Coming home to the power out.

Around the middle of July, a professor at Hunter was kind enough to encourage me in this art-making affair, by asking me to complete 20 new finished pieces by mid-September. I don’t know why i expected anything different of myself, but here i am, with less than a month left, and one, one little collage that i feel comfortable turning in. Every day i tell myself, “move your legs into that studio, woman!” but most days i count the number of hairs i can pull from my dog in one swipe, or scrub the rubbery caulk-stuff in the spaces between the tiles in the bathroom until it gets dark outside and then i write off that day as you know, just not an art day. “I have to feel it, or else all i’ll make is crap.” Right?

Truth is i’m terrified, which is typical, but the tasks i’m resorting to in order to avoid even setting foot in the studio that is frankly inconvenient for me to have, but is there for the sole purpose of getting me to work, those are surprising. I have never cared about tile-caulk, never been concerned about getting my dishes really clean. “Not-embarrassing” is the level i generally strive for in all my hygiene, and even what constitutes that changes by the day. I mean look, i’m so desperate that i chose to blog about it, of all the loathsome activities.

The art i want to be making is interesting and complex and approaches form in really innovative ways. The ideas i have are genuinely interesting, about how our immune systems have to recognize what cells are us before they can figure out something’s there that shouldn’t be, about “disease as a relationship,” about dogs and how they move, about scientists writing about bodies in a tone that denies they have them. The ideas, those i never run out of, but when i sit in my studio i don’t know how to make any of that external. I just putter around with pictures that aren’t really that cool, pasting them to boards and drawing on them with the skills of a toddler. I have cool stuff that i want to think about in a visual way, conversations i feel like i could have with myself forever, but it’s that i don’t have the language, the means.

There’s so much swirling around, those metal-pointy things that some buildings have all around their cornices to keep birds from resting there, the beauty of a great-white shark leaping entirely out of the water to gulp a seal in one bite that i saw on Blue Planet, the voice of Patsy Cline, the expression my dog made this morning when i got up really close to his ear and whispered, “Good Morning!” I feel ill-equipped to process all this emotionally, much less artistically.

But. I. Have. To. Right now. I just wish i could translate, could speak this visual language fluently. Words have always been inadequate, but at least i’m fairly comfortable with them. Making images seems right, but comes so much more slowly to me right now. And it’s frustrating as fuck.

Whistlin’ dixie.

I saw The Blow (aka Khaela Maricich) perform on Tuesday, and it’s preoccupied me with the dynamics of performance and integration with the audience, giving what you get. Beneath her witty banter, self-deprecating jokes, and choreographed dances was a desire to connect that i hadn’t felt since seeing a Tracy + The Plastics show. There’s a level of respect there, even for people talking through the whole show, even for the arms attached to relentless digital cameras. Those are qualities i admire and want to incorporate into my own work, things i’m afraid i’ll forget the longer i work in food service, a genuine regard for people, even and especially the types of people that generally attend indie rock shows in the NYC.

After The Blow i stayed for a little of the Electrelane show. I couldn’t take my eyes off the bass player, not just because she was cute and queer, but to watch her work. She was completely at ease, occasionally lifting her eyes to the crowd, where her bandmates were either distant with the audience or erratically moving to the beat. But more than that i loved that she periodically checked in with the other musicians, not just to time difficult transitions but to see what they were doing, and i felt, to see how they were doing. Performing alone, like Wynne Greenwood, Khaela Maricich, and Miranda July afford certain freedoms, certain possibilities, but with a collaboration it’s so interesting to me how essential it becomes to read the people you’re up there with, to pick up on the subtleties in their movements and know when and how to support them. The potential there for complexity and nuance is really exciting, and where collaboration usually scares me (attributable to teacher-enforced “group projects” where no one ever knew what was going on), i think i could get into it at some point.

Otherwise, i’ve mostly been trying to adjust to living by myself. It’s proved more difficult than i anticipated, it seems i’ve become so used to being anxious in my living situations that i have it here out of habit. When i come home i try to remember that it’s just me and pup here, that there’s no drama. It’s a happy problem to have, but frustrating in that i’ve been here a month and am still not completely at ease here, in this space.

If you have not heard the song “Atlas” by The Battles, do yourself a favor and find some way to listen to it. One of the best songs i’ve heard all year.

How come nothin’ tastes good.

Another warm-ish day in this schizophrenic spring is not to be squandered. The sun pouring through my apartment makes me feel just like 3:31 in the Arcade Fire’s “(Antichrist Television Blues)” when Régine Chassagne starts belting it. I had to reassure my sister that that is actually a person’s voice singing that high and that on-pitch, and not violins. Should you sadly be without this song, you can download a low-quality version here. In other musics, the new Björk is coming out May 7th, i’m already shaky-legs about it. I didn’t get tickets to see her on the three-day stint she’s in the nyc, which at first was hugely disappointing, but i decided my 86 dollars could be better spent elsewhere, in keeping with my attempts of late to examine my consumption patterns and align them more with my politics.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how i decide what i need and what i don’t. Obviously there are invariables, but there aren’t as many of those as i anticipated. I can’t compromise on things like dog food, or my, my, Metrocard, but those temporary tattoos from ebay? Admittedly i already am not a huge big-time consumerist monster, but i am a United Statesian, born and raised, and that means that i do have a positive emotional association to shopping. I want to not necessarily spend less, although that would be good, but to spend better. Instead of buying greens only when i’m feeling really tired and know it’s due to a lack of veggies, i want to get a big share of CSA and in the winter shop for produce only at farmer’s markets. What i really want is to research what grows in the NY, NJ, PA area when, and only buy local produce when it’s in season. Do i really need to eat oranges, when they’re only grown in places far away from here? It will be hard to forego avocados and citrus, but i want to try. It’s just too counterintuitive to feel good about not having a car here, and then rely so much on trucks to drive all over the country to bring me what i want.

This extends to online shopping as well. I live in New York, of all places, and i still buy things and have them shipped to me because it’s painfully easy. This is dumb. If the Big Apple can’t provide it, i don’t need it. The sole exception is the vegan dog food, which i have tried to find all over the city unsuccessfully. And maybe coffee.

I also want to be a more active freegan, which could ease my avocado cravings. I mean, if a grocery store trashes some perfectly good bananas that happen to have been grown thousands of miles away, it’s better to eat it than to offer it up to the landfill, right? I’m most hesitant about this one, due to the high potential for grossness, but i want to give it a genuine effort before i decide that only produce that has never seen the inside of a black bag is for me.

All this is a kind of internal spring cleaning, but it has more to do with the reading i’ve been getting into these last few days. I finished the 6th Harry Potter on Friday (a requisite “eek!” in anticipation of the 21 July release date of the Deathly Hallows), which meant Saturday morning i needed new reading material, so to the library i went. I want to get more focused in the artwork i want to be making, so that when i start the studio classes at Hunter i’ll be able to use my time well. I picked up no fewer than four books about science, most of them focusing on the aesthetics found in nature, the design principles of cells and trees, why they work.

I can’t think of any other ideas i’d rather be working with right now, finding the spaces where art and science intersect. In the first book, The Ancestor’s Tale, Richard Dawkins traces human evolutionary history backwards, which is not strictly about design in science but looked interesting. There’s a part where he’s talking about why we can go back in time and see parallels between ourselves and snakes and bacteria and grasses, and how the information remains remarkably intact. He makes the comparison between evolutionary history and literary history, how we use old documents to tell us about cultures and languages long dead. “The important point about DNA is that, as long as the chain of reproducing life is not broken, its coded information is copied to a new molecule before the old molecule is destroyed… Large quantities of our ancestors’ DNA information survives completely unchanged, come even from hundreds of millions of years ago, preserved in successive generations of living bodies.” How powerful, the idea that we are living relics, housing the traits that helped our ancestors thrive in the water as fish or as bacteria. I still can’t quite absorb this completely, but i will say these last few days have been easier with this knowledge. I think that’s what’s been motivating my need to get more local and sparser in my consumption; i’ve been seeing the connections between myself and my surroundings in much more explicit ways than i used to. It’s easy to get abstract with words like “environment” and “eco-friendly,” but when i peel an orange that shares some identical DNA information with me, it’s different.

It’s my mom’s doing, this fascination with science, and i can remember her trying to sound casual but unable to disguise her disappointment when she asked me why i never went into science. “You seemed so interested in it, you always enjoyed visiting me at the hospital.” Which is true. I thought i was a really lucky kid to have a mom who worked in the lab, who could teach me how to grow bacteria in petri dishes, how to look at dead tissues under a microscope. She came in to visit my anatomy class when i was a junior in high school, and it felt damn cool to hear her talk about the micro-organisms she knew so well.

I can’t wait to make things that honor the passions that she transferred to me, that explain to her why studying Ingres and genomes are not really that far off.