Leave-taking

I’m buzzed on cheap white wine and the heady smell of wood smoke drifting in from a bonfire two or three houses down. This is essential.

I am a person invested in ritual; in the deliberate gestures (both small and great) that allow us to make meaning for ourselves in the world. I considered carefully how I might mark the end of my time in this small city. I would be on my own, as I was when I arrived. This too, seems essential.

The first summer we were here, we were the only tenants in the building. We ran wild, charging up and down the stairs, sliding down the banisters, and wandering out to the parking lot to dance under the moon. Moody made origami sunflowers for me, and we walked along the river, pointing out muskrats and herons to one another. It was hot—like this summer has been—and we slept on the porch, searching for a breeze, trying to keep cool. In the two weeks I spent alone after moving in (before Moody arrived) I felt like an intruder, sleeping on the sofa when our bed felt too big for me alone. Together we were at home, and when I am old and grey, I will remember the first summer.

In many ways, this summer has been a strange echo of that one. Since Moody went ahead to Manhattan, I’ve wandered around like a ghost, spackling and sanding, packing and painting. Nothing is sufficient. So I sit on our sun porch, searching for a breeze in the hot night, watching the lights turn on and off in the cell-like rooms of the hotel across the way. They reflect in the slow black river, trembling gold and orange—the night’s only stars.

Somewhere (in rooms inside of rooms inside of rooms inside me) there is a 12-year-old girl, howling for another home left behind. This is the longest I’ve lived in one place since I was six years old, and that is something. Onward.

Winter Playlist

Lydia Ainsworth.....................................White Shadows

Woodkid..................................................Conquest of Spaces

Tori Amos...............................................Bells For Her

The Acid…........................................…..Tumbling Lights
Lorde…...................................................Buzzcut Season
Bjork ft. Antony and the Johnsons……..Fletta
Dear Reader……...........................……..Great White Bear
Daughter………...........................….…..Drift
City of the Sun…….................................Second Sun
Bear’s Den……...............................……Magdalene
Tom Rosenthal…...…..............................It’s OK
Joanna Newsom…...................................Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie
Joni Mitchell……............................……The Dawntreader

Laura Mvula............................................Sing to the Moon

Art by Kate Blegvad

Winter Update

The research and discovery process for writing a dissertation in contemporary art history (and perhaps for other fields?) is akin to bailing water from a doomed little boat. There’s always more water surging into the vessel, and you’re either going to exhaust yourself bailing or concede to life under water. Every day I stumble upon new work and new theory that rocks the supports of the unsteady structure I’ve begun, as if in a dream. Did I write that? Was that my idea? It’s strange to simultaneously feel so entangled with and so disconnected from your work. I almost lost my mind over a passage in Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections the other day, convinced that it would brighten the dark corners of my project but completely flummoxed by its real meaning. For about 10 minutes I was resolved to recreate Jung’s miniature stone village in the hope of “discovering my own myth” and the vivid mute secrets of dwelling that are the foundation of my work. Then I made tea and went back to bailing water.

The past few months have been filled by many such ridiculous crises, and I have little else to report. Moody and I dressed up as Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix for Halloween, and were correctly identified by no one. We had a sweet little Christmas together and sailed into 2015 with tummies full of pizza.

Happy New Year!

Autumn Playlist

Bear’s Den….............................................My Lair
Jesca Hoop…....................................The Kingdom
Bon Iver……......................................Brackett, WI
Ramona Falls…................................….I Say Fever
Beirut………........................................The Rip Tide
The Honey Trees…............................…Moon River
Nico…………....................................……These Days
Radical Face….............................…Welcome Home
Angel Olsen............................Some Things Cosmic
Mr. Little Jeans…....The Suburbs (Arcade Fire cover)
Lorde………...............................….…Glory and Gore
Antony and the Johnsons….....................Swanlights

The (End of) Summer Self

Everything and nothing happened this summer. I turned 25 and I taught a summer class at my university, but mostly I just struggled with my dissertation and felt guilty for every moment not spent struggling on it. Amanda Ann Klein said it best in her essay for Judgmental Observer: Academia conditions us to feel that when we’re not working, we don’t exist. It’s maddening and saddening, but perhaps the natural byproduct of a community of people driven enough to seek PhDs. My problem is that I’ve never been a particularly ambitious person. People who have known me a long time will probably laugh at this claim, but it’s the truth. I simply love learning (though less now than I used to).

Summer is a strange time for me. When the characters and rhythms of the university aren’t present, immediate, and ordering my life, I find it trickier to maintain the illusion that those characters and rhythms make sense in my life. They really don’t, but I have no plans to let that stop me.

I recently read a personal essay on The Hairpin (if you’ve never visited, you really ought to) that has stuck with me. In it, Taisia Kitaiskaia writes about the summer-self that withdraws from world, creating a kind of social vacuum where it may then grow large, swollen with its own intensity:

It’s like slipping outside of time—societal, human time. It’s in these slack summers that I feel most immortal, as unknown and useless as a god, unseen by any mortal eye and somehow full of a vain and hopeless majesty. I fill up more space in the room. Strange thoughts grow unimpeded.

Strange thoughts indeed. Here are some photos from this summer:

Poetry Wednesday

August

I have known summer least
and loved it best, of all seasons—so swollen
and drowsy
in my toughest cradle—I nearly missed it.

It was as I grew
that its usefulness shriveled, budding vacant,
becoming the great weight on me (on us)
that turns.

I have grass, and insects singing
I have
the mad bliss of remembering, completely,
the disentanglement of childhood.

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Desert Places

by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast 

In a field I looked into going past, 

And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, 

But a few weeds and stubble showing last. 

The woods around it have it--it is theirs. 

All animals are smothered in their lairs. 

I am too absent-spirited to count; 

The loneliness includes me unawares. 

And lonely as it is that loneliness 

Will be more lonely ere it will be less-- 

A blanker whiteness of benighted snow 

With no expression, nothing to express. 

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces 

Between stars--on stars where no human race is. 

I have it in me so much nearer home 

To scare myself with my own desert places.

Summer Playlist

Youth Lagoon.............................Afternoon

Phantogram….…........................When I’m Small

Elliot Smith….........................…Color Bars

Active Child…........................…Hanging On

Lykke Li…................................. I Never Learn

Keren Ann…..............................By the Cathedral

The Knife….…........................…Heartbeats

Quilt………............................….Penobska Oakwalk

Natasha Khan & Jon Hopkins…..Garden’s Heart

Elvis Costello………….............…Alison

Fiona Apple….........................Across the Universe (Beatles Cover)

The Shins.....................................Black Wave

Summer Slowdown

A Consistency of Vision

As I've said before (here and here), Ryan McGinley’s photographs were made for high summer, and I’m a little premature in posting some of his new work here at the beginning of May. I couldn't resist though. The photographs are deliciously warm and wonderfully dark, and they remind me of adventures from my college years (only more naked!). 

While I definitely prefer his older work (images from around 2001-2007), the newer pictures seduce with lurid color and impossible compositions. McGinley’s subject matter and aesthetic are consistently surreal (they're part of the language he's working in), but the earlier images seem to come forward from a softer dream space while the newer work delights in and lingers with the very frenzy of elements that formed it. 

I'll leave you with a snippet from his 2012 interview with Bill Powers:

Photography is limited, but it’s also limitless. You can put anything in front of your camera as long as you have a strong language. Photographs let you reinvent your self in another way. I can build my own pseudo-reality in photography. Since it’s a photo, it really happened and people will always respond to that. Like any good artist you just have to have a consistency of vision. I’d like to think I’m bringing poetry to the adventure of outdoor photography. Why I became of photographer is to observe the human spirit, to be a radical explorer, to join the circus and run away from home.

 

Images: 

1. Dakota (Moon Ladder Sunset), 2013

2. Wet Blaze, 2013

3. Glowing Pond (Green), 2013

4. Blonde Oleander, 2013

5. Hand Out, 2013

6. Golden Grassland, 2013

7. India (Frost), 2013

8. Spanish Moss, 2013

9. Pink Noise, 2013

10. Tree Procession, 2013

Spring Playlist

Air………………...…..…High School Lover

Heartless Bastards….The Arrow Killed the Beast

CocoRosie………..…..R.I.P. Burn Face

Chelsea Wolfe…….....Flatlands

Sharon Van Etten……………..…Serpents

Active Child………….Johnny Belinda

Coer De Pirate…......You Know I’m No Good (Amy Winehouse Cover)

Joni Mitchell……….....Cactus Tree

Björk…………...…....….Jóga

Aloe Blacc………..…...Wake Me Up

Oliver Tank…………..Past Present Future

Neko Case…………..This Tornado Loves You

Poetry Wednesday

Mutts

We were pacing,
cross-eyed from the bars of our cage as we looked
at the animals,
telling them from a distance
That we loved them terribly,
truly.

For you, the matted and white-whiskered
were the dearest,
but I felt for the wooly giants, nose-at-kneecap-high,
crashing through these shallows.

We found ourselves lowered,
bowed by cravings edge-by-edge with need.
The waiting would astound us, but
(the waiting has not astounded us yet!)

Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd something not-mine that I love:

Losing Track

by Denise Levertov

Long after you have swung back

away from me 

I think you are still with me: 

you come in close to the shore 

on the tide 

and nudge me awake the way 

a boat adrift nudges the pier: 

am I a pier 

half-in half-out of the water? 

and in the pleasure of that communion 

I lose track, 

the moon I watch goes down, the 

tide swings you away before 

I know I’m 

alone again long since, 

mud sucking at gray and black 

timbers of me, 

a light growth of green dreams drying.

Nana Daly

My grandmother was a profoundly kindhearted person whose only demands from life were great-grand-children, and time to paint. The last time we saw each other I was introducing my boyfriend to her at a family gathering, and she greeted us with an excited “When are you going to give me great-grandbabies??!” I had been worried about the very elderly, Irish-Catholic members of my family reacting badly to my very black boyfriend (and the realization that we were living in sin), but Nana Daly didn't seem fussed. She simply wanted great-grandbabies.

We (my many younger cousins, and I) called her “Nana” because it was the sound my older sister, struggling as a toddler to enunciate “Grandma,” had been able to muster. Somehow it stuck. Her famous vegetable soup (whose recipe is guarded as a family secret) became “Nana’s Soup.” Once a year, she would take my sister and me out separately and lavish us with attention. We ate Belgian waffles and went to see Santa Clause at the mall. She bought me a picture book, and took me to the craft store. That was called “Nana and Me Day.”

I usually think of myself as a thoroughly self-determined person, but my grandmother is the reason I’m working toward a PhD in art history. She’s the reason I love art. When I was four years old, she gave me my very first paint set and a heap of wonderfully thick, pulpy watercolor paper. She had handed oil pastels out to my sister, my cousin, and me some days prior, setting us up at the picnic table with a bowl of fruit to draw. My cousin did not want to draw and could not be persuaded to. My sister worked dutifully, and produced something very nearly resembling fruit. But I was the only one who drew the fruit and then begged for more paper, so that I might draw something else. She was happy to oblige and I felt, from then on, that I was just a little bit special to her.My grandmother was an amateur artist with a modicum of talent but an abundance of passion. As an adult, she took college art classes and, after my grandfather passed away, spent every spare cent on canvases and paint. She subscribed to Watercolor magazine and The Artist, and bought dozens of hardcover books on portrait painting and children’s book illustration. She had high hopes that I would go to art school, and (when I was old enough to read them) passed all of those books and magazines along to me. If she was disappointed when I went off to Vassar to major in art history instead of studio art, she surely never showed it.

When my family was evicted from our home in 2001, Nana Daly took us into hers. It was a tiny house (the one she had moved into when her six children were grown and her husband was gone), but she found room for us. For over a year she drove us to school and fed us at her table and offered us something very close to normalcy. She and I watched Bob Ross’s The Joy of Painting together on PBS and, to this day, that show is my cure-all, soothing raw nerves and relieving insomnia.

My grandmother was a fixture in my life, and I suppose I sort of assumed she’d always be around. I can’t imagine that she’s not painting fruit or making soup or doting on her two great-grandchildren somewhere. I owe her a great deal, and I only hope that she knew how special she was to me.

It's been eons..

I’m the kind of person who ignores aches and pains and sniffles and spasms and twinges and wobbles and chills. If there is any conceivable way I can pretend that I’m not coming down with something, then I do. Which it was why it was damn scary when I woke up one morning in October entirely blind in one eye and almost entirely blind in the other. I really couldn't ignore that (even if I wanted to….bumping into the furniture and pouring myself an early morning glass of tahini would have tipped Moody off pretttttty quickly). Following a pretty serious misdiagnosis by my optometrist, I was admitted to the Flaum Eye Institute, where the doctors told me that the stem cells in my eyes were dying, allowing cells from other parts of my eyes to take root and obscure my vision.

The doctors were hopeful that—because I’m young and healthy—the process might be reversed with surgery, but there was no rush, and (after a few minor procedures) they gave me six weeks on medication to see if they could summon a (scalpel-less) miracle. AND SUMMON THEY DID. Thank goodness, because eye surgery was the very last way I wanted to end my last semester of PhD coursework. And silver linings are really really real, folks. The entire art history department at UofR chipped in to grocery shop for Moody and me while I was out of commission, and my students all sent me chipper “get well soon” cards. There was a lot of love, and it made bumping into the furniture much, much less demoralizing. I can’t ever use contact lenses again and my glasses situation is complicated (I have the unholy misfortune of being allergic to metal, plastic, AND rubber), but I’m not going blind anymore. And that is really, really good news.

Christmas was great (but when is Christmas not great?). Moody and I went down to New York City to visit his parents, and I’m convinced they’re the nicest people in the world. Mama Moody took one look at my raggedy-ass winter coat and decided we were going shopping. Papa Moody briefly considered my vegetarianism and decided it was invalid. I ended up with a cashmere pea coat (waaaaay too nice for the likes of me) and a lot of questions (“But you eating fish won’t hurt you, right?”), and had an entirely wonderful break from dreary old Rochester.

Now that I’m finished with coursework, the real labor has begun. I’m not on campus every day now, and the dissertation process is all the more intense for the lack of structure. The name of the game is self-discipline. I've assembled a fabulous dissertation committee (Rachel Haidu, Douglas Crimp, and Joel Burges) and, for now, I’m reading as much as possible. Because my work centers on the theorization dwelling (and therefore must touch upon the subprime crisis), I want to build up a firm understanding of its economic context since the 1970s. It’s somewhat of a masochistic task (economics is not exactly my cup of tea), but I know that my project won’t be complete without having muddled through it.

That’s all for now, and I’ll try to be better about updates this spring. Expect some artsy and musical goodness soon!

Winter Playlist

Antony and the Johnsons........Angel on Fire
Arcade Fire...........................Normal Person
Vampire Weekend.................Hannah Hunt
Zola Jesus.............................Manifest Destiny
Georgi Kay............................Joga (Björk Cover)
The Lumineers.......................Dead Sea
Ellie Goulding & Lissie.......Making Pies (Patty Griffin Cover)
Bon Iver................................Holocene
The National..........................Humiliation
Julia Holter...................Hello Stranger (Barbara Lewis Cover)
Phosphorescent......................Song for Zula
Grouplove..............................Ways to Go

Fall Playlist

Mutual Benefit...................Advanced Falconry

David Bowie……………......Space Oddity
Rhye…………………......……Open
Heartless Bastards………..…Only For You
The Maccabees…………..…..Go
Agnes Obel…………………Fuel to Fire
Woodkid…………………....Brooklyn
Los Campesinos!…………....What Death Leaves Behind
The Tallest Man on Earth…...Dreamer
London Grammar……….....Wasting My Young Years

The Smiths……………...……..How Soon is Now? 

The Arcade Fire…………..…Reflektor

M83……………….....………...Wait

Plexus no. 19

Writing, as I do, on Chiharu Shiota, I tend to have a bit of a soft spot for large-scale installations that use thread to transform space. So when I saw a photograph of Gabriel Dawe's Plexus no. 19 this morning, I had to share it.

Created for the Miniartextil contemporary art exhibition, the spectrum of dyed threads electrifies its early 19th-century site; Villa Olmo (Como, Italy), whose own ornate beauty is severed by the introduction of the colored vectors. And when the sun shines in from above, it too is severed, creating new patterns of shadow and light that complicate the simpler trajectory of the installation's threads.

Enjoy!

                      

Pierre Julien Fieux: Are You Human?

The humanoids of Pierre Julien Fieux’s Are You Human? (CAPTCHA) project are, by turns, stolid, startled, and contentious. They expect the question, or they do not, and sometimes it incites in them a terrible rage. They catapult it back to the site and source of its emission, where they hope it will be expected, or where it will startle, and perhaps enrage.

These creatures do not rest: they prod and pull on their own elastic flesh, to see if the resultant body will land them in humanity’s box. A head splices and the portions fly apart; they come back together, and the head becomes a cube, or a wedge, with sharp edges that jar against the roundness of simple bodies.

I’m always saying that I admire people who work in ink and in watercolor (especially those who do it well). Both media are unforgiving when it comes to mistakes, and—especially as the complexity of the work increases—require a level of forethought I've never been able to manage. In the CAPTCHA series, the artist negates any such requirement, and the willful bleed of ink on wet paper becomes the frenzy of its figure. Stolid or startled, body and mind rebel against the starting question. It reverberates through invisible bones, and makes invisible teeth ache.

Some of Fieux’s creatures emerge from a harsher geometry: a complex of vectors and fractals that expand and contract on their own, alluding to the strange intelligence of the computer which measures humanity, but has none of its own.

In the short, animated film that accompanies and prefaces Fieux’s ink drawings, we witness some faceless creature’s (inexplicable) failure of the computer’s humanity check, and her subsequent imprisonment in a transparent cell, where further tests are performed. The viewer is made to understand that proving or failing to prove that one is human is not enough and is, perhaps, impossible. Despite being impossible, it will be asked of her again and again, with the singular, unmistakable effect of her submission—in the matter of her humanity—to the authority of the computer which is distinctly inhuman.