[ text and photos titled in turquoise are from original DD4TM pages - i've recycled them because i'm sentimental and they were gone for a long time - but Jens' life went on - and things happened - too much to tell you about, maybe he'll have time and tell us all about it someday - but due to developing circumstances that will now probably have to be by email from ... location to be revealed ]
Hoo boy - you've done it now - you clicked on the left tit and entered Jens' crib, gaining entry by paying attention to that which also gains Jens' attention. Anyway - you're skating on thin conceptual ice here and as soon as Jens realizes that some semblance of his stuff is up here he's gonna want to have more aesthetic and artistic control. We'll work something out Jens, promise...
[ note: that turned out to be a lie - we never did and he never did and now we probably won't ]
Beautiful photographs of excellently prepared vegetables. Jens really likes his vegetables, and he likes them well-oiled. If they're too frisky, he likes to chain them up until they submit to his philosophical position. I've heard them discussing this behind his back, and it seems they feel he has anterior motives - or something.
Notice the utilitarian white paint backdropping the computer holodeck and assorted thriftshop "finds" (also notice narrator)
AND THIS IS
When Jens isn't photographing stuff or painting stuff or recording stuff or spraying way too many layers of hot-solvent paint to push about in puddles or
isn't lurking in bars or making himself available to lonely ladies intrigued by big good-looking tattooed crazed bad-boy artist-musician-poets, he's at the mac holodeck (which has changed to a G4 and globs of recording gear) trying to figure out how to put all of that together. It's possible that he thinks about money from time to time...[ one of Jens' ladyfriends objected to the struck-through sentence so it was removed along with all of the rest of the content but since they're no longer together i've put it back in ]
[Jens Feil's Studio Meditation Area - San Diego Nov 1998]
Jens does, as do all those whose spirits and souls soar close to their inner sun, occasionally have moments of doubt about his relationship to Eternity. I happened to catch Jens just as he was about to mount into a complex assemblage of mechanical and symbolic parts - a photograph of - well, suffice to say that the graphic inventory includes a crossbow, a banana, and a quite co-operative young lady. It's possible that while handling the cross-shaped frame component seen in the background, to the right behind him, Jens was suddenly struck by - something - and decided to look up in the Yellow Pages the nearest house of worship. On the other hand - he may be ordering a pizza with two kinds of zucchini and extra anchovies.
This is what happened to that cross-like thing - jens assembled it into this item provisionally titled "Who's Friend" which when finished was eclectic with strobing lights, noise, and an attached sex toy which it waved about in an alarming manner. It was in a "hi-tek" art show here in San diego maybe in early 1999
Although most of America no longer needs to warm its homes with wood-fires, most new homes with any pretension to middle-class and up values include a fireplace in their construction. This amiable feature allows us to more rapidly burn up the remaining trees in the country and causes - via the massively inefficient combustion that occurs in a fireplace - large inversion layers of christmas wrapping and lurid plastic easter egg grass smoke to nightly lay in a stifling pall over many of America's cities to clog our collective nares. Be that as it may - you have a right to burn wet garbage and snotty kleenex in your fireplace and force your neighbors to breath it.
Jens and I agree that no domicile is complete without an uncontrolled combustion source. Jens has personally addressed this issue by having arranged a brick-lined hole in the former rear parking lot of his storefront to take advantage of all the scrapped melamine plastic-coated pressed-sawdust office furniture, polyester resin dress dummies, plastic signage, used carpeting, semi-comatose junkies and solvent huffers and the myriad other combustibles that litter the streets and alleys of San Diego. The great color in this shot comes from the metal particles in the mobile-home roof-sealing spray paint Jens used to get this fire going (none of that sissy barbecue lighter fluid for him!) and also from whatever he has in that glass. That was good Jens, what was it anyway?
When I arrived at Jens' the other afternoon after riding around in the van, I had to pee. Jens' industrial-chic location has such quintessentially urban views that I couldn't resist a shot of his interior courtyard. Three hours and a few beers later I was visited by a like urge, and so took a second shot out the window. There's something dramatic about the haphazard spareness of the place, the muted menace of its extremely low-rent transient and hooker ambiance contrasting starkly with the 6 story high San Diego Police headquarters looming almost right overhead - a presence that makes it quite safe to park your car and bolt with a six-pack for Jens' door. Call first to make sure he's home - you don't want to stand there where the locals can hear the familiar sound of moisture condensing on aluminum cans - you could get stampeded...
Between the point in urban development cycles where the original cities grow out from their early centers and all the people with any money run out to the suburbs to get away from people they think might have less money than they have since they are certain that the condition is catching - and the point where all the people with whatever money they extracted from the city's now-dead center start looking at the center of the city and going "hmmm... i could make a bundle doing 'X'..." - there's an ebb tide where artists and musicians and ethnic eateries and shops can briefly thrive. Urban Waste Space - and the flora and fauna that grows there on the tumbling brick and exposed framing of the previous business cycle is strange indeed, strange enough to provoke the indignation of the righteous. Jens is strange even if you're not righteous, but this Danish lad is enjoying the hell out of the San Diego landscapes you've largely abandoned. By the time this city realizes what it's losing, our "betters" will have crammed a tremendously un-needed ballpark and redevelopment project down our throats and forced the creeps, cretins, and creatives to some other location where they'll all be able to breath for a short spell before that starts looking good.
I'm told by mutual friends that Jens has just about packed up his scene here and is going to Denmark. Bye Jens - we'll miss you...
Jens Feil - 2000?
seen through the window from his computer modified photography show
[ jim wrinkle on right ]
