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.

thought

of late i've been accruing more empathy for the hazy middle class way of life that would have sent me into fits of revolt as a teenager. and i make no bones about it; my newfound empathy is directly correlated to my gradual immersion into such a way of life (number of times i've thought about wanting to own a house and be near my family in the past week? moreso than i have in my entire years of life prior). rather than hating myself for my bourgeois complacency, i am using myself as proof that not everyone who elects to live this way is motivated by robotic feelings of greed and corruption, that maybe most people are just trying to carve out their way to happiness in one quiet way or another. is it a bad thing to come by empathy for others primarily through your own life experiences? i don't think so; i think that just means we should seek out as many experiences as we can, to fully understand the breadth of others living in this world.

artmaking is slowly responding to this shift in paradigm.

morning newspaper

went home this weekend! social butterflied, bought some shades.

thought about selfishness and how it might be nice one of these days to enter into a selfless period in my life. wondering if art is selfish. also wondering if art is melancholic.

mainly while floating in the cold water of the local creek i though a lot about the difference between my two homes. roads in texas are wide and lonely. they are terrifying because no one cares if you go 80 miles per hour and crash. roads in los angeles are attention-deficit and crowded. they are terrifying because everyone cares if you break the law, and no one cares if you fuck up. this is an apt metaphor for life in both places, and perhaps a call to a more pedestrian way of life.