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16/04/2006
St Nostalgia
"Your piece starts with the longest sentence I have ever read. For real. I read it three times to make sure it was a sentence. This morning, I had ----- read it. And, alas, I have concluded that it was (a sentence). It's an impressive sentence, the length of which reflects the length of your struggle. The ending is my favorite part. The image of your life and all the destruction going into a bag made up of the same destruction. That is the definition of samsara, I believe. There's a feeling that there's no way out of the cycle. Yet, you are only fantasizing. This is not how the story ends, even though it is the end of the piece."
I don't know why I didn't go back. I could have gone back, -------- offered me a room. I could have been there this whole time and I just didn't go. If I could remember why I would feel better. As it stands, I feel ok just now. I am going to look at the first photograph ever. And I am going to live by a lake. I might get over myself long enough to see the world making it up to me, the fact that these things happen to everybody and the fact that I can't remember. And then I am going to party like we did that time in the backyard playing volleyball for Sandra's birthday. And everything is going to be fine.
And Again!
Easter was always great. One time we woke up and the house was full of chocolate, I swear. Like some Russian fairy-tale - milk, white, and dark chocolate squirrils (!) and bunnies, hollow chocolate eggs with sugar tableaus iced out inside them - hard-boiled eggs painted everywhere, kielbasa on the stove, hot bread on the table. The table had its tablecloth and a glistening slab of butter shaped like a little lamb with a teensy red bow around his neck, the good china. Coffee, church, ginger ale, uncles, ham. The Easter Bunny would come to the door, life-sized and cartoony, that was too good to be true. And I'd run wild in the woods behind the house, all springy and shiny with pools of water, forsythia and daffodil, crazy happy Michigan robins, Michigan sky Kodak-blue. Everything thawing, everything born, a new dress, a bow, a braid, tights, wet feet in wet shoes.
14/04/2006
Round & Round
- Lamb-fed lion
- A blooming girl with me
- The talk, too, burst its boundaries
- June 26, 1975
- You won't never be able to forgive her
- I read the book and became a bird
- The reach was narrow, straight, with high sides like a railway cutting
- After barely surviving being at sea
- How the Irish saved civilization
- Cuánto quieres? said the judge
- Excited in my random readings by coming upon terms evoking religiosity, I quite naturally made use of them in musing on my loves, which by being so named took on monstrous proportions.
- Jewish diamond merchants
- In my eyes of flesh
- So much for the hunters
- There's a certain accomplished, mature serenity among this third generation of women; it's pragmatic and dignified and comes from a non-religious "sacred": it has no illusions but it's tough and dependable.
- Yet there is nothing seductive about the truth.
- I would lead a French life, I wold follow the path of honor
- Écoutons la confession d'un compagnon d'enfer
- Miracles! O stand in wonder, Angel, for it was us
- I have news. Tomorrow a stranger will come. I have sent him.
- In surrender
- of the needs and the hopes which had given us our reality
- "Shit," said gymnast, "I got it wrong. I'm going to undo that leap."
13/04/2006
12/04/2006
Electric Co
This photo (of evacuees taking buses into Louisiana to vote in the mayoral election) devastates me, knocks the air out of me, lump in throat, all that. It's such a visual echo, a bookmark if you will, of all of the people fighting to get on the buses out of the city. And something about the attitude of deference of the white men combined with the pride and experience communicated in those women's body language, the feminine gesture of holding the purse. The new sweatshirts, you know they're new, all our clothes are new, the vivid colors. The symbolism of voting, the symbolism of the bus, the nobility of those human beings participating, remaining connected, desiring so strongly to remain connected. The historical significance of it all. It's just a picture, snapped like that, of a very undramatic moment. Yet to me it sings with drama, human drama, and because I am out here, one of the exiles, it hits me, I identify, I am moved by their power and I seriously can't look at it without crying. Like pictures of my dog. My heart expands and contracts and expands and I cry. I am a great big baby.
My absentee ballot goes out tomorrow. There's some fellow in Lakeview, that suburb of pro-life propoganda plastered on lawns roofs and walls, that suburb of white rich folks who would tear down Herman's "John Kerry" placards and sneer at me at the bank, that suburb of old New Orleans families, gated communities, and even open-hearted friends of mine looking to build families and history, anyhow. There's some fellow from Lakeview saying he's sick of "those people" (me) out here getting so much attention regarding the election because we "probably won't be coming back anyhow." I'd like to sit that man in a room for at least a week and ask him over and over again why he thinks that is. I'd like to hear his answer, really, and I'd like to hear him hear his answer. And then I'd like to just walk away.
I don't understand any of this. How people are fighting against FEMA trailer parks in "their" neighborhoods. Homeless mothers with kids remain homeless. How people are forgetting their friends & collegues. Friends are drifting apart and away. I don't understand why evacuees that I know are getting harrassed in their new "homes"; I don't understand the cold hard unforgiving-ness, I don't understand the poverty or even my own insomnia. There's nothing to it but to accept it, cast my vote, do what I can, let go.
09/04/2006
bottom line
I miss New Orleans painfully, dreadfully, more than I myself can even conceive. And I miss my dog even more than that.
Bingo
but of course there's art that makes a person say, "I could never do that!" which is something differently entirely from everything I wrote yest - though, "I could do that!" kindof translates into, "I couldn't," but not entirely, not in the Rembrandt-fashion or Hagop Sandaldjian Frida Kahlo Gerard Richter Kiki Smith or Van Gogh or whoever looms for you. Plus one person's "I could do that" is another person's "I could never!"
These attempts of mine to describe: as much as I think it's an invaluable and necessary part of being a contemporary artist (this is the post-modern world: a time of responsibility for the meanings of our language and what it means to be this person speaking this language) it's just an impossible undertaking. Once I define one thing a crack widens and a whole new creature emerges, waving a tiny flag or drinking a stein of ale; I can't not look, I have to go over there too; I'm just a little too aware. Dumb, too. Yeah, a little dumb.
08/04/2006
Zipper, Bone, Wave
I've realized, while devoting a ton of my time to writing & thinking & defining my art, that what I aim to do is make art that makes people say, "I could do that," while the fact remains that no, they can't, because they didn't: I did! Just to do something basic and uncomplicated in a special way that adds a new dimension to the materials and then to the subject, a deer, say, or a vase of roses. I'm not saying I want to be tricky, to create optical illusions, or to be a conceptual retard. I'm saying I think it's nice to reveal/to see a beautiful surprise in obvious everyday stuff. It's nice to see that you can make art that confronts tough emotional things and it can create intimacy. It's nice to see a soup can become something more. It's what my heroes did and do; it's what intrigues me most. Cuz you know? I really believe that to succeed at this requires a deep connection to your material, to the world around you, and a very real sophistication about how you do what you do. Not to say that I necessarily succeed at it but I will. Someday. (My materials these days: paper, pencil (graphite & colored), vellum, t-pins, scissors, paper cutter, markers, white paint, rubber cement. Oh and shellac. And obviously film, paper & chemicals in the darkroom. But mostly: rubber cement.)
I'm also aware that I really really like the sensation of stuff getting into my work that I just cannot explain. Yes, I've created a relationship to photography, for example, to the act of photographing, that works in the element of surprise. Shooting without looking, for example. But even that's a decision to "make accidents happen". What really thrills me, bear with me, is when something pops up in the field of a drawing, the body of a text, the gesture on a canvas that I just didn't see coming, that I can't explain, don't want to explain, could if I had to but gosh: what a nice surprise. I guess all the years of doing it doing it doing it through crisis and deadline and inspiration and droll creative blocks just hones the skills so you can grab it, write it, paint it, draw it, see it when it does come. It's not an accident, it's not some random catch, it's the result of full-on devotion.
And I know full well there's alot of valid art & artists out there that don't work this way, that don't make work this way or that even remotely expresses this thesis. I know alot of artists who work it all out, map it, plan it, think it, they're modernists, they make what a friend calls "boy art", it's hard and smart and cool. There's intelligence but not alot of mystery. And I can dig it, respect it, I really can. I just don't work that way. I'm in that camp, down there? The one where they sleep outside the tent and cry and holler, throw things in the fire and eat, play games, tell ghost stories and scream, who don't give two shits about looking like an idiot. and hold hands.
Dear Diary,
Chan Marshall's songs are so the Jackson Browne of '06. And can I tell you? I'm totally gonna get hit on tomorrow because I really need a pedicure.
Love,
Need A Haircut Too