oof

So I actually made something for the first time in some time. I was worried that it was going to come out looking either like a rat or a rat with a pig’s face, but I’m pretty confident now that it looks like the cat it was meant to look like. Ignore the odd blue panda-like markings. The cat is going to end up gessoed (I’m currently waiting for the first layer of glue size to set up) and painted a fairly uniform gray, which, if I get my act together, should be done with an encaustic (melted beeswax + damar varnish), tinted with the little packet of Mt. St. Helens ash I found when I was cleaning out Mom’s office.

In other news, lack of sleep + landscapers + pool repairpeople + packing + moving companies coming in to give estimates + grad school + website work have all conspired to make me feel like taking a swan dive into the empty pool. But. I think maybe things are starting to shape up. Going out with friends from high school this past Friday was … pleasant and traumatic in equal measure. I was made aware of the fact that I’m really not quite up for contact with the outside world, just yet, but that maybe I’ll be on surer footing in a couple months, when it’s going to be more urgent.

The paternal threat was that an appointment with a local driving school would be made for me, today. I’m wondering, if I’m careful not to bring it up, if it can be postponed until maybe next week.

sigils

Freskers indeed

So I did get back to sleep between about 6:00 and 9:00. A bit better, but good grief, I’m tired and cranky.

So much so that minor, minor irritants are really getting to me. I very rudely dispatched a fundraising call from the Fraternal Order of Police (I wouldn’t feel bad about this under any circumstances, but I wouldn’t have been as snappy). And then there’s the Target ad.

There’s a new Target ad out, you see (go to this page and click on the “commercial” link in the multimedia box thing at the top). Some apparently well-known clothing designer, a certain “Patrick Robinson,” is talking about how his new line for Target was inspired by ancient Greece. And fine, whatever, I’ve seen those ugly, flowy white dresses with gold halter-straps that have been cropping up at awards shows. Some people like that sort of thing. Great. But, specifically–and this is where I do take issue–Mr. Robinson claims to have taken his inspiration from “Greek frescoes.”

Or, as he chooses to pronounce the word, “freskers.”

a) “Freskers”? Why? Why would that be acceptable? Nobody says that. They certainly don’t say it on television where anyone might hear them. b) what Greek frescoes? They show two images of these alleged “freskers;” one is a Roman mosaic, and the second image is either not ancient or not Greek. Because when you tell me “Ancient Greek,” I assume you mean either Archaic or Hellenic. And not Minoan, although if that’s what you meant I’d let it slide; however, the second image doesn’t look remotely Minoan, so the point is moot. We have, like, two complete, surviving late Archaic/early Hellenic frescos. Total. And they don’t look anything like the image, either. That thing, while… lovely, I guess, is either Roman or modern. These people, they think they can just lie and lie and lie in order to sell high-waisted short shorts and two-piece swimwear. Disgraceful!

Flawed, sir or madam! Flawed!

Gross

So sometime around four I finally manage to drift off into  a sort of anxious half-sleep, and for an hour I have unpleasant, vaguely nightmarish half-sleep dreams. There was one where I was running away from a group of people standing on the front lawn, my dad among them. I slipped and fell splayed face down on the grass by the edge of the ditch where the conservation area starts, and I just start throwing up. For what felt like about a minute, the scene sort of fluttered between the edge of the ditch and the edge of the bed (no real vomiting was taking place, though). Mostly, though, I was just dreaming that I was wandering around the house late at night, in my bedroom, the playroom or my bathroom terribly disoriented and in the dark (there was another where I was trying to rearrange things on a bathroom shelf over the toilet that doesn’t exist, but small items kept getting knocked into the toilet–a small pad of green post-it notes, a little plastic figurine). I kept dreaming that I’d woken up and was standing in some random spot, unable to see where I was going. In the last one, I dreamed that I was feeling my way out of my bedroom, when I ran into what, for a split second, I thought was my brother’s bedroom door. Whatever I hit grunted and I opened my mouth and got what felt like a mouthful of hair, at which point I threw up a little more, and then (this is all happening over the course of like, two seconds, tops), I felt like I was being given three forceful shakes (I thought, at this point being half awake, that I actually felt someone’s hands on the sides of my ribcage–nothing there, of course). So now I’m debating whether to wait for sunrise and sleep then, try to go back to sleep, or to just sleep with the light on. I reiterate: gross!

Things

These are just some things I’ve had kicking around for awhile. The first photo is all of my little brother’s unwanted soccer and science fair trophies. I took them apart to remove the little plastic genie lamps and soccer players, and I took off the name plates. I don’t know what, if anything, I’m going to do with them, but they’re nice things to have around. I’ve actually never won a trophy, though I’ve always wanted to. Quite desperately. I’ve won a few ribbons (for some reason they’re always pink. I don’t know what that’s about), but never any trophies. I don’t know what I would have gotten a trophy for, mind you, but that’s really neither here nor there.

I’m beginning to think that, if all of my work were to be shown together, it would have the effect of resembling nothing so much as a kind of pathetic, miscarried child’s birthday party (that was meant to mean a miscarried party for a child, not a party for a miscarried child, but either sort of works… though the second reading is way creepier). Between the sadly distorted party decorations and the ambiguously dead stuffed animals,  it’s all getting to be a bit too melodramatic for my liking.

The second photo are some things of Mom’s that I gathered together. The blue saucer on the left is from, I believe, a tea set that she had as a girl (it was in a box with all of her old dolls); the one on the right is a piece she bought a couple years ago, when she was very much into collecting Limoges porcelain. The tag at the bottom is one of her old calling cards. There was a nearly-full box of them in her office. I don’t think calling cards were that frequently given by the time the 60s came around.

I don’t know if I want fix everything in place and seal it up (the box is the backing for a shadowbox frame), make it a “piece,” or whatever. It’s just nice to have. There is sort of a Perfect Lovers feel to it, as it stands, which I appreciate. But I just don’t know. I don’t really have a framework in mind for working with found objects. I’m pretty rooted in labor. Meticulous, repetitive labor. So things like these feel like cheating. Which, in a way, they are.

Anyway, speaking of Félix González-Torres, if you haven’t seen my friend Jack’s work, I think it would be worth your while. “Friend” is a bit of an overstatement–mostly we spent three years at school just smiling awkwardly at one another whenever we’d pass, but, suffice it to say, I think his work is probably the best that I’ve seen come out of MICA in… ever. Anyway, the connection is just that there are González-Torres references throughout. The work is very smart. And cold. But also incredibly sweet, more often than not. Basically, it’s everything I wish my work was.

So that’s that.

Photos

My shrink seems to think that it would do me good to take photos of the house before we move, to stave off homesickness/metal breakdown or whatever. Anyway, the results are in this flickr set, called As for me and my house. A book, incidentally, which seems to be out of print in this country and one that I attempted to start rereading the other day. You know, before realizing that a book about a reluctant preacher and his wife being tormented and unhappy in the middle of nowhere, Canadian Prairies was precisely the last thing I should be reading, right now.

Also, whilst flickr-ing, uploaded the rest of my recent work to a separate collection here. Nothing in particular of note about that, but if you ever wanted to see high-res images of the paintings, you can click on the “all sizes” link on each of the individual photo pages.

Doot doot doot

La dee da. Throwing away garbage-bag after garbage-bag’s worth of pieces of my childhood. Ho hum.

But not the Zbots. They’re not going anywhere.