i can't tell if i even like this

i feel a fever coming on just in time for xmas.
i saw this ad in my office building's elevator that advised against pairing an inexpensive gift with an expensive one, as the cheap gift will diminsh the value of the expensive one in the recipient's eyes.
kind of dreading xmas.

this minimal wave's creeping me out right now.

looking at gordon matta-clark and dana shutz lately.
wanting to make my drawings look like they're backlit and glowing. it's hard.
i walked around tribeca on my lunch break and had all these ideas for drawings so i went back to the office break room to write them down and helped bobby microwave his banquet chicken pot pie so he could eat lunch in his, "secret honeycomb."

actually, this album is really weird and all over the place. it should be categorized as drunk wave instead of min-wave.

i need to stop sleeping in a small cat pile in the corner of my bed.
ankle sprain has freed up more time to make drawings, and now i'm healed just as the drawing sprain is setting in.
it must be similar to the sprain of chronic masturbation or knitting.

i'm going to either throw up or pass out now.
considering quitting drinking along with my smoking quit.

fulton record store

can of worms

halloween lessons

I learn the best halloween lessons when imbibed.

a) absolutely not leaving my house tonight. There are too many children roaming the streets on a school night with straight up sugar lust in their eyes.
b) chinese restaurants have the laziest treats. fortune cookies.
c) the best way to deal with monday drudge is as follows: relieve sunday night terrors and anxiety of embarking on another five-day work cycle by drinking so heavily, monday morning you clock in drunk and clock out just as the hangover sets in.
d) trying to find good asian pop music in real life=difficult and expensive. trying to find asian pop music on the internet=easy and free.
e) it should always rain/snow on record fair days because the unwashed record collecting masses that haven't left their houses in weeks will have been rinsed of their grime. a convention center full of those people can smell like compost.
f) it is always a good idea to ride the bumpercars.
g) i really hope i'm wrong, but it seems the more western influence a country receives is definitely proportionate to how good their their music is. :( but maybe that is just from my western perspective : (((( and i just need to explore more : )

my gold streak youtube music journey. what can i say, sometimes you get lucky:









really wish i had more than two songs from this band.








best record fair find.

i wanna smoke prismatic cigs with romy schneider

so the story goes, clouzot had a little freak out after seeing fellini's 8 1/2 and basically had a creative, "oh fuck," moment. new wave was creeping on his cred and that mid-career fear of becoming obsolete, old, and boring set in (can't wait for that one). it's hard when you have unlimited access to actors, production funds, and beautiful fucking film stock that you can afford 70+ takes of a color separated romy schneider. not to mention bullying your sound techs to refine every burp and hiccup of the soundtrack. one by one his crew left, and the film was never finished.

i guess it's a testament to artistic paralysis; that fear and competition with the world is never a productive motivator. or maybe making the hubristic claim to reinvent cinema is a damning goal that almost always equals failure. or maybe people really do have only a few good creative gestures in them and it's terrifying to accept and believe that possibility.

i have definitely had those obsessive moments, refining every microscopic bit of an image to the point where i've sanded it down to dust. i've wasted hours harping over a two-inch corner with a fine two-hair brush when i would have made a better drawing with two marks and a fat brush. i've whined about not having enough time to draw, and then make the most progress in compressed two hour intervals.

boundaries, limitations and bullshit are so important when making creative decisions. if there's no counterpoint to the crazy monologue you have with yourself when you sit down to push a bunch of ink and paint around or write a story, or make a song, you are just alone, demonstrating rote motor skills, and muttering crazy talk to yourself. and probably making a mess.

even so, the film scraps of inferno are so visually seductive. i think this movie would have been one of those movies. i mean, look how good that shit looks even on youtube!

this week i will buy a receiver and speakers for my trash-picked turntable.

rolling around in fresh laundry.


she seems like a sad and lonely person, no?

the first time i ever heard songs from joe meek/bbc radiophonic workshop world was in bushwick about two years ago. it was on a record player and very good speakers. it was a very special drunken time for me.



love it.

i'm not resizing it.

wow oh wow the dekooning show at moma makes you want to run home immediately, shake your loved ones, and make a bunch of shit ASAP. the more art I see in person, the more I realize how much photographs fall short of the crushing scale and presence of being in the same space as a piece of art.

one of his paintings is STILL drying.. it keeps changing. it has a life of its own. it's painting itself now. how fucked up is that!?!


this painting hurts your eyes in a really good way. it reminds me of going to dia:beacon and feeling like i was going to throw up in/on a richard serra.


probably my favorite. he used tusche with salt mixed in to create the dappled white spots. i guess the salt acted as a resist to the acid, and once rolled, the oily ink curled away from the salt spots. it made me homesick for printing lithographs.

it's so spare, but so perfect. he made an edition of 47, which is a nerdy punchline for me because I can imagine him aiming for 50 and getting frustrated and quitting at some odd arbitrary number. no disrespect though. when you've processed a lithographic stone for a day and a half of essentially sanding down a stone with a gigantic party noise maker that weighs fifty pounds, making it perfectly level (we were taught to check perfect levelness by using cigarette papers. how gauche!), and then another day massaging said stone with gum arabic, when someone hands you something as loose as ink to draw, it is a huge huge risk. you don't want to fuck it up, because it's back to levigating for two fucking days. so basically, i'm saying, dekooning's got balls.

fuck, i miss making prints.

the beatles t-shirt on the ground kills me

I really just want to listen to old music I love most of the time. I keep trying to feed myself new books and movies, but I always find myself falling back in to old patterns. It's like that time me and alex were walking in prospect park and found a battery wedged in a fallen tree trunk. It looked as though the trunk grew around the battery and it just became part of the tree through stupid coincidence. It was also a battery brand I didn't recognize, and looked like the sort of antiquated energy source used to power a walkman or a ghetto blaster.

I forget where I was going with this, but I think I'm old enough now where I've formed indelible qualities and old man sticking points to what I like and what I don't. But I usually end up contradicting myself. For instance, seeing alex katz in person was like a brick to my head. I guess the subject matter undermines the process and allure of those thin, thin, fresh layers of paint. I mean, how excited would you be if I told you about some paintings of anna wintour and a bunch of flowers.. maybe a lake and a cat. Sounds mind numbing, I know, but trust me, they are really great flowers.

I am trying to keep the spirit of this blog alive which is I am usually drunk when I write in it.

My favorite person right now is Luigi Palma di Cesnola. He was the first director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a fucking crazy motherfucker. I can just imagine him ripping sarcophagus's from the ground in Cyprus and screaming, "ka-ching!" His wikipedia article is much more stately than the account I am reading of him. I don't know, everyone looks diginified in photos taken before 1980.

when I first started down the track

of trying to find this k-pop song I heard in H Mart today, I promised myself it would be a two hour commitment. But then youtube was all like, "no it doesn't work like that you dumb bitch," and here I am four hours later.

Let me tell you some things about k-pop. There is no such thing as too many band members. It feels like everyone in Korea has used the same synthesizer for the past like... thirty years. If there is ever a misgiving about the direction of a song, you should probably add some flute. By Korean genre standards, maroon5 would be considered a "melodic punk band." I guess it's comforting to know that mainstream creative lousery is a cross-cultural affliction.

After wading through progressive-folk, weird doors copy cat bands, and acoustic twee backwash, I don't know right from wrong, good from bad, and I forget who I am. I managed to find some gems, but I can hear some sloshing in my head so maybe I'm not to be trusted.


channeling edith piaf


kim choo ja is this lady who puddles herself on the floor, and then sings by herself, usually angrily.

last three, top of the heap.






now excuse me while i attempt to reconstruct my psyche.

non-boring video art

it's like the beauty of formalism and abstraction combined with the satisfaction of fucking shit up.

http://www.ubu.com/film/hubbard.html

put the fucking lotion in the basket

i think i kind of love this movie

which probably makes me kind of a bad person

book

References for the book of drawings I am making this week:





via stoppingoffplace






"The distancing effect is achieved by the way the "artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him [...] The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place." The use of direct audience-address is one way of disrupting stage illusion and generating the distancing effect. In performance, as the performer "observes himself," his objective is "to appear strange and even surprising to the audience. He achieves this by looking strangely at himself and his work."

lessons from youtube

russian people really bad at rapping, really good at dancing.


did your church have organs like this? you weren't forced to go to church as a child? oh. if this were a stereotypical hiphop video, all that expensve gear would have boobs (augmented, naturally), chains, and a bitching motorcade. either way both make you bothered. maybe kind of hot?


errr sometimes it's better off if you just close your eyes. is the case with drunk sex and misforunate youtube visuals. yeeesh.


this one's better anyway.


when you share a drunken cab ride home with a boy going from bed stuy to the upper east side PLUS the remainder of your trip home, it really makes a girl reasess her standing in the world. you wake up with a hangover, no renewed sense of financial maturity, and a shit ton of drunk downloaded library music. uh yay?

listening to the homosexuals, crying, smoking weed, drawing

yes this is my tonight.

youth and old age

scenery of the past month
- in queens, on my way from ps1 walking to the pulaski bridge, an old man nearly caned me, swinging at a mcdonalds medium size paper cup on the sidewalk.
- double-middle-finger dance by a seven year old on the rockaway beach boardwalk; his mother walking just far enough ahead with her head hung.
- toddler in stroller on the uptown c pounding his wristwatch screaming stop it stop it stop it.
- children in red hook throwing shoes at one another, performing a harmony korine script.
- a retarded man walks down eighth ave intentionally bumping in to chelsea breasts and no one quite knows how to address the situation.
- an old man walking past me eating lunch on a chelsea bench says, "don't think so much."

unfortunately

I am glad beige tumbled phew because i forgot about aunt sally.
"don't even get me started on the j-pop/j-punk"-thirteen year-old kim

alva loves bats

boss of lunch cat

did you read this book in school?

chester never sold out.

self-titled lunch cat

kim at work

some katz in response to cats

I don't really like Alex Katz. I'm resigned to the fact that much of my aesthetic is based on myopic personal timing, and it's just not katz-time for me. But I see a lot of his palette in my recent drawings, and the following paintings are pretty great.

closed circuit lunch cats

i know i know

it's pretty much the tritest assertion to ever make. But it's true. Edouard Manet is the fucking shit.
He perfected Illogical space, the female gaze, proportional trickery, and the modern venus. Greatest hits, but let's not forget the asparagus.

crumb

I don't care

what society says; when the crackhead on the sidewalk asks you to slow dance to the kiss fm soul show, you don't say no. you just don't.

fucking classic

open/close

sighted:


blind:

nineties drawing

derived from a nineties childhood. hope it brings nostalgia and vintage environmentalism to your heart.

fortify for the work week

at first gentle, then rough.

bibliography

to the cat comic:




to my employed life:



** replace dipping area with stapler

lunch cats

this is living in new york.

cat comic

i made this cat comic about my first job in bk at the pillow factory during my unemployed months. like many other exceptionally scarring experiences, the full effect of the absurdity and abuse is lost even when channeled through cats. no food stamps, no government check, just focus studies, dignity-swallowing womanly wiles, and cats. all i could draw was cats.

there's a reason why coffins are lined in velvet.

once my boss' husband got fired from his hedge fund job,
he shaved his hair in to a mohawk and came to work with us.
this period is marked by a lot of gchat with his still-employed banker bros and spousal squabbling.

so many father figures at the bar across the street.

this is the man

who calls my work every day and screams his head off.

this is his aesthetic:



no comment.

music sounds different anymore

hooray i love you

seriously, I need a reason to love new york lately. I point to the following causes:

1. random shit-affirming encounters whenever I leave my house that make me sad to be a female, a sighted person, a person at this point in history. give me the cave, and the bonnet. fuck, make it a burka.
2. sakura = not so sublime
3. chelsea work commute and the cold, withholding love of the c train, the most underachieving of the blue trains
4. corporate doldrums; endless salutations, weather speculations, the compacted smells of homemade microwave lunches in the lobby, and office protocol

a-boo a-hoo.
thanks for listening.

as reward, here's terry riley milking a goat, and then drinking the milk from that very goat.

http://www.ubu.com/film/aether.html


disclaimer: i don't think the other composers in this series milk goats.

too real for baby squares

A girl named Linda wakes up and goes for a morning stroll in her neighborhood. On her way, she encounters some locals, including a shirtless bearded man whom she calls 'Santa.'

via stopping off place


children's book by frank asch of moonbear fame. these kinds of obsessive drawings will never cease to give me the perpetual vapors. this is how i draw when left to my own devices, when i have no ideas and just a need to make some marks. linda feels like every day when i come home from work except there's fried chicken bones in the stairwell, and the occasional condom. love your hood.

thanks g

from this one time listening to music in your room.

rag and bone

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

wb yeats the circus animals' desertion

book vi

It is related of the Socratic philosopher Aristippus that, being shipwrecked and cast ashore on the coast of the Rhodians, he observed geometrical figures drawn thereon,and cried out to his companions: "Let us be of good cheer, for I see the traces of man." With that he made for the city of Rhodes, and went straight to the gymnasium. There he fell to discussing philosophical subjects, and presents were bestowed upon him, so that he could not only fit himself out, but could also provide those who accompanied him with clothing and all other necessities of life. When his companions wished to return to their country and asked him what message he wished them to carry home, he bade them say this: that children ought to be provided with property and resources of a kind that could swim with them even out of a shipwreck.

journalist/model/literary agent/linguist

resolutions

- I have technologically upgraded, so my show and tell will be more frequent: k

- i am quitting smoking. cigarettes just taste like burnt popcorn now.

- no more tossing puppies

i sleep with all the lights on because i'm afraid my dream girl will kill me in our enchanted mythical forest home.

art abuse

2011 – ".. the painting is 'very homosexual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned ... I am from the American CIA and I have a radio in my head. I am going to kill you.'

2010 – An art student visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art loses her balance and topples into Pablo Picasso's ‘The Actor,’ leaving a 6in tear

2007 – A woman says that she was so overcome with passion that she couldn’t resist planting a kiss on a painting by U.S. artist Cy Twombly at a gallery in Avignon, France

2007 – A gaggle of drunks broke into the Musee D' Orsay in Paris and slashed a 4in tear into Monet's 1874 Le pont d' Argenteuil – the culprits are still at large

1996 - Student Jubal Brow vomits on Piet Mondrian's Composition with Red and BlueI at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He claims that the incident was intentional

1972 – At the Vatican Michelangelo's Pieta is bludgeoned with a hammer by a man yelling "I am Jesus Christ, risen from the dead!"

bless yo self

That was a way of putting it--not very satisfactory:
A periphrastic study in a worn out poetical fashion,
Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle
With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter

- ts eliot, four quartets

yes

these don't even seem real

quaalude trumpet solo

guitar solo fin?

possibly about masturbation/wet dreams?

love it? love it?

play mountain

my drawings and noguchi's models would definitely get to second base.
p.s.--fuck you robert moses.

if i haven't noticed

I am really bad at sitting still.

I am moving again, back to my september room in clinton hill with two really awesome girls who dye scarves in the bath tub and make me dinner too much. It has the best fire escape in brooklyn, and the deaf-mute crackhead of grand avenue infamy. It's appropriate timing given the escalating propositions of my cheap cigarette dealer who looks like a bird in man form, mr. kiwi has moved back to chicago, and I can't taste the love in the corner empanadas anymore. I love this neighborhood, but living under train tracks definitely effects my positivity when it's raining, and the kids are doing whippets outside of woodhull before school. I will miss the rice and beans that sometimes tastes like trash, the enchiladas from cholulita, and my roommate's drunken tirades and earless cat. I'm not dying, and I'm not even leaving the borough so I guess it's a little dramatic to talk about missing shit. But when lured with criminally cheap rent, one must go, right?

And what's a new apartment without the new job to go with it?
I think for as long as I am living here I will be an endless loop of searching, looking, moving, and everything will be new and different forever. I can't help it; there's too many possibilities. Being stable is boring and there's always something to fix and shake around.

dad email

my dad likes to send me emails of links to art he likes.

this is what he sent me yesterday which is horrifying and kind of awesome.

work commute

dumbo truck

the image above is from this moving van that i used to see at my old job. it had all these handpainted images of all the items the truck and its movers could move. they were painted in kindergarten colors, and you could tell they tried to paint them as flat as possible, even though some really pretty paint strokes were starting to wear through. the weird thing about the paintings of dolleys and boxes was all the shadows looked like puddles which kind of took away from their advertising efforts. or maybe it was intentional. well to make a boring story short, i like its sense of humor, or possible lackthereof.

shut the fuck up about your cats

unemployment diet

things to eat when you have $30 for the week.

breakfast:
(1) charm/pity coffee from mr. kiwis
(1) serving pasta with/without kale (dependent on sleeping couch roommate)
rice wine vinegar or sesame oil or gojujang or fuck it, use them all

sandwich:
(1) portugese roll with with lots of roland extra strong dijon mustard
(1) ch'mingle and
(3) handfuls of spinach stuffed inside.

mash:
(1) potato mashed
(2) carrots mashed
(1) handful frozen peas
some chicken stock, rice wine vinegar, and sesame oil
(1) over easy egg on top.

lazy trash soup:
(1) container of kitchen basics (blegh i know) chicken stock
(2) potatoes
(3) carrots
(1) parsnip
(1) bunch of kale
(1/2) shallot
(2) green onions

omelette:
(2) eggs
(1) green onion
extra strong mustard!

one-two meals a day; just fill in the gaps with cigarettes and beer.
resist the urge to buy rice and beans that sometimes taste like trash from the mexican deli across the street. you know it doesn't love you.

i used to be pretty good at this

other things i was better at when i was 13 as opposed to now:

- eating real pizza


- weaving lanyard keychains


-writing sprawling prose recounting self-inflicted drama


things i am better at now than when i was 13:
-drinking
-art
-making friends (cats and people)
-weaving lanyard keychains