Original subtitles

[eerie music]

Downloaded from YTS.MX

- I can say, I can sit here, and say right now,

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

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]