the good, the bad, the ugly

if you haven't yet caught on, i'm been trying for a while to make sense of my texas upbringing. the veneer of toughness with which i meet everyday life has become an object of curiosity to my southern california peers. why do you constantly think the world is out to get you? they ask. and they're right - i have very little to fear in the state of free love. but i lived for many years in a state that joyfully electrocuted 361 inmates before 1977, and boasts a record 466 lethal injections since. i'm only starting to realize the lasting impact the existence of a death penalty can have on an personal level. it didn't matter that i didn't think one should kill others - the state did. judging by its dogged interpretation of the 2nd amendment, it also thinks other people should be able to kill you. the idea of survival takes on a radically different tone in this light. it's no longer about feeding your family. it's about not getting shot by your neighbor.

fly on the wall

i'm only starting to realize that most of my life has been shaped by an acute awareness of being the 'other'. always being the new kid in school. being one of 3 asians in a white suburban texas high school. arriving at art school and finding that no one else dyed their hair or wore fishnets. unconsciously, i've always expected other people to be not like me, because that had been the truth of my education. i hadn't realized this about myself until i moved to california, the state of plenty-and we're not just describing the avocado supply. people of modge-podge identities glide on by without stopping to think about the strangeness of their modge-podge world. i wonder often what it would've been like to grow up with this unfettered mentality. would i have felt compelled to be an artist?

costumes i missed out on this year

1. marina abramovic @ moma


2. jane lane (it's alright though, i am jane lane every day)


3. CHUNGKING EXPRESS

so weird

i read yet another major newspaper article today about the neverending recession, which was pretty darn scary, but not as scary as then perusing some photographs of aids in vietnam and feeling completely detached from the other hemisphere of the world. one of my greatest fears is being a poor global citizen. living in the states and in california in particular, it's tough deciding which consciousness of the world is fake and which is real. another reason to keep doing what we do and having compassion for what we don't do, because that's the only thing we can be really sure of.

on the dissolution of selfhood

identity is a funny thing, especially when the internet is involved. i may (and will) change residences year to year, but you can always trust in my email for a permanent address.

for an artist, a website is an important calling card, but what if your name is already inhabited by someone else? carolzou.com is owned by an actress and bilingual tv host, and it doesn't look like i can buy her out of her domain anytime soon. according to her twitter (also carolzou), she also lives in los angeles. if i were inclined toward the postmodern, 'meeting carol zou' would be an excellent title to a performance art piece.

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)

wednesday morning intervention

sleepers, 2010
i wondered if this abandoned mattress still held the bodies that had lived there once before.

festering thought

one thing that i think western thought lags behind on is its emphasis on addressing the symptoms rather than the structure of social issues. for example, our response to poverty in america is to encourage college attendance, which will presumably lead to job security. but now a significant number of people with bachelor's degrees are flooding the workforce - now a graduate education is required to escape menial drudgery. the core of the problem isn't educational attainment but a system that enforces a hierarchy with a small amount of people in high-paying jobs. economic disparity will not change unless the system changes (and now i'm starting to sound like karl marx). same with the environmental issue. instead of exploiting gasoline, we're turning our attention to exploiting other fuel resources that too will become unsustainable, instead of curbing the unrestrained consumption that drives the oil crisis. i often think that breaking issues down to the ethos of things makes it easier to approach on a personal level, and provides clarity for action.

maybe sending this message out into the internet will somehow make the world a better place. maybe, just maybe.

poorly articulated thought

it never occurs to me that my approach to my artistic subject is not universally shared. doesn't everyone feel a sad longing kind of love when they set about their work? no, no they don't, carol.

the thought only came to me today when i was looking at a french design monograph. one of the works was a collage of anonymous bodies that conveyed an air of dissatisfaction. i realized that i had never felt the way this artist feels when making his work--namely, the feeling of cutting up other people, and figuratively spitting on them.

you don't have to be hateful to be relevant, y'know.

poker face

re: this article

i was lamenting to my roommate the other day about the lack of counterculture grrl icons in contemporary media. back in the 90s, i could bust myself up like courtney love, shoplift like winona ryder, go home to daria on mtv, and plan my lilith fair outing to the angry, angry sounds of fiona apple. these were women who were tough, angry, and messy, but who were still accepted as a legitimate and desirable expression of counterculture.

what do we have now? avril lavigne getting married. rihanna getting beaten up by chris brown. gwen stefani hawking handbags. hillary clinton getting served by barack obama in the 2008 primaries (AHEM). women seem to have been reabsorbed into commercial culture, and 'rebel' is just the title of a spread in a fashion magazine. but then there's lady gaga. lady gaga defies all rational thought - this is a woman who prances around with a silicone penis jutting out of the middle of a psychedelic space-alien jumpsuit. her name makes me think of gag reflexes. and she's massively, commercially popular. the rise of lady gaga as an expression of alternative sexuality, i think, is representative of a shift in the movement for sexual equality - instead of focusing purely on women and their misbehavior, the sexual dialogue of the 00's is about queers, transsexuals, and yet-to-be-named forms of gender construction.

2 things conducive to lovers

1. portals that allow instant passage from one bedroom to the other.
2. portals that let you disappear into a nether-space in which time passes more slowly, while the rest of the world and their busy schedules stands still.

pleasurable things learned about prague today

czechoslovakia's 1989 nonviolent political revolution was called the velvet revolution. there are so many good, beautiful things about that sentence. one of these days i want to start my own jacquard uprising.

letter to a concert security guard: a haiku

do you think we're weird?
probably; you get paid to
stand here every day.

they went through all the motions of being a crowd-raising 90's alternative rock band, and they did it well. but in their well-timed thrashing one sensed a naivete that wasn't present in those who actually survived that time period. it was then i felt like we were all, in some manner or another, impersonating a generation we only wish we knew.

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?

shostakovich shakes the soul

lately the term 'russian' has been bandied about me as a catch-all adjective. 'oh, that's so russian. please, make that russian', people would say with equal amounts of vagueness and conviction as to the word's meaning. the meaning began to click, somewhat, when i heard a very russian performance of gershwin's 'rhapsody in blue', the iconic piece about ambulating through new york city. what was so russian about it? the syncopation was present, but not at all jazzy. each note was struck with measured rigor. the most surprising midtones were emphasized, bringing out notes and flavors, street corners and alleyways that never before existed in the skyline of the melody. the entire piece felt full even when quiet, and always stopped short of hitting a dramatic high or low due to the force that reigned throughout. move over, dorothy, because we're not in new york city anymore. this is not your mother's leonard bernstein directs the new york phil, to which you've faithfully listened since age 11. it was like watching the planes and colors of your favorite kandinsky painting get rearranged into something strange and striking. bravo.

sometimes (actually, all of the time) i wish i had more seriously pursued music.

metaphor (saturday)

the thought of her hung over us the entire night, a cloud that eventually darkened and rained.

forgive me for writing about your life

at my other work i work with teenagers in a gang, poverty, and violence affected area of los angeles. one of them handed me his college admissions essays to review. the first is about the three churches in his neighborhood, and how much their rites annoy him. after three scathing paragraphs about the inanity of religion, he concludes that he has become a tolerant person through having to put up with religious fools. it's nihilistic, it's blunt, it's not really the stuff of conservative college admissions committees. in the second essay he writes about a car accident that sent his father into a coma for two months, during which he was estranged from his family and sent to live with his aunt. in his own words, he was a nine year boy become a nine year old man. reading between the essays, one wonders if this is why he doesn't believe in god.

moments like these take me out of my own life, and into the amazing strength of others. success is relative to what you have to overcome, and so many of us are walking out there with eyes so wide we're blind to what we never had to experience. here in los angeles, where any value can become superficial and glib, i find myself drawn most to people who display the strength to survive through life--and survival occurs in the most unexpected and overlooked of places. it lives under highways, over gravel, and in the interstices between our two clasped hands. what does this mean for a world which seems to arrange its values otherwise--values such as intellect, creativity, entrepreneurship, none of which are necessarily bad, but somehow incomplete on their own? i don't know.

this is getting rather fiona apple about things. this world is bullshit, but this world is also pretty beautiful and amazing.

physical sensations experienced today

-tasting popcorn flavored with white cheddar, seasoning salt and the lavender soap my boss used to wash the container. first it tasted like laundry, then like rustic cabin getaways, then like chemicals.
-holding my wrists and fingers limp while a lady with excessive eyeliner oils them up, and enters my fingerprints into an electronic database. she tells me i'm a fingerprinting problem child, and that i need to moisturize.

literary analysis taken to the extreme

radiohead's fake plastic trees is about deep ecology, reaganomics, and romeo and juliet. it also sounds like grey and spaceships.

homeboy j.c. regarding The Man

"I was [...] merely a subject for official writing, filling up of forms with all the artificial superiority of a man of pen and ink to the men who grapple with realities outside the consecrated walls of official buildings. What ghosts we must have been to him! Mere symbols to juggle with in books and heavy registers, without brains and muscles and perplexities; something hardly useful and decidedly inferior."
-joseph conrad, the shadow line

appeals to male heroism aside, i've been wondering about this for a while. when we empower the quote unquote downtrodden and marginalized, do we empower them to function as members of the system, or as members outside of the system? there seems to be a lie somewhere in the ideal that bettering one's socioeconomic position means integration into mainstream ways of life. ultimately, do we believe that the system is, or can be, a tenable way of living?