| more books'ss |
[23 Feb 2007|01:33pm] |
I started but did not finish The Brothers Karamazov. I really, really tried, but i just didn't care. I think it was more my fault than Dostoevsky's, but the characters never really came alive for me.
And now...
I've officially caught Harry Potter fever. I held out for a long time, but i finally decided to give it a try, and wow. The first two were good and made me want to read more, but were nothing compared to how ravenously i read the third. The characters are more complex, have to make harder choices, confront more bizarre circumstances. I can only hope that the rest of them stay on this level, and from what friends are telling me, they do. So exciting. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire is on its way to the reserve shelf at the library as we speak. Yay!
Also, while i was waiting for the third HP to arrive, i plowed through Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, mostly because it made the NY Times's book section's best of 2006 list. I mean, it was an interesting read, but i thought the characters were acting like entitled, pretentious bastards a lot of the time. I can say the same of the Times so i suppose i should have seen that coming. I think i'll take my book recommendations from other sources from now on.
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| readin' |
[26 Dec 2006|11:50am] |
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music |
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sleater-kinney |
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these are the ones i've read since my last book list, starting with the ones i'm currently on:
willful creatures. aimee bender: weird, great short stories. some are really beautiful, others are unsettling.
theories and documents of contemporary art: a sourcebook. kristine stiles, ed: a collection of artist writings, from which i couldn't pry myself away when i visited my art school friend, so i got my own copy. infinitely more readable than art theory, with the same ideas.
kitchen confidential. anthony bourdain: a chef's memoir, entertaining and took me back to my brief stint as a line cook. also reminded me why i have to get out of this busgirl gig.
life of pi. yann martel: i resisted reading this because of its fame, but this one deserves all the success it can garner. addictive and original, by which i mean devoid of clichés.
the time of the doves. mercè rodoreda: beautiful, stream-of-consciousness novel about a woman's experience of the spanish civil war, translated from catalan.
talking at the gates. james campbell: a bio of james baldwin, which i'll probably re-read until memorized, to the annoyance of probably everyone who knows me.
tell me how long the train's been gone. james baldwin: it's james. so good.
jimmy corrigan, the smartest kid on earth. chris ware: really well-done graphic novel, a little sad at times but definitely not without humor.
i'm pretty sure that i left some out, meaning i'll try to update this more frequently so that books won't be constantly slipping through the cracks.
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| installation day three. |
[29 Aug 2006|12:34am] |
These are photos from a few days ago, it's slow in coming, this finding time to work thing. The hole is how i want it, now i just have to figure out what to put in it.
( funny that. )
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| another installation picature |
[22 Aug 2006|01:04am] |
I worked again today on the installation, making the hole a little crisper, and changing the shape a little so that it's not a straight rectangle. The neighbors asked if i was burying dogs in my backyard. Hot.
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| installation beginnings |
[15 Aug 2006|01:42pm] |
So, i started work on a new installation yesterday, and i'm going to try to document how it comes along, so behind the cut are some images of the big hole i dug. I kind of know what i want to do with it and why, and kind of not, which is good because i tend to not touch anything until i've freaked out and decided how every detail is going to be. It's also good because i usually employ the "quickie" approach to art, meaning that i spit out the finished product in the same day that i decide to work on it. I think i've been afraid of starting anything i wouldn't finish, so i avoid more longterm projects, but this thing i think will be good for getting me out of that mindset. There's something really beautiful about having the same piece with me for awhile, about waking up to it day after day. I'm excited, and whether or not this particular piece ends up in my portfolio doesn't matter. Right now it's just good to work.
( bippity-boppity-boo )
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| music + books |
[08 Aug 2006|03:16pm] |
The Kite Runner: Khaled Hosseini
Okay, so i tend to avoid the bestsellers like Emily's leftover Chinese food, but i'd heard so many good things that i couldn't avoid it. It was easy to get invested in the characters, and i found myself skipping ahead to see what would happen, instead of reading all of the lovely details of a scene. I also really appreciated the fact that the protagonist is kind of an asshole, usually writers don't let their leading characters be so flawed. That said, the character development was a little glossed-over, and the writing was at times really descriptive and at others just flat, uninventive even. The story was engrossing, if a little too perfect and predictable, but i really appreciated its quirks and twists, and its honesty about the changing landscape in Afghanistan.
Springtime Can Kill You: Jolie Holland
Apparently this was released in May, and i regretfully did not get the memo until a few days ago. I really could have used this album back then, but alas. I highly anticipated this second effort, after the stripped-down Escondida i was psyched to see what she'd do next with her lazy folk-blues. And damn, did she pull through. Everyone should have the title track (it's track 3 on the cd) on their summertime playlists. It's just an unbelievable two minutes and 48 seconds, and i don't mind admitting that this one song, not the cd but this song, was featured on repeat here in the basement apartment last night for a full hour. Oh, the drums on this. Gorgeous, gorgeous. The rest of it is just as good, with some killer lines and one song in particular that i identify with to the point that it makes me uncomfortable. I'm not gonna say which one, but if you really want to know, ask.
The Eraser: Thom Yorke
I can't get enough of this one, it really does deserve the hype. Lush, built-up electro tracks with Yorke's trademark lulling and lilting, and each song is so powerful. You'll be head-nodding along, and he'll knock you on your ass with lines like, "A self-fulfilling prophecy of endless possibility / You roll in reams across the street / In algebra, in algebra." And if "Atoms For Peace" doesn't break your heart in an addictive way, you should probably get yourself checked out. I'm starting to think this man can do no wrong.
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| books |
[01 Aug 2006|12:29pm] |
Swarm: Camille Roy
A little book with 2 short stories or novellas. I can't really tell which they are. So many sentences where i had to reread them about four times to really let them do all they were meant to do. Both of the stories concern the author's adolescence, and all its attending uncertainties and misunderstandings and lonelinesses.
Death Kit: Susan Sontag
I think Susan Sontag was a genius, but i couldn't really get into this book, and i'm not sure why. Maybe i didn't identify with it enough, but it just didn't seem as true as i'm used to her essays being. Or maybe i didn't give enough of myself to reading it. I feel like i did at the beginning but i stopped after awhile, and almost didn't finish the book. But parts of it were very beautiful.
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| lisssssts. |
[01 Jul 2006|02:25am] |
maybe i should start keepin' track of what i'm reading, listening to, viewing, as these have so much to do with where my feelings are all mushed up. maybe i will start brief thoughts on how the culture i absorb changes things. maybe i won't. for books i want only to include ones that i've finished, not still reading.
books:
-a survey study of the life and habits of birds, i forgot the title, but whoa. birds.
-The Biology of Violence: How Understanding the Brain, Behavior, and Environment Can Break the Vicious Circle of Aggression Debra Niehoff
-Letters To a Young Poet Rainer Maria Rilke
films/movies:
-lots of old Cary Grant and/or Katharine Hepburn films, particularly The Awful Truth, The Philadelphia Story, and Holiday
-The Thin Man
-Drawing Restraint 9 i know, how pretentious of me but damn is it beautiful
artists:
-Andrea Zittel. still reeling from the exhibit i saw of hers way back
music:
god, too much to list, currently on repeat are New Young Pony Club, Neko Case, Architecture in Helsinki, Love is All, Think About Life, and of course Patsy Cline
more to follow as i keep truckin'.
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| to emily. |
[29 Jun 2006|10:54pm] |
I live with an artist who knows she is an artist. Who makes because she wants to and believes in what she makes. Who trusts her intuition, watches over her sensitivity. I do not feel pressure to be the inspiring one, to initiate the conversations about making. I live with another artist, terrified but undeterred. Her words stick to my fingertips, and i am not the same. She knows ambition is not arrogance. A cluster of cheap meals, thick coffee, a yogurt cup of cigarette butts holds the drops of our unforgiving successes. And i am not the same.
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| to sharon. |
[27 Jun 2006|11:11pm] |
I can't shake the feeling that i am going through some kind of second adolescence, where the learning is happening too quickly for my body to synthesize all the lessons, to put them in their proper place. It's probably typical for the mid-twenties period, but everything seems chaotic, exciting, and relentlessly kinetic. I am certainly having difficulty assimilating these new realizations, it seems i barely get a chance to wrap my mind around one before another announces itself at my feet. I am perpetually on my knees, hoping for a calm that arrives only in snatches. Oddly, i am not afraid of the often painful truths, only of alienating those i am trying to love better. I failed bitterly of loving you well when i was last with you, and i am afraid no apology will ever compensate for it. Do know that i am deeply sorry.
I know that my body is leading me to becoming a much better woman than i have ever allowed myself to be, but its slowness in coming is frustrating and at times debilitating. I am excited about these roads, these paths i have found, but i am impatient with the knowledge that i'll not be arriving anywhere for a very long time, maybe never.
I can only ask for your patience at my attempts to adapt to these new contours, to this very unfamiliar home, with the hope that i will be able to give you the same, the freedom to fail that is based in the steady trust that we are each trying with all that we are to unravel the women we are terrified we already are; strong, compassionate, and determined women, because success is infinitely more frightening than failure.
I hope only that i have the courage to be there for you, to show my unflinching passion for you in the ways you need, and only those ways.
You are always with me. My sister.
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[27 May 2006|11:24pm] |
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music |
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Clap Your Hands Say Yeah |
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Having just finished, in chronological order, Mrs. Dalloway, The Angela Y. Davis Reader, The White Album, and "The Cyborg Manifesto" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, plus having been on a reading binge for the greater part of the last three months, i've concluded i'm due to start giving something back. Past due. As mentioned here earlier, i've been harboring this weight, energy waiting to be transferred to paper, or screen, or whatever medium it requires. Before i thought i should wait for it to materialize on its own, but it has gained this itchy quality of late, i think indicating that it's up to me to start getting this energy out of me, or prepare for a serious internal rash situation. Without the usual internal cues, i'm left to brainstorm on my own, which is the point of this here post. Note that this in no way expresses a commitment to or even a base appreciation for any of the following rudimentary, exploratory bulleted items:
-essay(s) concerning growing up in weird, weird Williamsburg, VeeAy (esp. busch gardens, the golf course, the woods behind my house, colonial-land)
-essay concerning the gamut of jobs i have held
-installation/photos documenting installation of dirt/plants into various domestic spaces
-essay(s) combating persistent racism in queer/feminist communities
-series of thematic mixtapes (possible incorporation of ideas, "skills" acquired from upcoming printmaking workshop, possible future class)
-essay(s) on biking, specifically the physics of it + learning to ride as an adult (maybe use it as jumping-off point to discuss other issues, brooklyn)
-essays on prospect park, its history, current lack of racial diversity, gentrification, politics of landscape
-essays on working for a doggie daycare
-small book with collage of found pics/drawings from old books, plus text about learning how to feed oneself (possible collaboration with Renee?)
Note the emphasis on writing. This could be either terrifying or uninteresting, but not both. Photography is safer, easier, less risky for me, and therefore can only be nominally involved.
More details to come. Things are in heavy percolation here in the basement of this little three-story building on st. johns place.
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| At the bar. |
[06 May 2006|12:23pm] |
"Are you always this quiet?"
"I like watching."
The boy in the plaid shirt rolled his sleeves up to the elbow while facing his bedroom mirror, approximately 50 minutes before he arrived. He's the most pathetic person here, with a faux-trucker cap and a flip-phone in his left breast pocket, where chew or at least a pack of cigarettes should be. I enjoy imagining what an interaction would be like between him and the real truckers that populated the small town in the shenandoah valley where i attended college. Something involving big gulps and fur. His keys dangle from a rock-climbing ring attached to the belt buckle over his right hip, and he bobs his knee on the lower stool rung self-consciously, as though he thinks he's supposed to have uncontrollable nervous energy.
"What's going on over there is a beautiful thing," dan informs me, "and not for the reasons you think." He motions towards two femmy girls shouting in each other's ears over the music and affectionately touching elbows, hips.
I smirk and nod at my drink, now mostly melted ice.
"I hate testosterone. Y'see that guy? He notices two girls making out and saunters over there to fuck it up."
I start to thank him for the dual lesson in heterosexism and the evils of patriarchy, but decide to spear the lime slice in my drink with a black plastic straw instead. He openly stares at the couple, especially fixated following the gentleman's departure from the scene. I am absorbed in the drops of pale pink liquid falling rhythmically from the lime.
He asks what i do when i'm not working, or taking care of my dog, or sleeping. His face congratulates his sensitivity for remembering the dog he met last weekend.
"Mostly, i read."
"Oh yeah? What kind of stuff?"
"Right now i have the adventures of huck finn and a biography of virginia woolf out from the library, and i'm trying to get through this book of essays by donna haraway and this historical survey of the impact of nat turner's rebellion."
"So you're interested in gender identity."
"..."
It occurs to me that i could have mentioned reading only a marxist analysis of shoelaces and he would have responded similarly.
"When i say i feel sometimes like i should have been a woman, that it would have been easier if i were a woman, people say, 'well, you're just a feminine guy.' But it's not like that."
I finally get it. I'm the sensitive, open-minded dyke here to affirm the validity of his half-formed gender issues. After all, straight white male is so unfashionable. In the safety of drunkenness or dehydrated moments of solitude, anything's better than what you are.
"They just don't understand me."
"Are you always this quiet?"
I make my way to the train, and pass an idling police van with a cop in the passenger side playing solitaire on the touchscreen computer. The driver stares blankly at the sidewalk, missing me entirely.
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| untitled on newsprint |
[22 Apr 2006|11:04pm] |
the text says:
i spend time
folded up in
nourishments,
conflicted
gravities
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[21 Apr 2006|11:54pm] |
I appreciate about new york that i can write until midnight and then still be able to go out. In the other locales i have inhabited, people turn in much closer to dusk than to dawn of the next day.
For once it feels like there's so much to say, usually it's all been said, and more eloquently. I can't escape the shimmer of pouring flax seeds into a bulk bin at the food co-op i'm a member of last sunday, these little brown fish piling up and sliding around the bin.
More and more my body is a site, a location for histories, for meanings, personal, political, and social. I am thinking it always was, and i am only now smart enough to acknowledge it. I learned in a documentary about insect defenses that there are black circles on some species of butterflies, "eyespots," so that when the insect flutters its wings resembles, to a bird, more the face of an owl than a meal. I can't even begin to fathom the evolution of that trait. How infinitely nature has to fuck with genetics to be able to select something so specific and so useful. Certainly the butterfly has no concept of the genius enacted on its back.
I am interested in the ways to fuck with my own options, to study the effects, to make decisions on what is useful. To allow what is useful to be fluid, to allow the uses themselves to shift and crash against each other. To embrace breaking.
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| writing |
[18 Apr 2006|11:43pm] |
I've been wanting to write more, wanting to feel overwhelmed with all that needs to be said and the partial satisfaction that comes from having said it, but i maybe haven't found the right conditions. Right now my mornings belong to my job, my afternoons crowded with errands and the occasional indulgent nap, and my evenings slippery. Late nights are often productive for me but i haven't had the energy consistently enough to make staying up late habitual. Cleaning my room helped minimize the immediate distractions, but the weather lately has made it unconscionable to spend much time indoors.
But but. I want to be writing. It seems that if i did, the more i did it the easier the words would come. Painfully obvious, but sometimes subtlety isn't so effective with me.
Also, i really want to be in a band. You know, being on stage flailing about, getting and giving energy in rooms with people and music and bouncing. I'm really afraid it'll never happen, never be high enough on the list of priorities to actualize.
Sometimes i worry about the extent to which using my time "wisely" drives my decisions, actions. Maybe i should allow for more recklessness, more waste.
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| explanation for absence/new wall piece |
[18 Apr 2006|11:35pm] |
The internet access i've been pirating (with consent) from my neighbors was down. hopefully that won't happen again.
Also, i found a mat on the curb and decided to make it a wall work-in-progress. This is the first "state"... using photocopies and potato cut stamps. I'll post further images as i work on it more.
( image )
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[08 Apr 2006|01:23am] |
The rind of an orange i ate at about 21:30 today, resealed with its seeds inside. Possible uses to follow.
( image )
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| fast #1 |
[07 Apr 2006|11:17pm] |
Yesterday i fasted. I worked most of the day so it was pretty easy. The biggest (only?) test of willpower was when i came home at around 18:30. I was sleepy from staying up late and getting up early the previous day, not related to the fasting i don't think. So i got into bed around 20:00. Throughout the day my stomach didn't really growl, but my eyes were heightened to almost anything food-related: an empty wrapper for a processed honeybun hugging a curb, french fries my boss ate for lunch, a 1/3 full plastic cup of green smoothie a professional-looking Brooklynite sipped as she passed me on the street. The images are vivid even a day later.
I felt much less-inclined to talk than usual, i'm not sure if this is directly related to the fasting, but it may be. It seemed like my eyesight and sense of smell took priority over my other senses, and i felt much more aware of/sensitive to my environments, that i needed to pay more attention almost. This might be related to my silence, in the same way that Neruda holds himself absolutely still when he's listening to something, in order to limit the distractions as much as possible.
It definitely seemed as though my eyes were hungrier than my stomach. I only felt the desire to chew after getting home in the evening. It will be much easier to fast on workdays because of the mental/physical distractions, maybe i'll do the first few on workdays, and then trying on a day off.
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| endoexperiment #2 |
[06 Apr 2006|07:38pm] |
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To weekly or bi-monthly (i never can remember if the prefix bi- means "twice" or "every two," here i mean twice a month) fast for one day. Each time during or immediately following the fast i will journal, focusing on my body's emotional responses. Fasting means intaking nothing except water, plain tea, and/or plain coffee.
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