Mildly freaking out before semester begins

Finished reading The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin. Wonderful book.

Have begun compiling illustrations and designing page layouts for a before-semester zine.

Had a day full of dread today. Good fodder for real work to get done. Egads.

Put a small chunk into Dr. Barnes’ book on art, in preparation for a class I’ll be taking from a Dr. Perthes at the Barnes Museum forthcoming.

Tonight some travelers will be coming through. One’s a student I’m familiar with and the other is a friend of hers. They’ll be staying for a few nights tentatively before their housings get situated elsewhere. I don’t know the situation in full, but, such is living in a home of love.

The Myth and Ariadne

Well, I’ve got a little ball rolling in regards to this blog. Seems poised for a fall off, but I’m enjoying it very much until then. Yesterday was fun. I took an early stop on the trolley and walked from 22nd and market to fairmount hardware, where I bought a water filter, a nitelight, food storage containers, an ice tray, a big pot to initiate three of my plants upgrades and a hundred pack of single edge razor blades. Later that day, I sold my bike to a PhD candidate, via Craigslist, and got 120 bucks out of it.

This morning I awoke to a phone call from someone else who was interested in the bike, and wanted to ask a few questions about the frame. This was at 7:15. I politely interrupted and said the bike is already sold- it went fast. And he went, ‘sh, awww, thanks!’. Tbh it was a good alarm. Who calls at 7:15?

My new home address is as follows 4604 Baltimore Avenue. Philadelphia 19143,  and you are welcome to write to me or send small things.

This morning after the phone call, I meditated and transferred three of my plants to larger containers. Here’s hoping the transplants go successfully.

I’m considering buying a printer, the drawback being ownership. Should I start a tally of how many times I go wanting one? What’s the answer to something like this? When I’m in school either I don’t print, (go without) or. I don’t know. What if my process (I’m thinking I could incorporate printing and copying) ends up hung nothing to do with printing and copying? I’ll continue to go without.


Finished reading Persepolis last night and was very pleased with it. The author alludes to Montesquieu’s the slavery of the Africans, and The Secrets of the CIA, and the Freemasons of Iran, and the Memoirs of Mossadegh, and now my reading list is a bit longer.

At the library today, I am checking out a book I’ve had on a list for a while: The Myth and Ariadne by Michael Taylor on De Chirico. I never knew if I was ready, we’ll see if it sticks.

Coffee Martyr

Oof. Keyboard is broke on the iPad. I guess typing on the screen, hey, isn’t so bad. Maybe just as good. I made a schedule for today and stuck with it. I made three thumbnail drawings upon waking (day four of this routine) then started coffee before sitting down to meditate. I think I liked it. I like hearing the sounds of the coffee maker, and much to my joy the sounds of the neighborhood are good too. I can hear trolley cars with their electric cable resonances from a few blocks away, and when they’re outside my building (a three and an attic walk up brownstone kind of), the idling air conditioner units that are situated on top. There’s usually people at our stop, so I can rest assured that our block is a healthy one, and I am happy to be a part of it. The trolley pulls away, and I can hear tires and engines of cars, and sometimes horns. We live just off the road (and overlooking a six point intersection). It’s all suppositions before the final fall semester of my undergrad starts. I’m focusing on sequential and spot illustration right now. Kind of meme like drawings. I have this one that’s a wrecking ball swung back, that reads ‘not saying anything’, and I wrote it in relation to political correctness, as I read DuBois and Hoffer; it’s ‘negriod’, ‘negro’ all over etc., but it’s civil and intellectual and to get to ideas, and truly used in the right way of that time, and it’s more sobering to get with their larger points than to dwell and vet and qualify. Of course such a vague illustration could mean a lot of things, so I like that too, probably better, for it matters less how we get to a thing than what the thing becomes in meaning by the journey. I have this teacher that uses ‘journey’ a lot, and I like that. She recommended a movie from our library, ‘Mindwalk’, which I checked out and watched yesterday morning first thing. I went back to a nap after making coffee and meditating and reading Freud’s intro to his Jokes book. I left my door open so if my roommates were to see in, to wonder why I wasn’t seizing the day, they could see the coffee martyr. ‘Good God, he brewed the pot to drink it not’! ‘What grounds for such boldness!?’

I hope to remember this day forever. I’m on track. 

K Goethe

Yesterdays breakup text got me thinking about the cycles. Well, anyways, it's for the best.

What's strange about 'relationships' is that lack of autonomy that seems to come with it. Most friendships last for years between contact yet in a dating setup there's an 'on call' aspect, the pretense being validation. Am I wrong?

Six Planets Are In Retrograde

Well Angie and Tim's trip went well I think. Time stood still with them, perhaps it's the season's end. Six planets are in retrograde now.

Angie and Tim walked on Saturday and brought their zines to bookshops. Wooden Shoe bought some copies outright, and Atomic Comics accepted some for their commission arrangement. I saw the transaction at the comic shop. Tim and Angie were humble. The clerk asked to see what they had. Seeing the quality, the tone of the clerk opened up and it was expressed like "yeah, we'll take these". I was very inspired by this reception. That night I made a dozen thumbnails in a comic book mindset.

I harvested from a thumbnail that I drew from a picture I took in Florida in the spirit of Ravillious. I transferred the drawing to mat board and did a watercolor painting, trying for some dry brush texturing too, and scraping back to white, exploring. Well, as anticipated, mine came out way more saturated than Eric's, and, some solutions were old hat (purple shadows), so, I'd like do it again. Reading of Ravillious' method hints that it's ungraspable. Ravillious considered his works drawings (even the paintings).

I love my new house situation.

Girlfriend broke up with me from neglect. Thank you.

Angie and Tim

Angie and Tim are coming to visit from their Summer digs in Long Island.

I took a break from eating yesterday and resumed this afternoon with a slice of pizza, a plum, and a coffee. I’m reading Eric Hoffer’s book again, Working and Thinking on the Waterfront and it’s a treasure. I may order another Eric Hoffer Book. He talks about writing about the history of the intellectual and I wonder if he ever got around to it. It seemed to be his big preoccupation in this journalistic work. Well, this might disrupt the rhythm of the journalistic format, but I opened a new tab and ordered two books from Hoffer since the last sentence. I also called my mom and asked for her password to her amazon account, so that I could download an anatomy book for reference.

I was tempted to order another book from Gayatri Spivak but goddam those writings are hard.

My roommates are out in nature somewhere taking photos of each other naked. Part of me wanted to go, and another part didn’t. When I woke up, I thought ‘yes!’ Because I wanted to see people naked, which is weak alibi. I think it’s natural to like clothes. Who wants every part jangling around all the time? Plus, with exception of some critters, we don’t have handy built in pockets.

I turned in my old apartment keys today, with my roommate, former. It was like a long business transaction, our living together, which I think is something like the best scenario for a housemate- nothing too personal. My new housemates sometimes talk of goin in on big meals together for efficiency, and if this too can be non-sentimental, it would be a good thing, whereas when it was pitched to me before I lived there it seemed like a lot of pressure I guess.

I’m thinking of selling the bike, as there’s no sensible route from my new apartment to school, and the trolley is pleasant, and most everything else is within walking distance. I’d put about $250 into the $100 bike; I think I’ll ask $150, or $180 with a lock and helmet. Oof .

There’s going to be a get together at my new place tonight, with sixteen confirmed guests, and I’m looking forward to that. I’ll pick up Angie and Tim soon enough then make my way there to clean and prepare for the night.

I signed up for two more classes during the Fall, on Saturdays no less. Whereas I try to treat Saturdays as holy days, I’m putting a little moratorium on that for the coming semester on the basis that I’m hungry for anatomy, and just want to binge on it. The classes are portrait sculpture/figure option, and Deer Ecorche. If I continue to participate in sunday painting sessions, I will be working seven days a week, which, what’s new, but also I’m thinking maybe I’m growing away from the Sunday painting practice, as it’s a contrived thing, a big chunk of time on the basis of practice, and (I don’t know) I think it’s a ego pit at this point, like I’m some star there, which is whack vibes for a room, so I think I’ll take a break on it. I never missed one last year.

Someone in the elevator here at PAFA said he’s not looking forward to the summer ending. I seconded, ‘it’s more relaxed’. he said, ‘much more’. It reminds me of David Rachoff’s profound hindsight as he neared his end, ( I think he committed suicide), “I just wish I would have enjoyed it more”. Sometime before that, on NPR, he relayed how he cut it off with his therapist, “I think it’s time to terminate”. These things have stuck with me and somehow kept me from reading his book of poems, as I am cautious as to what’s in there. I think he wrote this one; he read it aloud on NPR about the scorpion and the frog, which I think is an established poem, yet Rachoff’s was the first to put it into a pleasing pentameter.

Where should I bring my friends coming to see Philadelphia? I will try to give them plenty and plenty of space. For one thing their souls are going to have to catch up after riding a bus from Manhattan.

Black K-Swiss

Dear Clint,

I looked up the artists you’d mentioned. Looked them right up on the googletron. I looked up the painting that you said was your favorite (maybe of all time) by Bochner called the Theory of Painting. I guess it’s funny. It was made in 69.

I googled the names of those artists, and hit ‘images’ and couldn’t tell if I’d done something wrong; misspelled something, or something. Sylvia Mangold yielded many pictures of wooden floors.

I went for a walk. After going to Florida for four days to witness and attend the funeral of my grandfather-in-law I had $160 cash burning a hole in my pocket from the money dad gave me for the reimbursement for renting a car. I went to go get some shoes, I thought, but tried on a few pairs and decided not to. I was going for a pair of ‘old people shoes’, I called them. My friend said my aesthetic is “norm core”, to which I told another friend. Other friend said with exception of my not wearing New Balance sneakers, so I went to go get a pair of those. I tried on the white, with a big navy N on the side, then asked for the black on black, then went back to the white pair, but they didn’t fit as I thought they would. I wanted support. They were the classic New balance sneaker, but I didn’t feel the rumored support. I asked for better arch support, and was offered a different pair, tried them on, liked them, but didn’t like the price and left with reaffirmed loyalty for my old kicks.
On the walk home, I remembered this time when I was in fourth or fifth grade. K-Swiss shoes were going around and my dad and I went to the mall to get a pair, and I got black ones, but the fashion was white ones. I don’t know how it happened, but it all happened so quick. We left with a pair of black K-Swiss shoes and I felt strange; like the option of not caring was before me, and the bargain that I’d made to not care was in motion as we were leaving the mall parking lot. Something separated from something else and that was important because it wasn’t the shoes; it was the “inflection point”, as one of my professors says; the distance between perceived reality and reality.

When searching up a painter on google, it would make sense to go to ‘images’, but not in the case of some of the painters that taught at Yale in the 90’s- for those, you go to Wikipedia; to find out why and how come they’re important.
(zing!)

Like the black K-Swiss shoes, it doesn’t matter that much the K-Swiss manufactured them.
Like myself, it’s not as important that I’ve got backlogs of great or good ideas.
Like the Yale painting department, not enough painting.


White K-Swiss’s, actual paintings, actual paintings.

Pangs and crepescules

Yesterday morning I woke up thinking about my second girlfriend. It’s not uncommon, I wax poetic about our thing. I think we worked nicely. I think she’s with another guy, somone who strikes me as very normal. We had a sweet thing, and I think I might be painting for her. I read in Philip Guston’s book of lectures that everyone’s gotta have someone, someone to paint for. Van Gogh had Theo, he said, and he paints for Martha, (I think is his wife’s name). Well shoot, I want to be great; who am I painting for? 

There was so much pain in Tallahassee. I was a shitty adolescent and selfish sometimes, and I clashed with my family and dad and I were having a hard time making it work. Our poodle dog stopped eating when we first moved there, and came over with Addison’s Disease, and her insides kind of bubbled and sloshed in imbalances, topically expressing in nightly incontinences. I think I was in college when she bloated, and I think my mom called me and I went to the veterinary emergency center and walked the dog around the building just sobbing. You could see black and blue through her milky skin, and she was flushed of complexion like she’d aged almost all the way.

I get this newsletter from Rusty Blazenhoff and in it was listed websites created by Danielle Baskin. One of them was a domain name checker/ marriage advice site. The trick was you type in your name and the persons name and the engine checks if the domain is taken. Some mornings I’m really thinking about this old relationship I had. I typed in her name and mine, a kind taboo feeling. The domains were available, so it said we should. 

I don’t think I’ll get married. Not for the foreseeable future. Truth is I’m a (respectful) dog, with a contagious virus (herpes), who’s got not much time. I don’t feel comfortable with hooking up, famous last words. Any ways, why do I get hung up on this? 

I heard from a classmate that Edison didn’t sleep so much as he took cat naps. Her account was that he only cat napped. I want that. I wonder if Edison went through school on a regular schedule, and then sometime afterwards switched to napping only. 

Yesterday was a blast. I kicked rocks for three or four hours, got a new phone, (the same model that my poor Grammy has), and checked out a half dozen graphic novels from the library, as well as Freud’s Jokes analysis. No telling if I’m going to read them. Called my mom. 

I found a good way to buy things- it’s right when you need them and not before. Without fail buying before you need something is a kind of fortune telling, superstitious thing. I’d asked a friend a few years back if she buys before or what, because she had years of collecting and projects experience, and she didn’t have an answer, and in fact I think I embarrassed her, but behold I think the less variables the better, and I’ve subscribed to the m.o. that if it’s needed it’s needed and not a moment before, so I ran into a couple spots yesterday in sculpting. After kicking rocks for a while (it always feels like you’re rotting just before a big day- tends to), I worked on Ecorche figures, and a couple figures in clay, and I came to needing wanting steel stick epoxy, wire, and sculpey clay, which I procured. Fast forward an hour and I was out again to get some superglue, running through the streets I was having such a joyful day! The light was crepuscular and some (probably wine drunk) gals in tube dresses and pumps, one put out her hand for a high five, and I obliged and she yelled ‘woooo!’, and I thought God I love today; I love you, I should’ve told her I love you. I loved her, and probably her friend. 

I sculpted this trans person a few times and yesterday worked on the portrait and the hands, which I hope to modulate on to the figure somehow and cast it, maybe in opaque glass. For all the people saying it’s a ball or it’s a cylinder referring to structures of the face or something, yeah but it’s also a mouth. They’re lips. They’re eyes. Picasso got it. I’m reading DuBois Africa and the World now, and it’s talking about west African sculpture and how it’s better than anything that Europe had ever produced, and yeah, (though now I’m thinking of standing in front of Bernini’s deposition, but that’s a digression). It’s gotta be somehow about the polemic of intellectual capacity- the powers or lack thereof of observation, expressed through reproduction. All this to say I felt better in a kind of automatic modality of making eyes, making the mouth, of this trans portrait, and their body while I was sculpting it too, in an automatic mode, than I would have in a kind of sculpture modality. Well, here I’m trying to dismiss training, right on the coattails of imbibing in it. I learned muscles and all that through Ecorche, and now I’m putting it through the test of making figures. But I felt, connected like a creator, making eyes, (making eye balls, with hole poked into them for the blacks, then baked hard), then eyelids, and a nose, after the skull, and fingers, etc. I felt so far removed from capital S sculpture, in fact it feels like a dirty word writing it. This is heavily influenced by Guston. 

I was talking about Guston (this book of his) to my fox Ecorche teacher, and trying to talk up Guston as the mythic person he is and explains himself to be- an intellectual too, and flipped open the book to show pictures of his work, and there it was, his work, pages with a single short fat line, or another page with another single short fat line, and Diane was cool about it, but yeah it’s funny because the essays made those works kind of profound, but there’s kind of so much you can do with a picture plane huh? It’s funny I think sculptors get away with a lot. Like a figure in sculpture seems to be the currency, and you can be successful for sculpting deer or well I don’t know. I probably just don’t know that much about it. Everything’s hard. 

I haven’t painted except for a picture of an alligator tied in a knot all summer, and a little bit at the beginning some leftover school work. What’s the point of a summer if you don’t do something completely pointless? (Says Calvin and Hobbes). 

I’m supposed to be doing a bunch of writing and drawing for a political cartooning class. The weeks goal is to make an essay, boiled down to a few points, illustrated, and sequenced like a graphic novel. The fodder is ‘something that completely changed you’, and I want to write maybe about herpes. I think it’d be a good idea, considering otherwise I’m getting specific about relationships (o, that girlfriend I had way back when, it’s a little disconcerting tbh). This graphic novel called black hole seems to be about herpes. It’s a virus kind of thing, like a zombie morphism kind of thing, but the whole time reading it I thought herpes herpes. I rented a car down in Florida when I went down for my Grandfather (in-law)’s funeral. On NPR there was a statistician who cited that a common google search preceding young adult suicides is ‘herpes’. It was a relief to hear, it made sense in a way. Am I going to read these graphic novels then, or write, or what?