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.

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.

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.

life summary

december was hectic for me. my schedule ran like this: art, travel to parents' house, art, mild social life, art, travel to boyfriend's parents' house, art, travel to nyc to install art, come back home, start working 2 jobs again. i have arrived at the last part of that sentence, stumbling into significant other's darkened bed at midnight last night mumbling jet-lagged thoughts on judy chicago's the dinner party (me: and man was susan b. anthony's vagina plate huge! she had the biggest vagina of them all! he: mmmmf.). a whole new slew of things awaits me on my to-do list, but for the most part, free time is in my life again. this is new to me.

thoughts and drawings and videos and stuff once i rest a bit.

p.s. is this how every young artist feels at the beginning of her twenties? fame and fortune, come soon.

all moved in

i am officially a resident of the 9-0-0-2-7! why do my new digs rock? lots of reasons. it's 100% furnished according to my neurotic artist-sleeper needs--half of my closet space is dedicated to analog photo equipment, and half of my room space is dedicated to my bed. it's within walking distance of the grocery store, flower shop, gay bar, straight bar, cheese shop, movie place, coffee place, public park, subway stop, and the dangerjob. that's right, i can WALK to places in los angeles now! OH MY GOD! I AM SO HAPPY! NOW I CAN FOCUS ON IMPORTANT THINGS LIKE WALKING TO TRADER JOES, VISITING MY MOMMY FOR TANKSGIVING AND MAKING ART!

and i am slowly getting used to this ikea mattress, which feels like a rock with some sponge properties. i do have this much to say after spending a week building my own furniture only to have to reinforce everything with additional hardware from home depot: fuck. you. swedish. design. AND YOUR LITTLE MEATBALLS TOO!

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?

life advice

an art grad student whom i offended once at a party later told me a few things about life after your bfa:

1. i will be so goddamn broke.
2. i will have the most fun i have ever had.
2. i will continue to make art, but at the expense of my day job and my sleep schedule.

he was right on all counts.

why i don't mind having days off from work

in my spare time i'm trying to gather up an animated portfolio piece about, well, love, radiohead and the apocalypse? these two stills are preliminary excerpts from the storyboard. i also eat a lot of cottage cheese, and do yoga. i think i'm starting to reach past the age of cheap thrills.

things i have been doing of late

-riding bikes with my dad
-reading modernist literature
-developing an affinity for brahms
-organizing my email
-drinking lots of tea
-thinking about my next great project which will involve lots and lots of field research. at dance parties.
-trying to like joy division and failing miserably

self portrait of the artist on the eve of her 21st birthday

let's be honest. the negatives are shit because the vintage lightmeter i was using gave me a reading two stops too low. i printed them on a 3 filter, which strikes me as a cardinal sin in the church of ansel adams (side note: i thought about changing my facebook religious views to 'the zone system', but realized no one would find that funny). but it's not like these are photographs that i can reshoot, and they will still remain valuable to me because of their moment in time. just goes to show the beautiful images that i have produced in the past are not by accident, but by a deliberate and arduous process that typically goes shoot-catastrophe-reevaluate-reshoot. but what if we instilled an ethic of photographic process that can't be subject to this form of reiteration? that too has to answer to contingency? would roland barthes roll over in his grave?

and then i sat in studio crunching an apple and thinking about the meaning of photography

this is how i spend my saturday mornings. maturity has turned me into an old woman.

to do list for the eve of my 21st birthday

1. cut hair
   
2. inventory my body with 3200 speed film