bird

My show closes tomorrow. One more year here, then I am gone. That is mostly what I've been thinking about. I am supposedly writing an honor's thesis, but I've yet to start it. I have until tomorrow to withdraw from the credits, but I will probably just end up writing the damned thing, last minute as usual. I have been thinking about other, more interesting stuff besides escaping this little town, too. I've been reading a lot of criticism and theory and talking to older and wiser artists. RG was a total ass at the opening. Not to me, of course, but to a friend. It was mean, I felt badly for her. He was also hitting on another friend's GRANDmother and then telling the other young women how wrong it was for him to find her so very hot. There is a lot of backstory involved in describing just how inappropriate he is, and I shouldn't go into it here on a public journal, so just take my word for it. He's lecherous.

Ask me if you want to see photos of my work and/or my studio. I should have some tomorrow night, and I won't be posting them to the journal.

We are reading and discussing this play in class. It is very interesting, and the theme isn't at all dated, despite the nearly 100 years that have elapsed.

The play was created in 1913, and was billed as the "first Futurist opera". It features music by Matiushin, text by Kruchenykh, and has a prologue by Khlebnikov. Costumes/set design done by Malevich.

The play was recreated for the stage by Robert Benedtti for the LA County Museum of Art and California Institute of the Arts, though I am not sure what year that took place.

Video clip here.

Can I survive another 16 months in the hippy mecca? I currently have a patchouli-induced headache and can't think about anything besides getting out. Well, getting out and a new round of paintings.

I'm over the legendary R.G. as an instructor. I still admire his curmudgeonly personality and his unabashed love for dogs and Morandi still lifes, though. I've come to terms with the realization that we do not mesh well as teacher/pupil and besides that, I've found a new mentor who is way more articulate and better in terms of our dialogue. The best thing is she is either super interested in my work or is faking it really well.

I have to get a lot of studio work done between April (when I have studio access again) and early December, as I have decided to apply to M.F.A. programs next year. Exciting, scary, etc.

I have a bunch of shitty classes this term, and worst of all, no studios. I am going a little nuts, but it will end soon. 4 more weeks consisting of 2 art history papers, 3 written exams, 1 oral exam, and a handful of other busywork.

I just finished the annual drawing marathon course. The class was great, and also a lot of work. It was a 5 day course in which we worked either inside the studio or at an outdoor location from 9-5pm.

My final project was an installation which used time (that was the only requirement of our final) at first as a rule, but also was denoted by the accumulation of drawings and chairs. There is a whole lot more to say about it, specifically about the chairs and the place they've occupied in the history of art, but I will spare you as I'm guessing it would bore you to tears.









The work is still untitled.

"You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage," said Ajai Raj, an English sophomore. "How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?"

fabulous! then i read the bit at the very end of the article and got a little sick to my tummy:

"The $30,000 event was co-sponsored by the Texas Union Student Events Center and Student Endowed Centennial Lectureship Committee."

UGH.

How Blackness Became “Universal”
by Hadji Williams

Not long ago I met this woman at a concert. We were chatting, flirting a lot, and trying to get to know each other. She asked me what kind of music I liked. I said, “Jazz, blues, hip-hop, gospel… If it’s Black music, I’m with it.” Almost immediately she broke out laughing. When I asked her what was so funny, she said, “You said ‘Black music’. There’s no such thing as ‘Black music’. Music is universal.”

I walked away thinking about what she said. And over time as I saw more and more non-Blacks co-opting and claiming fashion, language and musical styles that came out of the Black community, I realized something: Blackness no longer belongs to Black people.

Blackness has been extracted, harvested, distilled and repackaged for mass consumption. And for the most part, it’s being bought, sold, defined and produced with little or no involvement from Blacks. If Blackness were a government, Blacks would be its figureheads with the real power held by others.

Now from what I’ve seen in society and the marketing worlds, Blackness goes thru 7 stages of extraction.

1. “What’s that?” Outsider recognition.
2. “Oh, that’s just some thing ‘they’ do/are.” Here, “it” and those connected to “it” are ridiculed and devalued.
3. “Hmmm, ‘it’ looks interesting -- bet I can do it/use ‘it’.” They covet.
4. “This could be profitable for ‘us’.” Then comes greed.
5. “This isn’t yours, it’s ‘ours’ -- it’s ‘universal’.” Then it’s taken, co-opted, redefined and commoditized.
6. “What happened? IT was so much better back when WE started it…” IT loses its cool cache as revisionist history and selective memory takes hold.
7. “What’s next?” Now it’s back to the ‘hood to see what else the natives are cooking up.

( keep reading! )

quotes from one of the most vilified and misquoted women in history:


Equality:

"I want to talk to you about equality, what equality is and what it means. It isn’t just an idea. It’s not some insipid word that ends up being bullshit. It doesn’t have anything at all to do with all those statements like: Oh, that happens to men too. I name an abuse and I hear: Oh, it happens to men too. That is not the equality we are struggling for. We could change our strategy and say: well, okay, we want equality; we’ll stick something up the ass of a man every three minutes.

You’ve never heard that from the feminist movement, because for us equality has real dignity and importance—it’s not some dumb word that can be twisted and made to look stupid as if it had no real meaning."


On male supremacy and militarism:

"I have heard in the last several years a great deal about the suffering of men over sexism. Of course, I have heard a great deal about the suffering of men all my life. Needless to say, I have read Hamlet. I have read King Lear. I am an educated woman. I know that men suffer. This is a new wrinkle. Implicit in the idea that this is a different kind of suffering is the claim, I think, that in part you are actually suffering because of something that you know happens to someone else. That would indeed be new.

But mostly your guilt, your suffering, reduces to: gee, we really feel so bad. Everything makes men feel so bad: what you do, what you don’t do, what you want to do, what you don’t want to want to do but are going to do anyway. I think most of your distress is: gee, we really feel so bad. And I’m sorry that you feel so bad—so uselessly and stupidly bad—because there is a way in which this really is your tragedy. And I don’t mean because you can’t cry. And I don’t mean because there is no real intimacy in your lives. And I don’t mean because the armor that you have to live with as men is stultifying: and I don’t doubt that it is. But I don’t mean any of that.

I mean that there is a relationship between the way that women are raped and your socialization to rape and the war machine that grinds you up and spits you out: the war machine that you go through just like that woman went through Larry Flynt’s meat grinder on the cover of Hustler. You damn well better believe that you’re involved in this tragedy and that it’s your tragedy too. Because you’re turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live. It is also part of the economy that you frequently claim to protest.

And the problem is that you think it’s out there: and it’s not out there. It’s in you. The pimps and the warmongers speak for you. Rape and war are not so different. And what the pimps and the warmongers do is that they make you so proud of being men who can get it up and give it hard. And they take that acculturated sexuality and they put you in little uniforms and they send you out to kill and to die."

Ordinary facts:

"And if there would be a plea or a question or a human address in that scream, it would be this: why are you so slow? Why are you so slow to understand the simplest things; not the complicated ideological things. You understand those. The simple things. The cliches. Simply that women are human to precisely the degree and quality that you are.

And also: that we do not have time. We women. We don’t have forever. Some of us don’t have another week or another day to take time for you to discuss whatever it is that will enable you to go out into those streets and do something. We are very close to death. All women are. And we are very close to rape and we are very close to beating. And we are inside a system of humiliation from which there is no escape for us. We use statistics not to try to quantify the injuries, but to convince the world that those injuries even exist. Those statistics are not abstractions. It is easy to say, Ah, the statistics, somebody writes them up one way and somebody writes them up another way. That’s true. But I hear about the rapes one by one by one by one by one, which is also how they happen. Those statistics are not abstract to me. Every three minutes a woman is being raped. Every eighteen seconds a woman is being beaten. There is nothing abstract about it. It is happening right now as I am speaking.

And it is happening for a simple reason. There is nothing complex and difficult about the reason. Men are doing it, because of the kind of power that men have over women. That power is real, concrete, exercised from one body to another body, exercised by someone who feels he has a right to exercise it, exercised in public and exercised in private. It is the sum and substance of women’s oppression.

It is not done 5000 miles away or 3000 miles away. It is done here and it is done now and it is done by the people in this room as well as by other contemporaries: our friends, our neighbors, people that we know. Women don’t have to go to school to learn about power. We just have to be women, walking down the street or trying to get the housework done after having given one’s body in marriage and then having no rights over it.

The power exercised by men day to day in life is power that is institutionalized. It is protected by law. It is protected by religion and religious practice. It is protected by universities, which are strongholds of male supremacy. It is protected by a police force. It is protected by those whom Shelley called the unacknowledged legislators of the world: the poets, the artists. Against that power, we have silence."


--all quotes lifted from the radgeek site, and are excerpts from Dworkin's book, Letters from a War Zone. wonderful book, of course.

I learned a lot from Andrea Dworkin. You could say she was like the mother I wish I had; the antithesis of my real mom.

Andrea was incredibly fierce and so eloquent...she spoke about us, she spoke to us, and for many women, she spoke for us. She truly cared about women and the conditions that are unique to women and girls living in the world today.

I love her and will miss her greatly.

Dworkin's most recent words, excerpted from her speech at University of Toronto, just one week before her death:

I'm going to ask you to remember the prostituted, the homeless, the battered, the raped, the tortured, the murdered, the raped-then-murdered, the murdered-then-raped; and I am going to ask you to remember the photographed, the ones that any or all of the above happened to and it was photographed and now the photographs are for sale in our free countries. I want you to think about those who have been hurt for the fun, the entertainment, the so-called speech of others; those who have been hurt for profit, for the financial benefit of pimps and entrepreneurs. I want you to remember the perpetrator and I am going to ask you to remember the victims: not just tonight but tomorrow and the next day. I want you to find a way to include them - the perpetrators and the victims - in what you do, how you think, how you act, what you care about, what your life means to you.

Now, I know, in this room, some of you are the women I have been talking about. I know that. People around you may not. I am going to ask you to use every single thing you can remember about what was done to you - how it was done, where, by whom, when, and, if you know - why - to begin to tear male dominance to pieces, to pull it apart, to vandalize it, to destabilize it, to mess it up, to get in its way, to fuck it up. I have to ask you to resist, not to comply, to destroy the power men have over women, to refuse to accept it, to abhor it and to do whatever is
necessary despite its cost to you to change it.

Dworkin Links:

http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/

http://www.mediawatch.com/news.html

http://www.radgeek.com/search?search=andrea+dworkin

http://www.radgeek.com/gt/2005/01/10/andrea_dworkin

My Insect Funeral
Part 9

When I was a child
I had a graveyard
where I buried insects
and dead birds under
a rose tree.
I would bury the insects
in tin foil and match boxes.
I would bury the birds
in pieces of red cloth.
It was all very sad
and I would cry
as I scooped the dirt
into their small graves
with a spoon.
Baudelaire would come
and join in
my insect funerals,
saying little parayers
the size of
dead birds.

San Francisco
February 1958

Insane Asylum
Part 8

Baudelaire went
to the insane asylum
disguised as a
psychiatrist.
He stayed there
for two months
and when he left,
the insane asylum
loved him so much
that it follwed
him all over
California,
and Baudelaire
laughed when the
insane asylum
rubbed itself
up against his
leg like a
strange cat.

A Baseball Game
Part 7

Baudelaire went
to a baseball game
and bought a hot dog
and lit up a pipe
of opium.
The New York Yankees
were playing
the Detroit Tigers.
In the fourth inning
an angel committed
suicide by jumping
off a low cloud.
The angel landed
on second base,
causing the
whole infield
to crack like
a huge mirror.
The game was
called on
account of
fear.

Salvador Dali
Part 6

"Are you
or aren't you
going to eat
your soup
you bloody old
cloud merchant?"
Jeanne Duval
shouted,
hitting Baudelaire
on the back
as he sat
daydreaming
out the window.
Baudelaire was
startled.
Then he laughed
like hell,
waving his spoon
in the air
like a wand
changing the room
into a painting
by Salvador
Dali, changing
the room
into a painting
by Van Gogh.

The Hour of Eternity
Part 5

"The Chinese
read the time
in the eyes
of cats,"
said Baudelaire
and went into
a jewelry store
on Market Street.
He came out
a few moments
later carrying
a twenty-one
jewel Siamese
cat that he
wore on the
end of a
golden chain.

The Flowerburgers
Part 4

Baudelaire opened
up a hamburger stand
in San Francisco,
but he put flowers
between the buns.
People would come in
and say, "Give me a
hamburger with plenty
of onions on it."
Baudelaire would give
them a flowerburger
instead and the people
would say, "What kind
of a hamburger stand
is this?"

1939
Part 3

Baudelaire used to come
to our house and watch
me grind coffee.
That was in 1939
and we lived in the slums
of Tacoma.
My mother would put
the coffee beans in the grinder.
I was a child
and would turn the handle,
pretending that it was
a hurdy-gurdy,
and Baudelaire would pretend
that he was a monkey,
hopping up and down
and holding out
a tin cup.

The American Hotel
Part 2

Baudelaire was sitting
in a doorway with a wino
on San Francisco's skid row.
The wino was a million
years old and could remember
dinosaurs.
Baudelaire and the wino
were drinking Petri Muscatel.
"One must always be drunk,"
said Baudelaire.
"I live in the American Hotel,"
said the wino. "And I can
remember dinosaurs."
"Be you drunken ceaselessly,"
said Baudelaire.

I think I will post as a series a poem by Richard Brautigan entitled The Galilee Hitch-Hiker.

The Galilee Hitch-Hiker
Part 1


Baudelaire was
driving a Model A
across Galilee.
He picked up a
hitch-hiker named
Jesus who had
been standing among
a school of fish,
feeding them
pieces of bread.
"Where are you
going?" asked
Jesus, getting
into the front seat.
"Anywhere, anywhere
out of this world!"
shouted
Baudelaire.
"I'll go with you
as far as
Golgotha,"
said Jesus.
"I have a
concession
at the carnival
there, and I
must not be
late."

add http:// to the following URLs to download music:



s30.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=35JW37B6ZWV1806IS6UTX5V096

s30.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=3OVYCVAEXJ28H2DNCUJ81CP0PG

s30.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=1EGWCIO79SFTK2VI7J3IPW2A8I

s30.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=225OEU9S03CQH1Y4MNQSQZK4JR

s30.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=0NDBQ5ZG0DC8S18THSRFDC5MSJ

s30.yousendit.com/d.aspx?id=1QQ1G3N9798NX1O0HNBIQK6YKH



available for a limited time/number of downloads, according to yousendit.com

enjoy!

today: reading kandinsky's book on painting and writing thoughts that have nothing to do with the reading in the margins. i am circling the good words and underlining passages of interesting ideas in the conventional manner.

Theosophy? Theosophy.

and this:

Theosophy in Art

The appearance of Theosophy after the 1880s coincided with the start of Gauguin's mature period. Gauguin's art, however, is not the only instance in which the creation of art has been driven by the theosophical beliefs of the artist. In the 20th century artists like Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, and also Kazimir Malevich, Jackson Pollock and Paul Klee are known to have been influenced, to some extent by theosophy. This influence is most commonly associated with the former two. According to the Grove Dictionary of Art, Vasily Kandinsky was particularly interested in Theosophy as a means of "apprehending inner values". This means that Kandinsky, like Gauguin, appreciated the spiritual insight that Theosophy promised and aspired to become an initiate. According to the same source, he became familiar with the work of the major Theosophical writers like Mme Blavatsky, who originally conceived of Theosophy, and Charles Leadbeater, who wrote the book on it. His famous thesis on Abstraction, a classic work that has been studied for many years, is "replete with theosophical references and theories". Piet Mondrian, during the period of his career when he was experimenting with abstraction, went even further than Kandinsky, by becoming a member of the Theosophical Society. His art of this period is characterized by "the dominance of spirit over matter".

Sources: Davis, Ann. "Theosophy", The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press)


----------------------------------------------------------------

i like the idea of apprehending inner values.

i think i took poor notes in my art history lecture today. i kept closing my eyes when the panda would turn his back to point things out in the slides. i caught several words that were missing vowels, others that were entirely illegible. i felt as though he was tired too. oh, and he did some corny animation thing with his powerpoint presentation. i really don't have the patience for animated graphics like this. he made the buddha statue rotate and made another (buddha or bodhisattva) statue turn into a cube which could then be rotated to four different views. he laughed and said it didn't look that ridiculous on his little laptop screen. he called it "cheesy".

tomorrow @ quarter past one: french exam w/marie antionette's sour-faced reincarnate. have not yet prepared! will do first thing in AM over coffee/fruit.

before and after i will paint things, providing the studio isn't being used for classes. i think it is entirely open fridays. one board needs gesso, other surfaces need paint. i will finish up the kandinsky book in the studio, i guess.

life in lawrence hall will continue through the weekend, it seems.

MUST BRING IPOD TO AVOID DROWNING IN ENYA TOMORROW.

cerulean blue.

ted leo's cover of kelly clarkson's since u been gone (!), almost as nice as the travis cover of britney spears oops i did it again. did you know paris hilton is working on an album?

blind contour drawings.

wine in nalgene botttles? unbreakable...?

i believe murakami references the little black sambo tale too:

"How much do you love me?" Midori asked.
"Enough to melt all the tigers in the world to butter," I said.

-excerpt from Norwegian Wood


very sweet, though after re-reading little black sambo it seems tarnished.