My performance art hero and good friend John M. White has left this world just shy of his 88th birthday.

I first met him in 1991 when I wandered into his performance art class at the Univ. of California, Irvine.

I didn’t know what performance art was, not really, or that the burly, mustached guy teaching it was a famous painter & sculptor, and also one of the early pioneers of L.A.’s performance art scene in the 70s & 80s.

But what he taught blew my mind. He helped becoming-artists dig deep, and many went full throttle, embodying the surreal to unleash emotional undercurrents that were often pure chaos & danger & gorgeous & that sometimes escalated so quickly that John had to grab the reins.

I saw artists throw themselves into walls and out of trees, risk knees & elbows rolling hard across concrete floors, bare their souls while eating lipstick, tap-dance across live electrical wires, one guy played hockey with a cow tongue, somebody else prattled Walt Whitman while pulling out a loaded gun (the gun was a terrible cliche, been done at least a hundred times & the student got expelled, but holey moley). Turning people into anarchic provocateurs wasn’t necessarily John’s intention, but it happened often because he was so good at providing safe spaces without limits.

After college, he took me around and introduced me to kick-ass L.A. performance art venues & artists who took me in like family, and John took me in too. I ate meals at his house. He gave me my first paid art jobs (I painted objects for his art installations around town, Warhol-factory-style). I met his wildly talented wife Sylvia, a driven art dealer/curator who went on to open successful galleries from NY to LA to Mexico while running a business that taught artists how to market themselves. And I met their hilarious little daughter Rachel, who John brought to class so she could critique students’ performance art pieces. “Did you like that performance?” John would ask, to which Rachel would often scream, “NO!” Lolol. (She liked my pieces, thank god!)

John started his 5x5x5 series in L.A. (five 5-minute pieces by 5 artists). The show later moved up to Ventura, which is home to incredible artists and amaaaazing audiences who are game for anything. Hundreds of performances (maybe thousands) erupted in gallery spaces with artists sweating, gambling everything, audiences thrilled & packed to the walls, the things we saw were a miracle, and this went on for decades.

A formally trained painter, John’s need to make art was rabid. Walk into his studio day or night, and you’d see at least 5 paintings going at once on a wall, paint dripping down to the carpet. His paintings are now part of American history in collections at the Guggenheim, LACMA, Smithsonian, Broad, and many others. His favorite studio was a Ventura strip mall storefront located next to a police substation — the cops would drive by the studio slowwww nightly to see what latest wild things were on display.

An avid fisherman and insatiable flirt, he was constantly surrounded by adoring friends and family and artists, and he was always quick to offer art advice, especially when it came to performance. Since he never stopped critiquing my work, I guess I was his student for 34 years (and I’d gladly take 34 more).

I got to hug him just hours before he departed. I reminded him of his favorite performances — some of these included a 6-foot penis; his student Beth who stood on a busy street corner holding a sign that read “Will F**k For Money” that almost caused several traffic accidents; and, the guy (we could never remember his name) who peed on the audience and almost started a riot but still got applause. John also liked the time I did a testicle puppet show, and the time when I asked fellow artists to sell me their souls for a dollar (many did, and I still have those signed contracts! lol).

A memorial was held at the 5x5x5 in Ventura at Art City this past week. The gallery was packed to the gills with artists and friends, and I had the honor of performing a flurry of John White bits referencing his life and long performance art history that spanned 50 years (not easy to sum up in 5 minutes, but I tried!).

Since John was once a pro golfer, it seemed necessary to dump hundreds of golf balls into the audience at the end. Handwritten on each was “87″ (John’s age) and the initials “JW.” Watching everyone trying to exit afterward with all those balls underfoot was a slowgoing delight John would’ve enjoyed.

On my way up to the show from L.A., I stopped off to pick up John’s ashes, which were packed into a container held in a red velvet bag. It was surreal, driving to the 5x5x5 with John’s remains in my car. When I reached Ventura, I put the bag into a black box John had given me in the 1990s, carried it into the gallery, and set it on a tall white pedestal (John would’ve loved that! lol) so he could be physically present for the 5x5x5 one last time.

If you’d told me in 1991 that 34 years later, I would carry John White in my arms into a Ventura gallery where he would sit on stage to watch me perform a retrospective of his life’s work, I’m not sure I would’ve believed it. Talk about full circle.

The final performance of the 5x5x5 memorial was a great piece by Steve Nagler of The Shrimps, who set a tiny empty chair made of matchsticks on fire. We all watched it burn to ash. It was moving, gorgeous, and the perfect finale.

I feel insanely lucky that I got to be part of these many amazing adventures, all thanks to my longtime mentor, doting husband and father, artist and teacher extraordinaire, and loyal friend to so many, John M. White.

Performance art saved many lives (including mine), thanks to him.

(In case it’s not 100% obvious that I’m a rabid John White fan, check out this happy birthday video I made for him in 2021…hahaha. And of course, my novel about performance art is dedicated to John too).

And for making John’s memorial a massive success, THANK YOU to Ventura’s 5x5x5 artists & wild fans for your endless talents + support, to brilliant musician Steve Aguilar for organizing & hosting & playing guitar, to Paul Lindhard & Art City Studios for hosting the 5x5x5 all these years, and to my cheerleader, photographer, logician, & creative partner KayDee Kersten for all her magic. xoxo

I hope you had an amazing New Year! I’m writing this from a scary windstorm that’s walloping L.A. at the moment, but even the growing mess of leaves and branches in my front yard can’t deter my excitement for 2025, which promises to be full of more art and psychic weirdness.

For starters, I just shot a short experimental film called Untranslatable, where I recorded myself telling an impassioned story in gibberish, then returned afterward to “translate” it into a cohesive narrative using subtitles.

Speaking gibberish without an internal narrative in mind feels really strange. Unlike a textual narrative that builds on the memory of what’s been said, gibberish builds on the memory of the spontaneous feelings you’ve surfaced in yourself out of nowhere.

Listening to the gibberish repeatedly later until a story emerges feels similar to how Surrealists employed automatic writing to plumb their unconscious minds for universal symbols and hidden meaning. It’s like listening to a foreign film whose language you don’t speak, but where you still try to make meaning out of a speaker’s raw human sounds, gestures, and tone.

Interpreting gibberish after-the-fact raises interesting questions: When does authorship truly occur? How does context (such as the addition of subtitles) change content? And, what role does the unconscious play in providing meaning, especially where a work was partially created unconsciously?

On the performance art front, I kicked off the new year by performing Alien Tuning Fork, a new piece that explores my past encounters with possible extraterrestrial intelligences. (Not only does it involve forks, I also discovered I can break a fork in half with my toes — how cool is that?!). I unveiled the new work at the 5x5x5 show at Art City, a killer art space in Ventura, CA that featured a bunch of fun performances for a standing-room-only audience that was positively on fire! You can check out Tuning Fork photos, and I hope to post some video of it soon. Special thanks to Ventura’s Steve Aguilar for producing the 5x5x5, and for his devastating piano work.

And, last but not least, in January ’25 I presented results again from my psychic experiment, this time at the International Remote Viewing Association (IRVA), an organization dedicated to exploring the science, mystery, and utility of remote viewing. I was a little nervous presenting to luminaries in the remote viewing field (some had worked on the U.S. Government’s top secret Star Gate project in the 1970s & 1980s), but the audience was incredibly kind, excited by my research, and super supportive during the Q&A with a ton of great ideas for future research directions. What an amazing and humbling experience. Thank you for inspiring me, IRVA!

May your 2025 be magical! If you’re interested in watching Untranslatable or checking out some performance art (I hope to produce a show in L.A. this summer!) check back here! xoxo

I hope you had a great summer — how’s it September already?! I’ve been keeping busy writing, training for my next 100K race, keeping the world safe from hackers, and working on paranormal projects.

I’m super excited to announce that I’ll be presenting at the 42nd Society for Scientific Exploration convention Sept. 27-29, where scientists will offer the latest paranormal research on nonphysical beings, crop circles, Tesla, tuning forks, energy healing, and more!

In my talk, Psychic Hacking: Using Remote Viewing to Steal Computer Data, I’ll present evidence from my Ph.D. research showing that psychics can use remote viewing to steal computer data (and possibly even national secrets) from thousands of miles away. Pretty wild!

The conference is streaming online this year, so if you’re into fringe science & the paranormal, check it out at www.scientificexploration.org.

….Andddd, I just learned that my dark caper-comedy screenplay, TWO ARTISTS KIDNAP ELON MUSK, is an official selection at the 2024 Austin Comedy Film Festival!

Adapted from my novel, two performance artists are driven over the edge by their soul-sucking jobs, so they plot the ultimate performance: to kidnap their billionaire boss Elon Musk, and turn him into a performance artist.

Two strong female protagonists? A villainous Elon Musk smoking out with bad boy Joe Rogan? Madcap action and art with danger and absurdity? I guarantee it!

RIP Jerry Springer. Full disclosure: I loved watching him continue what Donahue, Geraldo, Howard Stern, & Les Crane (1960′s) turned into a live-action tabloid art form. It was impossible to look away. Gimme that lurid sleaze, those profanity-laden fistfights, hurled chairs, all of it — our own American style of rough-and-ready sideshow performance, like watching grainy Kenneth Anger films live mixed with Harmony Korine…. Yeah, it was trashy (and probably partly scripted) and childishly ridiculous and definitely exploitative, but it was also reflective of people I knew and saw growing up….the 1970s-1980s were especially sleazy, gritty, and violent in my formative experience. I especially loved the episodes where people in the margins were given a voice, even if it was sensationalized by the form — maybe seeing Springer episodes like “I’m a witch” or “I like to cross-dress” that were considered so shocking back then helped set the stage for some level of normalization and equity that will eventually come. History will judge. But for sure, those episodes connected with the creative, emotive, sensitive, scared, and wilder parts of me that were rejected (often violently) by my peers — somehow I was not alone. And watching all the cro-magnon haters who Springer would bring on stage to create drama? Maybe seeing them helped steel us collectively to battle the ignorant haters still burning books and banning drag shows today.

Watch this clip of tabloid talker Les Crane in 1964 ask a male guest questions about a thing called “homosexuality.” This was ground-breaking for TV. And as archaic and weirdly quaint as this footage looks, one day people will look back on Jerry Springer episodes and probably feel the same about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev387WTquB8

My psychic extravaganza is finally almost here! As part of my Ph.D. program in Parapsychology (the study of the paranormal), I’m conducting a public psychic experiment to see if people can use psychic powers to see data inside computers.

If you think psychic powers are probably real (and ESPECIALLY if you think you might be psychic), I hope you’ll participate! Starting October 23, point your browser at www.psychicexperiment.org and have at it! 3 participants will also be randomly selected to win a $200 Amazon gift card!

Andddd if you’ll be near Ventura, California on November 4th, swing by the Art City Gallery and Studios, where I’ll be unleashing a new performance art piece with an array of awesome performers! 8PM and FREE!

I can’t believe it’s been so many months since my last post. This is the slowest diary everrrr!

As always, I’ve got new performance art and short film projects in the works — and I’m thrilled to say my TV pilot script The Occultist was a semi-finalist in the 2021 L.A. Screenplay Awards, and also in the L.A. Crime and Horror Film Festival — yayyy! My insanely creative pardner KayDee is also crushing it on the Producing front, most recently on the set of Friday Night Vibes, with Tiffany Haddish.

But at the moment, the majority of my time is being devoted to getting my Parapsychology Ph.D. dissertation up and running. I’m super excited and don’t want to say too much yet, except that it involves an experiment to measure E.S.P. ability in cybernetic ways that cross into The Matrix and Johnny Mnemonic territories. Stay tuned — I’ll be posting here when the experiment website goes public this summer, and I’d love for you to participate!

I also quietly launched my shamanic practice. I’m limiting my number of clients at the moment, but I’m already receiving strong interest, which is encouraging. Part of my recent journey has been mapping my shamanic lineage, which I’ve managed to trace back to Norse and Sámi ancestors who worshipped Odin and nature near the Arctic Circle. I’m continuing to train at the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, and deepening my connections to magical ancestors I sense are still around (and who were likely responsible for initiating my shamanic calling that began when I was a kid).

On the running front, I’m training for another 50K (33mi) ultramarathon race in August, and last fall I qualified for the 2023 Boston Marathon, running my 26.2-mile qualifying race in Big Bear, California in 3 hours, 16 minutes, which beat the qualifying standard by 10 minutes — not bad. See you next Spring, Boston!

2021 has been a wild ride, and it’s not even halfway done.

Due to Covid, this year hasn’t exactly been rife with in-person performance art opportunities, but Ventura’s 5x5x5 series curated by John M. White marched bravely onward via video, thank God.

So, after workshopping pieces in my backyard with mannequin parts, dirt, ladders, invisible skateboards, and bananas, I finally came up with something crazy from my childhood called 1979 Norwegian Choreography for Skateboard & Banana — check out the pics & video! The piece is simple, but it took 3 bone-jarring days to choreograph and shoot, so by the end, my legs were DESTROYED from all of that faux-skateboard jumping.
 

I just finished writing THE OCCULTIST, a new streaming/TV series pilot about a failed archeologist who becomes an occult detective — I’m so so so excited about this one, because it combines my eternal love of Indiana Jones and my obsession with the occult that dates back to my childhood — and the script just became a finalist at the 2021 Los Angeles International Underground Film Festival — yesssss!

Plus, DARK SILO, the script I co-wrote with KayDee Kersten, was a finalist in ScreenCraft’s 2021 Action & Adventure contest after winning Best Original Screenplay at the Burbank International Film Festival. Agents & producers: I am so ready for youuu!

My preliminary schoolwork toward my Ph.D. in Parapsychology is finally done. It concluded with a thesis paper called The Liberating Power of Image in the New Thought Movement, which is a feminist take on how the concepts of image and seeing in the metaphysical “mental sciences” (Religious Science, Christian Science, etc.) can liberate one from the raging patriarchy in Western modes of being & seeing.

My doctoral dissertation is up next. I’m still plotting what to research — my list is crazy long and growing: metaphysical healing, shamanic & witchy practices, chaos, E.S.P., ghosts, even aliens…. There are too many topics I’m excited about to choose. Maybe I can incorporate them all? Hm….

I hope you found something fun and fulfilling over the past 6 months to keep you sustained & inspired through this pandemic horror show. For me, it was my wife, dog, friends, and a lot of margaritas, followed by tons of running. I’ve racked up the miles from Los Angeles to Sedona, dropped 10 pounds, ran a half-marathon virtual race, and just started training for my 5th full marathon, with hopes of qualifying for the Boston Marathon this year (assuming my legs ever recover from all that make-believe skateboarding…lolol).

So, if you drive past a pale, bony, dehydrated blonde dude who is tripping through the asphalt streets of Burbank like a loon, please don’t run him over! Wishing you a healthy & beautiful summer!

Dear Diary: I’m crazy-excited to announce that DARK SILO — the FBI conspiracy-thriller film script I wrote with KayDee Kersten under our Roughhausers banner — just won Best Original Screenplay at the 2020 Burbank International Film Awards! Our minds are blown — thank you so much!

In a heartfelt F-U to Covid, I had the chance to perform in a mask on the streets of Ventura a few months back with a mop and a palm frond. In Mesopotamian and Egyptian religions, the palm branch represents eternal life (the palm’s name comes from the Greek phoinix, the same word we use to mean the bird that revives itself from its own burnt ashes). Here the mop is not necessarily a symbol for cleaning; it might serve as my own human-made frond — a kind of artificial (but magic) ‘palm’ held in (the palm of) my hand (with ‘palm’ coming from the Latin palma, meaning the hand spread open like a leaf). In my mind, I was my own Axis Mundi, a human bridge channeling & imbuing the mundane and unnatural with the magical healing power of the natural. Let’s hope the spell works.

In another attempt to kick Covid’s ass, I was seriously disappointed to learn that all of my running races had been canceled this year, so I decided to stage my own solo race: a 50K (31 mi) ultra-marathon around Cordova, the Burbank street where I live. The run took just under 5 hours (about 28 loops around the block), during which my better half KayDee kept me alive with fluids & food, organized all of the spectators who showed up to cheer (OMG, THANK YOU GUYS!!!), and chatted with people who tuned in from around the globe to watch the race’s streaming feed, live from a camera in our front yard. KayDee also made me an epoxied finisher’s medal — see below. Amazing! First ultra-marathon, complete. Suck it, Covid!

Wherever you are, I hope you’re hanging in there, and managing to thrive. I feel grateful that in the midst of this Covid-era craziness — so much pain, loss, confusion, animosity — that there have been moments of joy, which have been harder than ever to find — a full-time job, really — but I don’t know what else to do, except seek them out, and pry them from 2020′s rotting palm, because I — we — you — deserve them.

Hi Friends! Oh man, my 2019 was a wild ride. First, Dark Silo, the screenplay I co-wrote with my creative partner in crime KayDee Kersten, was a semi-finalist at the NYC International Screenplay Contest — hopefully we’ll see it in theaters soon! We also wrapped production on Rattle Rattle, a surreal short film we shot in our Burbank garage that was a semi-finalist at both L.A.’s IndieX and Indie Short Fest film festivals—not bad!

There was plenty of performance art too. KayDee and I co-produced Not An Exit, a sold-out evening of performance art in downtown Los Angeles in July with an amazing lineup of artists. And, I performed a couple of pieces at 5×5, the monthly performance series at Ventura’s amazing Art City Gallery.

My favorite solo piece this year was John’s Arrow, which was both a performance and a magic spell designed to help heal my hospitalized mentor, John White.

Although I’ve been a practicing occultist since I was a kid (Norse magic, shamanism, chaos magic, you name it), this was my first public magical act that incorporated actual magical intention and charged tools, including crystals, sigils, magical movement, spirit water, and a felt blanket (the latter which was a nod to performance artist Joseph Beuys, who was obsessed with both felt and energy).

I’m indebted to film director and occultist Alejandro Jodorowsky, whose book Psychomagic really opened my eyes to the possibilities of overtly mixing public performance with magical practices. When I look back at my performances over the past decades, I see plenty of shamanic and witchy elements (both on stage and in my own internal approach to performance), but it was Jodorowsky’s book that convinced me to bring spooky+healing to the forefront. After the Arrow piece was over, several audience members approached to say that the space’s air had taken on a strange charge — and even better, my mentor’s recovery seemed to accelerate over the days that immediately followed. Really, who can ask for more than that? Thanks, Jodorowsky!

In 2020 I’m looking to finish 2 more scripts that are on deck, produce another performance art night in L.A., and explore psychomagic further with more public spells geared toward healing (which I hope will be useful in what is shaping up to be a truly insane election year). If you’d like to receive a note when these and other happenings are happening, join my mailing list — and above all, have an amazing New Year!

After a year at the typer with my creative partner (the genius writer-producer KayDee Kersten), a new feature-length screenplay has been born: 120 pages of FBI thriller wrapped around a conspiracy I think might be bigger than JFK, King Jr., Marilyn Monroe, Kurt Cobain, Vince Foster, and the fake moon landing combined.

Even as a kid I wanted to be a writer, but a screenwriter especially, so my life has felt like one long sprint toward film in epic slow motion, a dichotomy paradox interrupted by performance art, standup comedy, beer, karate, hilarious occult practices, shitty jobs, strange ladies, and other adventures required for a screen scribe to possess any depth.

If I could change anything, it might be that my script arrived a decade sooner so my favorite film professor in college, the brilliant Anne Friedberg, might’ve had a chance to read it. A contemporary of Yvonne Rainer and wife of screenwriter Howard A. Rodman, Anne was a sparky postmodernist full of humor and encouragement who said to me once, I have no doubt you’ll get there, which was pretttttty much the best thing you can say to a boy who spends his days dreaming. Anne also confided that she’d always wanted to be a Vegas showgirl, so she’d be pleased to know our new script is driven by a smart female protagonist — and also that I’ve been known to dress up like a showgirl myself. Here’s my, er, most successful attempt right before a West Hollywood bar crawl a couple of months ago. So…would you do her? Hahaha:

In December, I had the honor of opening L.A.’s 18th annual Nihilist Film Festival with its traditional blessing of TVs and other electronic devices. With America’s funniest nihilist Elisha Shapiro presiding, I blessed a TV and every cellphone in the crowd using Luke Skywalker’s long lost arm from Empire Strikes Back:

Finally, in February I dusted off Rattle Rattle, a dark fairy tale piece I originally performed in 1992. Aesthetically, I’ve always been a purist who prefers not to repeat performances so each can stand alone in time and space. (Full disclosure: while I love this purity, it can be exhausting, since 2-3 bookings in a row means having to create multiple pieces from scratch in a very short time, and sometimes my muse is drunk and slow to show up). In Rattle Rattle‘s case, I allowed an exception to my rule because with the world the way it is right now (very fucked up), I thought maybe the audience could use some magick drawn from creative energies in my past (sort of a Back to the Future shamanic recipe of my own Marty McFly design), and it worked, I think, judging from the crowd’s happy reactions.