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.

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.

the birthday wish

my 90s first generation immigrant family had an incredible knack for economy. we saved the same 'happy birthday' banner and christmas tree for years, and no matter where we were they would appear with regularity.

pleasurable

bending over a stove of boiling spaghetti and allowing the steam to steam open your pores. the bubbles on the surface also provide a meditative focusing point for reflections on matter, convection, the universe.

my kombucha culture is coming along nicely. you are jealous.

my time

lately i've been photographing concerts for the label for which i work (and for which i start full time in june! yay me!). it's an incredible amount of fun; however, during these shows the art sk00ler in me is also tempted to point the camera elsewhere. these are some outtakes that i enjoy.

show and tell

i was recently commissioned by one of my friends to design a guitar paint job (not to actually paint the guitar, thank goodness). this is the final sketch and i'm pretty well pleased. can't wait to actually see the guitar!



it was no doubt inspired by 3 things:

1. the recent performance of florence and the machine that i had caught at coachella.


2. a vintage cover of salinger's catcher in the rye (this is the part where i admit to perusing bookcoverarchive.com at least once a week).


3. pablo neruda's poema 13, which is excerpted in the inscription.

Entre los labios y la voz, algo se va muriendo.
Algo con alas de pájaro, algo de angustia y de olvido.
Así como las redes no retienen el agua.

Between the lips and the voice, something goes dying.
Something with wings of a bird, something of anguish and forgetting.
Similar to the way that nets don't retain water.

in case you were wondering about the thought process of a designer!