inventory of drawings march '09 - present

In the past eight months, I have made:

- a little over 300 real drawings; real because they live on real paper and not sketchbook paper
- 20 really good drawings; good because they lead somewhere new, and they haven't expired by my standards
- so 6.7% were 'successful,' but all were necessary.

i'm pretty sure my mom reads this

I just found this list unpacking boxes and thought it was funny and/or embarrassing.
I forget the context for most of these.

- wherein you learn to recreate people in other people to avoid meeting new people.
- convenient trenches
- spent day drawing plans for large bob dylan trap.
- now i'm stuck in my room with the parrot next door squawking back all our previous night's sex sounds.
- substitute tanlines

!

I don't really sleep very much anymore, not that I ever have, but now I'm on bennett hours (if you know them, you will know). It's kind of disorienting because I just end up experiencing a full range of emotions I'm not usually conscious for. I also become less and less articulate in describing them, and my coping mechanisms develop a poor sense of humor. I also tend to watch horrifying youtube videos like the Paula Abdul reality tv show, chain smoke, and think about that time I was raped (just kidding!).

Then I do some math to stay sharp:
I tally up how many times I have to talk about what kind of asian I am and it averages (2) a day.
Then I tally up the amount of times someone tells me I look seventeen; averages (1).
Then I count all the niche Korean products strangers expect me to know because they once had a Korean girlfriend (1; this is not a common occurrence, but it happened today and I thought it was funny. I got to drive a vintage benz out of the conversation so whatever.)

This totals the number of beers I drink: 4
Which I multiply by (3) for each segment of the day (morning, afternoon, evening)
which equals the amount of cigarettes I smoke to celebrate the day.

The piles of internet debris I stack on my desktop are really getting out of hand.
Someone should clean that up.

This is Topher's desk illustrating that time I almost set our studio on fire. No cats or pillows were scathed, but the fire department broke all our windows and made a slip n' slide. So glad I quit before this happened.


ellsworth kelly's beautiful stem.


mr. blunk


andrew i'm a fucking show off wyeth.

album

I've been listening to the generic flipper album a lot to remain positive.

Supermarket music kills me. When I hear that Whitney Houston song about how she will always love me, it just reminds me of being younger and never imagining that I would be listening to it at twenty-four, unemployed, in a hood c-town, buying cheap groceries. It's a little depressing.

Or going to the deli at four am for a drunk sandwich and hearing that rhianna song about getting set on fire while the deli guy talks about missing his family back in yemen.

Is it too much to ask for music to be perfectly calibrated to each situation?

yes.

synchronization

UNTITLED (PERFECT LOVERS) BY FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES (1987-1991)
"Two identical battery-operated clocks are placed in the gallery, side
by side and initially set to the same time. With time, though, they
inevitably fall out of sync: batteries running out and the ever-present
drive towards entropy of things."

"best hip hop song ever"

inventory of spaces '09-'10

I made a map of this past year in brooklyn.

why me and eric are bad friends

me: oh i keep hearing pops that are not messages

eric: you are losing it
ok well i am going to go do something that isnt this, cya

me: fuck you

eric: what i need a shower
i smell terrible

me: ok bye

the fall for fall

proto- am app?

female gaze

cybill shepherd in the last picture show

current events + mundanities

- I have secret names for most of my drawings, even ones i haven't drawn yet. they're usually movie references or names of minor stock characters from books or cartoons. lately the names have been slang i hear on the m train that i'm not hood enough to understand.

- going to art school is like putting yourself through marriage counseling when you don't have marital issues, you're not married, and you're too young to know what marriage even means.

- i use my computer desktop like a filing cabinet with no drawers, and no organization. it's just piles of crap i like. i like treating it like one of those big lottery ball baskets, never knowing what or where anything is.

- i don't really analyze what i like or what i'm doing anymore. i know it's a geriatric trait to just say fuck it this is what i am doing, but that's what i've been doing. actually, i don't really have the mental capacity or luxury to think too hard about things lately.

- i watched painters painting and read some articles my favorite art history professor recently published and felt instantly bummed. i am now watching a lot of old cartoons and feel less bummed. it's a more preferable feeling of engaging in something simultaneously alienating but interesting. that and they're funnier.


- i found this painting and it reminded me of how my brain is lined in cotton candy and also how cute mitsue is so i sent it to her. i forget who made it, but i bet they're asian.


- whenever the house music comes on upstairs, the internet goes away. i feel like these two occurrences are linked.

- when i draw representationally, i usually draw breakfast or cats. tonight i'm drawing french fries, which i just recently had for breakfast in a long island city diner. so yeah, breakfast and cats. I could be the next Louis Wain, but his cats were more autonomous than the cats i draw. my cats are understated and defeated in their cuteness. his were bourgeois gentlemen and ladies, before he went insane. He also had total cat commitment and was president of the national cat club. this is a photo of him with his muse, peter, and later work during his institutionalized days:



"Which do I love the most?"


"Early Indian Irish"


- i've been taking paintings i like that i find online, and editing them in seashore. seashore is the most basic image editing program for macs. it's mostly for people who don't know what curves are, have too poor an internet connection to download pirated photoshop, and are too dumb or impatient to download pirated photoshop. it's fun and it helps me think about my process of decision making with drawing. it also reminds me of my ms paint days of blobby pixellated paint tools. i only give myself ten minutes to work on them so i don't get all risd with it.



obviously before:

(-)

so many negatives, i'm equalling positive. check it :

(-) job 1 exploded
(-) job 2 exploded
(-) have to move
(-) have to sell table
(-) can't sell table
(-) can't sell other items
(-) lost phone
(-) losing mind
_____________________
(+)

haha.

extinct

dear whoever you are

well.

I said I would let you know how my unemployment adventure progressed.

I have this sweet little routine worked out for most of my week days. I have a new job of applying for jobs, which I wish could be my actual job. I really enjoy just wandering around the city, making multiple train connections (today: J, F, 2, 3, 4, 5, L, G), and listening to all the batty private conversations people have in public.

I like the man with the big stick of cotton candy balloons in baby shades of every color, the kids struggling to walk city blocks in clothes they have yet to grow in to, the teenagers with baggy jeans they've convinced themselves they've grown in to.

I like women in chinatown with crazy mismatched patterns of paisley, houndstooth, and polka-dots, seeing owners that looks like their dogs, and trying to decipher secret dynamics between couples walking down delancey street, self-conscious cool kids on bedford avenue, and total strangers forced to sit too close to each other on the rush hour J train. It still never fails to interest me how so many people live here, with their own lives, moving together as total strangers, sharing their lives with one another if even for five minutes on a train platform before the F comes.

I wake up at 11 like I should always be allowed to do, and apply for two jobs and two rooms on the internet.
I eat the bullshit mash survival gruel I cook once a week in military-cook proportions to prepare for the day.

This week it's:
chicken stock (watered waaaaay down), miso paste (to balance the watering down), soy sauce, white potatoes, shallots, leeks, carrots, chickpeas, green peas, chicken sausage, black pepper, some vinegar, too much jasmine rice that sucked up all the liquid and cooked down to congee-consistency.

(It started to get more earth tone in color as the week progressed and it began to melt in to itself.)

Then, I leave the house, apply to two more jobs in person, and try and make an impression.
I'm not very good with first impressions, so I just focus on making an impression, positive or not. For as much as I need a job, my past experience has taught me, there will always be jobs to have, and if they're assholes from the start before you get a chance to fuck up or even work for them, they're probably not worth impressing.

Afterwards I treat myself to a celebratory drink at the top of happy hour, photocopy my cat comic (yesterday), wander around prospect park in the rain (today), read a book/paper in the least douchey (low laptop and dreadlock quotient) coffee shop I can find (monday), and go home to draw (today).