http://listen.grooveshark.com/s/Beginning_To_See_The_Light/2kjv9g

Awashed Here

... imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in - an interesting hole I find myself in - fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. Douglas Adams

He's got it right, like, three fourths of the way through

Show me some passion, Javier

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/12/magazine/14actors.html?hp#1

Ducky ruined real men for me when I was 15

And even he couldn't figure out how to get out of his shitty bedroom and go get what he wanted.

this is what i wish it could feel more like

http://listen.grooveshark.com/s/A_Song_For_You/ww34j

it should, for everything i'd like to think we did for it.

Gillian Wearing - 2 into 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36WUgFMDY-M

7000 words

http://www.7000words.com/en/word/

Abby Kent is a Goddess

All photos by Loren Marshall 2010

Truths of the day

You know it's finals when: You have to walk out of class to get a hold of yourself from crying through your quiz and you find some other woman in another class doing the same.

My landlord is harrassing me about our business arrangement to get his houses rented for him next year and I did the unthinkably-Reina and fucking called my daddy on him.

Fernando, I hope you didn't blow it and I can still try to get the thousand bucks per house if I land them next semester... but it can't happen until next semester, and I can't have him calling and texting me at all hours of every day. When he's calling more than my father, brother, best friends and housemate combined, we have a problem; It's refreshing to hear my father say what he knows is a truth for me and has always been: I can do anything I put my mind to, but I can only put my mind on so many things, and it's impossible for me to work under someone else's pressure." Possibly cliche? It's the first thing that I would call it if someone else said it. But he's right; that shit ruins me.

RECESS Exhibit

http://recesshws.blogspot.com/

Blogged documentation of the exhibit currently at Houghton House's Davis Gallery at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. My video is 20 minutes long and vimeo and youtube did NOT accept it. I will be cutting it into two parts soon. Stay tuned. It was an exciting experience.

art:21 with Kara Walker

ART:21: Can you talk about the humor in your work? Is it a tragic humor?

WALKER: Giddy humor. Giddy. I think I described this kind of turbulence that drives most of the work, and it's a turbulence that's not unlike melodrama, or the kind of dredging up of every feeling one could possibly have about a situation which is all about feeling. And it's difficult not to laugh off that behavior, that sense of being overloaded, out of control, unable to contain even the horror of being able to think about something that you know you shouldn't be thinking about, or that you know isn't going to resolve itself just by thinking about it. It might not resolve itself by talking about it. It might not resolve itself by enacting laws about it. Or writing about it. And it's that feeling of needing to make this offering as a form of truth-telling, no matter how awful it is and then, uhg, you know, being flabbergasted at even having to do that! Why should that even have to be done? And then sometimes the work is just ridiculous and silly and weird.

Damn, women.

Thankful After Giving Thanks

How I love to see the gang! We have too good of a time for someone to not be the asshole with the camera.

This is my home at it's most refreshing. I remember our first thanksgiving back from being away was so utterly dreadful and uncomfortable. This was my first back since then, and, luckily, at least we've gotten past that.

Open Letter on The artful Love

I’ve never really made a visual work of art about love before. I didn’t feel like I’d ever want to, because any relationship that would be worth it anyhow should be lived through the experiences, with the resounding returns of patterns and signs that click off of the tongue after flickering across my retina, flipping the image backward against the surface of my brain. As an after thought, I often feel over-indulgent and rude to disclose my pain. It’s more elegant to suffer silently. Someone else will be moved by your pain and tell your story. I haven’t even made any art about my mother yet.

I have always been able to decide that if I couldn’t have or do something, then I didn’t want it. Some other project or object would do just fine, and I would learn to be happy with that too. I talked to you about that once. We used to eat the packaged saltines and dip them in the free Italian dressing the old café at our college used to offer for salads. Our dates were never much, poor kids that we were. If you could call it a date, all we would do is sit in a booth together between classes. You would have your French homework or poems to critique and I maybe read from some book, but often just talked or looked at you. So, one day we were eating crackers dipped in dressing and I told you that I could just decide I didn’t want something I couldn’t have, and as a result, I always got everything I wanted. I thought it was a genius perspective, and it was one of the things that made me invincible. We fought about that, we fought about a lot of things I said while eating crackers, like the fact that I don’t think that I’m going to live past 65 and that if you ever broke any woman’s heart, it was because she wasn’t listening to you.

I have to take it all with me into my next place I make as my home. Right? Our language was the only one I’ve been practicing since I was seventeen. I even had to drop Spanish. What can I leave out and forget now? That the sum of love is what you pay for it? I’m tired of suffering but I was only ever good at performing tragedy. “You are me”, you said to me. But you hate yourself right now, and I hate you a little too. I’ll never say I resent you, but I resent myself for not trusting you right away with my secrets. I expected everything of yours to be mine (because it all once was, I painted that Attic.), but I needed something new to belong to only me. And I did secretly love the men you were afraid of my loving when I got hit with new magic. I thought maybe it was a new language to learn, but really, it was just the first joke I would eventually get. I’m sorry I was not more honest about that. I didn’t know what I was feeling at the time. I barely knew where I was. It was my first taste as a new kind of agent of Neptune. One day, I found myself loving you madly again, and I resent the confusion and codependency I found for you when my father was locked away. It rang through my guts and the veins of my heart. I regret not telling you I was proud of you more often, for being brave every day, trying to learn and grow and change.
I don’t believe that you would never speak to me again for making art about you. Even if it was about our ugly, blank faces looking at one another, saying nothing good. I don’t know if you would discredit me because maybe you won’t agree. You were very careful, when I asked you to open up about home to not give in and say anything about me. I think now, you want to omit from the story that you moved in with my friends and moved to my town because of me. But I am going to use the videos I shot of us fighting, and I am going to record more of my experiences from now on. I can't just revisit them as a memory. I need them as a text.

It’s been some time since I knew we were saying anything truly productive to one another. I think we just started to when I confronted you four days ago. And then, a morning later, you said, “maybe, it has to end or change completely”. Heaven or hell is too much for a living human. Reaching hands across space and time is subjective to the amount of light we can see over the distance. I think you’re right, but neither of us came to a decision, and because we haven’t, the purgatory is eating me alive. It’s bloody and difficult because you’re my favorite person; the one who I show the artists whose work I want to rip off and the person I share my books first with. You collaborate best with my visions. I could have never eaten the void with out you-- Even if it did tear back open after everyone walked through it. My favorite song you've written is a ballad about Valerie Solanas, inspired after I got too drunk watching a movie about her and empathized with her need for a woman only society. You used to call me the biggest woman you knew. We are a terrible revolution and when we love mightily, we are producers of phenomena Signs, Staffs and Stars bang and blow and burn. With you, I thought I learned to be more of a real, living, free woman. But, then, why do I ache so badly from the worry that some day one of us is going to pull the ten swords out of our sides. I don't know how not to suffer.

You are a revolution all on your own, too. Please don’t think that I never listened to you. I always tried. I have truly been happiest by your side. I owe so much to our meeting. When I listen to Our Lady Peace, I think about you and I in puberty, listening to our cd's in secret at the same time and looking to the sky. When I listen to Broken Social Scene or Yo La Tengo, I always remember having sex in the dark after that first concert of ours, and you telling me for the first time you loved me. Paris was an experience that rattled my soul and the whole time, I felt your ghost embedded in the psychogeography. I found myself on your streets, and found that fool's journal I hope you fill with beautiful representations of our story. We have a beautiful story. I feel that I've grown in brilliant ways and gained a remarkable insight to the family I want and dream of making. Fuck, I know how to have a family because of you. Fuck, I was in a band because of you.


I have utter faith in you. No matter if I say and believe I need distance from you, I still miss you; wish you would call and tell me one thing you did that day that made you feel joy and comfort. One day you’re going to step back from the edge and look at the scenery and you will feel peace. If you never call me again, please at least call me when you find yourself there. I would love to tell you what my view looks like. I recently put back on my wall the photo of the words "Eventually" written behind you. I don't have it in me to take it back down. "Eventually" isn't for me; "eventually" is for you.

I still want, one day, for you to watch "Once."

“on patti smith”


warrior with your words,

you
sought

freedom,

release, release.


freedom, it calls to you

it calls to you.

and i, too, seek confessional.


jesus never died for my sins
either, patti.

but in the name of the spirit and the soul

the holy holy soul,
i say warrior and i say vanguard,


crusader.


rock and roll is for the people,

rock and roll is for the power,



and your poetry is for god.
she

herself, may muse to you tantric
rhapsode.


you invent prayer for

wholeness of existence - tragedy of birth - guttural virtuoso


each word white hot
crackling on the tongue
that licks your clit
and clicks in your mouth

your belief in rimbaud,

in robert,

in love for sonic,
in your dreams,

in your climax,

in rite,

both you and i:

soulful, release.


punk

is one of many words
that it could be
but i call it beauty in jarring sensation
of your creation.

human, your order.



discovery of the unfamiliar.
human, the new words for



ancient needs.

human, “don’t fuck with the past


but fuck plenty with the future.”

human, seeking nerves under
your skin.

your guitar and your howls become
your instruments of battle

tools to carve the groove
i groove to. live on.
feed on. patti.

Crossing Veins

home has yet to manifest in consciousness,
except for memories which cling,
static-
along the walls
of black holes in junk closets.

filth and trash built a solid wall against supra-being
until routine purge
scrapes my interior, that
meta-
place where all of the pressure against my spine sets.
excavation is visceral,
placement, episodic,
and i transition to new realms.

i believe it is my rising sign in scorpio
that fixates in making origin;
responds to history lost in
shadowed euskara rivers
and the dark, hard
andean leather of
rancheros del gobierno
my abuelo refused to skin
off his back to warm
an american family.

thus, crossing veins in
beating and birthing organs -
quicksilver floods
cut into topography
of libra sun,
ice over secret impulse
for warrior-god to choke-hold venus
desire, attune to taboo
masochistic healing rite
on pluto.

what i recall, myself,
are the edges of kitchens
a line of grime
from the refrigerator to the counter end.
places that no one thinks to touch or care
or tend-
bags of cans collecting wet stale smells
with the promise to be exchanged for tomorrow’s pizza dinner
i think about eating tomorrow when i think about home.
and that is my moon sign in taurus.
stubbornly earthbound

home is found in space
the stars claim for me,
their momentary collision.

proof of engineering

you and i have whispered into each other’s ear
static vows across
wires and cables that
tangle with our harangued legs
and our separate needs.

costs of time and space become evident
now that we pay for all our minutes,
but it has been six months,
and we still extend to elastic limit.

what will happen beyond, god knows;

i anticipate our yield strength
to fracture with ignited,
entropic passions. -
with staves snapping,
stars eating voided infinite.