Tuesday, April 28, 2009

the innanet


I'm taking a web design class this semester so I can have a portfolio website. It was a bad idea, it has never taken me so long to be mediocre at something before.

I've been making lists for a long time now. I kind of want to write about 40 blank lists and invite a bunch of girls over and make everyone sit in a real big circle. Then we would pass out the lists and everyone would have 60 seconds to write as many things as they could before switching with the person on their left.

I had help with this, you know who you are. maybe you are embarrassed.
maybe I am going to illustrate this.

things i didn't like about you:
you were short
you used paint palettes as ashtrays
you never made me anything, just talked about it
you smoked all my weed and then fell asleep
you broke my toilet
you didn't like my dog

things i did like about you:
you paid attention
you smelled my hair
you liked hammocks
we went on roadtrips
you wrote me a bad song - and a good one
you played chess

things to do at the beach
sleep
apply sunscreen
read a book
draw a cartoon
undo your top strap
dig a hole
eat a popsicle
drink a beer and hide it in the sand

favorite times to smoke a joint
during my lunch break/ down the street in front of the loading dock
walking to the train in the morning before everyone else is awake
while watching twin peaks
with group partners in 'radio documentary' class


actors who only play one character
whoopie goldberg
christian slater
arnold schwarzenneggah
keaneau
christopher lloyd
jennifer anniston
things that are overrated
miranda july
thick pancakes
the magnetic fields
cadbury eggs
cats
college?
granola
not ever leaving new york

names of ex-friends
Obie
RJ
Sara
Brittany
Amadi
Michael
Greg
Angad

things that are underrated
flossing
the bus system
things i have lost
subway card
ipod charger
my ability to read sarcasm
scabs
many movies/ more books
virginity
my favorite cookbook
$20 . definitely a lot more
half of both of my two front teeth

colors with interesting names including crayola names
ochre
cerulean
umber
ruby
peridot
cyan
lavender
atomic tangerine
pumpernickle
beaver

things life would be better without
the girl who thinks she is my boss, but absolutely is not
the hair that gets stuck in my mouth/ your mouth when we are kissing
rooms without windows
when you try and make those faces

things i left at home that i needed today
my notebook
overdue library book
headphones
my external hard drive
film
clean underwear
lunch money

feelings i get on the subway
nausea
a quietness
'shit, why did i have to see you here?'
'im stuck'
interested observation/ disinterested observation
routine
sticky feet
a dedication to vegetarianism

magazines i like
national geographic
capricious
n+1
found magazine
arthur magazine

things i want to do to my teacher
cut his hair
paint his toes
listen to him talk about whatever book he's reading
fog his glasses


end.
of me wasting time in the ucc

Monday, April 27, 2009

halloweeners



Screamin. Bushwick. October 2008.

living stones: plants that look like pebbles



Living Stones. October 2008.


PLANTS THAT LOOK LIKE PEBBLES!
Lithops Wikipedia
Colorado State Horticulture

big little



August 2008.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

heartbreaker






Thank you, Monica.
Thank you, Artun.
Congrats!


a poem


a poem about a person

I like it when my cat watches me have sex
He is usually upstairs sleeping
on my roommate's bed
when I go looking for him
I take him under one arm and bring him into my room
I feed him
He is confused and stares at the bowl before he begins to eat
That’s when I close the door
J is already on my bed, adjusting my ipod. Something 70s and Brazilian starts playing
When I am on top and feeling everything—one hand on J’s shoulder, the other against the wall
I turn my body
My brown eyes meet his
Big and yellow and glowing in the dark

Saturday, April 18, 2009

late announcements


There are some things that you should know about. I'll try and be more on the ball about all this.

My friend Greg from the VBS times puts together this wonderful cinema/drinking series:

CINEMA 16 @ BELL HOUSE!
Sunday, April 19, 2009
6pm doors; 7pm show
The Bell House
(149 7th Street, Brooklyn, NY,
11215)
F Train to 4th Avenue
G train to Smith & 9th Street
M/R to 9th Street


$10 -- cheaper than a movie in the city!
Buy advance tickets

Free Red Stripe from 6pm-7pm




I'll see y'all tomorrow.

-----

This is a little on the late side but a while ago I met this sweet girl named Ani and she had a genuine idea --->
I couldn't make it to the opening this time around, but I'll definitely be there next time I'm going to try and put some of my photos up for sale, if that sounds appealing to anyone out there.

Saturday, April 18
closes April 23
6-10 PM
Brooklyn Artists Gym
168 7th St at Third Ave, third floor, 718-858-9069
go drink and listen to some music and look at some nice work



-----

Lastly, the delightful Maxwell Williams currated this a while ago. I was sad I missed the opening but I was in New Orleans at the time. Anyways, it is closing soon and everyone should go.

\/1R7U4L 1|\|$4|\|17'/
CINDERS GALLERY
103 Havemeyer St, Brooklyn, NY


cinders caption: "Curator Maxwell Williams buggin out"


brotherly love


Dear Philadelphia,
I love your city, but I don't think there is enough Ben Franklin.
Love,
Emily






Tuesday, April 14, 2009

a disposable camera


comic book

gina, my friend i met on the train

clayton and monica, going to be taken down upon request

morning after sleepover

friends

boney slug

with hair

and whiskers

hott stuffing in the middle

simon

accident

books love the kids

Sunday, April 12, 2009

branch out

I thought I would be using this to post new photos or writing. But mostly I just put up everyday's bullshit. It is so much easier, and probably more popular. Like this:

T.I., I love you. I got brains so good, you coulda sworn I gone to college. I am sad you are going to jail.
I hate clowns. The one on the left is Conrad Veidt LOOK.
But I like kids.



I need to branch out.
I know who all of you are, except the Brooklyns, which is all of you.

1 United States Brooklyn, New York
2 United States Brooklyn, New York
3 United States Brooklyn, New York
4 United States Atlanta, Georgia
5 United States Brooklyn, New York
6 Unknown ?
7 United States Brooklyn, New York
8 Unknown ?
9 United States Brooklyn, New York
10 Belgium Brussels, Brussels Hoofdstedelij...
11 Unknown ?
12 United States Rhinebeck, New York
13 United States Brooklyn, New York
14 United States Brookline, Massachusetts
15 United States Norcross, Georgia
16 United States 1,241
17 United States Brooklyn, New York
18 United States Brooklyn, New York
19 United States Brooklyn, New York
20 United Kingdom Blackburn, Blackburn with Darwen
21 Portugal Loures, Lisboa
22 United States Brooklyn, New York
23 United States Chicago, Illinois
24 United States Middletown, New York
25 Germany 3,838

neely



Romantic love was invented to manipulate women -Jenny Holzer

Is this true?

No.




My brain is flaking.
My body is sore like I went running; I definitely did not. Instead of going Upstate, I found another way not to. I think it had to do with the rain.
I did buy heavy bags of potting soil at Home Depot and dragged it all back home. I saw some guy with dreadlocks that touched the cement floor when I was buying a handsaw. I wish I could have remembered his name, or at least something else about him besides his hair, from when we worked together at the library. So we just kind of nodded when we saw eachother.


I am almost embarrassed, but not
by this-
I was in my bed: in front of a 10-ft window with no curtain, and I watched 'We Are Wizards' on Hulu. The entire thing. It is a few years old and all about 'wizard rock', bands with HP themes. Harry and the Potters, Draco and the Malfoys, the Whomping Willow, etc. All their fans are 7-year-olds or young and greasy girls, which is kind of amazing. To be musician with a predefined shelf-life like that. Like an open jar of mayonnaise.
But Brad Neely was also in the movie. He said lots of funny things and was proud (and probably lying) when he said he had never read the books. Neely said he liked the movies a lot, mostly HP no. 2. He rescripted the movies and made 'adult audio tracks' to play against the muted movie if you time it just right.
I still havn't seen these- maybe one day soon, maybe the next time it rains.

Before you watch that, you should read this. I used my incredible skills honed from writing out Stephen Malkmus and Mike Watt transcriptions for VBS to capture this glory:

"Dear Diary,
Sometimes I think that this planet is owned by devils,
Sometimes I feel like my friends don't even know who I am
And my family belongs to some other me.
Sometimes, I need to be one with nature,
I want to frolic with the polycorns
and run amongst the braintrees, in the brain forest.
So I go to the city park by the lake.
Walking potion: 10 parts sugar, 90 parts whiskey.
If it's cold out, I take a bag of chowder,
And in the summer, I take a bag of banana chowder.

Once there, I look for the dream girls,
And I see the day-mares
And the talking shadows, bonding over disgusting things.
I see the perfects, and the lay-downs, and the hunched-ups.
I watch the followers looking for punch meat (?) ,
And I notice the pansexuals, wiggling down the lane,
with their shades on.
Sometimes, if I'm fast enough, I catch a glimpse of the brainfucker,
Just fuckin the shit out of everyone- and we don't even know it.

But mostly, I look for the dream girls,
You know, if you try sometimes,
You just might find, get what you want.

I have a big coat, with big pockets.
Sometimes, kittens get in there,
It's cool with my as long as they keep their hooksocks curled.
I look for wizard turds in the forest because I was once told they could be rolled into gold.
Sometimes I go to the lake and sing songs to the lake about the lake,
Once, a goose clapped.

Today on the road I saw something important,
I like to think they died while hugging, and that a person hadn't arranged them afterwards.
I found a soft tree and leaned up there, until the stars put on their make up.
I calmed down and focused my Chi, it's good to have a Chi hammer on the ready.
Then, I saw a second important thing that night, hmm.
You know, I felt pretty wise.
Shit matters, even if you can't figure it out,
Even if we are ruled by devils,
Even if my days don't mean anything.
I just hope that I die while hugging
And not while in a wine drinking contest."




Friday, April 10, 2009

all things must pass



____ the open windows that I have closed. But first, I took a picture of the view.




Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)



-----
Tommy Wiseau
-----




All Thing Must Pass all morning that was really the afternoon in disguise.




-----
please please please be in Socrates

-----


MONOTONE Carl Sandberg

THE monotone of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.

The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
Bannered with fire and gold.

A face I know is beautiful--
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And the peace of long warm rain.


Thursday, April 9, 2009

job applications


Because of all the things happening here lately I think I deserve to leave Brooklyn soon. I want to see California from the driver's seat of a car. And probably because it goes against everything I am thinking, I started applying for real jobs in and around New York for the summer.

planning coverletters and submissions to:
Brooklyn Rail
National Geographic
Capricious
Creative Time
Harvest Works
freewilliamsburg
ETCETCETC

I also want to start volunteering at the Lower East Side Print Shop in May.

Saturday I'm leaving Brooklyn and going upstate. No matter what.
GATES SALON TONIGHT

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

waterloo sunsets


Taken from a mediocre essay written in Spring 09.
------------------------------
Ray Davies, what do you mean to voyeurism and what does voyeurism mean to you?




But I don’t need no friends, as long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in paradise. -Waterloo Sunset, The Kinks

... after glimpsing a colorful boy running down the streets. The boy was chasing a large red ball that was propelling itself down an alleyway and away from a grubby mob of French-spouting children. The boy was the balloon’s friend, but the other children were jealous and chased the balloon and tried to harm it by throwing stones. Eventually the red balloon meets a crowd of other Technicolor balloons and together they float away in silent concert to the top of the sky.

That was the first time I saw Albert Lamorisse's 1956 The Red Balloon (Le ballon rouge.)

Yet, this is my personal account of a sentimental attachment to a work of art—the love of a spectator. I am a pedestrian, a student, an amateur photographer and an audience member. What is more interesting to analyze is the indissoluble and unexplainable relationship between an artist and their creation. Just as I have found my connection to The Red Balloon to be extraordinarily rare, it is the same for artists.

...It’s the artworks that are never completed to satisfaction, or never seen shown before the death of an artist that have the most significance in one's life.

...Ray Davies songs are short, at around 2:30 and combine definitively '60s British electrified-rock with head-bobbing pop rhythms. His work uses personal narrative to capture the smallest, but most enjoyable moments in of life: the scenes we witness from a window, meeting a mysterious woman, getting over a lover or watching the daily rush hour traffic when you are not a part of it. These songs are in fact stories about the small minutes of happiness, infatuation and nostalgia that make up our lives.

“Waterloo Sunset” is written from the point of view of a man staring out the window onto the Waterloo Bridge connecting the East and West sides of London over the River Thames. Davies sings, but I don’t need no friends, as long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset, I am in paradise. He spies a young couple, Terry and Julie, and everything in the world seems to be at peace as long as they are in love, as they are in that moment.

By the end of the song we do not learn who Terry and Julie are, or if they are even real. It is not necessary to know the identity of the lovers in order to understand the bliss of their meetings. Davies has offered many contradicting identities for Terry and Julie, recorded in interviews and his autobiography. ...But the song is widely thought to be about Terence Stamp and Julie Christie, British film stars that were once a high profile romantic couple—even Christie acknowledges that the song is about her and Stamp. Could be the mystery that preserves this song as a timeless story about finding connection in the London’s swarming metropolis? If so, is Ray Davies doing a service to his work by protecting the subject’s true identities?

The cynic might hear “Waterloo Sunset” as a mundane observation of everyday urban traffic patterns. But the song has been proclaimed “a masterpiece” by The Who’s Pete Townshend and "the most beautiful song in the English language" by music critic Robert Christgau. ...In 1985, Return to Waterloo, a soundtrack to a self-directed and written film of the same name was released by Davies. The title is a direct reference to the 1967 song, but the story takes a more dystopian perspective on London street life, while still playing on public voyeurism, imagination, exploring a relationship to the city of London. Davies’ song "Return to Waterloo" concerns the struggles an aging man’s dreams of a return to the world of his youth. Another 15 years later, in 2000, Davies published Waterloo Sunset Stories, a collection of short stories titled exclusively after Kinks songs. The autobiographical stories revolve around an aged rock musician, Les Mulligan, and a cynical promoter planning his comeback.

...I have experienced unexplainable echoes of art, film, and literature—a result of what I can only assume is a deep personal connection to a work. Such as my love for an old French children’s movie about a boy chasing a balloon, or the songs that stick themselves to the insides of all our heads, or the books we continue to read over and over. Artists have similar relationships to their own work, as there are enduring forces that connect the creator his creation. For some, a particular story is perennially created, expanded, destroyed, and redigested over an entire career. Artists are able to dedicate themselves to a story with many endings, just as Davies is connected to “Waterloo Sunset”. ...


crazy arms

happy birthday, dad.

i took these a while ago. i have a ton, but i didnt use a tripod. im going to crop them down and edit it into a grid. final product ill post up later.


chinese sleeping

I found this mystery note the morning after Valentines. Thank you, Mystery T.


For the first time in years, I need to give some credit to the New School. I got randomly chosen to be apart of a survey group and 'as a gift for my participation' I get $25 at Murray's Bagels. I'm not going to think about how much money I've spent on school.


Manly house guests:



Monday, April 6, 2009

sparks on the tracks


I am worried about graduation and how much is going on, but also how much isn't going on. I don't remember the last time I felt like I accomplished something.
Senior thesis work needs to get done. Get started, really. I am making a book out of collected bits of the summer. I am learning more about watercolors and guasch over xeroxes.

It is raining outside right now and I want to stay here and listen to the cars driving on the wet road outside my window. Or watch the sparks on the tracks as the trains goes by the other side of the station.
I don't want to respond to a certain professor's rude emails about why I didn't come to class. I didn't go because I didn't go. I never got the chance to watch CĂ©line and Julie Go Boating on account of all the nonsense that's
been happening lately.


E is the most forgettable letter.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

singing islands

What is a singing island?

A name taken mostly from Phil Elverum's (The Microphones) Song Islands album.

It is also a piece of a Korewori proverb I read in my favorite section of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New Galleries for Oceanic Art is behind Egypt, and also faces Central Park. It is filled with wooden canoes, shields, and statues of primordial ancestors from Polynesia, Micronesia, and Papua New Guinea. All of the bodies of the statues are tall and thin, filled with holes, and covered with mythological animals and painted abstract designs. I am going to try and go back this week and find the quote I read about the 'songs of the islands' and take pictures of the ceiling. The center of the ceiling is covered with a tide of wooden panels that were once part of a ceremonial house.



Canoe Prow
19th–early 20th century
Middle Sepik, Iatmul
Papua New Guinea, Middle Sepik River
Wood, cowrie shells
L: 71 1/2 in. (181.6 cm)
The Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Collection, Purchase, Nelson A. Rockefeller Gift, 1955
1978.412.705

"Crocodiles play a central role in the art and culture of the Iatmul people. According to one Iatmul creation account, an ancestral crocodile was responsible for forming the land. In the beginning, the earth was covered by a primordial ocean, into whose depths the crocodile dived. Reaching the bottom, it brought up on its back a load of mud, which became an island when it surfaced. From that island, the land grew and hardened, but it continues to rest on the back of the ancestral crocodile, which occasionally moves, causing earthquakes. Both now and in the past, the prows of most sizeable canoes are carved, as here, in the form of a crocodile. The scale of the present work indicates that it probably adorned a large war canoe, capable of holding from fifteen to twentyfive men. These large canoes, hollowed from a single massive log, were also used for trading and fishing expeditions. Although canoes are no longer used in warfare, contemporary Iatmul carvers continue to make large examples for use in trade and general transportation."



It could also be a moment like lighting a cigarette from a stove burner while it is still in your mouth and simultaneously catching your hair on fire and then laughing about it with your neighbor who did the same thing.




Now you're gone, I won't fall, fall in the fire
Oh no, I am lacking, I want what I see

Saturday, April 4, 2009

rough



Thursday, April 2, 2009

nypd

who are the police?

cops banging on my window woke me up at 6.04am this morning.
looking for a fugitive.
they didn't leave a card or anything so i called 911.
and then 311/ the 81st precinct

and i know that they probably weren't cops at all and i know you can buy fake badges at pawn shops.

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

HEY MA


HEY MA, IM PREGNANT


APRIL FOOLS


cant stop watching this. THOSE NAILS.