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.

final video

hypnos part 1

what kept me awake in bed last night was a strange determination to be able to describe my college eateries to someone who had never been to school in upstate new york. my mind wandered over the art student cafe and paused for a sweet moment at the cafeteria in the basement of the humanities building. it was run by a tibetan couple, and attracted tortured humanities grad students as well as senior undergrads aspiring to be tortured grad students. emily and i used to line up for soup every day -- by noon because the line would become absurdly long afterwards. we would always opt for the vegan soup option with a pumpernickel roll. there were about 8 or 9 different soups in rotation, and we speculated daily about the day's soup. the hours spent reminiscing about groundnut and thai carrot, the two clear favorites!

in ithaca, a bleak wintry town with very little amenities, one looked forward to alcohol, sex, and soup -- in other words, things that kept one's body warm. alcohol always resulted in vomiting, headache and regret, and the sex never occurred as frequently as one would have liked. soup remained our one constant source of comfort.

when the grammy's are announced and katy perry feels so two years ago

so much of (post)modern life is spent trying to convince ourselves that things are new and exciting, every second of every day. with so many things happening at once, 365 days of distance often feels like 365 years of accomplishment, but is traversed as quickly as one forgets yesterday's pop song. numbingly spectacular, immediately gratifying, without any sense of temporal rootedness (maybe constancy is a less masculine-oriented word) - this is our generation.

the weather (part 2)

it's almost october. a shock to think about. i have been out of school and living in los angeles for four months--which is just long enough for me to stop using the 'i just moved here and don't know anything' excuse. i feel as if some great epiphany should be around the corner, but none seems imminent. growing up in colorado i always associated october with the height of autumn putrefaction and flux, the treetops bursting into flames and then disappearing in a river of rot down the sewer drain. but here it feels like everyone is immersed in a sunny mausoleum whose demand on its residents never changes, because the climate never changes. it is still as hot as ever.

one certain colorado october it snowed the day before halloween. i was a witch that year. my mother made my costume out of black satin, as well as my halloween bag which always made my candy stash look deceptively small and my neighbors consequently more generous. that year, and most years from age 4-9, no inclement weather could stand in the way of me and free candy. i crunched through the snow in black pumps and no socks, slush seeping in under the arches of my feet, for 2 hours knocking on my neighbors' doors. i returned with my feet red, almost frostbitten, and, among other things, three whole hershey's bars.

things i associate with blondie

mittens, sweaters, whiskey, salsa dancing at 4 am, tungsten lamps, winter air, staying warm, hardwood floors, mexico city.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CmhqoB1lNE

eric roberts and chequers

being 17, riding 141 mph down the highway with the windows down, feeling so much possibility in the world and wanting everything--these are all things i think of when i listen to mr. brightside by the killers.

PABLO NERUDA AND SWEATERS

when in a funk about your current state of art/body/being, revert to older modes of being. this is a relic from a sleepless but formative semester involving land art, lithography, large format cameras, and long hair. why did i cut it again?

scenes from childhood

I used to con the neighborhood kids into using the picnic tables as a runway from which we would jump wildly into the air, with the intent that every time our muscles would be conditioned to travel a little further. I had been reading a lot of The Fledgling, by Jane Langton. I was obsessed with learning how to fly.