Congratulations to Paul Sargent on the successful completion of his Public Collectors Joong Boo Residency!
Almost two years ago, Paul visited Chicago and I took him to Joong Boo for a meal. It was a kind of proto-Joong Boo Residency because I had not formally announced the project and was still trying to figure out the overall shape and structure of what I would do. Returning in a more official capacity, Paul became the 36th resident today. He will also be one of the very last residents because I'm ending the project soon in order to start a new Public Collectors residency that I'll announce in a couple months.
Paul is in Chicago to sort an excruciatingly boring banking-related task that could be accomplished in about two or three weeks from afar, or about one hour in person. He opted to drive all night to Chicago to take care of business in person. For a guy that spent all of last evening in a car, he arrived looking quite fresh and ready to consume Korean food. Paul went with the always great Spicy Squid and I continued my fixation of the Spicy Tofu Soup. It's not very warm in Chicago today so if I can enjoy this volcanic concoction a little longer, I'm gonna do it.
Paul and I have known each other for almost two decades. He is a deep and gifted thinker who has worked in a variety of mediums including sound, video, 'zines and more. Paul has contributed to projects I've worked on and we collaborated (with Terence Hannum, André Foisy and others) on an underground music history and event series called Hardcore Histories that was mostly staged at Mess Hall, a since-ended experimental cultural center that I co-ran in Chicago's Rogers Park neighborhood.
For one Hardcore Histories event, Paul, Terence and I scoured YouTube in its very first months of existence and put together a screening of our favorite hardcore and punk videos that people had uploaded. In the earliest days of the website, the amount of subcultural music material could probably be measured in under ten hours. Now it's likely millions of hours.
Paul can and will go deeper down an internet rabbit hole than probably anyone else I know. We discussed the early days of Tumblr, image-based Tumblrs that provide little or no background (like Internet K-Hole) and some of the latest videos he is marveling at on the web, which include real-time recordings of people playing video games that go on for several hours.
Paul asked me about the art book fair world and we talked about his own zine-publishing past and what that was like in Las Vegas in the early 1990s. Paul's approach to zine publishing was quite different from my own and I enjoyed learning about some of the ways he created and published before we knew each other.
Finally we chatted a little about creative struggles and strategies for how to finish projects or keep them going long enough for something rich and compelling to emerge. For one example, we discussed some mutual friends who often return to a particular subject on social media, posting just a sentence here and there, and each post is a gem, but those posts only happen every few weeks or months. Over time, there might be a lot of depth and insight, but someone would have to string everything together to see what's there.
After a leisurely meal, we took a quick look around the store, attempting to figure out if the bag of small avocados seemed like a good idea (it wasn't - too ripe) and imagining driving home with a massive half-Jack Fruit and the incredible mess one could make attempting to eat it in the car.
I'm not really taking new applications but I'm also not finished quite yet because another residency is planned in just over a week. Stay tuned for news of my next residency project or check out past participants here.
