first date: a haiku

you checking for lumps?
trying to start a fire?
gentle circles please

non-objective art of the day

instructions: look at an area of reflected morning light in your room. appreciate it as you would appreciate a moving picture.

lately been struck most by vito acconci's following piece and tino sehgal's performances. harrell fletcher is always on my mind. people who tell supporters of objective art to ess-tee-eff-yew, as i have lately been too busy navigating traffic to consciously go to any art museum, and appreciate "art" as we know it. but afraid to relinquish the art object altogether, or to become one of "those bastards" who make purely self indulgent conceptual work. hmmmm? woke up this morning to the sound of airplanes nearby. thinks in warzones there are more bulletholes.

epochal

the early part of our lives, the part defined by mandatory education, has always been separated into neat 3-5 year epochs. the first day of kindergarden. graduation from 5th grade. initiation into middle school. living and dying in high school. college, if you're lucky, and grad school, if you're brave. within this externally imposed structure you become accustomed to operating according to 4-year biorhythms. if you move about a lot as you're experiencing these regular upheavals, your sense of beginning and ending is even more urgent. i always get the itch to move on after too long, to begin things with a bang and run away before they have a chance to properly fade out. fleeing is comfortable.

but then after the education period you're thrown out into a world in which at least half of your life is still staring at you in an amorphous mass, unsectioned by anything or anyone. in fact, you're expected to choose something, and live it forever, and be complacent, and find your beginnings and endings staggering along at a pace that matches no one else's, their dramatic exigencies buried underneath a steady flow of time.

being at the juncture of these two periods, is difficult.

today's theme song is 'middle distance runner', by sea wolf. it thematically concerns tired bodies, longing, and gypsy magic, which, coincidentally, is also the theme of tonight's activities. you say kid a, i say chicken wire?

teen chefs: a haiku

hey, let's make cookies!
use the mixer, not your hands!
you put flour where?!

woke up with this in my head today

the song, not the making out. julie andrews is probably the reason i cut my hair short. and wander through fields picking wildflowers. and try to teach myself the guit-OH MY GOD FORMATIVE CHILDHOOD MOVIES COME BACK TO HAUNT ME!

you have no idea

[kid walks up to the front desk of the primarily latino youth center in which i work. i look up from my current book: race, culture, and the city: a pedagogy for black urban struggle.]

kid: what are you reading?
me: oh, a book about how white people are keeping us down.
kid: is it scary?

typographic love note of the day

he's like blackadder and you're like rosewood, and part of me wonders why i just can't settle for a good clean modern type.

also, kenneth koch, you make me want to wear argyle sweaters, place a headband in my shoulder-length bob, carry a stack of books and sit on a bench full of sweet nothings knocking knees with you in the new york autumn.

shostakovich shakes the soul

lately the term 'russian' has been bandied about me as a catch-all adjective. 'oh, that's so russian. please, make that russian', people would say with equal amounts of vagueness and conviction as to the word's meaning. the meaning began to click, somewhat, when i heard a very russian performance of gershwin's 'rhapsody in blue', the iconic piece about ambulating through new york city. what was so russian about it? the syncopation was present, but not at all jazzy. each note was struck with measured rigor. the most surprising midtones were emphasized, bringing out notes and flavors, street corners and alleyways that never before existed in the skyline of the melody. the entire piece felt full even when quiet, and always stopped short of hitting a dramatic high or low due to the force that reigned throughout. move over, dorothy, because we're not in new york city anymore. this is not your mother's leonard bernstein directs the new york phil, to which you've faithfully listened since age 11. it was like watching the planes and colors of your favorite kandinsky painting get rearranged into something strange and striking. bravo.

sometimes (actually, all of the time) i wish i had more seriously pursued music.

name game

i have this habit of cataloging people, arranging them in categories, flows, color codes and equations in an attempt to statistically resolve heartache, or something like it. for example: if alice plus billy was divided by kelly, does billy therefore equal bad news bears? answer: statement holds true if and only if alice was less than or equal to kelly. i've been collecting statistics on names for a while, trying to figure out the common denominator to people in my life. these are my conclusions thus far:

alan's are smooth criminals.
ashley's will be your friend for life.
dan's are strung out dreamers.
davids are upstanding, sometimes too much so. davy's are cool, and beware of dave's.
emily's will invariably remind you of your mother.
jill's have sloping noses and high cheekbones.
josh's are mentally unstable, but lots of fun.
lauren's are all-american, and lots of fun.
martha's thrive in winter.
meghan's have long brunette hair.
michael's are collected, expedient, and have a dry sense of humor. mike's are significantly wackier.
molly's you always want to love.
reed's have good posture.
ryan's will always be just friends, but gawd do they make you smile.
tim's are troublemakers.

and carol? i've only known one other carol in my life, and we both were quietly kooky.

a place to bury strangers

reading some commentary about a show i recently attended, makes me wonder if journalism nowadays is all about wallowing in the possibilities of language, rather than portraying an authentic (? authenticity always in question marks ?) account of what occurred. for further example, see jonathan gold's food journalism, which, in its sumptuous prose, testifies more to the palate and imagination (and what an imagination, mr. gold!) of the author than the food quality itself.

the show i went to, they projected images of a moving desert onto the bandmates, and their music in fact felt like an outlying wasteland. every now and then the reed-thin lead singer would semicircle backwards in stilted motion like a cougar on the prowl. there were strobe lights. there were fog machines. the most disturbing part of the show when when, under the blinking retina of the strobe light, the lead singer smashed his guitar to the ground and began tearing out the strings as if he were gutting a dead animal (the word desiccated keeps coming to mind as a phonetic description of the horror i witnessed, even though the meaning doesn't match). he destroyed two guitars in this fashion. i was in the front row trying to take pictures, which meant my head hurt more than usual after the show finished. i went home, laid on my bed, and felt feverish for 2 hours.

received an invoice for my car insurance payment yesterday. boo! must start considering grad school, or selling my art, or selling my body. southern california, i will never fully love thee.

hmm

freelance job tonight? no problem. let me put on my thinking 'stick.

peanut butter to your jelly

i was around 5 or 6 and reading judy blume's entire oeuvre for children when somewhere in the fudge series (maybe?), i learned the concept of 'the bite'. 'the bite' was illustrated with butter, but also applies to jam, peanut butter, nutella, and/or honey. 'the bite' is the philosophically perfect part of a sandwich, and it occurs when you slather a piece of bread with sugary goodness, fold it over, and take your first bite right smack dab from the center of that fold where the topping gathers up and its gooeyness is enclosed by soft crustless bread. it is the absolute yum.

also, today at work i convinced a teenage girl that rihanna, and no one on this earth, can "deserve" a beating from chris brown. activism, bitches!

god bless health insurance

reasons i think the nurse's aide was hitting on me today:
-he remarked approvingly that i was under 120 lbs, and asked me what band i liked

reasons i think the nurse's aide was not hitting on me today:
-he was there to take my urine sample

in short, i woke up this morning to realize that the bodily discomfort of friday night was not, as i had then assumed, caused by deafening shoegaze bands and their accompanying strobe light shows. i'm ok though.

metaphor (saturday)

the thought of her hung over us the entire night, a cloud that eventually darkened and rained.

forgive me for writing about your life

at my other work i work with teenagers in a gang, poverty, and violence affected area of los angeles. one of them handed me his college admissions essays to review. the first is about the three churches in his neighborhood, and how much their rites annoy him. after three scathing paragraphs about the inanity of religion, he concludes that he has become a tolerant person through having to put up with religious fools. it's nihilistic, it's blunt, it's not really the stuff of conservative college admissions committees. in the second essay he writes about a car accident that sent his father into a coma for two months, during which he was estranged from his family and sent to live with his aunt. in his own words, he was a nine year boy become a nine year old man. reading between the essays, one wonders if this is why he doesn't believe in god.

moments like these take me out of my own life, and into the amazing strength of others. success is relative to what you have to overcome, and so many of us are walking out there with eyes so wide we're blind to what we never had to experience. here in los angeles, where any value can become superficial and glib, i find myself drawn most to people who display the strength to survive through life--and survival occurs in the most unexpected and overlooked of places. it lives under highways, over gravel, and in the interstices between our two clasped hands. what does this mean for a world which seems to arrange its values otherwise--values such as intellect, creativity, entrepreneurship, none of which are necessarily bad, but somehow incomplete on their own? i don't know.

this is getting rather fiona apple about things. this world is bullshit, but this world is also pretty beautiful and amazing.

i made a postsecret last night

it really helped me say some things that i couldn't say to myself so thank you, frank, for all that you do.

i haven't really been artmaking/artgestating lately, have i? some artists receive their greatest inspiration in moments of physical and emotional disquiet, but i am not one of them. i need to learn how to be silent again. to lie on my bed and think more, dream more, care more. soon, i promise, soon. this bodes to be a very sad winter. a pablo neruda and sweaters kind of winter, to be exact.

things that keep on recurring in my work

drawings, lines, narratives, crossings, space, dumb shit, flowers, rain, silence, white, bodies, loss, me, you

physical sensations experienced today

-tasting popcorn flavored with white cheddar, seasoning salt and the lavender soap my boss used to wash the container. first it tasted like laundry, then like rustic cabin getaways, then like chemicals.
-holding my wrists and fingers limp while a lady with excessive eyeliner oils them up, and enters my fingerprints into an electronic database. she tells me i'm a fingerprinting problem child, and that i need to moisturize.

pffffft

the impossible project announced today that it will begin manufacturing polaroid film again in 2010. i have one word for all you digital naysayers: schooled. the polaroid apocalypse came and went before the sky even started falling. in honor of that, and in honor of me figuring out how to work my workplace's copier scanner thingamajig, here are some polaroids from last night:







a friend had succeeded in bullying me into attending an lgbt mexican dance party in downtown los angeles (friends: best and worst ideas ever). there were all flavors of transsexuals there from mustachio'ed to be-bjorked. my feet stomped tirelessly in medieval torture device shoes while my body seemed far away. i was undercover, not quite hazy enough for my liking, and for the most part, bored.

note for later

this week has brought me tumult with some and peace with others. i am finally able to make peace with the fact that a year ago, in those two electric weeks with you, i could feel all the molecules in my body singing and they will sing in that moment regardless of whatever has since transpired, between and for both of us in our lives. thank you.

all night long

after 2 months of working at dangerbird, i'm only beginning to fixate on the silversun pickups.

also, a proposal

that we begin changing our gmail labels (do you use those? i do. obsessively.) to reference geographic formations. having the option to move your mail to the 'black hole of hell' folder just feels so cathartic.

pleasurable part 3

stripping to MGMT

when in doubt

investigate how other cultures address issues of sexual fluidity and difference.

pleasurable part 2

hipster watching. casbah, a robin's egg blue mid-eastern cafe on the corner of hyperion and sunset, is my new favorite place for reading indulgent theory, drinking loose-leaf tea, and people watching. to my credit i think i caught the woman staring at me all scrunched up and frownyfaced over my zizek. would you like to join us in an incense laden 1970s throwback threesome? her gaze seemed to beckon.

pleasurable

pictured: bran muffin, ceylon tea, indian teapot, luce irigaray, sketch/thinking book, sunset boulevard

love bites

sometimes the shape of, uh, convenient bruising can be a good point of departure for temporary tattoos.

i forgot to mention last time that the area outside my apartment complex has been smelling of coriander lately--one of my favorite spices.

today on the highway someone stole my soul

waiting in the long line of cars to go home. windows down, radio off. then i hear a click, a whoosh, a triumphant phrase. the car in my left lane disappears in front of me, as a camera with a detachable flash peeks out of the right rear window.

some of the time i worry that i am slowly slipping into becoming a hipster whose external appearance legitimates all other forms of her being. but then i convince myself that i have toughness and gumption, two qualities that are instilled over time and therefore, unrelinquishable.

(p.s. that's not a word? well, it should be.)

permanently

last night i read the most heartshockingly beautiful poem in the guise of a short story, by kenneth koch. the point of this is not to talk about kenneth koch (well, a little) but to talk about poems in the guises of things. i think that's a nice way to think about constructing life, art, the movies (poems in the guise of an extended action sequence, for example). because what the world needs now, besides mandatory arts education, is feelings and reasons.

portrait of a french porcelain purveyor

her first and last name both have four letters and two vowels. she drives up to a shoe warehouse in a district beyond traditional abandonment, so i can pay her $10 in exchange for her grandmother's china. she emerges from her car with two mammoth labrador-poodles on a leash that look, feel, and behave like sheepskin rugs. oh, she always walks her dogs in these empty industrial lots at night, she says. she leaves the engine running and the lights on while she takes her dogs for a stroll around the parking lot, leaving me to examine the plates. oh, this was her grandmother's and she and her husband never used it when they were first married 25 years ago, but doesn't food just taste better when served on beautiful plates? i agree. she walks me to my car, wishes me a safe drive, and beams rays of sunshine at everyone in the parking lot, who are by now enthralled with her dogs. on the drive home i realize that she smells exactly like one of my old piano teachers. she is the reason i want to be 50. on a side note, the china is beautiful.