ARTIST | USED SURFBOARDS | PHOTOGRAPHER | REDWOODS | FILM MAKER | WHISKEY | EDUCATOR | MANURE | IOTAS | SPECTACLE | GAMBOL | BONGOS
San Francisco, CA
Joined March 2009
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Dems blew the doors off tonight and the smug scattered like roaches. But a landslide is just raw material, worthless till somebody does the slow, stubborn work of making something real. Savor it. Trust no one who’s never ruined a canvas chasing truth. Then get back to work.
#Vote
Feb 5, 1989: Xiao Lu puts two bullets through her own artwork in Beijing's national gallery. The show shuts in two hours.
In 2006 she got the work back by signing a photograph of the shooting.
#photography
jamescharleslyons.com/xiao-l…
Dec 30, 1994. Phish's first night at Madison Square Garden. They opened with a song about a king who doesn't exist, and 18,000 people screamed his name back.
The king was fake. The devotion wasn't.
#music
jamescharleslyons.com/hail-t…
My 5 year old had a nightmare and took over the bed, so I ended up on the couch watching four men in suits play Take 5 like it was nothing. 5 beats to the bar, no sneer, nothing to prove. It's still one of the most perfect things ever put on TV.
#jazz
jamescharleslyons.com/five-b…
Sesame Street once made a Waiting for Godot sketch with Muppets. Telly and Grover waiting for Elmo. Existential dread in felt form.
And then the tree got up and left to sing show tunes. The furniture tapped out. That tree is all of us.
🔗 jamescharleslyons.com/muppet…
#SamuelBeckett
Robby Müller burns this world down in black and white because color was always too polite for the truth... Dead Man is a shot of mescal and a knife in the ribs, Blake lurching through a fever dream America that was ALWAYS already a rotting corpse.
Neil Young's guitar doesn't score this film, it ATTACKS it, howling at the void like a wounded animal that refuses to die. Jarmusch and Müller took the Western out back and put a bullet in it...
and what crawled out is stranger and more honest than anything Hollywood ever had the guts to attempt #CriterionCollection #DeadMan #JimJarmusch #RobbyMuller #NeilYoung
2 lines. All that survived of Sophocles' Nausicaä. We took those fragments to Pillar Point at Mavericks and performed them on a beach that's been Ohlone sacred land, a ship graveyard, and a bootlegger's paradise. Don't just use a location let it talk back
tinyurl.com/bdeh5stu
I had the privilege of studying with Spalding Gray for two quarters, learning to excavate truth from the wreckage of experience, to find the story hiding in the confession.
then vanished into a life so idiosyncratic and fierce it makes conventional success look like surrender. The truth here doesn't redeem anything.
It just is: messy, heartbreaking, and more alive than most people manage in their sanest moments.
#theater #documentation #liveart #performance
nytimes.com/2026/02/04/theat…
Raw, uncut chaos. Everything eating everything in perfectly balanced horror. Divine rage without soft edges. What real looks like when it's not comfortable.
#LINESBallet #AlonzoKing #DancePhotography #ReunionIsland #ContemporaryDance
jamescharleslyons.com/on-nec…
Père Lachaise: where immortality projects fail spectacularly and trees push through marble. The story isn't Morrison or Wilde, it's the forgotten nobodies whose monuments are now moss farms. There's something honest about that failure.
jamescharleslyons.com/pere-l…
#PèreLachaise #Paris
Père Lachaise: where immortality projects fail spectacularly and trees push through marble. Real story isn't Morrison or Wilde, it's the forgotten nobodies whose monuments are now just moss farms. Something honest about that failure.
#Paris #Grave
jamescharleslyons.com/pere-l…
Peninsula Creamery in Palo Alto: a fuck u to disruption culture, standing firm while everything around it optimizes itself to death. Some places deserve to survive because they remember what they are jamescharleslyons.com/penins…… #PaloAlto #SiliconValley #Authenticity #disruptiontown
I'm trying to trap something real, nail this moment to the wall like a desperate insect. If I get it right, it keeps moving, keeps living long after I'm gone. That's the only immortality that isn't total bullshit.
#ArtIsLife #CaptureTheMoment #ImmortalityThroughArt
Someone believed this car would take them somewhere. Believed the house would hold. The island's promise would sustain them. It didn't. The clouds press down like a bruise. The monster isn't the wreckage, it's the delusion that paradise operates on faith instead of physics.
#rust
