Tsar czar

A show! Hooray!

Bleachman

Obsession on the SOMA streets just stalking and lurching around at 16th and South Van Ness, street scenes played out so hard that if you weren’t looking away you wanted in the mix. Some old liquor-Philippino food- convenience store perched across from the gas station, smeary yellow glass adorned with cut-rate neon, beer hawking bikini girls and Bleachman. Caped up in red, blue and yellow brandishing a hypodermic needle and smiling broadly while perched at an incline between the tattoo and hot rod girly mags display, blasting a clean white streak through the grime.

The inception of my obsessions became clear in the weeks that followed, running down anyone and anything I could find that would tell me more about bleach and why a cartoon would need to be made about it needing a captain. Soon I realized it was drugs, and maybe terribly soiled thrift store clothes. Still the absurdity was what appealed the most to me, a posterboard graphic needed to be made and posted as a last ditch effort to combat the ignorance of drug disease. Bleach kills everything,….. this was what sprung full-grown from a stroll on the seedy streets of the Mission. I imagined different scenarios and incidents where I could use bleach to kill all organic matter, not to be destructive but instead to think through what applying bleach to everything would do.

I repeated this to one of my friends after a few weeks, and he came alive with it, ran with the feeling I suggested, we both made it a mantra that we threw out at ridiculous times. There have been hundreds, maybe thousands since; I take care to always acknowledge the beginning though, to remember my roots. It can take many forms; health, food, media, government but under it all there’s a burning desire to know something,… about something.