dear lorrie moore

even though your paean to being twenty is, in fact, lovely and insightful, i would ask that you reconsider the universal age of passion. it's actually seventeen.

love,
carol

"Here’s the thing about being 20 years old. It’s actually the universal age of passion. It’s the age at which nature and form come together and your individual passion achieves its final shape and expression. When, later in life, when you’re older, you feel furious, it’s the fury of a 20-year-old. When you fall in love, it’s the love of a 20-year-old. It’s articulate, it’s visceral, it’s platonic. It’s the pure form of the emotion. When you observe the hypocrisies and injustices of the world, and feel shocked and betrayed by them, you’re actually being 20 again. And yet, you’re just shy of being able to drink. How perfectly completed, and thwarted, at the same time."
-lorrie moore

honey and hay

i've always found people with artistic manifestos curious and admirable. actually, i also find them very stubborn and stuck in their ways, especially if they are modernist painters. the reason being that art for me functions as a basic need, a lack if you will, whose formal and conceptual terrain shifts with the changing of the ground and circumstance below your feet. i've been thinking a lot about what being a young, broke, relocated artist means in terms of the work i produce. i've been taking stabs at artmaking here and there, but ultimately finding myself frustrated and a little frightened by how foreign everything feels in this new context. put simply, for someone whose art is based on lack, i now lack different things. in los angeles, a sun-baked hyperactive megalopolis teeming with media images and uncertainty, i need solitude. i need sustained, repeated actions that will restore my dwindling attention span. i need a return to materiality as a counterpoint to the visual superficiality around me. i need to be able to articulate a stable, spiritual body. i need achromatic color palettes. which is why i'm looking into the possibility of ordering some hay.

in terms of life, i have a boyfriend. i have an art friend. i found a part-time job working for a local record label assisting their art director on packaging and web graphics. the office is cool, and they give me free merchandise and buy me vegan lunches. i think it will tide me over for a few months while i look for a more permanent situation, although my life seems intent on its commitment to instability. in general, i'm wrapping up a hectic and delirious summer, and ready to head into a quieter sense of autumn.

bread

i am taking the night off to myself. for the first time in a while, actually. possible courses of action involve: cleaning my room, watching art 21, watching andrei tarkovsky, reading dickens, reading camus, graphiting, painting, doing my dishes, and/or lying around senseless listening to my bloody valentine and pretending i am a thousands-year-old mummy plotting the moment in which i throw off my embalming linens and make a triumphant return to the stage.

watch for a somewhat solidified life update after monday.

request

that everything you do carries the jouissance of a rock song, 6-23-09