WARNING: If you comment on this journal with anything along the lines of "hang in there" or "it'll work out" or "it'll get better" I swear to God I will boot you off my friends list.
Art School Boy
as told by boundcreature
Set the scene at The Atomic Cafe, it's a couple of years back and I'm having tea with Ron, an instructor I met during the one year I spent at Montserrat, College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts. His class had a tremendous impact on my life, so much so that I often go back and drop in on him. When introducing me to his students, he'd often joke: "This is Jordan, he loved this class so much that he dropped-out of college."
It's not far from the truth. His class made me think, it challenged me and when it was over, I knew that graduating from Montserrat would be a huge mistake. I'd kept in touch with him after going home to Pennsylvania. Now that I was living in Beverly again, we occasionally got together during his mid-day break. One afternoon, we were having lunch at Maria's (incidentally, one of the worst places to eat in Beverly -- as a whole, Massachussets is full of terrible places to eat) with another of my former instructors, a wonderful guy named Chuck. Queue-up brief Chuck aside:
I took to Chuck pretty fast. He had that Jersey Shore accent that I find myself innately attracted to. He was my instructor in 2D Design. One day, while hanging out in the photo department, waiting for Ron to finish up a meeting, he came into the room singing "I Love Livin' In The City" by FEAR. I had a laugh, imagining the hippie-esque Chuck as an adolescent punker. He caught my smile, "Yeh, Jordan knows this..." and we're both singing "Cockroaches on the WALLS! Crabs crawlin' on my BALLS, ohhhh, but I'm sooo CLEAN CUT, I just wanna FUCK SOME SLUT... I LOOOOVVVVE livin' in the CITY!!!" Bizarre.
Back to lunch at Maria's, I was eating a terrible (but free, and thus: awesome) meatball sub. We got to talkin' about some graphic design books I was reading and I asked them why my time at Montserrat involved such a miniscule amount of reading. Turns out, the students don't like to read, so the administration pressures the teachers to keep it to a minimum. Lovely.
The majority of my self-education has been through books. One night, in October 2003, I was living in Jamaica Plain, completely broke and jobless. I found a guy through Craigslist who needed a corporate identity designed for a nonprofit he was starting. I told him I knew how to do it. I didn't know how to do it. But, I said I did. After the meeting, I went directly to the library and took out five books on identity design and branding, that night, I read the most-promising one from cover to cover. It took me about six hours. In the next month I read all of the others and prepared a stellar identity for him.
I don't understand how you can run an art school that doesn't involve reading and critical thinking. While still a student at Montserrat I suddenly realized: "this is where the people who paint the stuff in the frame store at the mall come from." Maybe you think I'm immature, but I live in a world where it's US against THEM. Montserrat, to me, represented an improper balance, heavily favoring THEM. I met some great instructors and a handful of amazing students while there and I miss them alot, but it never felt right to me. We were dropping close to twenty-four thousand dollars each, per year, for the privilege of attending the school. For what? To be turned loose on the world, bogged down with debt, with no means whatsoever of entering the workforce?
Standing in the visitors gallery at Montserrat, on the night of an opening, rubbing the winter chill out of my arms while discreetly shoving my face full of auderves, I felt out of place. A tall boy with a partially shaved head, Manic Panic vampire red hair hanging to my chin, covered entirely in paint-spattered and ripped clothes, standing amongst the affluent natives of the North Shore, wearing nice clothing, sipping champagne and admiring the "art" on the walls. Was this really the audience they were teaching me to communicate with? It made me feel like art had no value, that, if the paintings on the walls were art, made by artists, then I was not an artist. My first year at Montserrat was my last year.
To this day, I'm distrustful of anyone who calls themself an artist. I still hold the word sacred, no matter how tarnished I've seen it become. These days, everyone is an artist... and I'll never believe that it isn't US against THEM. Even if I don't really feel the US, I just feel a ME and it's goddamn lonely.
Three years of working my ass off, challenging myself, refusing to compromise and pushing my individual boundaries and here I sit, separating enough nickels from a pile of change to walk to 7-11 and get an iced tea. For me, it's not about getting rich, but the endless supply of road blocks that I have faced will never let me forget, even for a minute, that it's US against THEM. Those who bleed for it against those who roll-over for it. The people who stand their ground and maintain their self-respect against the people who aquiesce to the status-quo.
Sometimes, I wish that none of this meant anything to me and I could just take a job and shut the fuck up. Sometimes, I wish there was a support group for dedicated creative maniacs. I've considered starting one, but I'd have to put a lot of effort into finding talented artists. I gave up on finding a kindred spirit within the Graphic Artists Guild (any organization that would offer me a leadership role, at the age of twenty-three, cannot possibly have its head on straight).
So, in the end, I go it alone. No peers, no mentor, becoming more and more detached from the beaten path and growing more and more tired of it every day.
Tell me, if you read this far, what does art mean to you? How would you describe an artist? What (specific) pieces of art make you realize your place on the planet?
Kissing Palomino
dreamily recounted by boundcreature
We were on her bed, the window was open, a slight breeze was coming in. We had just finished listening to Le Tigre a couple of times while talking and now Green Day was playing. I was lying on my back, she was lying on her stomach, over my right arm, with her head kind of resting on my right shoulder. If I produce a movie of my life, I will speed up this scene with a neat little elapsed-time trick:
SCENE 12 : Interior, dorm room
Palo is seated at the far left corner of the bed, Jordan at the far right. Over the course of three hours (to be elapsed to no more than ten seconds) their bodies inch towards one another, tentatively, contorting in unnatural postures that feign a level of comfort; a subterfuge to avoid drawing attention to their mutual desire to make physical contact. Cut the elapsed time shot, just as...
She leans in and I feel her lips on mine and I'm thinking "wow, I'm really kissing this girl" and I stay conscious of my neck muscles holding my head up to keep kissing her, afraid I'll lose all control and my head will drop to the bed, as if her kiss had drained my life-force.
My hands
on her sides,
underneath her shirt...
she's soft,
even by girl standards.
We kiss for hours and I swear, that fucking Green Day album repeated like six times and I found myself thinking "man, this is a great record, who saw that coming" but I'm still kissing her and after a while, we fall asleep, to really quiet music and the street sounds drifting up to her window.
A few weeks later, in my room, on the leopard print futon, she sits on my lap and kisses me. She is wearing a tie, with a shirt whose buttons are fighting a battle of epic proportions to restrain her breasts. She looks kinda punk and the tie is making me want to scream with delight. (I wonder if I can talk her into dressing more punk, punk rock girls are so cute... I don't want to change her though, hell, to be fair, I can even dress like... I dunno, whatever her past boyfriends were, losers i guess -- heh, couldn't help it... oh, uncrinkle your face beautiful girl, you know I'm just kidding)!
But still, that tie, those lips, kissing soft and unhurried, leaving me melted into the leopard print futon cover...
I started writing this an hour ago, I'm listening to Sleater-Kinney. I hope the first story doesn't suck. I'm gonna try to tell stories in this journal for a while, I really liked how the last few sounded and how it made me stretch to communicate with you guys, instead of just bitching. I feel shitty lately, I'm very poor, it seems that multiple aspects of my universe are conspiring against me and I can't seem to catch a break. I'm dissapointed in the way my career has gone so far and I feel like I've hit a road block big enough that I'm not entirely sure I can get past it on the power of discipline and dedication this time.
Through all of this, my friends have treated me better than I could have ever expected. I don't really say thank you alot in person because I'm still kinda embarrased by not being able to really take care of myself, but I am very thankful to you guys for helping me out. I know full well that this is a situation that I put myself into and must get myself out of, but it's nice that, sometimes, I don't feel so alone when some of you are around. I'm not gonna namecheck, but thanks alot, really. My time spent with some of you, doing some of the things that some of you have paid for me to do has been the kinda fun that has helped me make it through the shitty days spent alone in my bedroom trying to figure out how to fix this mess.
Art School Boy
as told by boundcreature
Set the scene at The Atomic Cafe, it's a couple of years back and I'm having tea with Ron, an instructor I met during the one year I spent at Montserrat, College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts. His class had a tremendous impact on my life, so much so that I often go back and drop in on him. When introducing me to his students, he'd often joke: "This is Jordan, he loved this class so much that he dropped-out of college."
It's not far from the truth. His class made me think, it challenged me and when it was over, I knew that graduating from Montserrat would be a huge mistake. I'd kept in touch with him after going home to Pennsylvania. Now that I was living in Beverly again, we occasionally got together during his mid-day break. One afternoon, we were having lunch at Maria's (incidentally, one of the worst places to eat in Beverly -- as a whole, Massachussets is full of terrible places to eat) with another of my former instructors, a wonderful guy named Chuck. Queue-up brief Chuck aside:
I took to Chuck pretty fast. He had that Jersey Shore accent that I find myself innately attracted to. He was my instructor in 2D Design. One day, while hanging out in the photo department, waiting for Ron to finish up a meeting, he came into the room singing "I Love Livin' In The City" by FEAR. I had a laugh, imagining the hippie-esque Chuck as an adolescent punker. He caught my smile, "Yeh, Jordan knows this..." and we're both singing "Cockroaches on the WALLS! Crabs crawlin' on my BALLS, ohhhh, but I'm sooo CLEAN CUT, I just wanna FUCK SOME SLUT... I LOOOOVVVVE livin' in the CITY!!!" Bizarre.
Back to lunch at Maria's, I was eating a terrible (but free, and thus: awesome) meatball sub. We got to talkin' about some graphic design books I was reading and I asked them why my time at Montserrat involved such a miniscule amount of reading. Turns out, the students don't like to read, so the administration pressures the teachers to keep it to a minimum. Lovely.
The majority of my self-education has been through books. One night, in October 2003, I was living in Jamaica Plain, completely broke and jobless. I found a guy through Craigslist who needed a corporate identity designed for a nonprofit he was starting. I told him I knew how to do it. I didn't know how to do it. But, I said I did. After the meeting, I went directly to the library and took out five books on identity design and branding, that night, I read the most-promising one from cover to cover. It took me about six hours. In the next month I read all of the others and prepared a stellar identity for him.
I don't understand how you can run an art school that doesn't involve reading and critical thinking. While still a student at Montserrat I suddenly realized: "this is where the people who paint the stuff in the frame store at the mall come from." Maybe you think I'm immature, but I live in a world where it's US against THEM. Montserrat, to me, represented an improper balance, heavily favoring THEM. I met some great instructors and a handful of amazing students while there and I miss them alot, but it never felt right to me. We were dropping close to twenty-four thousand dollars each, per year, for the privilege of attending the school. For what? To be turned loose on the world, bogged down with debt, with no means whatsoever of entering the workforce?
Standing in the visitors gallery at Montserrat, on the night of an opening, rubbing the winter chill out of my arms while discreetly shoving my face full of auderves, I felt out of place. A tall boy with a partially shaved head, Manic Panic vampire red hair hanging to my chin, covered entirely in paint-spattered and ripped clothes, standing amongst the affluent natives of the North Shore, wearing nice clothing, sipping champagne and admiring the "art" on the walls. Was this really the audience they were teaching me to communicate with? It made me feel like art had no value, that, if the paintings on the walls were art, made by artists, then I was not an artist. My first year at Montserrat was my last year.
To this day, I'm distrustful of anyone who calls themself an artist. I still hold the word sacred, no matter how tarnished I've seen it become. These days, everyone is an artist... and I'll never believe that it isn't US against THEM. Even if I don't really feel the US, I just feel a ME and it's goddamn lonely.
Three years of working my ass off, challenging myself, refusing to compromise and pushing my individual boundaries and here I sit, separating enough nickels from a pile of change to walk to 7-11 and get an iced tea. For me, it's not about getting rich, but the endless supply of road blocks that I have faced will never let me forget, even for a minute, that it's US against THEM. Those who bleed for it against those who roll-over for it. The people who stand their ground and maintain their self-respect against the people who aquiesce to the status-quo.
Sometimes, I wish that none of this meant anything to me and I could just take a job and shut the fuck up. Sometimes, I wish there was a support group for dedicated creative maniacs. I've considered starting one, but I'd have to put a lot of effort into finding talented artists. I gave up on finding a kindred spirit within the Graphic Artists Guild (any organization that would offer me a leadership role, at the age of twenty-three, cannot possibly have its head on straight).
So, in the end, I go it alone. No peers, no mentor, becoming more and more detached from the beaten path and growing more and more tired of it every day.
Tell me, if you read this far, what does art mean to you? How would you describe an artist? What (specific) pieces of art make you realize your place on the planet?
Kissing Palomino
dreamily recounted by boundcreature
We were on her bed, the window was open, a slight breeze was coming in. We had just finished listening to Le Tigre a couple of times while talking and now Green Day was playing. I was lying on my back, she was lying on her stomach, over my right arm, with her head kind of resting on my right shoulder. If I produce a movie of my life, I will speed up this scene with a neat little elapsed-time trick:
SCENE 12 : Interior, dorm room
Palo is seated at the far left corner of the bed, Jordan at the far right. Over the course of three hours (to be elapsed to no more than ten seconds) their bodies inch towards one another, tentatively, contorting in unnatural postures that feign a level of comfort; a subterfuge to avoid drawing attention to their mutual desire to make physical contact. Cut the elapsed time shot, just as...
She leans in and I feel her lips on mine and I'm thinking "wow, I'm really kissing this girl" and I stay conscious of my neck muscles holding my head up to keep kissing her, afraid I'll lose all control and my head will drop to the bed, as if her kiss had drained my life-force.
My hands
on her sides,
underneath her shirt...
she's soft,
even by girl standards.
We kiss for hours and I swear, that fucking Green Day album repeated like six times and I found myself thinking "man, this is a great record, who saw that coming" but I'm still kissing her and after a while, we fall asleep, to really quiet music and the street sounds drifting up to her window.
A few weeks later, in my room, on the leopard print futon, she sits on my lap and kisses me. She is wearing a tie, with a shirt whose buttons are fighting a battle of epic proportions to restrain her breasts. She looks kinda punk and the tie is making me want to scream with delight. (I wonder if I can talk her into dressing more punk, punk rock girls are so cute... I don't want to change her though, hell, to be fair, I can even dress like... I dunno, whatever her past boyfriends were, losers i guess -- heh, couldn't help it... oh, uncrinkle your face beautiful girl, you know I'm just kidding)!
But still, that tie, those lips, kissing soft and unhurried, leaving me melted into the leopard print futon cover...
I started writing this an hour ago, I'm listening to Sleater-Kinney. I hope the first story doesn't suck. I'm gonna try to tell stories in this journal for a while, I really liked how the last few sounded and how it made me stretch to communicate with you guys, instead of just bitching. I feel shitty lately, I'm very poor, it seems that multiple aspects of my universe are conspiring against me and I can't seem to catch a break. I'm dissapointed in the way my career has gone so far and I feel like I've hit a road block big enough that I'm not entirely sure I can get past it on the power of discipline and dedication this time.
Through all of this, my friends have treated me better than I could have ever expected. I don't really say thank you alot in person because I'm still kinda embarrased by not being able to really take care of myself, but I am very thankful to you guys for helping me out. I know full well that this is a situation that I put myself into and must get myself out of, but it's nice that, sometimes, I don't feel so alone when some of you are around. I'm not gonna namecheck, but thanks alot, really. My time spent with some of you, doing some of the things that some of you have paid for me to do has been the kinda fun that has helped me make it through the shitty days spent alone in my bedroom trying to figure out how to fix this mess.
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I share the frustrations with art school. That's why I'm an official art school dropout