in search of lost time

i've been home for the past week. it's been wonderful. for the first time i'm realizing how much i enjoy each one of my family's unique presences. being home also abates, temporarily, the homesickness i try to suppress when living on my own. i used to eschew the familiar in favor of the new, but there's a great comfort in things you can revisit and still feel happy.

some themes have been recurring in my thoughts:

-the meaning of passion relative to your age
-maintaining integrity in the face of change
-how to mark time within the scope of your lifespan
-glass and paper and wire

room temperature

i finished bernard schlinker's the reader this morning but it has yet to let me out of its blue-green world.
accordingly, the sky started to rain and i had one of my more pensive walks in a while.
overall i am happy and ready to pack up for the year; a lot happened in 2010.

last work of 2010

just like honey (2010) is equally a product of every lyric from the 1985 shoegaze classic, psychocandy, as it is a product of living in one of the world's most bewildering megacities. living in close quarters with 3.6 million other people, i can only think of the honeycomb as a way to represent the resonance yet separation that i feel towards my neighbors. each cell, each city corner holds a different image of existence. i can't help but think that these images are a macrocosm of the events and memories we hold inside our own bodies, and which allow us to have sympathy for others.

growth

as my plane coasted into texas over the barren november landscape i thought to myself, to live in texas is to know a land that lives and dies. i'm not quite sure what that thought meant. in new england the world always seemed to go to sleep under a gentle blanket of snow that unfailingly yawned awake; in california the world never sleeps, encased as it is in a perpetually lit greenhouse. nothing dies but here. here the grass is always in some state of growth and retreat, sinking its roots into the dusty ground from which everything was born. pressing your body into the brambles it scratches you, threatening you with death and forcing you to breathe life all at the same time.

shrink wrap

over the past unemployed months i've somehow become a how-to guide for losing weight. seriously. i ate a box of ice cream sandwiches within the last two days and even that couldn't weigh me down. the least i can do is share my wisdom, and then go get checked for tapeworms.

1. stop drinking. this cuts down on alcohol calories, and associated munchies. see: the mozzarella sticks and tofu wings at the late night diner right below my college apartment.
2. stop eating other people's food. see: all the office birthdays we celebrated with cupcakes.
3. but, eat your roommate's snacks instead of buying your own. the guilt and attempt at cover-up will make you snack less.
4. sit on your ass and let your muscle tone deteriorate (muscles weigh more than fat, yo!)
5. have impromptu dance parties with yourself. 1 hour of shaking it to janet jackson burns approximately 6000 calories.
6. develop a relationship with your local donut shop lady. you'll feel bad about asking your friend to make you a donut.

alternately: read michael pollan and vow to never eat from this industrial food chain again.

90s hits that are also new wave films

the corrs - breathless - jean luc godard
the cranberries - dreams - ingmar bergman

significance? i'm not sure. all i know is that i spent too much time reliving my natalie imbruglia love affair this morning (any movies named 'torn'??).

silent light

just another day wrecking my room in the name of installation art!

unknown pleasures

i finally updated my itunes so that i can scroll through all my album artwork, and boy does it make me happy. this is my favorite diptych, which isn't much of a surprise since directions to see a ghost is pretty much my favorite album package of all time. the psychedelia! the raised cover! the greens and magentas!

current project

where lovers have wings

on my walk today i saw two shopping carts engaging in what seemed to be a furtive love act. the pure kind, not the dirty kind.

other than that i have been listening to the black keys all day, making candles and nursing my growing fascination with topology. robert smithson, the jesus and mary chain, and berndt and hila becher are all figures coming back to haunt me.

a specimen of verbal beauty

this website reinforces my voyeuristic fascination with letters and artifacts

costumes i missed out on this year

1. marina abramovic @ moma


2. jane lane (it's alright though, i am jane lane every day)


3. CHUNGKING EXPRESS

life goals

to be updated as i think of more things

1. to be a successful, showing artist
   
2. to have the means to live in portland or some similar woodsy area
   
3. to roadtrip from the top of mexico to the tip of argentina (ideally on a motorbike, but we're trying to be realistic here)
   
4. to never stop believing
   
5. to master janet jackson's dance moves
   

toil and trouble

my candlemaking supplies came in! (yes, i do save my packing paper for drawing and yes, that is a hexagonal mold! have a witchin' halloween!)

new work

the pain of parting / the pathos of wandering / the shock of meeting
a girl / a ship / a mouse

my first attempt at soundscapes, small drawings and a more decentered narrative.

dream

i am flying in a helicopter over the falkland islands. we swoop sharply down into an arctic environment and i encounter a penguin with a blue forehead. we continue onward over the map of south america to melbourne, which is all lit up and orange against the night like a sylvain chomet film.

it was vivid and exhilarating. i had no idea such scapes existed in my head.

on other news i am applying to grad school. it's causing in me a lot of anxiety and hermit-like behavior. pray for me?

so weird

i read yet another major newspaper article today about the neverending recession, which was pretty darn scary, but not as scary as then perusing some photographs of aids in vietnam and feeling completely detached from the other hemisphere of the world. one of my greatest fears is being a poor global citizen. living in the states and in california in particular, it's tough deciding which consciousness of the world is fake and which is real. another reason to keep doing what we do and having compassion for what we don't do, because that's the only thing we can be really sure of.

love you so much it makes me sick

one youtube foray into the vaselines and a few clicks later, i find that my kurt love is still burning and well, and in fact improves with aging and distance. what is it about your paleness that will always suggest trees, sacredness, and cobalt blue more than anything else?

on a side note, tony wilson's impact on british punk is highly underrated. absolutely charming!

pleasure reading

ironic that i brought this volume to las vegas? totally. my mother asked if attending a wedding there made me want to get married any sooner. i told her quite the opposite, and she told me to stop spending so much time with the boyfriend. the woman is kind, but she is also goal-oriented. anyway, my month of leaving los angeles is over, time to settle down and work!

orange you glad i'm not an apple?

oh, you know, just another day hang drying clothes at home.

preliminary sketch regarding hyperventilation

poor lighting. this was not intended to be frightening.

from the vault

i came into the yeah yeah yeah's second album during a time of the coldest winter and the softest night. i used to listen to the entire album while grinding my stones in the lithography studio, and then on the subsequent midnight walk home. the wind was cold and still, the trees dark and sympathetic, and it took my mind away from the burning ache in my arm muscles. my inner self in that period ached with the ache that accompanies the birth of something new, a feeling that i can't quite place but is analogous to the gaps that lie between glass pieces of song lyric.

i, linguist

i went to the local libe today to pick up some educational materials. i say that rather ironically because my so called education consists of the following:

• mexican textiles
  
• mexican paper cutting
  
• art 21: the book (ed. note: when will i stop being a nerd about art21? never?)
  
• php/mysql programming for absolute beginners
  
• web style guide
  
• conversational tagalog

gone fishing

i had a dream about expatriation, which set me to thinking about all the dreaming i held inside of me and how much of them would be fulfilled. while i strongly believe that a part of my soul lies in argentina, or somewhere like it, i also know that i won't be leaving the united states anytime soon, one of the reasons being that i don't want to leave my first generation parents stranded between three continents. i think about artists like marina abramovic, who lived among migrants and spent three months walking the great wall of china, and wonder if i could ever commit to my work with such intensity. i've been bargaining for a while against the artist's lot of instability and destitution, but with the lot now thrust upon me, the life of an artist is sounding its siren's call again. looking out at it is like looking out at the pacific ocean, a profound, dangerous territory that glitters on the surface. the advent of another day finds myself staring at it with deepened longing.

former apartment

in light of recent circumstances i've been looking through the mess that is my digital file system, culling snapshots here and there for a portfolio. this is from the vault, when i first moved to los angeles, and when i still believed in using film but had nowhere to print it.

blech

the music industry has been floundering lately, and as a result i lost my job yesterday. the big groan in my stomach was followed by a brief flash of empowerment at being in full control of my own time again. oh 9-to-5 schedules, how you make us long for summer vacation. i'll be using my severance pay to take this month off and reorganize my life, but if you know anyone who may be interested in melancholic line drawings and/or print design, send them my way?

my father the communist

i was in san francisco this weekend visiting my uc berkeley-bound brother. while window shopping in chinatown, my mother disclosed to me that, as a teen, there was nothing my post-cultural revolution father wanted more than a maoist red cap. as a person who thinks way too much about radicalism and liberationist movements, i always find it interesting how one culture's norms can become another culture's revolution. my father has more in common with american capitalism than with pseudo-marxist college students. he probably just wanted to look cool.

the slip

friday diptych day

when i'm not thinking about the everyday, i'm most likely thinking about vagrancy and hermeticism and space et al.

pop quiz

i've been thinking about the 90s lately and how much of them will come back in the 2010s, as trends tend to cycle through a 20 year period. i started by assessing my personal sense of 90s-ocity with this list from 90swoman. my answers are bolded.

by the way, i am so ready to emerge from a bush-induced economic crisis into the heyday of the clinton years.

You might be a 90s Woman if…

• Any of the following changed your life: Bikini Kill, Nirvana, 7 Year Bitch, Hole, Babes in Toyland, Sinead O’Connor, Lisa Carver, Tank Girl, Sister Spit, Liz Phair.
• You have had a crush on any of the following: Paul Rudd, James Spader, Brittany Murphy, Winona Ryder, Johnny Depp (21 Jump Street era).
• You’ve read Sassy.
• When you heard Billy Corgan and Jessica Simpson were dating you got upset.
• You’ve made a mix tape on an actual tape.
• You know lines from Clueless.
• You’ve marched for abortion rights, against the first Iraq War, or for Take Back the Night.
• You have ever been into Wicca, eco-feminism, or liberation theology.
• You have a speech ready whenever any of the following come up: Camille Paglia (RAVING PSYCHO!), WAM, Katie Roiphe, or the Michigan Womyn’s Festival.
• You think any of the following items of clothing are hot: thigh-highs, plaid shirts, work boots with dresses, cat-eye glasses, chunky heels, baby-doll dresses, overalls, plaid, flannel, bra straps showing, barrettes.
• You’ve dyed your hair a color not found in nature, ideally with Manic Panic.
• You are all over your birth control responsibilities.
• It would never occur to you that women wouldn’t work or that men wouldn’t clean the house.
• You have self-identified as bisexual (even if you’re gay or straight).
• You can do a feminist analysis of your favorite pop culture.
• You started—or at least read—a zine. Now it’s a blog or tumblr.
• You are both ironic and sentimental. But for real, not like that “like rain on a wedding day” Alannis Morissette irony song, which you have mocked but know all the words to.

photography is the construction of fiction, not fact

being in the photo pit for the silversun pickups last friday was probably one of the more fun experiences i've had courtesy of the workplace. and now i am saddled with avoiding photo editing and the sad fact that i need a new lens... anyone, anyone?

photo editing awaits me in my personal projects as well. BLECHHHHHH!!!! THAT'S HOW MONDAYS MAKE ME FEEELLLLL!

en foco

diptych of the photos that occur when setting up my camera, 2010

another window

a good quote

"one doesn't live in a country, one lives in a language." — emil cioran

shame and fortune

"...my mother once traumatized me at age 5 by chopping off ALL MY HAIR from the ears down. My id has never been the same again. (She also once did this secretly to my sister by sneaking up to her from behind, gently stroking her locks, and then SNIP!)"
—the chicktionary


—victo ngai

the two images really speak to me. let's just say i've been on the receiving end of a cut or two.

every day is nostalgia day

life change happens so suddenly and subtly that you forget who you were one year ago until the memory seems so far away. you recall the warmth of the sun and the smell of your ginger saffron candle which would come to be the envelope in which everything else is stored - a smell that yoked together the sensations soft and spicy, blue and warm, cream and cold all at the same time.

nighttime story 2

my book from the sketchbook project came in! i'll be sending it back to new york city in january, where it will go on display in the brooklyn library and some lucky fool or two will be able to check out and read my musings on the theme 'nighttime stories'. the book will be a graphic documentation of my dreams a la carl jung (or carol yun as she's known in these quarters). of course my first order of business was to hand-letter the cover.

nighttime story

NEW OBSESSION

this is what your awkward gothic teenage self would sound like if she grew up to be an accomplished, thoughtful young woman.

los angeles freeway system: a haiku

i dreamed that i was
driving on the 10 freeway
in the rain; i died.

of love and rockets

also

how come when i set to work creating pictures of bands i end up creating pictures of mermaids? put that on a postcard and send it to your mother.

confessions from the workroom

truth, a good portion of my design hours are spent trolling the internet for visual inspiration. today's theme was mc escher, medieval churches, and vintage board games. my wanderings led me to conclude that parcheesi is *the* paramount board game for graphic designers, followed closely by chinese checkers. however, my favorite game as a child was always candyland, and if i could live in the following warm toned roygbiv paradise, i totally would.

desire: a geography

reality seems strange after you've returned from a few days spent in the interzones between trauma and the past. you are surprised to discover that you have a shadow creeping alongside you, scaling the wall among dried out leaves and branches. the ground rises and falls before you (really, just the effect of misplaced sidewalk tiles). everything is bathed in the golden light of dusk.

so predictable

roommate: where'd you go?
me: to get a donut.
roommate: oh, did you have a bad day again?

this kind of thing is just my bag, baby

i'm totally gonna do this!

the myth of the spider woman

boyfriend: i thought of a good haircut for you

inception

i caught the opening of inception last night. i've been diligently recording my dreams and it was really nice to watch a movie that captured the essence of walking through a dream. walking out of the theater is exactly like waking up in a hazy stupor. the one exception is that my dream levels happen vertically instead of horizontally. you'll know what i mean when you see it.

dream

riding roller coasters in the dusk. going our separate ways to a fish shack and stepping into an artist's residency in a house stuffed with boxes. you did something you never do and i gushed amber liquid all over you

morning light (two studies)

return of semi-confessional understated drawings

guess what guys! i got the scanner at current workplace up and running! sad that access to electronics is the only thing that limits my inner monologue (age of the internet, i greet you with suspicion). anyway, i am working on somethings which will slowly trickle online with the aid of this new discovery. don't i always say that?

on the dissolution of selfhood

identity is a funny thing, especially when the internet is involved. i may (and will) change residences year to year, but you can always trust in my email for a permanent address.

for an artist, a website is an important calling card, but what if your name is already inhabited by someone else? carolzou.com is owned by an actress and bilingual tv host, and it doesn't look like i can buy her out of her domain anytime soon. according to her twitter (also carolzou), she also lives in los angeles. if i were inclined toward the postmodern, 'meeting carol zou' would be an excellent title to a performance art piece.

transcript of a very strange conversation i had with the bro

him: i've been getting into this band called coconut records. have you heard of them?
me: no.... [discerns from wikipedia that it's fronted by jason schwartzman]. wow. you're so hip.
him: thanks. apparently the frontman's an actor too.
[silence]
me: ... you know he was an acclaimed actor first, right?
him: whatever.
me: have you seen rushmore?
him: is that a movie?

have i fallen into that age of making references that younger generations do not understand?

questions and their answers

where have i been for the last week? san francisco.



who was i with? le boyfriend.


(note our masterful command of the 180 degree rule)

what did we feast upon? piet mondrian cake.



what am i going to do with myself now? make some art!

dream

i was in the darkroom, by the sea. you held me in your room and asked me why i was hurt (striped sweater). everything was very gentle and fluttering. incandescent oranges, salty breeze, clean planes of steel.

she draws him a boarding pass?!

i watched chungking express last night. as if the cranberries weren't already burned into an intense visceral memory of the 90s, now a cover version will also make me cry uncontrollably.

songs about dreams

nice dream - radiohead
moonage daydream - david bowie
dream at tempo 119 - silversun pickups
love dream - franz liszt
dreaming - robert schumann
dripping dream - sonic youth
bird dream of the olympus mountain - the pixies

hard as nails

all i needed to know about carol i learned from her nail polish collection, 2010

interior jettison

a couple of days ago my one year anniversary of arriving in los angeles happened, and as it sank in i felt an incredible sense of tiredness from undergoing a year of the Biggest Fucking Emotional Grinder Ever (tm) and coming through the other side. relocating and adjusting to the west coast, finding a job, settling into a living quarter, rethinking art, and through it all trying to mend all the baggage from the past so that i could be in a functional relationship with someone else - it was an enormous undertaking and i still feel a little shellshocked from the inside out.

i hope the rest of life isn't like this, or, if it is, that i will be able to bear it better, and it will seem like the background instead of the foreground of my days.

soft, what light through yonder window breaks

i would like to share with the internet this image of kurdt kobane, which i had never seen before until today. thank you, my favorite 14-year-old blogger.

things that have been floating around in my consciousness lately

1. la opera's production of the ring cycle


2. the boston celtics


i'm not sure how i feel about this.

sample manifesto

"I want to create a fusion of art and life, Asia and America, Duchampiana and Levi-Straussian savagism, cool form and hot video, dealing with all of those complex problems, spanning the tribal memory of the nomadic Asians who crossed over the Bering Strait over 10,000 years ago. Then, I came, flying in a Boeing 707, on July 4th in 1964, drawn to the glittering Pop Art world of New York."

i really like this woman and this quote makes me like her even more.

white kleenex

do you record the smell of sneezes? i ask this because my father's sneeze always filled the room with a characteristic smell, something like a minty grassy pollen mixed with snot. i would imagine the sneeze particles hanging in the air and recoil, holding my breath so that the particles would not penetrate into the air i breathed. i soon learned to anticipate his sneezes and gamely duck out of the room whenever i saw one coming on. this method was so successful that i haven't thought about his sneezes for a long time, until last night when someone broke out a joint at a concert. i usually enjoy the sweet grassy smell, but this must have been a bad batch, because boy oh boy did it smell like one of the sneezes that had terrorized my childhood. i regressed to being 5, and held my breath.

i wonder what my father would think of my sharing this information on the internet. as a side note, all of these family photographs look a little wonky because they were scanned on a very low quality negative scanner (the only one i could find). after being trained in analog photography and relentlessly deterred by a post-grad digital world, i'm beginning to enjoy the terms of my digital submission. i'm starting to think that we can manipulate photographs and still preserve their original integrity - as long as you know what integrity means.

p.s.

did i tell you i was maintaining another blog/site/project with my art partner of all time? i'm a lady of many projects.

saturday morning breakfast cereal

lying on my bed eyes fixated on the ceiling light and letting my thoughts spiral out and back again. somewhere along the way i think that jack kerouac must have done this once, in a little shack in denver, and thousands of dreamers across the world have stared at ceilings in the same way, and the only difference was that jack had the knack to write these things down in language that crackled and gasped. only a few people, i think, are gifted enough to write these experiences but the secret that every writer, artist, maker is trying to convey is that everyone can live them. if you're brave enough.

i caught a snippet of the mtv movie awards last night and i got angry. angry that celebrities and whatnots think that getting up on stage and rapping about the oil spill is enough to actually mop it up. i know our culture is "spectacularized" to the point where it's all message and no action but at the end of the day "raising awareness" is not enough to make a palpable impact, especially if awareness is mediated through the commercialized piece of shit that is contemporary pop culture, in which you entreat one moment and are lost among a screaming sea of justin bieber fans the next. and then i thought, is this a casualty of modern democracy? do we elect our celebrities to speak for us just as we elect our politicians to act? is everyone just urging someone else to do something, while standing still themselves? this is wrong, folks. pick up your own litter, stop shopping at walmart and mind your own business.

at least that's what i think.

animal logic

i had some free time at work today so i made a 4-color honeycomb pattern and overlaid it over an image of brasilian favelas, the which i had studied in city planning 101 as an example of population density and the immense economy of the poor. this is just a sketch, one as much about homes, warm colors, synergy, as it is about my recent discovery that my father spends his free time looking at maps. i am a true daughter of a civil engineer.