St Pete Blue

St. Pete Blue was originally developed in 2005 from "intersecting" materials collected or developed in 1969 in St. Petersburg, Florida while I was a student at Eckerd College ("FPC"). One set of ephemera is from 1968-1969 when I was part of a project team, led by my roommate graphic artist David Wise, to create, develop and publish an avant garde yearbook that eventually took the form of loose-leaf, inter-connected papers of photographs and narratives stored in a square, cardboard container. The "idea" for this format derives from our studies with one of our literature professors, Bob Detweiler, of the following artists' works, among others: William Burroughs' Naked Lunch (1959), loosely connected vignettes that could be read in any order. Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch (1963, 1966) whose chapters could also be read in any order. There was John Barth's postmodern essay, "The Literature of Exhaustion" (1967). And his novel Lost in The Funhouse (1968) which opens with "Frame-Tale," a "story" in which "ONCE UPON A TIME THERE" and "WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN" are printed vertically, one on each side of the paper. It is intended to be cut by the reader and the ends fastened together (after being twisted) into a Mobius strip ( a loop with no beginning or end). John Cage's experiments with music and experience, and even Kerouac's Visions of Gerard (1963) with its existential jazz riffs of illusions and realities, were also influential as we took their ideas to create, to invent, to explore, to experiment seriously with 'text'. The second ephemera set is a "catalogue" of some twenty pages from the fall of 1969 based upon the literary effects of Jack Kerouac found in his bedroom/study following his death, and catalogued by Bob Detweiler with my assistance. Together these materials may form an auto-ethnographic expression of whatever meanings you may make of the semiotic experience here-with-in.