summer class

summer classes have started. i awoke at 10 this morning to bike to douglass and watch rebel without a cause. (jesus, who doesn't love james dean?)




Our Culture of the 60s class looks more like cinema studies. The list:

Rebel Without a Cause
Harvest of Shame
"I have a Dream": The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mississippi: Is This America?: 1962-64, Eyes on the Prize, Series I
The Time Has Come, Eyes on the Prize, Series II
Black Panthers: Huey Newton/Black Panther Newsreel
Interviews with My Lai Veterans
Remember My Lai
Underground
Berkley in the '60s
Woodstock I
Woodstock II
Growing Up Female
Radcliffe Blues
Carnal Knowledge
Nothing But a Man
The Graduate
Easy Rider

History of the Print looks more like this:



Albrecht Durer. etching, lithograph, aquatint, woodcut, engraving, intaglio, etc.
Lot of talk of RCIPP. Downside: 3 hr 45 m class period. grawr.


going to southwest burrito or noodle gourmet with zachariah. hahaha. lunch, nap, reading w/ cjers.

The Things They Carried

Wonderful. Excellent.

I'm going to sleep or something like it.



P.S. There is a skunk living under our porch. It's official. I was sitting on our porch with a cig and a cup of green tea and watched it pop its head out and dig around in our bushes for its own sustenance.

I hope it hasn't sprayed my bike.




P.P.S. The guy who's mean to his dog across the street passed by and said a jovial "morning". I thought it funny that he didn't have to say the "good" but I got the message.

post

i've been in the house for the most part the last few days, filling my head with fiction. Battle Royale, V for Vendetta. Snatch. I'm more than halfway through The Things They Carried, after a few hours, and 3/4 through Geek Love. I'm surprised the pages have flown by as they have. I only hope they continue their flight when summer classes start tomorrow. Culture of the 60s and History of the Print. Hopefully they're as good in reality as they appear on the registrar.

[I've been getting up after most people on the east coast leave work for the day. I'm convinced my internal clock is still set to somewhere in the pacific, and always has. Maybe your body is always used to the place where it is born. I should be going to school in a place where jollyo is right now. I'm not really behind, just a day ahead. ]

Artists use lies to tell the truth.

It's not the norm for me to quote hollywood action flicks, but i was thinking about some things... something about artists and writers and fiction. I was staring at a book of Brazilian graffiti yesterday, wondering as i was leafing through the photos why the photos even existed. What is the point of reframing when all the world exists around us as we see it already? See it for yourself. But then I thought maybe, maybe we frame it again so we can see it with that much more clarity, removed from the location, the situation. Hindsight 20/20. Maybe we use the rule of thirds, the details of composition frozen to teach how to see. We all have our own natural way of capturing our surroundings, maybe seeing them beautifully, aesthetically pleasing is just a tool, to take with onto the streets and use again in reframing our vision until the world is only something spectacular. Maybe that's what artists do. Create a world of fiction, a separate sphere, on tripods and film, to show that our lives can look like this and do.

And then I was reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and the storyteller said this:

You can tell a war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let's say, and afterward you ask, "Is it true?" and if the answer matters, you've got your answer.

For example, we've all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.

Is it true?
The answer matters.

You'd feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it's just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did happen--and maybe it did, anything's possible--even then you know it can't be true, because a true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example: Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it's a killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says, "The fuck you do that for?" and the jumper says, "Story of my life, man," and the other guy starts to smile but he's dead.

That's a true story that never happened.

It's not true, fiction and so much of the arts. Any story retold is a stretch from the truth, a shadow of what happened. Any painting made, story retold on film is nowhere near the truth but has been filtered through our minds, the artist and the audience. Zach had told me that in philosophy, the emotions are too erratic to be accounted for. I believe, she knows, he loves. They encompass a world that cannot be nailed down as solid truth.

So is truth a matter of fact or a matter of relevance? i think we pick the truth which suits us and our history best.











[I was staining the deck all afternoon and my arms and chest are currently "7480 Redwood"

I love this boy.]

it will be mine.

what whatwhatWHATWHAT

what ever happened
to good old fashioned sleep

c'mon sheep


sincerely,
insomniac

tee hee.

Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

- Mark Twain

blank page 1

A blank page. One of the most enticing things man has ever faced.

Thoughts break upon the surface, the tensile strength of the skull no force to combat the push of progress.

I’ve been feeling nostalgic. I had Counting Crows on, Better than Ezra, Collective Soul. Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too. I was in the cornfields and the woods behind my house. Damp with dew, timeless—the thick blanket of trees stretch out to oblivion and I’m running, the grass growing to tower above my head, I trip over my clothes as they fall into careless pools about my body, I’m shrinking as the sun sinks beneath the infinite hills in the distance, and I flop over into a dust angel in the dirt to count fireflies in the sky.

Atmosphere.

Ebb and flow. I realized the most I want for people is for them to find peace. “Peace” has become such an extravagant and overbearing slogan, cheapened by buttons and media, hypocrites and false advertisement, by the administration and the institution, the church and the dove. The peace I mean has nothing to do with anything so cold. It’s a flow. No edits or punctuation. No fear of drowning. It comes as it will and the metamorphosis, the transition from one existence, one state of being, one place of mind, one day, one week, one depressive year to another begun anew is seamless, perfect. This is the only perfection this world can afford. The fluidity of time, the push and pull in the streets, the rise and fall of the sun. We are fooling ourselves if we think we have what it takes to barter our way to some sort of divinity. This world is perfect in the way that we are not. This life is perfect, and we would be if we could only see that.

Do not fear my tone, the words you might have heard on soapboxes or on Sabbaths. I belong to nothing that has to be given a name to make it validated. I’m sick of names. I won’t go into formalities—some are an elephant or an ass, a cross of wood, a degree, a space in the Whitney. (there’s a name.) They sound like the seven year olds with private tree forts and a lacking vocabulary—only without the imagination.

…I suppose peace can be found in any form. Under any banner. I don’t mean to pull the rouse, to sound like the feminist who says women are better than men instead of equal, that if you are not with us you are against us bullshit, that just flips the mirror but never rights it. There is some good under any banner. Much good. I suppose the banner’s just the problem. The name, such stark black and white. Why is it so hard to see that everything is just a shade of gray? Being so blinded—maybe that’s why they call it seeing the light. No sense of a range of tones, just blown-out brilliance. Eureka, here are those who understand. But there’s something dangerous about putting all your eggs in one basket. It turns out to be a frying pan, and you find yourself and your integrity scrambled to deal with the heat of your savior.

why struggle, why fry, when you can float? You may go under at times, but humans are naturally buoyant and you will rise again.


I feel fine.

Nostalgia. I was listening and reminiscing about the passion I had when I was 16. The world was everything and mine. I wonder where it has gone. Five years isn’t much, but it’s something.

I go to school for art. And you’re just fooling yourself and me if you were to believe it were all landscapes and clay pots. Mostly you’d just be making a fool out of me. I’ve done as much soul-searching as I have at any point in my life in the past 30 months, looked in the mirror and no longer saw a reflection but met myself. It might be different than what I thought but I am comforted in the fact that it will never be the same.

I would like to tell you something about my art, explain it a little, what I “do”, but I’m wondering if it’s so very worth it. Perhaps the process is that much above the end result. It’s not that I don’t think you’d understand it—that’s exactly the pretentious mentality about the art “world” that I despise and of which I would much rather dispose. I trust that you can understand. You are an intelligent human being, and you will feel something in your gut, in your bones, even if it is just hunger pains or the hangover from the debauchery of the night before. I suppose that my greatest ambition right now is to give you some kind of peace.

I’m trying out this free-writing thing. Getting myself to spit something out before I scrap it and nothing gets done. Here’s part 1.

I hope the best for you and your loved ones.


10:01 AM

“Q: What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an agnostic, and a dyslexic?
A: Someone who stays up all night wondering if there is a Dog.”

grouch marx

zach has the attention-span of a shrimp fork.

lazy day...crazy daisy

I just passed out on the couch and woke up again and the house looks beautiful. Sunshine, lace curtains, shadows from the blinds. If only I hadn't left that rechargeable in the media office, the camera wouldn't be so dusty on a shelf. Magnet left yesterday after happy hour, much to our dismay, so Hartwell is down to 4 swell residents. I'm pretty restless. We saw little green shoots in the garden today which was exciting, followed by a period staring at the lazy daisy hose in action. Matt was attacked. He is in stable condition.

I just had a lovely thought out on the porch but it's seemed to have escaped me.

I'm currently engrossed in Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. Sideshow freaks and a nuclear family; it's something other than New Brunswick.

Liz is coming here on Saturday! 5 hours down from MA and then we'll probably take the train to the city and check out the Whitney biennial and perhaps the Met. Sister time. It's been a while since Lil Sibs Weekends in Ithaca. Much joy.

Summer's pretty set for me. After this weekend's plans, I start classes (history of the print [art history] & culture of the 60s [american studies]) ont he 30th. Cheryl's wedding is the 24th of June (to which i'm happy to say Amanda Barrett & Charles Phillips will be attending). After classes end the 7th, I'm flying out of Newark on the 8th of July to Greensboro, NC, to partake in Elsewhere Artist Collaborative. Quite ecstatic. We have been informed that Elsewhere Upstairs has no electricity save for that provided by extension cords leading from downstairs; the only showers are at the YMCA for a dollar down the road; no heat or air; and we ought to watch Life Aquatic if we have not yet before coming.

I hope the interns get a glock to share.

The internship sounds awesome. Living on site in the space. Something like indoor camping. I'll be back some time in August.