramatic music]
That's a weird one.
Me, like a little kid, holding a teddy bear.
My childhood, I would say, is probably colorful.
I had a single mother for a long time,
I stayed with my grandparents
quite a bit during summers.
I think drew circles prematurely, like age one.
Then it wasn't but a week or two later
I started putting eyes in them.
[dramatic music]
When I was 1 1/2 I was potty trained
and I went straight to school after that.
And was reading when I was two years old
and was in the gifted and talented programs
all through school.
I wasn't really a prodigy or anything
because I never got to nurture it
but then as I got a little bit older
I started not being interested
in school anymore, it was kind of boring.
I felt like they were holding me back.
I was also a latch key kid, so was I home alone a whole lot.
I had wear this awful red yarn with a key on it
and it would rub me all day
because if I lost my key or something
I would have no way to get into the house.
But my mother showed me how to break-in
to the house with a knife through the kitchen window.
When I was 10, I started getting in trouble with the law.
If my mother wasn't coming home after work, I--
All the other kids had to go in at dinner-time,
I could stay outside forever.
But it was dark; I was more scared of the house,
than I was the dark so I started--
By the time I was 11 or 12, I started
breaking into people's houses after they died
and would go through their stuff
and hang out in these other people's houses.
[chuckles] It's a strange thing.
It just my mind would wander, like,
one lady died across the street.
She was elderly and I broke into her house
and I stayed in there for a couple weeks.
I wasn't every missing; I went to school,
come home before my mom got home
and stuff like that, but if I found
some swords, or something from her travels,
I would play with them and give them to the other kids.
I'd steal her TV and stuff. [chuckles]
Just to hang out in the people's houses after they died.
[dramatic music]
I would, rather than play outside
or in some dead person's house
than in my own house because for some reason,
I had this irrational fear, paranoia
of the bad people.
I had really no concept of what they were.
I just had this vague idea that
the bad people were killers.
Anyone whoever got killed was killed
by these mysterious bad people.
One lady down the street, Olga,
she got murdered and they played
the 9-1-1 tape on TV and her husband
had escaped, or something.
He got furloughed or something
from a mental hospital and stabbed her all up
and every time he stabbed her,
he was screaming her name, Olga.
He was going, "Ol-ga, Ol-ga, Ol-ga, Ol-ga,"
like that and then she was screaming to death,
she screamed until she died.
And that really haunted me; that type
of thing really scared me.
So I was just always afraid of these bad people.
I just always thought they were somewhere around.
I had this whole ritual before I went to sleep at night.
I would pretend like I was dead already
so that if the bad people found me and tried to kill me
they would see I was already dead.
And I would have this elaborate set-up
like a funeral or something, and I would sleep
next to the open window in the summertime.
[eerie music]
I was picked on a lot by the older kids
because they could stay out longer,
so if some of these older high school kids,
they would try to beat me up.
Then I would take it out on--
I would just pass the beating down the line.
I would only have one friend at at time;
they would be my best friend, inseparable,
and then I would eventually beat them up
and then look for a new friend
and be their friend for awhile and beat them up.
Then after a while nobody was allowed to play with me
probably by the time I was about 13, I'd say.
I used art a lot of times, at least in
the beginning, a whole lot.
Maybe not the self-portraits, but with the performances,
to purge myself of the trauma.
Traumatic events, I would relay them,
like an exorcism or something, just
let it all out, all of these terrible things.
But my mother, she has no idea,
all these crazy things that went on.
She might remember a few incidents,
or something with me with the police,
but she had no idea the types of things
I was a witness to, or subjected to.
I don't know because when you're a boy
you're supposed to suck it up.
You don't really tell your mother
that Officer [beep], the one you think
is supposed to be helping people
is molesting all the troubled kids.
You don't uh--
You know, you got a single mom
and you're a boy, you just got to suck it up, really.
[dramatic music]
I think this is around the time
that I was graduating.
I graduate from ETSU in the summer of '98,
so there'll probably be some
of the pictures in there about that.
The dorm was like a prison
with the cinder block walls.
I just had these scribbles on this old palette
and it's like some tensions are flying off,
it's a self-constructed wall it looks like
I'm trying to build in my brain.
I really felt comfortable in the college
and the dormitory; I stayed in the dormitory five years,
every semester, even summer school
because it was just convenient,
and stuff, and I didn't mind it.
I been in prison one time, a long time ago,
and I got used to it.
There's some anxiety; that's nuts.
I was under a whole lot of stress going to college.
It was really hard for me to do assignments.
The called the ACLU on me one time
because I sewed my mouth shut for
this photography student.
They had the lawyers come, and they
had this big meeting, and everything.
They had more than one meeting on me.
But was this one was the big one.
And then I had to jump through
a lot of hoops in order to graduate.
Even if my faculty, my teachers, advisors
and stuff would say, "Oh, we recommend," at the evaluation,
" you skip two or three years worth of stuff
"and just take 5,000 level advanced
"classes, electives and stuff like that."
The head chairman said, "No, if he wants
"to graduate he has to jump through every hoop,
"he has to do everything just like everybody else
"and he does not get special treatment."
That guy really held me back, big time.
And I didn't like to do assignments.
They would have me make a painting;
like in the syllabus it would say, I think one of the said,
"Make a drawing that weighed five pounds,"
and I told the teacher--
I mean, that stuff really stressed me out,
kept me up at night, all night, and I would think,
"How am I going to approach this
"and not fly off the handle and get upset?"
But I would say, "If I make any drawing
"that weighs five pounds, it's automatically garbage."
It doesn't have anything to do with me.
I have my life purpose, I'm going to draw myself
everyday for the rest of my life.
If I make a drawing that weighs five pounds,
I don't want it; that's silliness.
And they would say, "You have to do this,
"you have to do that."
I would never do it; I would never do it.
[dramatic music]
That's the last day of classes.
Last class, last exam, last hoop, last jump.
I look kind of blue, kind of down,
but I probably was really relieved to get out of there.
This is funny; here's me in a diaper with a ski mask on.
I don't know why, but at the time,
still to me it speaks to me something about
being a baby and in a violent ski mask.
And I made this nail-studded paddle
for an Intro to Sculpture class
and on one side of the paddle,
I don't know if you can really tell,
I painted welts, and flesh-colored welts
so it looked, like, you saw that nails
and it was like a before and after.
But the teacher did not want me to come back into class
because she thought I was going to spank myself with it.
But my girlfriend at the time took
all of these Polaroids of me
with the ski mask and the diaper
and I would just scribble red pen on it
and make it look like some kind
of spank yourself or something.
And I would leave these--
I still have quite a few of them left,
like probably 20 or so, and I would leave them
in people's places, like in their car,
or different stuff and it was
kind of like a funny thing to do.
People would find it and then they'd feel like--
[laughs] They'd freak out. [laughs]
One time I left one under--
I was house-sitting and they had
a big tub of sour cream in the refrigerator
and I left a Polaroid of me in the ski mask
and the diaper under it.
Well, apparently that sour cream
had gone totally sour and they never moved it
until they moved out of the apartment.
So a year later of something, when they moved out,
they were cleaning out the refrigerator
and they found it and they thought,
"Oh my gosh! We've been violated.
"Some psychopath freak has come in here
"and took pictures of the ski mask and a diaper."
But then they saw the tattoos and they realized it was me.
[laughs] And I just think that's funny, sometimes.
I still do it, but, you never know what happens
if the people meant to find them will find them.
That's just a regular; probably some anxiety.
Then, my best friend, Don Morgan,
shot himself in the head.
Don, he had some mental problems.
He had gone to some kind of inpatient treatment
for a couple of days and his girlfriend
had me go over and try to clean up the bloodstain
before his parents came from Chattanooga.
And the more I was scrubbing it,
the bigger the puddle kept getting
until, finally, I just left it.
I don't know how you clean up that stuff.
He was in the ICU and I was wanting
to trade places with him and stuff.
And then I had to call his family
and I was like a robot, or something.
Then I had to get to the free mental health
and tell them, "Oh my gosh, my best friend
"shot himself in the head."
Oh, here's me crying again; it looks more
like I was trying to force myself to cry.
I don't think I was really crying too much.
Actually, that looks like a real teardrop.
This is probably a water color,
chalk, that is some tears on there, so I guess,
yeah I was probably really crying.
But it's not too many times I do that.
[dramatic music]
[knocking]
Hey, come in; kitchen.
To the left is the closet.
People tell me that I'm like
some frightening and some scary.
Well, now, because of the drug things online
people say I'm an attention whore
or I'm a liar, like I make these things up
to get attention, or you know,
because I want publicity.
Here's the bathroom if you need to use it.
- And this is the cool shot, right there.
I do a lot of painting in the bathtub to relax.
So those water color crayons in the corner are for drawing.
- [Voiceover] Nice, cool, okay.
They say I'm doing some gimmicks to make money
but I'm like, "Oh my gosh, they're in some fantasy land."
Because if I had some money, I would not
be living in this type of place.
I would not be living in squalor.
That's how a lot of people see me.
Okay, then here, are my releases,
basically my merchandise,
like old stock, that's my inventory stock.
And these are the ones that haven't released yet,
that are still being developed, but they're still products.
I was having a really strange experience
where I was waking up with seizures
and I was having a fit and the world
would be too bright, my fists would
be all clenched up and I'd be shaking, like this.
And I would have this feeling that I
was being born, physically, for the first time ever.
And then these are documents of projects past.
No, not these two, but these boxes, and these things here.
And after the first couple mornings waking up
like this, with the seizure fit and everything,
and being born for the first time, it was really scary.
And then the third day, the third morning,
I wake up, I'm twisted around with
the blanket all wrapped up around me
and I'm thinking, "I'm a breach birth,"
like the umbilical cord or something's
wrapped up around my neck, and I'm choking
and I'm dying, I'm being born, and the world's too bright
and I'm shaking, and then I said to Nicole,
"Oh my gosh, what if I'm a C-Section?"
This is art supplies and media.
And then these are the photographs
that I find in the trash constantly.
Then, the next morning after that,
after having a wonderful, peaceful sleep,
I wake up, I'm having a seizure,
I'm thinking I'm being born again
for the first time, physically.
I called it a near-birth experience.
And there's walkie talkies just going off over my head,
like, "Kssh, calling 124, kssh,"
and all this stuff--
And then this little closet is a clothes closet.
And I can barely walk, I'm practically crawling
and using the walls with my shoulder
to get to the front door and I look through the peephole
and there's cops here, and cops here,
and my neighbor across the hall door's wide open
and there's a dead lady laying
in the middle of the kitchen floor.
And so I went from a near-birth experience
to a instant tunnel-vision of death.
These are DVDs, art films, art DVDs
that I used to really love but I
don't have time to watch anymore.
That's the only time I've every really contemplated
moving out of here, I thought, "It's getting too close."
Then I opened up the door and looked
and they picked her up in a sheet
like she was on the streets of Syria
and they just slung her onto to the gurney
right in front of my door.
Then the next morning I woke up
and I didn't have the seizure,
pushed the button for the elevator door,
door opens up and there's a dead body on there
with the cops, and the cop's like,
"You can't come on, on this one."
And I was like, "Oh my god, it's closing in."
And these people next door to me
used to party all the time and they hadn't been partying
and I was like, "Oh my god, if this guy's dead
"I'm outta here," because it's just coming too close to me.
The last closet is the potluck closet.
And it's got tools, bicycle pump, all my books.
I don't have a whole lot of books.
Even though I don't socialize and interact
with these people, it was just getting to be too much death,
and with this near-birth experience, seizure craziness,
that's the only time I've ever thought about leaving.
I love this place so much,
no matter what happens, I love it.
[dramatic music]
When I first moved into this building
in 2000, or something, my original goal
was to make a documentary about all
of the interesting people that live
in this building, from veterans, to elderly people,
just all different types of people.
And this building is really well known
for having a whole lot of interesting characters.
So I was going to do a documentary
but then I never felt comfortable.
Most people don't even leave their apartment
and they're all on drugs, some of them
are so messed up, on psyche meds,
that the case manager once told me
that if she could get them out of their chair,
recliner, lounge chair, three times a day,
that was a good day for them.
And it was really boring, I never did a documentary.
I started a new sketchbook and this is what I wrote:
Theme: pill, medicine and drug experiment
Every single person in my apartment building
takes pills and or drugs; I live in a big building.
They say someone can get every kind
of pill there is in my apartment.
The experiment is to take every single kind
and draw myself under the influence
of every drug and every pill and note the changes.
That was my big delusion of grandeur,
I could take all these pills.
And the first day I got a hold
of something called Butalbitals,
they were pain pills; I took four of them.
Then the next day I took Valium.
Then I took a break from the pills
and I drank all these liquor drinks.
I was sitting at the bar drawing myself
it was looking pretty good but
then it got to where I had get someone
to make a map of how I get back home.
I was just scribbling and stuff,
I was all messed up on liquor.
This one I took some Percocets.
This is Lortabs, it made my nose really itchy.
Didn't do too much else to me, just made my nose itch.
And this one is huffing Nitrous Oxide, laughing gas.
And then this one is Xanax;
this one was my favorite of all.
It made me feel most earthy and peaceful.
Then this one, someone came--
All these pills were things people just gave to me
because they heard about my project.
Every time someone would give me something
they would tell someone about it,
so people were just knocking on my door
left and right and saying, "When I was a kid
"we used to do this; or here's this."
This girl cleaned out here medicine cabinet
and she gave me one blue, one milligram Xanax,
one and a half rocks of [mumbles],
one Vicodin and then a totem pole.
And I just took them all.
Originally I was going to do one a day
but then by the time I think I got to about--
This one says I took a day off
and did nothing but Percocet.
So I think I was already doing more than one a day
but I'd wait until it wore off and I felt normal,
and then I would do another one.
But by this day I was taking more
than one thing at a time.
It was getting to be quite a bit.
Then I did mushrooms, the psychedelic mushrooms.
Right as it started kicking in,
my eyes started getting bigger,
and colors, and then my whole--
It's weird, all these pixels started radiating
and flying out of my face.
By the time it got to here I couldn't
even draw anymore,so it ended.
I mean, the drawing ended at a good point,
I got a lot of details and stuff.
This one, after that, the next day
I went to a psychiatrist and I said,
"Here's my pictures on all these different drugs,
"I'm doing this experiment."
Nobody had given me anything else
after the mushrooms and I said,
"I just want a prescription for one pill
"of every type of thing I haven't done yet."
And what he did instead was he thought
I was psychotic for taking all these different pills.
So he gave me a prescription for 100 Seroquel pills,
which are heavy tranquilizers and it
was the worst experience of my life.
The worst drug I have ever ingested
was a Seroquel tranquilizer pill.
You can see I was having to fight it
the whole time, to be just to draw.
I started off doing the proportions,
getting the ears and the cheeks and the eyes
and everything right, and then all of a sudden
something inside me, like an inner voice said,
"Don't look at the mirror!"
So then I just kept drawing in the book.
And then the same voice said,
"Don't look at your book!"
Then I thought, "Oh my gosh, I may need to lay down."
And I looked over at my bed and it said,
"Don't look at your bed," like that,
and I was just stuck.
The medicine was trying to cut my brain off
from my body.
It really effects you, probably your nervous system
and I had to physically force myself
to keep drawing through the worst feeling ever.
And it was then that I realized
that when they shoot a lion with
a tranquilizer dart, or if a bear gets trapped in a tree
and they need to shoot it with a tranquilizer dart,
it always looks to me like it's drunk,
like in La-la Land, but it's not.
In real life that lion still wants
to chew their throats out of all those people
It just can't move; that inner voice is saying,
"Don't rip their throats out," like that.
So it's scary, one of the most terrifying
things I've ever experienced.
Then, this is Ambien.
And I kept getting lower and lower to the floor,
by the time I got to my body, my arm
was not even attached in the same place.
Then Buspar, I snorted--
I crushed it up and snorted it
because they said it would act faster that way.
Then I drank a bunch of cough syrup.
And my friend, when she saw this, she said,
"You're giving yourself Down Syndrome,"
but I already knew that, kind of, subconciously
because I found this Korean book in the trash
and found a picture of a girl with Down Syndrome
and put it on there.
And I was drunk, almost hallucinating on cough syrup
and I went to this Chinese restaurant up the street
to ask what this meant because I knew
there was the lady at the, when you walk in,
the greeter, was Korean, so I was trying
to find out what it meant and she wrote something
and that said, "A very beautiful woman."
So here's me and some Korean; it's very strange.
Then this was huffing lighter fluids.
Some old man knocked on my door and he said,
"When I was a kid we used to huff lighter fluid,"
and he just stuffed his hand, gave me some lighter fluid.
He said, "Put it on a sock, stick in a brown bag,
"and just breathe that stuff and you'll get real messed up."
And I did it, but I really liked the fact
that I subconsciously picked this metallic crayons
because it really shows the fumes.
When I look at it I can still smell it
and see the fumes and the blurry eye,
like that metal smell or something.
Then this one was Ritalin.
It didn't really do too much to me, really.
Like, in the other books you've seen more wild.
Then this one, I made PCP.
My face, you can see it's coming off in sections
and then this is some vomit, not in real life,
this is drawing, painted, but I vomited.
I had eaten a sandwich earlier that day
that had some tomato in it and then did
the PCP and everything, then someone knocked on my door
and said, "Oh, I heard you was on the Appalachian Trail,
"and you got a lot of pictures and stuff."
So invited them all in and I was sitting around
telling 40 different people that--
I was showing them the Appalachian Trail book
and then something told me,
"Bryan, these people aren't real."
And I was like, "Whoa, this is messed up!"
Then there'd a knock at the door
and they'd say, "Oh hi, Bryan, I heard
"you were on the Appalachian Trail."
I let them all in, 20,30 people
and after, like, a half hour or so,
showing them all that book and telling them all
these crazy stories, BAM, these people aren't real. [laughs]
And I would totally freak out.
After I realized the third or fourth time
that this kept happening, I went and vomited
and all this red stuff was coming out
of my nose and I thought,
"Oh my god, my brain is falling out of my nose."
But it wasn't; it was that tomato
that was in that sandwich.
But I was on PCP and I thought my brain was falling out.
And then that's when I quit.
I mean, I've done others since then
but that's when that little experiment ended.
I couldn't keep going on like that; it was crazy.
[dramatic music]
When I was living with my aunt,
my second cousin, which was a small child,
and her mother, and my grandmother
and my great-aunt, there was a lot of chaos.
I was living in a trailer in central Virginia
and a lot of arguing and typical family-type of drama
but it was somewhat stressful because
the child was involved.
My great-aunt, she was in the last stages of Alzheimer's
and couldn't remember anything past 18 seconds,
so she was constantly repeating the same questions.
My grandmother had a couple strokes,
there was just all this stress around me.
And so I thought, "Well, I'd like to go to China."
I thought if I went to China and I heard
all of these people talking in Chinese
I wouldn't mind, like, I could live with that.
Then I thought, "Well, if I go to China,
"I've heard so much stuff," like
they drown their girl babies,
there's just so much outrageous things.
All my life, from elementary school on,
I've heard all these outrageous things, and I thought,
"Well, if I go there, I better learn Chinese first,
"in case the people started yelling at me
"I'll know what they're saying."
So for 6 hours a day, everyday, 7 days a week
for 9 months straight, I taught myself Mandarin Chinese.
While I was doing this I would go,
every now and then, to the Chinese restaurant in town
and I could practice, and say some things.
Then there was a waiter I befriended
and he would come over once a week
and I would teach him English.
We didn't really do too much; I did
the Chinese all on my own, but I really
tried to help him learn English.
But somewhere along that line I thought to myself,
"Well, if I learn Mandarin Chinese,"
and I know it really well, I go to some city in China
where there's no foreigners at all, no tourism,
no white people; I'm the only white person there
and I tell jokes in Chinese and do stand-up comedy,
I thought, "Well, I could become
"a famous comedian instantly."
Because they have so many millions of people.
Then I thought, "If I do stand-up comedy
"in China, within nine months I'll have my own sitcom,"
and stuff, like Seinfeld or something,
And then I thought, "Well, right after
"that I'll be doing blockbuster movies,
I'll become a superstar, a Chinese superstar."
And I really believed that this could be a real possibility.
Then I did a Chinese wedding in New York
after about nine months of teaching myself Mandarin
I performed my, I wrote a routine and everything,
and I performed my stand-up comedy at a Chinese wedding
and it was a big hit, and I thought,
"Well, this is a real possibility.
"I'm doing it, I'm going to China,
"I'm going to become a famous stand-up comedian.
"Within a year, or a little over a year,
"I'll be a Chinese superstar."
Then I get to China and after a couple days
I met a guy on the street that had lived
in the United States for quite a while
and he spoke English and I said,
"Where is the stand-up comedy?
"I want to be a stand-up comedian."
And he said, "We don't have that here."
and I was like, "Oh my gosh."
All my dreams were completely shattered.
Then when I found myself back in the United States
I thought, "I cannot be a stand-up comedian."
There's thousands and thousands of stand-up comedians,
everyone wants to be a stand-up comedian,
there's just so much luck involved
and all this other type of business trying to do that.
And then I'm here, back in this nasty place
where I was a long time ago.
And I was like, "The hell with it,
"I'm going to start stand-up tragedy."
Instead of making strangers laugh in public
I'm going to make them cry.
I started doing it at this coffee shop.
I was nervous, like stage fright,
so I read other people's poetry,
or some writings, but I read it my own way
because, see, I'd been doing the self-portraits
the whole time, for over 10 years.
It was putting all of my feelings
into a little 8.5 by 11.5 inch sketchbook page.
So I was constantly putting all my feelings
into this confining little place.
Then when I started to decide,
"Okay, I'm going to do this other stuff,"
it was an explosion of emotion.
I was bottled up into such
a little tiny place, surface area.
When I started reading the other people's poetry
I just went off, I just read it like I wanted to;
as aggressive as I wanted, as deranged sounding,
or whatever I wanted, I just did it really outrageously
Then I started writing my own stuff.
I'd read these other people's things;
I did it twice, reading other people's stuff,
then I wrote one thing, or two things,
and then I went and did it again the next week
that way, with my own stuff and it
had even more emotion in it.
Then one of the side goals in my mind
was to make psychopaths or sociopaths have feelings.
I've been concerned with this quite a bit.
So I tried to use videos, microphone.
My name is Bryan Lewis Saunders,
I'm 16 and I'm allergic to popcorn.
Sounds, experimental music to evoke
as much feeling into people as possible.
I was hoping I could do it so intense that even
a psychopath would have feelings and be upset.
I was a little bit delusional because no matter what
the people, the psychopaths would take it the wrong way.
You can say anything about some animal torture
or something and they will think it's funny.
It just depends on who the people are
but the psychopath that's there in the audience,
you not doing nothing for them but entertaining them.
They got off on some crazy stuff.
[melancholy music]
[eerie music]
The word "daku" has many definitions,
like love, time, God, or any other word.
Its meaning is its use.
By this I simply mean that its definition
lies in our daily conversation.
So for someone to say, "What is God,"
"What is time," or "What is Daku,"
creates linguistic superstitions.
It creates a mystery where there really isn't one.
We know what it is by how we use it.
Before I divulge the impact that Daku has had on my life
it is both necessary and vital
that I first share with you the origins of Daku.
[eerie music]
My first experience with the mysterious stomach pain
occurred when I was 16.
I was at a movie theater with a friend of mine,
named Craig Whines, eating popcorn in an aisle seat
when WHAM, I got broadsided by
the most excrutiating gigabolt of pain
comprehensible to man.
It doubled me over and my right arm stiffened
and stopped me from falling and rolling
all the way out into the aisle.
I could have make a somersault out of it.
But you don't show pain in public.
After the initial shock, it felt as if
the whole left side of my abdomen
was being pinched by an industrial strength metal clothespin
that had been heated up and stuck
where a drill bit is supposed to go
and then run in reverse, drawing me up tighter
and tighter until is stripped around,
triple knotted, burning more tissue in my gut
and I couldn't move.
Emotionally, fear and anger are brother and sister,
stay with me here.
My anticipation of more pain equals fear
and my perception of doctors as ignorant
equals anger, and when both of these feelings
taboo fornicate inside my head
I became the proud father of a bouncing,
new baby bad blood emotional incest offspring
of hatred towards man like none I've ever known before.
I have this little pet; it's name is Daku.
All of his teeth and claws came in,
I no longer eat, I only feed him.
He can't be killed unless I die.
He is an invisible part of me.
Daku is bad mystery.
No one, not even doctors with all of their machines
can see him, machines might make him high
but medicine makes him angry.
And we don't want him angry!
He digs and claws, meats and tears,
rips and gnaws and chews tunnels in my gut
always moving forwards.
Sometimes I feel like rescuing him
by taking a knife and freeing him.
Cut Daku out!
Sometimes I think he's cancer.
Daku says "yes", but the doctors say "no."
I get a pain in my chest when he's not in his nest.
I can't walk when he's hungry,
I can't sleep when he's lonely.
I've often tried to talk to the Daku
but he doesn't listen very well, either.
He's unruly and I think Daku is deaf.
If I stabbed him I'd be certain of relief.
Daku hates to be petted so I poke at him.
He's outgrowing his tank.
Daku can also eat in two different places at the same time.
He's right here just begging me to stab him,
gut him, gut myself, pull him out
and stomp on the Daku.
Daku is no friend, Daku is killing me!
["killing me" echoes]
[crowd cheers]
[melancholy paino music]
[upbeat music]
A lot of the time people, I think,
when it comes to me they're just trying
to figure out if what I'm doing is even real or not.
I don't fault them with it; it's just the times we live in.
I consider myself weird, I know I'm weird.
If you isolate yourself, you develop weird ideas.
I wouldn't film me walking through here, though.
Let's take these stairs.
Because I interact socially with people online
and with the phone, I'm not totally alone
and I've got friends that can say,
"You're getting a little bit--
"That's too much, that's too weird,
"That's not really the politically correct way
"to go about expressing that,"
I get feedback.
I will say that I'm definitely strange,
I would definitely say I would think of myself as weird.
Some people might think of me as creepy;
I don't think I'm creepy, I think
that people might be creeps themselves
and see something of that creepy nature
in them, and then be like, "Oh, that's creepy."
because it maybe affects them.
I don't set out to be like, "Oh, I'm going
"to be as creepy as possible," or something like that.
If I was going to do that, I'd be a real creep,
I mean I would creep people out big-time,
more than they could handle it.
I don't have any desire to do that.
I'm sure that some people think that I'm creepy.
But I tell stories like this.
It doesn't haunt me so much, like,
I don't still fear the bad people.
I really became one of them.
I still have this negative self-image a lot of times,
like, oh I'm a bad person, I became one of the bad people.
But people that know me now, and don't know
anything about me in this past
other than what I say during my performances
or in my books, or dreams and things.
They would never think I was a bad person.
I use the art, really, to change my life
and become a good person.
I need to more accepting that I am a good person,
try to be a good person
but I fear under certain stress,
or some situations, social situations,
I could easily revert; I have that ingrained into me
that kind of anger, and lack of emotions sometimes
and I have to try to really stay focused.
And I isolate myself, really,
so I don't get involved in that.
[dramatic music]
When it comes to the dark side
in the arts, and the tortured soul,
the tortured people are the ones that give a shit.
The tortured people are the people that care.
So there's nothing wrong with that.
And art is probably the greatest tool
we have right now to deal with it,
to deal with all of it.
I'd say there's a real great link.
Some kids get into art because
they don't know what else to do,
so at the universities they'll tell them,
"Well, you don't have to be tortured,
"you don't have to do this, you can just like images,"
but a lot of times I think there's something lacking.
I would suggest that if someone is not upset
they want to be an artist, they like art,
they think it's really interesting, and they're not upset,
I'd say find something to get upset about.
Go there and then you can really be inspired
and do some great stuff that will provoke
other people to use their brains.
Because there's not even enough people
in the Western world really even using
their brains anymore, and it gets worse
as time goes by, that they're doing less thinking,
more repeating, more cut and paste.
So I would recommend to people
get tortured, become a tortured soul, really.
I don't suggest go out and get drunk
or create problems for yourself,
but I would just say, "Find out what bothers you
"and explore it, find out what upsets you,
"find out what really gets your goat,
"what really pisses you off, and then explore that."
Ask yourself, "Why is that, what is it about me
"that makes react this way, or feel this way,"
and then go there.
And they're going to do some interesting stuff
no matter who they are; whether
they're really that tortured or not.
You don't have to be insane and ranting
and raving, and flopping around
and cutting parts of your body off
to do great art; you just have to give a shit.
You just have to care about something.
And not enough people do.
I would just recommend people care.
[dramatic music]
[theme music]