living out of boxes

standing out, or outside.

[free until they cut me down]

(L):  Iron and Wine lyrics and image:  Kara Walker appropriation with stickers

(R):  Oct 07 issue, Art in America

Kara Walker slideshow:  the anti-Oprah

ain't nothing but a number / decade of choice.

The record is beginning again.  I turned 28 on Sunday. 

I started really thinking about the changing of the number a week before.  I was waiting in line at my favorite big box bookstore when this tiny blonde girl with wire-rimmed glasses told the clerk, "Thank you for the words you said."  This was right after she had said she wished she could be like the clerk because she wants to be grown up.  When she is, she explained, she wants to be a teacher that teaches either K or pre-K.  The clerk asked her if she was in K or pre-K.  No, she said.  She is in first grade. 

You hear a lot that people wish they were the age of a kid again, but I never do.  I, like this very certain little first grader, just wanted to be grown up, and spent my whole adolescence looking forward to that freedom.   I can remember walking around my first semester of college and turning random corners, delighted that I was the only one who could choose them. 

And, since it is ten years later, I try to remember this so I won't find that I've taken my open exercising of free will for granted.  On my birthday, I talked to Isaac, and mentioned these ten years and my decade of adulthood.  He disagreed with measuring it like that, saying he felt like I've only really been grown up since I've left the Midwest, age 25.  That take on it is a bit more forgiving...whatever, it's all arbitrary anyway. 

Another part of this delight of choosing what's around me is finding art - things other people have made or thought about that I can infuse into my own.  Here are two from the past day:
-poetry:  Poem for my Daughter Disparaging the Gossamer Depictions of the Women of Certain Southern Texts by Adrian Blevins.
-music:  The Shepherd's Dog, new Iron and Wine album.  I'm not even going to waste wide world web space expounding on how ridiculous I got about this coming out on Tuesday.  I'm going to appeal to concision, instead, (ha!) and just say it was completely worth all of the anticipation I had...a gorgeous blend of folk and psychedelic rock.  I'm still dreaming about it. 

L:  collage and Iron and Wine lyrics from the song "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car"

R:  drawing and Iron and Wine lyrics from the song "Peace Beneath the City" (which nicely contrasts the above-linked poem).

the difference between a sign and a symbol.

(I know most people are only interested in their own dreams, but...)

A week ago I had a dream that I wrote about as soon as I got up.  Here are my notes:

The Walking Stick
It was still out by the door and with light red and green patterns.  Thick.  Horizontal.  There's a thin, carved part on the side.  I was in a familiar physics class that I'm always in but have not read the book for.  The room is full of scientists/anthropologists/experts.  One says:  Someone must have left it there (it being the stick).  I was frightened by the intention he was suggesting.  Maybe it was by the stream and Lula had found it?  But the stream's on the other side of the fence.  Oh.  Maybe it's from someone walking by the side of the highway?  A professor comes up to me and says, I hope you have gotten a lot out of this class.  His card says:  "jurisprudence".  Immediately I have a feeling of guilt because I hadn't.

 

over my ravens head

This one comes from three sources:
-center image is a Nuxalk raven mask, mid to late 19th century, and is from an ad for Listening to Our Ancestors:  The Art of Native Life Along the North Pacific Coast, which opened today at the National Museum of the Native American in New York.   I found this ad in the Arts section of the NY Times, and had to use it because of my penchant for images of North Pacific Coast ravens.     

-the waves are drawn but appropriated from Rookwood tiles that depict a scene with the three ships of Columbus (633 from 1000 Tiles)

-and the red heart-like shapes are medieval designs that were used in some mid-fourteenth c. tiles, "printed tiles", from England (212 from 1000 Tiles)

I love making stuff with designs from that tile book!

designing my own sketches of Spain.

In the last couple of weeks I've taken on a second job for the sole purpose of raising airfare dollars.  I have a couple of domestic destinations that I hope to reach before the end of the year, but my extra toiling is expressly going toward airfare for a trip to Spain over the upcoming winter holidays.  I haven't been out of the USA for three years, and that's made me itch pretty bad.  So, now, with a destination in sight, I have a plan.

I'd been thinking I definitely wanted to check out Barcelona (that's where Americans have to go, right?).  But in a travel essay I read this week, I learned about el Camino de Santiago, a 500 mile path that's been traversed by pilgrims traveling across northern Spain for the past 1,000 years.  I've measured between the days I have off and the mileage I'll be able to get in, and I'm going to do a leg of it that will take about a week.   I am very excited.

drawing of an Antwerp-influenced Dutch tile (238) from 1000 Tiles .

sketching space.

Last night I drew a corner of my bedroom after minutes of staring at it without noticing...marveling at the small details that could have made stories in themselves.   This room reminds me of the bedroom of a shotgun house that I stayed in for about a week last summer around this time in New Orleans.  High ceilings with windows facing out onto the street.  It confuses me as if I'm nearly back in that place.  And this drawing, which is now its own thing, reminds me of this one, drawn roughly a year ago, too.

[a sort of homecoming]

Earlier this month, I went back to Wisconsin for Suzie's wedding party.  And, being the compulsive-date-indexer that I somehow ended up being, the trip back had a separate significance since this summer marks ten years since my high school graduation.  The significance doesn't come in because I'm nostalgic for high school, but, less tangibly, for the bright spirit I had that summer, which was ready to fly out of Lake Geneva into whatever my grown-up life had ahead for me. 

Sometime before that summer I had copied a Franz Kafka quote into my address book, which I memorized and repeated to myself so often that it wasn't even in the form of words, after a point, looping...just a very open feeling:
It is not necessary that you leave the house. Remain at your table and listen. Do not even listen, only wait. Do not even wait, be wholly still and alone. The world will present itself to you for its unmasking, it can do no other, in ecstasy it will writhe at your feet.
I was ready.  Not just for the agenda items that I knew where coming (starting college, falling in love), but for the stories I didn't know yet and the trials I had no idea I could have made it through.


Here I am now, in a completely different place, with the layers of hindsight I could never have guessed that summer that I'd now have.  I'm to a point where I can appreciate that my best-laid plans are nowhere to be fucking found, and am ecstatic to have the freedom that having no plan gives. 

And I thank everyone who has had the grace to welcome me back, especially my mother.  Arms have been open to me as if I never left and as if they hadn't aged.
 

can I get your time signature?

I'm sure Kim Gordon is proud.

Went to see Marnie Stern and her touring band (Zach Hill and Robby Moncrieff) on Wednesday at Local 506.  It was so much fun, hearing the difference between the produced, recorded music and the live show.
L:  Marnie Stern at Local 506 in Chapel Hill, NC.

R:  MS and Zach Hill.

There were some technical distractions, but the music of these three, understandably, would be difficult to coordinate live.  But that was part of the fun.  I am a fan, and not a musician myself, so I appreciated the improvisation all three had to play with to make their live show work.  I know Marnie Stern's first album pretty well, which is what they played, but what made the show fun for me was hearing Zach Hill's drumming stylistically adding something to the mix.  I may have no clue what's going on with the technical side of the guitar shredding, but I can hear good drumming.

Now I'm a Hella fan, too.  Typical. 

past the expectations

Each of these illustrations were drawn, appropriated, from the context of  much larger sources.  Here they are:

top L:  a comic from *"the Pickle Fork" by Megan Kelso.
top R:  a section of "In other folks' homes" (Plate 5) by Elizabeth Catlett, from The Negro Woman, 1946-47
bottom L: a comic from *"Wednesday Morning Yoga" by Ellen Forney.
bottom R: a comic from *"Turtle Pancakes" by Robyn Chapman.

*these comics are compiled in the book Scheherazade:  Comics about Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters, edited by Megan Kelso