lately

maturity is sinking its claws into me like iron into wood and i am called upon to be older than i actually feel. it is not harsh, but it is firm. an anvil slowly pressing its way through the bottom of the sea.

the birthday wish

my 90s first generation immigrant family had an incredible knack for economy. we saved the same 'happy birthday' banner and christmas tree for years, and no matter where we were they would appear with regularity.

pleasurable

bending over a stove of boiling spaghetti and allowing the steam to steam open your pores. the bubbles on the surface also provide a meditative focusing point for reflections on matter, convection, the universe.

my kombucha culture is coming along nicely. you are jealous.

my time

lately i've been photographing concerts for the label for which i work (and for which i start full time in june! yay me!). it's an incredible amount of fun; however, during these shows the art sk00ler in me is also tempted to point the camera elsewhere. these are some outtakes that i enjoy.

show and tell

i was recently commissioned by one of my friends to design a guitar paint job (not to actually paint the guitar, thank goodness). this is the final sketch and i'm pretty well pleased. can't wait to actually see the guitar!



it was no doubt inspired by 3 things:

1. the recent performance of florence and the machine that i had caught at coachella.


2. a vintage cover of salinger's catcher in the rye (this is the part where i admit to perusing bookcoverarchive.com at least once a week).


3. pablo neruda's poema 13, which is excerpted in the inscription.

Entre los labios y la voz, algo se va muriendo.
Algo con alas de pájaro, algo de angustia y de olvido.
Así como las redes no retienen el agua.

Between the lips and the voice, something goes dying.
Something with wings of a bird, something of anguish and forgetting.
Similar to the way that nets don't retain water.

in case you were wondering about the thought process of a designer!

in which carol completes the transition to southern california hippie-dom

seasonal allergies, life, et al

i've been exhausted lately, but in a good way. or in a bad way, if you judge me according to my blog output. i made these drawings last night while watching the entire canon of radiohead music videos. give it up to thom yorke for consistently visualizing a world of blue-grey urban alienation.




the subject of this metaphor is open to interpretation.

i'll be switching jobs in the next few weeks. i will have more time to do arty things both in my personal and my professional life, which is a very liberating feeling. one of which is working on a new animation titled 'dreams about flight'. can't wait to actually have some footage to post!

some notes from a psychedelic czech movie i watched last night

cassandra cat, 1963

"youth never ages."
"you are my home, i live in you wherever you go."
"in exile it's important to identify and carry your roots inside of you; otherwise you always feel like your roots are lost in another place, and are unable to root yourself in the present."

i've been having mental images of cities unwinding on long strands of tape (cinema, slow down!), and vomiting.

p.s. emily, that is totally you and tabitha.

this is what i think about in traffic

have you ever wondered how much time businesses spend trying to come up with acronyms for their telephone number such as 1-888-KOOL-AID? i mean, which comes first, the phone number or the acronym? i tried fabricating my own phone slogans today, but for some reason the first two that came to mind were 1-800-DEAD-CAT and 1-800-APE-RAPE. what does that say about me?

oh bee-hive!

i was driving from work to work today and became very emotional at the sight of hotel windows. i was drawn to the pristine orderliness of their facade, as well as the human histories that lived behind the windows, tenants drawing their blinds at different hours of the day, inserting themselves into a larger pattern while completely unaware of the stranger in the next room. i felt some pathos for the church windows down the road as well.

the morning after everything.

waking life, 2001

lately i've been enjoying dreaming as an escape from the real world into a kinder, and stranger reality. in general i've been drawn to the sensual abandonment of surrealism as opposed to formulating things in conceptual language. last night i dreamt about meeting and leaving in airports, and a cold winter forest with a voice recorder stuck in one of the trees. i threw a smooth marbled stone at it; it started playing joy division.

monday night fever

i spent tonight listening to tschaikovsky's piano concerto in b flat minor, which incidentally will always be linked with this image in my head. cue fixation with swimmers and blue things.


harold and maude, 1971

been thinking that having answers is scarier than having questions, which is why i keep running from the former to the latter. but it's time to stop, and run deeper into the answers themselves.

birds of a feather

lately i've been urging myself to live in the moment instead of dwelling in past things, to wake up and let myself feel everything that's around me instead of retreating into a safe little cocoon of what-has-been. but what does it mean to live in the moment? i have this habit of, when under severe emotional duress, fixating on arranging everything around me into little geometric constellations and color categories as a way of escaping the storm brewing in my head. but i think that if we were to truly concentrate on just the physical properties of the world around us without inserting any subjective interpretation, the true meaning and experience of the moment that lies beneath such signifiers would actually fly beyond our grasp.

i guess my answer to the moment question is that it exists when you are completely aware of what's in your own head and what's around you, but actively invested in neither. the moment exists in the gap between your thoughts and your perception of the world - a gap that widens as you, unconscious, fly deeper into it. riding in motor vehicles is particularly conducive to this.

does that make sense?

i've had some wack dreams which i shall recount in a moment.