texas ranger

forgetting is our way of denying that we'd lived the things that seem so far away, now. you need memories to be a person, you know?

generic announcements

got back from coachella monday morning. haven't slept for more than 4 hours a night in almost a week, need some time to process the absolute physical, mental, and emotional intensity of the experience. my thesis animation will be playing in a film festival this weekend, and my photographs of mexico city will also be exhibited this weekend at a gallery show about urbanism and graffiti art. yay for life and art.

while digging up my photos of mexico city, i found an old self-portrait that i had really loved but never dared to show in crit. our situationist punk rock printmaking professor at the time was telling us about an artist who drew into the reverse side of fashion photos so that "wounds" would appear in the front, and i carved the e.e. cumming phrase 'to eat flowers, and not to be afraid' into this one. salvaje!

in celebration of today

i'm going to coachella this weekend. bye bye internet! xoxoxo

wackest dream i've had in a long freaking time

spending a lot of time with boyfriend before he has to leave. my parents have just had a third child. i am 5, i go into the infant care unit and cut a clean circle around the baby's left hand, snipping a red bracelet through the skin. i then cry and tell my parents so they can go sew it up, and that i didn't mean anything by it. as in all dreams it's the tone that matters and this didn't feel traumatic, just kind of uncanny. i met boyfriend at a flea market and he comforted me. then we went for a walk around a guggenheim museum-like spiral structure. at an intersection a girl asked me to hold her boyfriend so i said ok, she passes a severed head into my hands. i scream and drop it. she grabs the head indignantly, the head has small arms and legs. it turns out he was just a midget.

woman, sunshine

this is off the first roll of film i ever took. my high school journalism advisor also ran an enviable darkroom, and i would longingly eye the people going in and out everyday, working their photochemical magic. i finally talked her into showing me how to develop film one day; she gave me a roll of tri-x and told me to go off shooting. as i was in the backyard zooming in on dried pieces of squash my mother came out raving and asking what i was doing. i pointed the camera at her, she waved her hand over her face.

pleasure/pain

really i like writing 'xoxo' at the end of messages because i like crossing things out in between gasps of saying i love you.

introduction

i stayed after work today to scan my collected archive of family negatives. it's really amazing to see pictures of things you've lived but don't remember and have never seen before. the digital images are just placeholders until i decide which ones i want to print from film, and how. in the meantime, i think i may periodically post images from the archive with an accompanying story. you know, from my past to yours.


this is my mummy and me in boulder, colorado, where most of these negatives take place. my parents always liked hanging out in grassy fields and taking pictures, something i always took for granted but now realize is not universal. we used to share one of those clapboard houses with someone; i think it was the blue one. i will always describe my mother as beautiful in these pictures. she's very demure and ladylike. even now, she seems ages away even though photographically she's no more than a few years older than me currently. as for me, i began my love affair with multicolored dresses early. also a hint of things come, i loved the camera. i used to smile a lot before my teeth grew in and got crooked in adolescence, and i got self conscious.

thursday morning exercise

"One should take care when fighting monsters, to not become a monster in the process."
-F. Nietszche

in that same spirit, one should take care when putting on clothing, to not become a clothing monster in the process.

she's into superstition

P.S. i looked up my holiday mathis horoscope for my birthday. may all of it be true!

You take care of your people, and they make your life fun and easy. This month brings a financial breakthrough, and career trajectories change. A twist in the plot of your personal life comes in May. You'll find out who cares more deeply than you imagined. You'll plant a seed in June and harvest in October. Pisces and Capricorn people adore you. Your lucky numbers are: 9, 10, 4, 33 and 20.

today is my birthday

i'm 22 today. it's raining outside. the day feels like a quiet gunshot.

some words from rainer:

"Go into yourself an explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find to the question whether you must create. Accept it as it sounds, without enquiring too closely into every word. Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist. [...] Perhaps however, after this descent into yourself and into your aloneness, you will have to renounce your claim to become a poet."

"Love your solitude and bear the pain which it has caused you with fair-sounding lament. For those that are near you are far, you say, and this shows that distance begins to grow round you. And when your nearness is far, then your distance is already among the stars and very great; be glad of your growing, into which you can take no one else with you, and be good to those that remain behind, and be self-possessed and quiet with them and do not torment them with your doubts and do not frighten them with your confidence or joy, which they could not comprehend."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, (I, IV)

one platonic woman coming right up

reading, thinking, gathering inspiration and not worrying about Art Institutions As We Know Them right now.

some words for the interim

"You are so young, you have not even begun, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything that is unsolved in your heart and to try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books written in a very strange tongue. Do not search now for the answers which cannot be given you because you could not live them. It is a matter of living everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then, gradually, without noticing it, one distant day live right into the answer."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (IV)