IPOD
RADIO
PICS
I've been working, in a rather desultory manner, on this series of prints of men I know. This idea is a blatant rip off from a couple of friends of mine, who were doing paintings and drawings of women he's kissed and another of women with whom he's friends.
The trouble with my endeavour, I've found, is that most of the men that are important to me do not live in the same state as I. Because of this, I've been getting source material from the internet, but most of my male friends are apparently very virtuous in that they display no outwards indications of physical vanity. This dearth of photographs has brought my projec to a halt for the time being, to be resumed when I can personally photograph the individuals. For now, though, I've got three fellows all finished with. The above picture is the plate, after printing, for a collograph of David Bessent, done with carborundum grit and tape. It looks a little like him, though apparently it also looks a little like Lenin.
This week has been one of many packages. My new camera arrived (witness above photograph), as well as my new knives for relief print carving. Yesterday, bis for Veganerotica were left on the porch, which isn't terrifically exiting, but today an entire couch and chaise showed up, all wrapped up in plastic. My camera can perform its function underwater without any deleterious effect to itself. How wonderful is that? Very.
Did you know that a few months ago I got a tattoo? In August, from Good Times Tattoo by Alex Hinton in Salt Lake City. Despite it being significantly more painful than I had anticipated, almost immediately after its completion I wanted more more more. Like the reasons for which cigarettes were abandoned, finances are an impediment. I gave my tattoo artist a present (one of my tentacles) a couple of days later, and I don't know if that's strange behaviour or not.
O Sternenfall
von einer Brucke einmal eingesehn--:
Dich nicht vergessen
Stehn.
Translation:
Oh, falling star
once seen from a bridge--:
to not forget you
to endure.
~Rainier Maria Rilke
I don't know any German, not really, but I'm rather good with remembering seemingly meaningless ephemera--foreign words; the precise dates of occurrences inconsequential to me, happening to strangers; someone's face, still puffy with sleep and the old narrow bed; tiny objects held only briefly.
Figure modeling is excellent for memorizing things. You scan through reams of text in your brain as you hold still, so still, and when you come upon something you don't quite recall, caught on a snag, you worry at it, like a bad memory or a bad tooth, thumbing that page over and over in your brain until you can resolve the inaccuracy. I don't know what disturbed that snippet and made me recall it so vividly and suddenly. I stopped working and said the German words aloud. Rather poorly, I suspect, but there was no one else there to hear me torture the language. After writing it, Rilke changed it a little and ended "Der Tod" (Death) with those lines. Rilke said that the last three lines (the ones above) burst in on his brain unbidden, and resolved it suddenly.
Just won an Arty award for being a super genius. Sadly, I probably can't attend the awards party, complete with tantalizing open bar, because I don't actually live in Utah. Maybe I will allow myself a rare beer tonight to celebrate and make up for what I'll miss.
Someone keeps buying things off of my wishlist, but sending the gift to themselves or it is lost and absorbed by the postal system. I keep expecting these phantom gifts, in a continued state of mild expectation, checking for little brown packages on my return from school. No packages ever arrive, no stop motion animation DVDs to fill me with the half poison nostolgia from when Tommy and I had a non-dialogue film festival just for us two and his cat, the three of us curled on his couch having thought better of sex and diverting it into obscure sensualities, no behind-the-times comic books for my niche friends to remark on how I just barely started reading that. Is the gift the phantom?
I played table tennis, or rather ping-pong, at the group studio of my friends. The men are kind, gentlemanly, with me when we play. They compliment a good hit, and fail to keep score, patient when I repeatedly lose the tiny white ball. With each other they curl back their lips and expose their incisor teeth as they serve.
On the airplane ride home, I surreptitiously watch Olympic women's single table tennis on my seat mate's television. Young asian girls with manly, unflattering haircuts play an awkward and ungainly game, and for some unknown sportsman's reason, players must retrieve errant white plastic balls by themselves. Climbing over barricades, and scrambling around after the ball only serves to make the sport that much more undignified. These girls, however accomplished they may be, will never be the subject of the fantasies of men too old for them, the realm reserved for half realized Amazonian women like countless gymnasts and volleyball players.
I attended the orientation for incoming graduate students three days ago in the courtyard between the college buildings. I don't yet know the better routes to take, and had to carry my bike up stairs in various places; sweat begins to gloss my forehead and back as I arrive at the half circle of unoccupied chairs, the little folding table of juice and chips. Early, I arrive early but am uncertain until I ask. Other people mull around the little galleries ringing the courtyard, filled with the artwork from other schools. I compare my age to their percieved age. Am I old, or young, in comparison to this group? The same question is better translated as "Am I accomplished or am I slow comparatively?" I do not come to a conclusion. My foot is trod on when I try to find a seat, and still I go unnoticed until I bring it to the attention of the person still standing on me. It's a photography student, which I find predictable in the way that personal prejudices are always noted when confirmed. Of course a photographer fails to observe her surroundings. I prefer to feed this dislike of people who have skills I don't have, rather than admitting that I'm the one who made myself omittable.
When the Olympic table tennis player serves the ball, she twists it in her hand, cupping it and turning her wrist around, concealing the action behind the paddle, flicking the ball out suddenly--graceful and deft, like a magic trick, like a promise. I doubt what it will be before the ball reappears, struck by the ready paddle and bouncing across the tiny taut net--perhaps this time it will be something else instead.
Graduate Student Open Studios
September 7th
2pm till 9pm
PS I just broke my camera. I was considering making some thing, like more teacups, to raise money to replace it and then realized that I now had no camera to photograph the items to sell to buy a working camera. Damnit!
Demon Tamer went live this morning. Take a looksie.
Do any of you have pictures of the gallery during "Secret"? My pictures of it are predictably horrid.
Open studios this coming weekend at my new school. It's on the 7th, and by the 7th I will have been a graduate student for 6 days. Because of this, all of the stuff I'll have in my studio will not have been made at CSULB, but I'll also have the cleanest studio. Come and gawk at me and my stuff.
GLAMFA and Open Studios
Years ago, before I moved to Phoenix and before I moved to Long Beach, when my life was still unpredictable, when two meals a day seemed almost extravagant and cheap wine and gin were majority income expenses, I was spending an evening at the house of someone who I probably shouldn't be around when we were both drunk and unchaperoned. He had a beautifully preserved beetle in his house, hung on the wall in a glass case. I had taught a mutual friend how to re-constitute and move the limbs of dead insects without shattering their exoskeleton, and he had made a bit of a cottage industry out of displaying them. I saw the beetle, this perfect wonderful thing that almost glowed and I wanted so badly to smash it. The desire to destroy to, to make it into tiny pieces no longer recognizable as perfect and wonderful or even as beetle bits, was palpable, and I could taste that penny taste in my mouth that you get in a fight when you know you will lose but you keep on anyway, because to run away, to leave and preserve yourself, is unthinkable in that moment.
That is how I feel now.
For the first time in over ten years, I heard an old family lie. At first, I was so saddened and outraged by it, this false image of me. But now, I envy this fabulism, and I dream about that perfect, fictitious naked child, so strong and conquering, and feel the reality of me to be so wormlike in contrast, cowering as I am, and recieving unprotesting, where she took what pleased her and destroyed when she had tired of it. She is powerful and full, like a new butterfly over filled of potent new blood so that it drips out of the ends of its wings.
But so many, people who knew me the best I thought, believed in her, in that shining perfect evil. Believed that at least briefly, when I was pushing my nymphette years to their last, that I was her. In "1984," Winston is asked where the past is. He responds that it is in memory.
I did not destroy the beetle. I just saw it a few days ago while on my trip to Salt Lake City, in a different house but still owned by the same boy.
"You look so healthy." I told him.
"It is because I am full of poison," he said.
When I lived in Phoenix, making a trip to SLC felt like going home, so I'd always look forward to it with such anticipating and excitement. Now, though, I don't quite feel the same. Sure, I'm very excited to see my friends who I haven't seen in a bit, but that isn't tempered by the desire to escape where I currently live. This place is wonderful.
All of that aside, I'm still excited to go to SLC, albeit for an uncomfortably long time. I've got an appointment at Good Times Tattoo on Tuesday morning. This will be my first tattoo of any significant size, and I'm not really certain what to expect from it, and I haven't heard from the artist after sending my image to him. Maybe you could help me out, eh? You can pay for a tattoo with a debit card, right? It would just be awfully inconvenient if I had to leave my left arm behind while I ran down the street to the ATM.
I've divided up my stay between various houses, so as not to exhaust anyone's hospitality, so maybe this will feel more like a series of tiny trips, rather than one big stay in the same place. I've made a list of things to do in town, people to visit, little jobs I can do, etc. I hope I don't get terribly bored and become a nuisance to all of my friends who are gainfully employed, and so can't afford to spend time entertaining me in the daytime, and probably can't stay up late, either.
I curated another print exchange, and this is it:
Not only that, but there's an online store for a the show, so you can buy some art for super cheap if you are so inclined:
http://kayo.cartfly.com
I'm just finishing up my own piece for the show, and I must admit, right now I loathe it. I'm hoping that my feelings towards it will improve with time, because otherwise, damn, I might just have to rig up some apparatus in Salt Lake and make another piece. This piece, I just can't stand to look at it right now. It will be miserable if I end up going to a show I curated and organised, and having my piece in the show be the one everyone sort of walks past.
New set goes up Tuesday morning in MR. You should have a looksie, you know, if you should feel so inclined. You've got at least a day left to think about whether or not you'll accede to my request, so you needn't feel rushed. Granted, I did trick you into reading my blog by putting the more interesting, less attention-whore-y stuff at the beginning, but don't hold it against me for long.
http://suicidegirls.com/members/Roethke/albums/site/8334/
Update:
I'm leaving for my appointment. Fuck, I am so nervous.
This is a comic jam. Guess which part of it is mine:
As my friend Caleb said "Ah, penis. The answer to that age old question, 'Now what should I draw?' "
Whom amongst you is going to APE this year?
Also, I couldn't see a doctor before I left that abyss of despair, Phoenix. So, I'm still in constant horrible pain. Or, in constant super fun delightful pain. I don't want to be a downer or anything. Nonetheless, California is wonderful, and when I go outside I don't feel like the world is trying very very hard to kill me.
Ha! I tricked you all into helping me pay medical bills.
This was not what I had initially intended to do. Rather, I'd hoped that I could take the proceeds from tentacle sales (still for sale, go back a journal entry to see them) and save them up for the first real tattoo I want to get when I'm in Salt Lake City in August. The only tattoo artists I know are in SLC, and I'm a little put off by the idea of having a stranger permanently ink me. I'm not trying to get a discount from them or anything, I just don't want some fellow that I don't know from Adam to be fussing about with my dermis.
Alas, such honest frivolities were not meant to be, and the money is going to the more dull and mundane purpose of having my throat slit open for the umpteenth time. And what a horrid coincidence! The last time I had to get all chopped up was just before I moved here to Phoenix, and now I'm a week and a half away from getting to Long Beach, and the ol' foetal twin rears her ugly little head.
Awesome. My genes are apparently mediocre at best, as all of this nastiness is congenital. I've a mind to call up my parents and give them a stern talking to about what nonsense they allowed their alleles to get up to. Reoccurence of this condition is so rare that doctors usually don't even bother to mention it, but I'm a particularly lucky person and beat the odds.
Really, though, I'm rather terrified.
You can buy them, or you can trade me for them. In the spoiler are some things I wouldn't mind getting ahold of, but if you've got something else awesome let me know.
Large Tentacles:
They will vary slighty, but all of them are printed on white fabric, with black fabric backing, and weighted at the bottom. They also have wire in them to make them slightly posable. I say slightly, because basically you can just increase the curvature or decrease it slightly, you can't change the actual shape much. About 33" tall.
$35 each plus shipping
Medium Tentacles:
They will vary slighty, but all of them are printed on white fabric, with black fabric backing, and weighted at the bottom. About 22" tall.
$25 each plus shipping
Small Tentacles:
They will vary slighty, but all of them are printed on light colored fabric, with black fabric backing, and weighted at the bottom. About 15" tall.
$15 plus shipping
Oh, but you want the whole shebang, you say? I have an option especially for you:
One of each:
$65, plus shipping
I accept payment via paypal, or check (as long as you get it to me in time. If it arrives in July, I'll just mail it back to you). Message me withwhat you'd like and I'll let you know what shipping will be.
Please include in the comments section of the paypal form what exactly it is that you ordered.
These prices only apply until the end of the month when I move, and only until I sell out of the finished pieces.
A few other things I made that are also for sale:
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